by
Joy Williams
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“They’ve completed the new library, and we’re allowed two days off from classes to move the books from the old institution down the hill to the new institution. We are to be utilized as a merry and willing human chain. I resist being so utilized. I’m here to learn.”
“So you’re coming here instead,” Angela said.
There was silence.
“Which is wonderful,” Angela said. “Really wonderful.”
“I’m hanging up, Mummy. You can continue with your inanities if you wish.”
christ lol
“This ain’t much of an establishment if you pardon my saying so,” he said to Angela. “No steaks in the freezer, no ice cream, sound system inadequate, music fit only to disinform the listener, no point in hearing it twice, towels thin, washcloths worn and most suspect, bed lumpy, poor recycling practices, few spare lightbulbs on hand, fire extinguishers out of date, no playing cards, clocks not set properly—”
“I like them a little fast,” Angela conceded. It was all true. He was in no way exaggerating.
“Potted violets on windowsill in very poor condition, worst case of powdery mildew I ever saw. I could go on.”
lmao
“Deke used to be an art critic,” Darleen said.
He waved one hand dismissively. “Just for the prison newsletter.”
“Yeah, Deke attended prison for two years,” Darleen said.
“I began my thesis there,” Deke said. “ ‘Others: Do They Exist?’ But I never completed it. I was a couple of hundred pages into it when I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t genuine breakthrough thinking.”
lol
And the boy said, talking with his mouth full like he always does, “That’s why you’re not supposed to have a crucifix in the bedroom. Is a cross the same as a crucifix?” he says.
I could see the meat with the ketchup on it in his mouth. “No,” I said. “A crucifix is a cross with the body on it.”
“A cross is OK, then,” he said. “And a crucifix is OK as long as the eyes aren’t open. You don’t want that in the bedroom.”
One of the senior editors seemed interested in his progress, a man named Franklin Woolf, but everyone called him Loup. He was erudite and viciously funny. You want to be the last to leave the room when he’s in it, one of the other junior editors warned Cliff, though he was eager to learn and knew he could learn a lot from him. Loup arranged to have him move into the midtown writing studio of one of the house’s venerable authors, who had relocated temporarily to Mexico. It was full of books and had good light and a kitchen, and the bathroom was his alone. It was a far better arrangement than the brownstone. The author was working on a “volcano” of a book but everyone knew he had stopped writing, that he’d lost his nerve. Nobody went to Mexico anymore to write books. The man was finished.
sweet housing situation if you can get it
Loup was going through boxes of manuscripts, a dozen of them that had been on his desk for a month. He was now disposing of them rapidly. He would pick an even-numbered page and give it his full attention. One page could tell him everything. Sometimes the decision was made on a single line. It was all true, what writers suspected.
He called Cliff into his office and read aloud, “I looked out the window. I could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees.” He said to Cliff, “What the hell does that mean?”
“I like it,” Cliff ventured. “It’s not bad.”
“So give her a chance. If we don’t change her life, somebody else will.”
“They told me I was washing the diapers with too much bleach and that’s why the baby’s been cranky,” Ricky said. “Do you think that could be true?”
He had so wearied of her it was like an ache in his bones.
“I’ve found a good sitter,” she said. “It took me forever to find a really responsible one. Why don’t I come along to the service for your father?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“We never do anything important together. I hardly ever see you. Afterwards we could go out, couldn’t we?”
“We’ll have another drink and go out tonight. We’ll go to that seafood place.”
It was late afternoon and the sun was falling with haste toward the earth.
“Gramma said that when dusk falls it reminds God of the hearts of men. That’s the only time he thinks of us, at dusk.”
“Your grandmother was an amazing woman,” Cliff said.
She looked at him uncertainly.
They would quarrel later. He was relieved it was finally over.
ack
I was DUI, which was so boring in the vast scheme of things and particularly in the louche gray world of the Mission. DUIs were beneath interest and I had already experienced girls looking right through me in a practiced way even though this would change if the particulars of my case became known. I had been drinking Manhattans all afternoon for reasons that remain obscure and when returning home had driven off the road into the city’s largest cemetery, demolishing seven headstones before my old Suburban stopped. If one of those girls had a friend or family member whose marker had been so desecrated, God himself wouldn’t be willing to help me.
The first policeman on the scene said, “You’re lucky you didn’t kill somebody.” Naturally, he was laughing.
lol
From the time I was ambulatory until I was fourteen and refused to participate, every year on my birthday my father would video me going around an immense organ-pipe cactus in the city’s botanical garden. The cactus is practically under lock and key now. It could never survive elsewhere, certainly. Some miscreant would shoot it full of arrows or smack holes in it with a golf club.
My father would splice the frames and speed them up so I would start off on my circuit, disappear for a moment and emerge a year older, again and again a year older, taller and less remarkable. I began as a skipping and smiling creature and gradually emerged as a slouching and scowling one. Still, my parents appeared unaware of the little film’s existential horror. My mother claims that she no longer has it, that it no longer exists, and I have chosen to believe her.
She appeared a somewhat older version of one of the paramedics who arrived at the house the night my father died, though it was unlikely that anyone would go from being a paramedic to being an employee at a resort that had seen better days and was, in fact, in foreclosure. Though perhaps she had accumulated a record of not saving anyone and had lost her position as an emergency responder.
“Do I know you,” I asked. Or maybe it was “Have I seen you before?” because I had never known her, even if she’d been the one to feel my father’s last breath leave his body. She threw me a dismissive look and returned to her station to greet and seat a party of four, whom she’d evidently been expecting as they had planned ahead and made a reservation.
My point is that however fortunate your life or—considering the myriad grotesque ways one can depart from it—your death, it’s usually strangers who have their hands on you at the end and usher you down the darkened aisle. Or rather that was one of my reflections as I waited for my friends with whom I would commence a night of serious drinking.