The man had no luck in hiring the woman’s children.
They lived off their mother and grew demandingly lovely on two slipcovered sofas pushed together end to end.
Coarse, dandelionish tufts of fabric sewn at intervals into the slipcovers left pink imprints on their cheeks, their foreheads.
I later liked to watch them walking ably away from me but not yet toward each other.
I will not give you any of the gore.
EMPLOYMENT
I’m looking for work in this room, naturally. I’m desiring lots of work in this room. I’m very serious about my desire.
I go up to the guy. “Is there work?” I ask.
“I would imagine,” he says. He shows me to the desk. It’s the same old desk, my desk.
I pull out the chair and sit down.
I open one of the drawers. I find my underwear and socks exactly where I keep them. I open another and find my health-and-beauty aids.
The guy says, “You get dental, eyeglass, life insurance, major medical, death and dismembership, two weeks’ paid vacation, seven paid holidays, fifteen paid sick days, personal days TBA. Employee pilfering is the retail sector’s filthiest of secrets. Lift with your whole body, not with your limbs. Don’t just be a people person — be a person’s person. Come in through the employees’ entrance and breathe out through your nose. This concludes the orientation.”
I reach for a pen.
He slaps my hand hard.
“Just do what you’d be doing anyway,” he says. “Only now it’s going to be work.”
SPEAK UP
She wants to know what he saw in her, so I reach right in for it, pluck it out, and hand it to her. It’s a grammatical occurrence of something big, something way out of scale.
This is a conversation we’re having, an incident. She is hemming his trousers, the six pair he left behind. I have been encouraging her to wear them herself — one pair per day of the week, time off on Wednesday, middle of the week, in case she runs out of anecdotal material.
In short, I tell her, Hate him.
But she wants to know what if he calls, what if he comes back, what if they’re both shopping for memo pads in the same micromart.
Skip it, I tell her.
To be fair, what goes where? In terms of my life, where should this be taking up places?
The only way this keeps going is if you speak up.
Tell me something.
Tell me every other thing.
How’s every other thing?
THIS STORY
This story has two parts.
The first is about his last love — how he got circumstanced in it, and all the antiperspirants and behaving and abbreviations it later came to entail. This part is long — much too long for me to include or even synopsize here — and it darts out at this or that. Please do not hold it against me if I pretend that this part of the story was misplaced or, better, put aside to boil.
The second part of the story is short and familiar. It parallels your own life, so it is that much the easier to remember. It lends itself handily to discussion in groups small and still smaller. I will recite it in its entirety:
Son, you cunt!
Loo
Shall we face something else?
I had a sister once.
The center square of the little city where she had grown up still had a couple of “comfort stations.” That was what they called those belowground public lavatories whose stairwelled entrances, sided and canopied with frosted glass, looked like gateways to some sunken Victorian exposition. She could not remember whether she simply wasn’t allowed down there or just preferred holding it in.
This sister was the self-silencing type.
She was done up in a body bereft of freckles or shine.
She never found a way to get her hair rioting upward in the flaring fashion of her time.
Loo (for that was the name she used) was already at that stage in her headway toward demise where it was best to tell people what they wanted to hear. What they mostly wanted to hear was that nobody else, no matter her station in life, ever really knew how much it was she should by now have gone ahead and packed.
Her sleep in those days was generous to a fault. But she would wake up and feel herself felled by the clarities and definitudes of the new day. Then to work, in the afternoons, in a windowless basement office in an overchilled building on the outskirts of town. There would sometimes be too rational a cast to her mind, and sometimes she nodded off, but this was an ungiving, dream-free species of sleep and did not want her in it. There was nothing to be made of it, either. It left no residue.
She was a remainder of her parents, not a reminder of them.
Her private life was not so much private as simply witnessless.
The shops in those days did in fact sell something called a “body pillow,” but she had not brought any of them home yet.
Her second job was an older person’s job.
She was afraid there was nothing she didn’t find entirely mysterious, nothing that didn’t make her feel as if she had never once belonged in her life. But the two or three people to whom she had been closest had always been the most difficult to fathom or even unveil. Even their faces seemed to destabilize themselves into new forms of unrecognizability under the hardly forceful pressure of her gaze. She would no longer know who the person was that was morphing disorganizingly before her eyes while the two of them were eating or pretending not to be hungry or doing whatever they did that kept them together undefended. She would have no steadying sense of what the person truly looked like from one instant to the next. And if the externals were themselves so mutable, there could be no end to speculation about what exactly might be going on inside any human body purposely neighboring her own. There was no reliable way of finding out. Everything she claimed to understand about people was no more than hazarded.
She wanted to convince herself that there was a way to learn how she might securely know just one thing, maybe a couple of things, about any other person — if only the most persuasive of that person’s reasons for having hated his handwriting at the moment it came time at last to make a list of things that must change absolutely right away or else.
Other things that brought a better grade of sorrow into her world, broadened her agony, etc.?
She had the disadvantage of apparently looking like a lot of other people, because she was often accosted by strangers who took it for granted that she was somebody they knew, and they insisted on resuming conversations broken off long ago and threw fits when she could not supply the precise lines of flattery or remorse they had been waiting all this long while to hear.
She had been living for some disorderly time in furnitureless, dun-colored small-town apartments with the blinds drawn at all hours. She had never learned the names of the streets. She had only a punctured knowledge of geography. She supposed that it helped her to be far from the center of anything, never incited by what went on in thicker populations.
Looking too long unfondled, she would doubtless have a different answer now, but coach herself forward she did. A heavy-haired girl of terrorizing ordinary beauty cornered her, unpeppily, at some upstairs cabaret, but were teems of feeling fizzing between the two of them afterward? Or did memory spoon out some garniture of emotion over everything taking its time in catty months to come?