Sam Lipsyte - The Fun Parts

“That pussy saved your life!” shouted a retired East Coast Crip in a wheelchair.

Uncle Drive-By, Craig called him.

While Mandy confessed her infidelity to Craig, she caught him eyeing the high-end Austrian cleaver on the magnetic kitchen strip. A good terror run begins at home. But they did a brave thing. They quit crack together, for the weekend.

Then came the day she entered the apartment, about a year after Linda had died, and through clots of rock smoke saw Craig, on his knees, his face in the crotch of an obese girl with a platinum chignon. The treasurer of Mandy’s Saturday morning Clean Slate Meditations meeting jerked off in the girl’s ear. Something about seeing the afghan Linda had wrapped herself in during her last, ravaged days shift under the girl’s buttocks shook Mandy. Craig looked over, slurry eyed, asked Mandy to join the fun.

Yes, the vicissitudes.

Mandy summoned her inner banshee, threw a lamp, some decent flatware. The others fled, and Craig packed the measly possessions he’d amassed in his turd of a life — some rusted throwing stars, a box of stale marzipan, his crack pipe, his cherished coverless paperback edition of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger —and scrammed. Now she saw him at meetings, tried not to retch at his conjob shares or recall the sweetness of their precious predawn hours, when addiction itself seemed as exquisite and harmless as a unicorn foal.

* * *

Today, after she’d led the ladies of cardio ballet through a quasi-sadistic grueler, Mandy leaned on the mirrored wall of the dance studio, sipped her bottled water, thought about her father in his living rigor mortis. If they’d had them when he was younger, he might have thrived in some sort of Holocaust support group, with sponsors, chips, key tags, coffee. Just once, history could have given her father a sloppy hug.

Mandy rolled her shoulders, sank into that honeyed post-class ache. A runnel of sweat curled down her calf. The day drained out of her. Endorphins filled her floodplains. Some people in recovery couldn’t manufacture these chemicals anymore. But then her body tightened again. She sensed movement, a figure, a man maybe, tall, through the corridor window. The figure disappeared, and another, smaller person clopped toward her in chunky heels.

“You seem so peaceful, I hate to disturb you.”

Tovah Gold looked twelve, but she had a degree in creative writing and a published poetry chapbook. She’d once presented a copy to Mandy but said she should not feel obligated to read it. Mandy sometimes wondered if Tovah thought she was dumb. The chapbook was called For the Student Union Dead , and Mandy thought the poems in it were dumb, the way smart people were often dumb.

Tovah taught a memoir class at the JCC. Mostly grandmothers spilling family matzo ball secrets, she’d said, or retired men composing disturbingly dry accounts of affairs with their best friends’ wives.

“Mostly I just help them with their segues,” Tovah once said.

“Hi,” said Mandy now. “How’s it going?”

“Horribly. No immortal lines this week, and my boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, I should say, has decided that our poetics are incompatible.”

“Right there myself,” said Mandy. “I kicked Craig out. He’s bad for my recovery.”

Tovah knew the Ballad of Craig and Mandy, took anthropological delight.

“What is it you all say?” she said. “Show up until you grow up?”

“Craig won’t grow up. He can go to hell.”

“But don’t you think he needs some—”

“Girlfriend, please,” said Mandy, did that dismissive wave all the sisters favored in meetings and lately on TV, but which Mandy couldn’t master.

“What’s that other one?” said Tovah. “You’re only as sick as your secrets? Is that it? I love that one. It doesn’t know it, but it’s poetry.”

“It knows it,” Mandy said.

Tovah was a good friend, maybe her only one in the so-called civilian world, but that didn’t mean Mandy couldn’t hate her sometimes, the gooey earnestness that, along with the poetess shtick, seemed both pure and calculated, a saintly condescension. Tovah’s innocence was a type of abuse. But Tovah’s fondness for Mandy was genuine. That made it better and worse.

“Listen, Mandy,” said Tovah. “I need to tell you something. I don’t want you to feel strange about it. Because in my world, the artist’s world, it’s a common thing. But maybe not for normal people.”

“I’m normal?”

“You’re wonderful,” said Tovah.

“Thanks,” said Mandy, already mourning the rousing solitude of a few minutes earlier. Bitch had snatched her natural rush.

“Anyway,” said Tovah, “I’ve been working on a poem cycle about you.”

“A what?”

“A bunch of poems.”

“About me?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know a lot, Mandy.”

“Not really. Maybe about me and Craig.”

“Researching facts isn’t the point,” said Tovah. “It’s about my construction of you. My projection.”

“So,” said Mandy, “I don’t get it. Are you asking permission?”

“A real artist never asks permission.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t want any static between us.”

“Am I Mandy?” said Mandy.

“Pardon?”

“In your poem, am I Mandy? Do you name me? Do you say Mandy Gottlieb?”

“No. It’s addressed to a nameless person.”

“Then why would I care?”

Tovah seemed stunned.

“Well … because it’s so obviously you.”

“But you said it’s about your structure of me.”

“My construction of … yes, that’s right.”

“So who cares?”

“I don’t really understand your question.”

“It’s okay, Tovah. Write what your heart tells you to write.”

“You are so marvelous, Mandy. You see life so clearly and simply, and it makes so much sense to you. I can’t thank you enough.”

“It’s enough,” said Mandy.

Tovah clutched her leather satchel, clopped away.

* * *

Mandy had a shower and steam, ran her favorite purple comb through her hair.

All you could do was stay clean and stay fit. Cardio ballet was mostly cardio. The ballet part was more like a dream of yourself.

Outside the locker room a tall man in a hooded sweatshirt leaned against the wall. He looked about thirty, with wavy hair and light stubble on his chin. His smirk seemed oddly familiar, almost comforting. Mandy made to move past him, and he cleared his throat, for comedic effect, she figured, though she could also hear phlegm swirl.

“Good class today?”

The man’s voice was thin and kind.

“Do I know you? Have you taken cardio ballet?”

“I want to,” said the man. “I want to very much.”

“There’s a sign-up sheet at the front desk.”

“I was hoping to talk to you first. Get a read on the class.”

“A read?”

“What it’s all about,” said the man.

“It’s about cardio and ballet. Sign up. We need men.”

“Would I get to be your partner?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your ballet partner. Throw you up in the air.”

“Sorry. It’s not very advanced ballet. This is just to get the blood pumping. There are other classes where you might … What? Why are you laughing?”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You look like you’re laughing.”

“I know. It gets me in trouble sometimes. It’s just how my face goes when I’m listening to somebody kind and beautiful talk about something she cares about.”

Mandy took a few steps back.

“Oh, no.” The man palmed his mouth. “I guess I just accidentally spoke my heart! I should get out of here. I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll sign up for the class.”