Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

The host and hostess, they were swell people. No need to say more. Nice folks. I was going to say "for Christians," but it is never necessary for you to actually say it, is it? As for the houseguest thing, we can skip right from Friday when we got there to Saturday before supper, their having over a few neighbors to meet us — other couples, more Christians. There was this one fellow among them, he seemed to take me for a person of special interest. We got to talking with what was surely more gusto than you would have thought customary among such citizens. I don't know what about so much as I know it had to do with a lot of different municipal things — the houses around there, the gardening, getting the old estates up to scratch with strenuous renovations. There were these trays of Rob Roys going from hand to hand, and dishes of tiny asparagus spears and something lemony in a small porcelain bowl, kids underfoot, and the light in there, it was that settled light, this burnished thing the April light can sometimes get to be at maybe any o'clock when you are indoors in a low-slung, high-gloss, many-windowed room. Well, I might as well tell you now, the fellow had a little girl there, maybe half the age of our boy. Harelipped — this was the thing — a girl with a bad face to go through life with, and I think I got drunk enough to say to the man, "Aw, God — aw, shit."

THAT'S IT. THE STORY STOPS SHORT right then and there with "Aw, God — aw, shit." Because the next thing you know, its morning and I am waking up in one of the upstairs beds. But I cannot tell you how I got there. I cannot even tell you what was what between when I was knocking back those Rob Roys and when I was lying down and lifting away the comforter from my head.

There was a carillon across the street. Or across the town. Who knows? It was playing hymns. Or what I think are hymns. As for me, I felt entirely terrific — feeling nothing, not even a tremor of what you would expect in the way of any aftereffect. What I mean is this — that I had gotten so bad off that I had actually lost time, lost hours — not in this but in real life. Yet there I was, waking up and never sprightlier, never more refurbished in fiber and spirit. Restored, I tell you — I could have said to you, "Look at me, for Christ's sake, look at me — I am in the pink, on par, up to snuff!" Except for this thing of a whole night having vanished on me — which was something I was not going to let myself think about yet — or which I did not actually really even believe yet — whereas I kept trying to figure out how a thing like this sort of worked, one minute you're on your feet blazing away with a great new friend, the next minute you've skipped over no knowing what, and how did you get to here and to this from there and from that and from whatever that was?

Thing was, I knew I couldn't ask my wife. Christ, are you kidding? But I could smell the bacon down there, and went down, thinking that if I don't get a certain kind of a look from her, then this will mean I must have behaved passably well enough, even if I was actually out like a light behind my eyes. And this is how the whole thing down there turned out, all of them downstairs — host, hostess, wife, our boys — and nobody — wife least of all — seeming to regard me as other than an immoderately late-riser and indecorous latecomer to the table.

Coffee is poured, conversation reinstalled.

But here is where the story stops short again. Because — just by way of making an effort to add myself to the civilities — I said, "Wretchedest luck, that bugger, and such a handsome woman, his espoused, the two of them such a damnably attractive couple, and that little girl with the, you know, with the thing, the lip." I mean, I did a speech as an offering, as a show of my harmless presence, the hearty closing up of the morning circle, the one we seek to form to ward off what there had to have been for everyone of night spells.

NOT STOPS SHORT ENOUGH, THOUGH. Because somebody was taking me up on it, converting ceremony to sermon. My wife, of course — her, of course — with that carillon going absolutely nuts behind her. I tell you, whoever it was, and whatever he was playing, the man was good on the thing, the man was getting something colossal from those community bells.

But back to my wife, please — for she nips off a bit of toast and says, "You call it bad luck? Knowing what you know, considering what you know, taking into account all that you know, this is what you say, just bad luck?"

Ah, but this is madness, this is treachery — saying anything about a thing like this when I know it is a thing that ought to be left unsaid. Besides, we had no business being where we were. Even if it had meant keeping to the city and to squabbling over everything in sight, here is where we belong, the city is where we belong, where all the trees worth climbing are kept well out of sight. Those were rich people. My drink, when I was drinking, it had never been anything with the swagger of the armorial in its name.

I mean, what the hell was she getting at, just a harelip?

Listen, I didn't give her the satisfaction. I didn't ask. What I did was go to work on it with my own good sense — trying harder to remember, or to make things up — the result being that on the way home, I came up with a story that goes roughly like this — the fellow with the little girl sort of producing himself from out of the mist of the rest, my not tracking his features any too clearly, my vision already diminished by at least half.

"Ah, yes," he says, and with his glass he gives my glass a click. He says, "Great to meet the neighbors, don't you say?" He says, "See the fucking neighbors?" He says, "Here's to fucking us."

And me, what did I do?

Say l'chaim ?

Click his glass back?

"Oh, sure, sure," I hear the fellow say. "Sure, sure — right, right — super, boffo, swell, wouldn't you say?"

I know. We drank.

Did I ever say, "Surgery can handle that"? Is that what I said? Click the hell out of his glass again and say "It's nothing — a good man can fix it right up"?

I mean, what had I said to him to get him to say to me, "Had a little chap of his measure once," and waggle his Rob Roy in salute to my boy? Except all of this, it's all invention, isn't it? — because by then it was too hard for me to tell if we were standing in light or kneeling in water. "Bloody garage door took his fucking head off, don't you know? No, really, old chap. Brand new electric sort of a thing. Electronic, I mean."

We were coming up on a tollbooth, my wife and I.

In real life, that is. But I don't have to tell you I wasn't there with all my wits. "Take this!" my wife was saying, and I took a hand off the wheel to take the coins from her hand, meanwhile still making up sentences to keep filling in for where whiskey had done its best to devise an abyss.

"Nothing against the old homestead, though — no bloody hard feelings."

Is this what I think the man said next? Or something like, "The fucker drops like a shot the day they finish getting the wiring in."

I don't think I ever got his name, the man who came for cocktails when the neighbors came over and who then took his leave with the others so that the host and hostess could finally sit us down to something — my wife says to cold lamb. She also says she was standing right there and heard every single word, him saying how they'd lost a son but that God had made it up to them with the girl. My wife says the man said to me, "I'd spotted you, you know," and that I said, "For what?" and that the man said, "For a Jew."

But I would not put it past her, making that up, just the way me, I am making this up, especially the part about my hearing the sonofabitch say, "Happy fucking Easter," plus the part about my seeing myself get a hand up out of my pocket to hold his chin in place so that I could aim for right on his lips when that was where I kissed him.