Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

YEARS AGO THERE HAD BEEN a fellow who kept trying to offer me some observations along the very same lines of the ones which my wife, in her time, did. But I didn't see any reason to argue with him, either. So far as his story goes, he's dead as a doornail now, so let's just get his name and address right out here right onto this sheet of paper here — Wortis, S. Bernard Wortis, his conduct of the business of psychiatry being carried out by him at one of the high even numbers on, you know, on East Fifty-seventh Street.

Here's an example of it.

"Just look at yourself. Don't you ever look at yourself? Why don't you come to your senses and sit yourself down and take a good look at yourself?"

But I have always been the sort of person to take a different view of looking.

You take today on the subway, for instance, this woman with this hulkiness of a suitcase. .

Here is what my mother used to say to me:

"Do you see what you look like? I don't think you see what you look like. How can you let people see you looking like this? You want to through life seeing yourself looking like this?"

Look, the man committed me and made sure I stayed right where he did it to me to, and this was for just shy of eight brazen months.

I kept trying to see up inside of her pants past where the crease was.

I'm leaving out everything. I'm leaving out even the tits and ass of it. I am just too weary of it for me to ever go over the whole history of it in the sense of the whole anything of anything again.

All right, shy of nine months, not shy of eight months — but since when is time the point?

He said to me, "It's high time you took the time to sit yourself down and take a good decent look at yourself."

Here is what happened on the E train today — the woman the color of what do they say? There is a woman the color of coffee with cream in it, and she's got on short pants on her, and for the top she's got on what I think they call a halter top, and they're both, they are both, the top and the bottom, they have that look, the both of them, that you will sometimes see of their being both at the same time just tight enough and just loose enough, and she has got her hair mown all the way down to her skull to a woolly-looking fuzzy high-domed cuntlike frizzle of a thing — and there her legs are, there her legs are, they are uncovered and glowy right up to almost past her backside almost and crossed in the manner, leg over leg, of how only a woman who gets herself looked at like this ever crosses her legs leg over leg like this — and the eyes and the arms and the mouth and the throat! I mean the things of her, the woman, the things!

She had a small child up on one shoulder.

She was about twenty, and it was — I don't know — maybe it was a baby.

There wasn't any ring on any of her fingers.

The child, the baby, it was out like a light in any light, and I could tell the mother was almost also.

Oh, well, yes — I could see the slenderest of gold ones.

Like a wire.

But it wasn't on any of her fingers.

My sister used to say to me: "I don't think you ever stop to think of what you look like."

The building I live in now, hey, it's so full of psychologists and psychiatrists and psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, it isn't even funny.

This whole block is.

They know who Wortis is here.

Or who Wortis was.

His fame went all of the way up from Fifty-seventh Street — or, if the rhyme's all the same to you, came up — because here is where I live up here now.

The suitcase, just to look at it — you could just look at it and tell it weighed a ton.

The first girl I ever tried to get to do it, she did it — but she didn't look like anything, and neither have any of the others of them all of the million times since.

Hundreds.

Thousands.

Not one fucking one!

But what about the girl on the E train today when I was going for the D at Seventh?

Look, you've got a perfect right to know why the man committed me, but tell me something, tell me — can't you already tell for yourself?

I thought: "Someone's dumped her. She's got no one. God has sent me, as my deliverance, this deliverance."

The second girl I ever did it with was probably less good to look at than the first one was. Right then and there, who couldn't have taken one look and doped it all out, the hopeless oblata of desire.

The last one said: "Okay, but do not think you are getting away with fooling me with what you look like, buster, not even for one stinking minute."

I thought: "Wouldn't it be proof of heaven's handiwork if she gets out at Seventh to also change over for the D?"

He said it with the accent on the nard .

Dead at forty-three.

Heart.

Heaven was taking a hand in it, all right — except only up to a point it was. Because when she got it to the door, struggling with it and with the baby so piercingly, so pitiably, that it made you want to kill for love, what she said to me was "No" when I said to her "You want for me to come try to help you with it so you can get it down the stairs?"

I'm not telling the whole story.

Tomorrow is June 17th.

That's a little more of the story.

The rest of it is, she said she wasn't going down the stairs, but when I got down them and then looked back up them, then there she was, coming down them and then going right past me on the platform and then going all the way away from me to the end of the platform as far away from me as she could get, all that cargo of her wretchedness notwithstanding.

My wife says, "Who do you think is ever going to look at you looking like this?"

Hey, but guess whose sister the motherfucker was humping when his ticker up and jumped him forty bucks into a one-hundred-dollar hour of friendly family psychotherapy!

Yeah, but lately, lately, what I'd like to know is this: Who has the one validated desperation of my life ever been doing to death for me, no es verdad?

"YUH, YUH, YUH."

"Oooo. Uuuu. Uuumach."

This is how they wake up. They wake up vomiting. Actually, it is a little after they wake up that Mr. and Mrs. North commence to first retch, then vomit.

They are not fools.

They know as well as you do the large peril of vomiting in one's sleep. Even in a condition of light sleep, there is the risk of strangulation on some chunk of what gets thrown up from the stomach. The odd bolus of ingestimenta could come skidding back up and lodge-self in some impromptu kink in the food pipe. Even with pillows lifting the head, you're looking for grief if you sleep on your back.

Mr. and Mrs. sleep on their backs. Once abed, this is the posture each pursues throughout the course of the dream-driven night.

They are good sleepers.

They do not vomit until they wake up.

They have separate bathrooms. Mr. and Mrs. use separate bathrooms for the act of vomiting. True, they could both in fact hasten themselves to the nearer bathroom, the one spouse disgorging himself into the sink while the other kneels before the toilet.

Don't ask me why it's not the way they do it.

Perhaps in some families vomiting is a private matter. Or perhaps it is that in this family each of the parties favors the same class of receptacle — Mr. and Mrs. being, after all, husband and wife and therefore alike. Without my speaking of it too descriptively, I take due note that the duration of their relation might have made of them a pair of sink-vomiters or of toilet-vomiters or even of tub-vomiters — vomiters whose practice it would be to vomit into the same style of concavity.

SEE WHAT YOU CAN MAKE OF THIS.

Early in the marriage, mixing bowls were kept at the ready — his on his side, hers on hers — on the floor by their bed. But as the marriage matured, its principals managed to scale certain elevations of self-control — thus making, in the end, the preparation of installing the nearby catch basin superfluous to their needs.