Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

Just as well.

For the bowls were notably unsightly seen squatting there to either side of the bed, where company might spot them when company was taken from the receiving rooms onto a tour of the interior of the Northern family residence.

"What's that?" the alert caller might think to himself — and, getting for his trouble no answer to the unstated but no less tasksome question, presume the offensive and worse.

So the mixing bowls were set aside, and it was a welcome triumph when they were, for now neither Mr. nor Mrs. has to cope with the nuisance of collecting such clumsy utensils from the kitchen night after cantankerous night. Sad to say, they had, in the old days, now and then quarreled on this score, but only on those occasions when they had both already retired for the evening, their having neglected to situate their bowls in place beforehand. First he, then she, or first she, then he, would claim fatigue much too fantastic to undertake the tiring travel all that mileage to the kitchen.

He, for example, would say, "I'm just too spent to do it, my darling," whereupon she would say, "Goes double, my love, for me."

Or sometimes say for me before saying my love .

Yet someone clearly had to, and, in the course of things, much as it was contrary to their temperaments, a fearful disputation would ensue until one or the other relented — which one being neither, as a rule, here neither nor there.

Thankfully, the debate over the mixing bowls became, in its time, a datum of the past. What remained to be ironed out was this — who was to have exclusive use of the nearer bathroom? It was vexation itself, this question. Naturally neither Mr. nor Mrs. proved willing to concede that he was any the less in control of his vomitus. To be sure, it seemed unfair that one or the other of them should have to lose one point to win another. So it fell out between them that it was quite properly the Mr. who ought traipse the greater distance — since this seemed to them the chivalrous, and therefore the more romantical, resolution.

Oh, Mr. North, Mr. North, the fellow insisted he could be happy with this program, and indeed he proved to be — for it pleased him to act in a fashion that promoted his self-esteem, and she, Mrs. North, she, for her part, was happy that her presence created the opportunity for Mr. North to carry out those gestures of courtly conduct consistent with his status as he understood it to rank, a generosity that enhanced her self-esteem inasmuch as she, Mrs. North, she, in effect, was providing for his.

BUT AS TO THE PRESENT, so that you might hear for yourself without hearing overmuch from me.

It ordinarily happens that the spouses greet each other before they start to vomit — a hale, a hearty, "Good morning, dearest," or some such expression of politesse. It might even happen that a number of sentences will have passed between the parties before one or the other of them is seized by the first official squeeze of the incipient spasm.

The following passage is drawn from their jointly reported account.

"Good morning, my dear."

"Good morning to you."

"Sleep well, my sweet?"

"Ever so well, thank you. And you?"

"Oh, fine, thank you. Very well indeed."

"That's good. Good. . good. . goo-uh. Goo-uh! Uh. Yuh! Yuh! Yuh! "

"Uuuu. Uuuuuch!"

"Yuh, yuh, ooyuch, yach! "

"Uuuuuch. Uuuuuch. Ooooo wach !"

And so on and so on, a connubial symphony, an achievable excellence, the matchless accord of the seasoned adventure in the monogamy of the over-fed.

MUST BE MY THIRD TIME around this time. Or is one supposed to say round ? Not that I am claiming that this is such a lot, just the three tries, and one of them not even plausibly a try yet, not even decently enough of a try so far that I could quit it right here and still get to count it as anything much more than the start of a start of a try at a try. Great Christ Almighty, there used to be a time when one could slog one's way through twenty, thirty, forty of the kind, knocking one's fnocking brains out over some adverb-ridden thing, proud as punch to have turned one's nose up at as many as that many words. Ah, but Great Christ Almighty all over again, my friends, your parts of speech were no big deal back then.

One had words galore.

One had words to burn.

One had to beat them back with a stick.

I myself had words to kill back then, and did away with as many as the country limit allowed.

Oh, there were words to go around back then, and don't let anybody ever tell you any different!

Unless he says round .

That I should have said round .

That actually it's round that would have been the proper way for a proper writer to do it.

MY PAL DENIS SAYS that one of the things which Nietzsche once said was a thing which went roughly along the lines of a saying like this:

"What good did killing God do if grammar still sasses you back?"

Listen, you think anybody ever needs to be told?

Speaking of which — not of Him or of Denis but just of listening — there is this one fellow who is sitting listening to this other fellow in the two earlier times around when I made the two earlier tries at the story which I am fixing to try to tell you for the third time this time now, just like it right this minute now is supposed to be you sitting, please God, listening to me.

Except they're both, those both, on a plane.

On an airplane.

Which airplane has been going around and around over the airport because the airplane can't get in.

IT IS A QUESTION of congestion.

Or of round and around.

You have to have a runway, you have to have clearance, the traffic is terrific, you think it takes a genius to invent such an explanation as this?

Or to tell you how scared to death it is so easy for everyone up in the air for them to get when you have gone from all of the way here to all of the way there but, word to word, the pilot cannot get in?

Save your breath.

Who hasn't himself been through it?

One's belted down into the last seat one's ever going to ever get oneself belted into — while meanwhile the big lunk keeps wallowing the fnock around, no clarification from the fnocking cockpit forthcoming!

So it's no wonder, isn't it?

That you'll talk just to hear yourself talk?

As one of the men on the plane in the story did.

Or did in the story on the plane.

LIKE THIS:

"Would you believe it if I told you I travel with the dead? No, really, it is actually a business, I am with a firm that operates in this business, for when you sometimes have to have somebody with it if there is a casket which is in transit, either because it is a statute that you have to, either because it is probably a state or federal statute that you have to, or because of the airlines themselves enacting it, a regulation which they themselves have deemed enacted, somebody, a ticketed passsenger, traveling with the dead."

Oh, you could look to me to be talking my head off just as frantically as he is if it were I who was strapped in up there next to the fellow we just sat here and heard — what with nothing by way of a word still to come from the people in charge of the circling and still no hint of the first descent to earth.

But I'm down here writing — and going for my third.

Whereas up there in that, up in that airplane, the man next to the man just listens.

Or appears to do.

Not that the fellow talking would anyhow not keep talking because he's so scared.

THIS IS SOME MORE of what, sentence by sentence, the scared man says and then says.

"You have to be bondable."

"What if it's really the wheels?"