Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

But why argue?

Where's the percentage?

It wasn't a cockroach on my mother's card.

It was just a very groggy earwig instead.

OH, THE PLEASURE SOLOVEI took in the manner of Shea's death, never mind that it was a suicide and Shea the very paradigm of what Solovei could not but help but helplessly think of whenever he, Solovei, had thought to set himself the meditation of what it must be to be the very gentile — oh so very big-boned, so very large-boned, heavy-boned, long and broad in all the central categories, the blithe inventor of every blocky declension, the very thing of this actual life most actually lived.

And never mind that Solovei loved Shea.

Solovei loved Shea's death more.

Could not keep himself from telling everyone.

"You hear about poor Shea? Poor devil drove himself off a fucking cliff. Took his car out and went poking up along the coast and found himself the scenic view that must have looked to him to be oceanic enough and then sailed the sonofabitch right off."

Or so the story went.

The story that had been carried cross-country to Solovei by those who had still been keeping company with Shea right up until Shea's finale.

Not that Solovei and Shea had ever had a falling out. Just that Solovei had come to arrive at a time in his life when it was more and more seeming to him to be necessary for him to keep himself more and more to his own small experience. This is why when Solovei told everyone about poor Shea, it was via the telephone that Solovei would pass along the news.

It made him ashamed.

"Hello?"

"Hi, this is Solovei."

"I'm calling about Shea."

"You remember, my old buddy Shea — big guy? Great big happy bastard, great big cheerful happy chap, with this sort of what you might call this indomitably red or reddish or reddish-colored hair?"

"Anyway, I just got this call from the other side of creation and you'll never guess what."

It seemed to Solovei nothing short of a veritable show of heroics in himself that he could keep telephoning the word around when here it kept making the fellow feel so horribly ashamed of himself for him to be doing it.

"Ah, God, the fierceness it must have taken in him for him to have taken hold of that goddamn wheel."

And so saying, have a vision of the hands of his friend Shea — great hams of hands, as Solovei understood these gentiles in these matters to say.

Meaty.

Big-freckled.

Letting go and gripping elsewise and then yanking your mind that long, clattering, blazing, disastrous way.

Jesus Christ.

The fucking savagery of Shea!

To which she said, "Oh, it is certainly not a question of living or of dying but only of the hilt."

Solovei did not get this.

He said, "Hilt?"

She said, "Why it has got its teeth so obstinately into you like this, Shea's doing away with himself — the fact that, like his life, how he did it was up to the hilt."

"Oh," Solovei said.

"Yes, of course," Solovei said.

"I see," Solovei said.

"Yes, I suppose so," Solovei said.

And knew his interlocutor had uncovered the truth.

She.

Her.

One of the ones Solovei had stopped feeling the necessity of keeping up with when he had started feeling the necessity of slowing down for himself.

"Come on over and we'll fuck," she said.

"You're spooked," she said.

"It'll get you unspooked," she said.

"Come fuck," she said.

"Maybe sometime soon," Solovei said, and then, with terror in his heart, hung up.

AS FOR WHAT IS LEFT of the story, Solovei never did manage to have his little visit with her but did have, some months thereafterward, a dream in which he had set out to have it, the visit, and in it saw himself in his motor-car motoring along the highway to her house, whereupon suddenly also saw — that is, the Solovei sleeping saw the Solovei driving — suddenly also saw himself having to perform an amazing sequence of unimaginably shrewd maneuvers to elude the enormous truck that had so abruptly been revealed to be bearing down so brutally down upon Solovei from Solovei's blind side, which was both, in his dream, of Solovei's sides.

Solovei could even hear himself already telephoning all of the friends he used to have.

"Hi."

"It's me."

"It's Solovei."

"I was on my way over to see Shea's old wife."

"I had the car out, just to pay a condolence call, and couldn't have conceivably have been driving more cautiously, when out of the blue there is all of a sudden right out of blue this gigantic fucking truck."

"Anyway, it's a miracle, the stunts I could all of a sudden so incredibly do — the steering, the brakes — my reliable, my viciously reliable, my God, mind."

MYRNA, LINDA, LILY, JANICE, SHIRLEY, Phoebe, Barbie, Barbara, Sylvia, Marilyn, Elaine, Georgia, Iris, Natalie, Patty, Joyce, Binnie, Velma, Molly, Mrs. Shea, Lucille, Marie, Maria, Valerie, Barbara, Grace, Stephanie, Caroline, Tina, Eliza, Edwina, Evelyn, Edna, Joanna, Jeanne, Janet, Enid, Edith, Laurella, Lorrie, Lorraine, Myra, Emily, Kate, Cathy, Constance, Hedy, Heidi, Barbara, Katrina, Denise, Josephina, Carolyn, Cousin Lettie, Leslie, Lettie, Barbara, Geraldine, Theodora, Patricia, Lena, Lena's sister, Felicia, Emmie, Effie, Ellie, Nettie, Nancy, Blissie, Nell, Nellie, Lilly, Nora, Barbara, Lillian, Helen, Helene, Mrs. Rose, Joy, Ann, Nan, Jan, Deb, Sue, Barbie, Susannah, Suzanne, Mary, Barbara, Barbara, Barbara, Martha, Sheila, Sheilah, Deirdre, Barbara, Cynthia, Cindy, Belle, Betty, Belinda, Bertha, Bettina, Barbie, Betsy, Blossom, Brenda, Brigette, Bronwen, Bessie, Barbara, Barbara, Barbie, Barbara, Barbara.

There have been buckets more than these, of course. But it would be indecent of me for me to list beyond the last name listed. It is sufficient to say I proved to exhibit an exorbitant fondness for the name Barbara and that I finally offered marriage to a person whose name was concludingly thus.

She accepted.

We were wed.

Have lived blissfully ever since.

O Bliss!

Have been joyful ever since.

O Joy!

This heart is overflowing.

O Accepta!

O Wedda!

O, hoshana in the highest!

HOSHANA?

I EXPECT THAT IT IS NECESSARY for me to tell you the true story of my father's shoes — for I have so often told — if not you, then others — such false stories of my father's shoes, sometimes claiming for my father's shoes some sort of formal irregularity that would enforce the thought of there being a certain abnormality of the feet my father had.

But there was nothing exceptional about my father's feet. My father's feet were perfectly routine feet. My own feet seem to me no different from my father's feet, and my feet are — can I not see my feet as they are? — entirely routine.

Ah, but here I am, already cheating.

I mean, it is shoes, my father's shoes, that I have been inviting you to prepare yourself to hear me tell the truth of, not the feet my father fitted into his shoes.

The firm of Balzano & Son made them, made all of them, dozens of them for each of the four seasons and for all of their uses, all with the maker's mark worked somewhere cunning into the buttery lining of each shoe's interior, Balzano & Son in the left shoe, Balzano & Son in the right shoe, and for each Balzano & Son shoe there would be a bespoke Balzano & Son shoe tree, each rubbed contour a vortical conjugation in wood grain, all formed to fit the exact form of each shoe exactly, this foot, that foot, it too, each shoe tree too, declaring its demand to argue for the theory of its provenance, the name Balzano & Son burnt into each layered grip of each shoe tree, into the grip of the left one and into the grip of the right one, Balzano & Son in the grip of the left one, Balzano & Son in the grip of the right one.