Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

At this Beatrice retrieved her implements and settled upon myself a none too forgiving gaze. "Look," she said at length, "my father was a monarch, yes, and me, I am some piece of ass, depend upon it — which, conjecture that it is, is nevertheless probably how come your weird relation had to hex me — the dirty stinking rotten crummy creep!"

It was then I spoke to my pet thusly: "Oh, oh, Beatrice, I beg you, I beg you, no more of this coarseness — it is altogether too distressing to me for me to hear it from your lips, not least when I now have such a deal of everything to struggle with within myself to make an adjustment to if we are, you and I, to produce a future for ourselves from this present — that you can converse, to cite the first of these items, that you are prospectively a most sumptuous instance of womanhood, to cite the second of these, that you promise incalculable erotic bliss, to cite the third, and that you must certainly be rich as well as royal, to cite in seriatim now a fourth and fifth."

"Kiss me, Gordo!" Beatrice commanded, flinging aside the symbols of her servitude and thrusting her open body at me. "Kiss me, pal, and all — big bucks, fabulous pussy, even life everlasting — it all shall be yours!"

"Sounds pretty swell to me," I acknowledged. But, collecting myself not a jot too soon, I drew myself safely apart and issued the ensuing statement: "I positively refuse, precious thing, to surrender myself to the conditions, and therefore to the punchline, of any joke that I, Gordon — Gordon! — have not myself devised, just as I would also refuse, please be aware, to forego even one of the several myselves deployed in the foregoing utterance."

The brute's eyes widened.

One noted, I note — with a twinge of unseemly satisfaction perhaps — that it was no longer my turn to be the party taken aback. Yet my heart was swift to soften at the spectacle of melancholy I had, in my recall to form, inspired — and, accordingly, awful as it was for me in my ruined substance to do, I reached out my fingertips and caused them to create a sort of consoling effect upon the nearer of the cur's ears.

"There, there," I crooned, "thrilling as it would be — I don't deny it for an instant — to inaugurate your freedom and therefore to liberate your tits, your title, your checking account, and your hole — I do think, on the whole, sweetness, I should much prefer the fame of my having been the proprietor of a talking dog."

Well, I needn't report the bitch bit me good and proper at that. Nor that I do not expect the wound she gave me — good God, the offense of one's biology, the incommensurable insult of it! — ever to give itself to even the beginnings of repair.

That's it.

It needs only to say no regrets.

It's been the first and last of my amours — witty, just, and not all that long from now, fatal.

I WANT TO TELL YOU some fast things first about when I was little and then I am going to go ahead and tell you a story like everybody else. One is there was a tree out front and I heard things in it and I could not see up to the top of it and it made me scared I couldn't. Two is the man next door said come see my jonquils and I did not know if I should or not. Three is I went to bed with socks on and somebody came in and pulled off the covers and stood looking and crying and saying look at that. Four is Little Eugene had a slime spoon and they made it my job to be the one to have to go clean it off. Five is the butter-and-egg man died from adhesions. Six is the plumber died from getting electrocuted. Six is the gardener died from digging up a basilisk. Seven is the electrician died from a double hernia. Seven is the fruit-and-vegetable man died from his goiter getting wet. Eight is my second-grade teacher died from something. Nine is the sandwich man at the druggist's died from something else. Ten is the mailman died from kidney trouble and his wife. Eleven is the man who came to put the wallpaper up died from keeling over. Twelve is my mother died from stones in her cunt. Thirteen is my cousin Artie Sakowitz died from choking on ice water. Fourteen is Aunt Esther died, Aunt Dora died, Aunt Adele died, Aunt Pauline died, Aunt Miriam died, also Uncle Lou did, Uncle Sig did, Uncle Jack did, Tante Ida did, Tante Lily did, and so did a girl in my class from bending over too much, and so did a man from a sled hitting his head, and so did a dog, and so did Jesus. Lots of movie stars are dead. Rabbi Sandrow is dead. There are dead people from wars, from volcanoes, from floods, from earthquakes, from fires, from famine, from pestilence, from pestilence, bad food, bad habits, rash decisions, rushes to judgment, killer plants, death thoughts, from playing too much with a jump rope too much, from even just doing nothing. There is a bug that can make you die by you walking on its back. There is a jellyfish that can swim in through your nose and then climb up into your brain and then eat your whole brain up. There is a lake that has bloodsuckers in it that can suck all of the blood out of somebody and nobody can get the bloodsuckers off of them even after all of the blood has been sucked out of them and there is no blood left in them anymore for the bloodsuckers anymore to suck out of them anymore. Did you know you can get somebody's hair stuck in your throat and suffocate from it? You can get hemorrhages. You can get dysplasia. You can get glossitis and herpetic stomatitis. You can get acute arterial thrombosis. Don't laugh. It's not funny. There's nothing funny about any of it. You think there's anything funny about obstructive uropathy? How about idiopathic long QT syndrome, you asshole! You think it's funny too? Fucking people with their fucking idea of what's hilarious! It makes me sick when somebody's got pericarditis with effusion and people start laughing about it and making wisecracks about it and carrying on like it's some kind of fucking joke.

People!

What makes people so absolutely so sickening?

Doesn't anybody know what makes people stand there and be so sickening?

Okay, as to the story like everybody else:

Schmulevitz comes out of the doctor's office, and Mrs. Schmulevitz says to him: "So? So tell me, darling husband, so what is the verdict?"

"The verdict?" Schmulevitz says. He says, "You are asking me, Schmulevitz, what the verdict is? Because the answer is," he says, "not so hotsy-totsy, for your information. Because for your information, Mrs. Schmulevitz," Schmulevitz says to Mrs. Schmulevitz, "because for your information the man in there, he gives me two weeks tops."

"Two weeks tops?" Mrs. Schmulevitz says to Schmulevitz. She says to him, "You are telling me the verdict is two weeks tops? So what is the deal with the two weeks tops?" Mrs. Schmulevitz says to Schmulevitz. "What, pray tell, is the condition with regard to the two weeks tops?" says Mrs. Schmulevitz.

"The ticker," says Schmulevitz. "The man says to me forget it, Schmulevitz, it's the ticker, Schmulevitz. Tops, the man says to me, you got two weeks tops, the man says to me. This is what the man says to me because of the ticker," says Schmulevitz.

"Well," says Mrs. Schmulevitz, "thank God at least it's not cancer."

So to you that's pretty fucking comic, right?

God, I cannot goddamn believe it.

ALL RIGHT, WE EACH HAVE SEVEN CARDS. Seven cards have been dealt to you, seven cards have been dealt to me. Let us say that, between the two of us, it is I who has done the dealing, yes? All right — if it is I who has been the one to deal, then you play first.

Yes, yes, yes, of course — but what do you play?

Let us say that you play the seven of diamonds.

Very good, you have played the seven of diamonds.

All right, my options are these — play a seven, or play a diamond, or play an eight.