Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

And by what means, you ask, were all and sundry possessed of the news of these behaviors?

Skip it.

Never was there a one — dreadful thing, nasty thing! — to distribute more widely word of his humiliations.

Nor was it not unknown how the widow who rented rooms to him entered them punctually on the occasion of their tenant's having from their precinct removed himself, the better to translate his endeavors abroad into revenue-bearing gestures, the lady's agenda consisting in her lavishing upon the interior of the disgusting vessel a further episode of covert flushing, there having been present — egad! — to this worthy's nose sufficient of notice to have sent her on the errand.

("How dare the creep pee in Tante Lorelei's cruet!")

Need we state, however, that what was paid to her by him who occupied the premises for the privilege that he might do so was a sum satisfactory in its magnitude to subdue the extremes of her annoyance? Too, to inspire in such as herself such esteem of her net advantage that the return of the now soundly washed object to the site where its owner conceived of it as hidden was never, as a domestic courtesy, neglected.

Ach!

Returned, yes, but never once, once returned, dried entirely of that which had been introduced into it — the cruet, Tante Lorelei's cruet! — to render it good and washed and torrentially rinsed.

Hmm.

All vermin please note.

To bathe in! To take sips from!

Go know when it comes to the customs of your cockroach in your Bohemian household.

Hence, yes, you guessed it, our little closure here discloses itself accordingly:

The fellow not actually perishing from fright but only very nearly doing so, which close call some thirsty, dirty exoskeletal invertebrate, crawly and not unmodishly vile (revealed in the midst of its vanishing up into the conduit of his business), had, in its evil decor, wrought.

Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!

(Sorry, Franzie.)

"Ai caramba, meineh schlangeleh! " shrieked he — for, man that he then was, could he, albeit stricken as he now was, still not shriek as such a one undone?

It later turned out, as it never not does, that the focus of all this dissembling of mine was indeed, in due course, compelled to consent to relinquish himself, in whatever phylum, to the one true abyss.

This by enacting a strong French swerve.

The upshot being a stroke induced by rushed — nay, gulped — draughts of Lipton's Instant Tea Mix in the company of many too many Uneeda Biscuits.

His headstone gives his dates.

Gives his name.

But gives nothing of his story, there having actually, of such a thing, been none.

Unless you people count impersonations, damn you.

I, the true Kafka, do not.

ANNA KRACZYNA IS LIVING HERE here in my house with me now. Anna Kraczyna is from Florence (Firenze to you, smart aleck!), and was born there and has lived there all her life (except, of course, for the time of it that she has been living here with me in my house, which is, you should have been able to tell by now, which is not a house in Florence), even though a smart aleck such as yourself might look at the name and arrive at a notion otherwise. Anyway, the reason I am writing this about Anna Kraczyna living here with me here in my house is this — the thing she just did, the thing she just said right after she had just done it, I have to, I just have to make a record of them both. One is she was vacuum cleaning the carpet in the carpeted bedroom. I refer to that bedroom as the carpeted bedroom because the other bedrooms aren't. The carpeted bedroom was long ago carpeted because when my wife Barbara and I created this house, the floor in the now-carpeted bedroom wasn't good enough, as was the floor elsewhere in this house, to just get by with with its being scraped, its being sanded, its then getting itself stained and varnished, or polyeurathaned, if that's what you call it, all that. It had to be carpeted, the only solution was that it be carpeted, and so we carpeted it. It's the one, it is the bedroom, my wife Barbara and I slept in all the years of the marriage, and then it was the one wherein Barbara was looked after all the years of her dying. She had to be fed there and have everything else done for her there. You don't want to hear what. It is too awful for anybody to have to hear what — was probably, probably was too awful for Anna Kraczyna to have heard some little bit of it, I don't doubt, although, yes, she did hear some little bit of it — because I couldn't, because, yes, I think I tried but couldn't keep my mouth shut. I wish I hadn't told her. It always gets told all wrong when you tell anyone. I don't think there is any way for me ever to tell any of this to anyone without it getting told pretty all wrong in the telling — the words you use, the way you use them, what your face is doing when you do. But I told Anna Kraczyna a little bit of some of it because we had to kill some time between when we got up this morning and when she had to go off to the airport for her to get herself back to Florence, where she'll start calling it, I guess, calling Florence, Firenze again. But I don't know. I don't know what Anna Kraczyna does when she is not here with me in my house and is instead in hers in Florence with her Pietro. It's just, as I said, a guess. But I bet it would be more or less congruent with the quality of what I have seen her do and heard her say at — what do they say? — at close hand, or is it range? Which brings us to this story — the story of Anna Kraczyna listening to me tell about my wife Barbara living and about my wife Barbara dying and then of Anna Kraczyna herself killing time vacuum cleaning the carpet in the one bedroom that's carpeted. She was going, she said, before she went to go do it, to go after the hairs of hers that had become visible to her on the carpet — and it would be easy for you to see how they would. We had spent a lot of time in there, Anna Kraczyna and I, this is one reason — and her hair, Anna Kraczyna's hair, it is probably as long and as golden as any hair anywhere. Well, it is as long and as golden as any hair I have ever slept next to, this you can bank on, and I guess this would go for my wife Barbara's hair too. Well, this is one of the reasons Anna Kraczyna's hair was so visible in there in that bedroom in there — because I had to change the carpet in there from the one my wife Barbara had decided on when we first had the carpet bought and paid for and laid. It was pretty wrecked. It was pretty ruined. It had been a kind of tapestrylike affair, or maybe it would be more correct of me for me to say a sort of turkey-work affair, crewel-work, or, Christ, I don't know what — this linen-y floral stitchery, this florally branchy clouded stitchery affair, all of it — wrought from, knotted into, embossed upon a ground of wheat-colored union twill, I suppose I could say, or, look, why not say beige? — because beige is what I was going to say — say beige in the first place — the original impulse I had, it was for me to say beige — so if it's all the same to you and if sufficient of your smart aleckiness has been by maybe been worn the hell off you by now, why don't I just go ahead and make it beige, just stick to beige, say, okay, then say anyhow beige? It didn't show anything, is the thing. Which, over the course of the years of my wife Barbara dying in there, was a lucky thing for all concerned. You know, all the machines and whatnot in there — tubes, tubes, tubules, tubules, tubulation, tubulation to the baseboards as if the municipality had decreed there be dredged a runaway cesspool. Then she died. Then my wife Barbara died. So one of the corrections I right away performed was get these gangs of specialists to rush onto the premises for them to have a go at getting the carpet rehabilitated. Then I finally broke down and went to a carpet store and made arrangements to have the dreamiest extravagance of the lot installed. Chesnut-colored. This — you won't believe this — this angora, I think, wool — or alpaca wool, maybe it's said, having to be snatched away, in season, from a region indecently southerly on the beast's neck. From Bolivia, anyway. So new-looking — so smooth-feeling on your feet — everywhere this chestnut-colored, wonderful wool miracle — except now that it is stretched out down on the floor in there, everything that descends to it is declared. They didn't tell me, nobody told me, you have a carpet laid anywhere like this, you lay a carpet in your house like this, watch out, get set, it is going to end up being a minute-to-minute lifelong project for you, all the sheddings, all the detritus, the ceaseless torrent of mere being made to glare back up at you in accusation from some umbrous perfection so much darker than a resident with any common sense would have picked for himself to have to live with with two eyes still in his head.