Lynne Tillman - No Lease on Life

It made her sick.

The cops didn’t see what the commotion was all about, there were no unruly kids on the church steps, they didn’t see the eggs, they drove over some of them and crushed them into the street, they didn’t look up, they didn’t see her, they drove away.

The ancient black woman fed her Chihuahua and wheeled herself to bed.

The man in the third-floor window was frustrated. He couldn’t go back to sleep. It didn’t matter. It was Saturday. He didn’t have to go to work.

Elizabeth hesitated. The street was dead. Then she climbed through the window into the apartment. Fatboy followed her obediently. She’d maintain a low profile, buy a white-noise machine, keep it next to the bed. Maybe nothing would happen. She slid next to Roy and poked him in his calf with her toenail. He was dead to the world, alive in another.

No one deserved to sleep. She wondered if she could. Elizabeth pulled the sheet over her head and waited.

※

I’d like to thank C. Carr for encouraging me to do a book set in New York; Tom Keenan for our discussions, his enthusiasm and acuity; the MacDowell Colony for giving me a wonderful place to write, and all the people who contributed jokes: David Hofstra, Joe Wood, Paul Shapiro, Bob DiBellis, Eiliot Sharp, Mark Wethli, Jane Gillooly, Rick Lyon, James Welling, John Divola. Marc Ribot, Dennis Cooper, Larry Gross, Charlotte Carter, Andrea Blum, Osvaldo Golijov, Martha Wilson, Michael Smith, Dick Connette, Charles Karubian, and many others whose jokes have become mine. I’d like especially to thank Richard Kupchinsksas, Debbie Negron, and Ginette Schenk for talking with me for this project.

Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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