Can't and Won't: Stories (18 page)

Short Conversation (in Airport Departure Lounge)

“Is that a new sweater?” one woman asks another, a stranger, sitting next to her.

The other woman says it’s not.

There is no further conversation.

Revise: 2

Continue with Baby but remove Priorities. Make Priorities Priority. Cut inside Moving Forward. Add to Paradox that the boredom is contained within the interest, while the interest is contained within the boredom. Take that out. Find Time. Continue with Time. Continue with Waiting. Add to Baby that its hand is grasping the foot of a strange frog. Add Priority and Nervous to Revise: 1. Continue Kingston with Family and Supermarkets. Continue with Grouch. Start Kingston with Siberian Tiger.

Left Luggage

The problem is this: she is passing through the city and needs to spend some time in the public library. But the library coat check will not accept her suitcase—she must leave it somewhere else. The answer seems clear: she will go down the street to the railway station and leave her suitcase, and then come back to the library. She walks in the wind and the rain with a small umbrella in one hand and the handle of her rolling suitcase in the other, to the railway station. She walks all over the station looking for the left-luggage office. There are restaurants and shops, a beautiful high ceiling with constellations on it, marble floors and walls, grand staircases and sloping walkways, but there is no left-luggage office. At an information window she asks about left luggage, and the angry employee silently reaches under the counter for a flyer and hands it to her. It is the flyer of a commercial left-luggage establishment that has two addresses, neither of which is in the station. She must go either several blocks uptown or several blocks down.

She walks uptown in the wind and the rain and then several blocks east, in the wrong direction, and then several blocks west, in the right direction, and finds the address, an old, narrow building between a fast-food store and a travel agent. She rides up in the elevator with a couple who are planning to get married in Brazil. They are on their way to a notary public. The woman is explaining to the man that he needs to swear before a notary that he has not been married before. Besides the notary public and the left-luggage office, this building contains a Western Union office where money can be sent or received.

The whole of the small top floor, the sixth, is the left-luggage place—one room on the street side and one in the back. The street-side room is entirely empty and flooded with sunlight. In the back room, a long folding table has been pushed across the doorway, and a man sits at the table beside a large roll of little pale blue tickets, the sort that are given out for rides at a country fair. There are some suitcases grouped against the walls in the room behind him. He smiles and speaks to her with an Eastern European accent. His smile is friendly. Some of his teeth are crooked and some are missing. She pays $10 in advance, gives the man her suitcase, and takes a pale blue ticket. Then she goes back down in the elevator and starts walking in the wind and the rain back towards the public library, thinking about her suitcase. In her haste and confusion, she has not locked it. She hopes her foreign currency won’t be stolen.

She has just flown into the city from another city, in another country. They do it differently there, she thinks: in that place, there was a locker right in the middle of the station, and the locker opened onto a conveyor belt that took all the luggage to some holding area. There, she had deposited her suitcase in the locker, for a fee equivalent to $5, which seemed expensive to a man standing near her, who opened his eyes and his mouth wide and said, “
Donnerwetter!!
” When she was ready to pick up her suitcase, it was returned to her at the same place, by conveyor belt. She thinks about this as she walks. She will forget about it for a while, in the library, as she works in the quiet, chilly, thinly populated room. But as she walks, she thinks, But I am home now, and this is how we do it, in this city, in our country.

Waiting for Takeoff

We sit in the airplane so long, on the ground, waiting to take off, that one woman declares she will now write her novel, and another in a neighboring seat says she will be happy to edit it. Food is being sold in the aisle, and the passengers, either hungry from waiting or worried that they will not see food again for some time, are eagerly buying it, even food they would not normally eat. For instance, there are candy bars long enough to use as weapons. The steward who is selling the food says he was once attacked by a passenger, though not with a candy bar. Because the plane had been delayed so long, he said, the passenger threw a drink in his face, damaging one eyeball with a piece of ice.

Industry

rant from Flaubert

How nature laughs at us—

And how impassive is the ball at which the trees dance—and the grass, and the waves!

The bell of the steamship from Le Havre rings so furiously I have to stop working.

What a raucous thing a
machine
is.

What a racket industry makes in the world!

How many foolish professions are born of it!

What a lot of stupidity comes from it!

Humanity is turning into an animal!

To make a
single pin
requires
five or six different specialists.

What can you expect from the people of Manchester—

who spend their lives making
pins?
!!

The Sky Above Los Angeles

The sky is always above a tract house in Los Angeles. As the day passes, the sun comes in the large window from the east, then the south, then the west. As I look out the window at the sky, I see cumulus clouds pile up suddenly in complex, pastel-colored geometrical shapes and then immediately collapse and dissolve. After this has happened a number of times in succession, at last it seems possible for me to begin painting again.

dream

Two Characters in a Paragraph

The story is only two paragraphs long. I’m working on the end of the second paragraph, which is the end of the story. I’m intent on this work, and my back is turned. And while I’m working on the end, look what they’re up to in the beginning! And they’re not very far away! He seems to have drifted from where I put him and is hovering over her, only one paragraph away (in the first paragraph). True, it is a dense paragraph, and they’re in the very middle of it, and it’s dark in there. I knew they were both in there, but when I left it and turned to the second paragraph, there wasn’t anything going on between them. Now look …

dream

Swimming in Egypt

We are in Egypt. We are about to go deep-sea diving. They have erected a vast tank of water on land next to the Mediterranean Sea. We strap oxygen to our backs and descend into this tank. We go all the way to the bottom. Here, there is a cluster of blue lights shining on the entrance to a tunnel. We enter the tunnel. The tunnel will lead into the Mediterranean. We swim and swim. At the far end of the tunnel, we see more lights, white ones. When we have passed through the lights, we come out of the tunnel, suddenly, into the open sea, which drops away beneath us a full kilometer or more. There are fish all around and above us, and reefs on all sides. We think we are flying, over the deep. We forget, for now, that we must be careful not to get lost, but must find our way back to the mouth of the tunnel.

dream

The Language of Things in the House

The washing machine in spin cycle: “Pakistani, Pakistani.”

The washing machine agitating (slow): “Firefighter, firefighter, firefighter, firefighter.”

Plates rattling in the rack of the dishwasher: “Neglected.”

The glass blender knocking on the bottom of the metal sink: “Cumberland.”

Pots and dishes rattling in the sink: “Tobacco, tobacco.”

The wooden spoon in the plastic bowl stirring the pancake mix: “What the hell, what the hell.”

An iron burner rattling on its metal tray: “Bonanza.”

The suction-cup pencil sharpener being peeled up from the top of the bookcase: “Rip van Winkle.”

Markers rolling and bumping in a drawer that is opened and then shut: “Purple fruit.”

The lid of a whipped butter tub being prised off and then put down on the counter: “Horóscopy.”

A spoon stirring yeast in a bowl: “Unilateral, unilateral.”

Could it be that subliminally we are hearing words and phrases all the time?

These words and phrases must be lingering in the upper part of our subconscious, readily available.

Almost always, there has to be something hollow involved: a resonating chamber.

Water going down the drain of the kitchen sink: “Late ball game.”

Water running into a glass jar: “Mohammed.”

The empty Parmesan cheese jar when set down on counter: “Believe me.”

A fork clattering on the countertop: “I’ll be right back.”

The metal slotted spoon rattling as it is put down on the stove: “Pakistani.”

A pot in the sink with water running in: “A profound respect.”

A spoon stirring a mug of tea: “Iraqi, -raqi, -raqi, -raqi.”

The washing machine in agitation cycle: “Pocketbook, pocketbook.”

The washing machine in agitation cycle: “Corporate re-, corporate re-.”

Maybe the words we hear spoken by the things in our house are words already in our brain from our reading; or from what we have been hearing on the radio or talking about to each other; or from what we often read out the car window, as for instance the sign of Cumberland Farms; or they are simply words we have always liked, such as Roanoke
(
as in Virginia
)
. If these words (“Iraqi, -raqi”) are in the tissue of our brain all the time, we then hear them because we hear exactly the right rhythm for the word along with more or less the right consonants and, often, something close to the right vowels. Once the rhythm and the consonants are there, our brain, having this word somewhere in it already, may be supplying the appropriate vowels.

Two hands washing in the basin: “Quote unquote.”

Stove dial clicking on: “Rick.”

Metal rug beater being hung up on a hook against the wooden wall of the basement stairs: “Carbohydrate.”

Man’s wet foot squeaking on the gas pedal: “Lisa!”

The different language sounds are created by these objects in the following way: hard consonants are created by hard objects striking hard surfaces. Vowels are created with hollow spaces, such as the inside of the butter tub whose lid and inner volume created the sounds of the word “horóscopy”—“horó” when the lid was coming off and “scopy” when the lid was put down on the counter. Some vowels, such as the
e
’s in “neglected,” spoken by the plates in the dishwater, are supplied by our brain to fill out what we hear as merely consonants: “nglctd.”

Either consonants function to punctuate or to stop vowel sounds; or vowels function to fill out or to color consonants.

Wooden-handled knife hitting counter: “Background.”

Plastic salad spinner being set down on counter: “Julie! Check it out!”

Drain gurgling: “Hórticult.”

Orange juice container shaken once: “Genoa.”

Cat jumping down onto bathroom tiles: “Va bene.”

Kettle being set on clay tile: “Palermo.”

Wicker laundry basket as its lid is being opened: “Vobiscum” or “Wo bist du?”

Sneeze: “At issue.”

Winter jacket as it is being unzipped: “Allumettes.”

Grating of wire mesh dryer filter being cleaned with fingers: “Philadelphia.”

Water being sucked down drain of kitchen sink: “Dvo
ř
ák.”

First release of water from toilet tank as handle is depressed: “Rudolph.”

I don’t think I’ve heard or read these words recently—does this mean I
always
have the word “Rudolph,” for instance, in my head, maybe from Rudolph Giuliani, but more probably from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?

Zipper: “Rip.”

Rattling of dishwashing utensils: “Collaboration.”

Rubber flip-flop squeaking on wooden floor: “Echt.”

If you hear one of these words, and pay attention, you are more likely to hear another. If you stop paying attention, you will stop hearing them.

You can hear the squawking of ducks in the scrape of a knife on a plastic cutting board. You can hear ducks, also, in the squeaking of a wet sponge rubbing a refrigerator shelf. More friction (wet sponge) will produce a squeak, whereas less friction (dry sponge) will produce a soft brushing sound. You can hear a sort of monotonous wailing music in a fan or two fans going at once if there is some slight variation in their sound.

There is no meaningful connection between the action or object that produces the sound (man’s foot on gas pedal) and the significance of the word (“Lisa!”).

Bird: “Dix-huit.”

Bird: “Margueríte!”

Bird: “Hey, Frederíka!”

Soup bowl on counter: “Fabrizio!”