Can't and Won't: Stories (20 page)

I’m not tired of all good books, I’m just tired of novels and stories, even good ones, or ones that are supposed to be good. These days, I prefer books that contain something real, or something the author at least believed to be real. I don’t want to be bored by someone else’s imagination. Most people’s imagination just isn’t very interesting—you can guess where the author got this idea and that idea. You can predict what will come next before you finish reading one sentence. It all seems so arbitrary.

But it’s true that I’m also bored, sometimes, by my own dreams, and by the act of dreaming: here I go again, this scene does not make sense, I must be falling asleep, this is a dream, I’m about to start dreaming again. And I am sometimes bored even by the act of thinking: Here’s another thought, I’m about to find it interesting or not interesting—not this again! In fact, I am sometimes bored by my friendships: Oh, we will spend the evening together, we will talk, then I will go home—this again!

Actually, I don’t mean I’m bored by old novels and books of stories if they’re good. Just new ones—good or bad. I feel like saying: Please spare me your imagination, I’m so tired of your vivid imagination, let someone else enjoy it. That’s how I’m feeling these days, anyway, maybe it will pass.

Old Woman, Old Fish

The fish that has been sitting in my stomach all afternoon was so old by the time I cooked and ate it, no wonder I am uncomfortable—an old woman digesting an old fish.

Staying at the Pharmacist’s

story from Flaubert

Where am I staying? In the home of a pharmacist! Yes, but whose student is he?
Dupré’s!
Isn’t that fantastic?

Like Dupré, he makes a lot of seltzer water.

“I’m the only one in Trouville who makes seltzer water,” he says.

And it’s true that often, as early as eight o’clock in the morning, I am woken by the noise of corks flying away:
pif
,
paf
, and
cccrrrout!

The kitchen is also the laboratory. Among the saucepans, there rises, in an arc, from a monstrous still, a

fearful tube of steaming copper

and often they can’t put the pot on the fire because of the pharmaceutical preparations.

To go to the shithouse in the courtyard, you have to step over baskets filled with bottles. They have a pump out there that spits water and sprays your legs. The two boys rinse jars. A parrot squawks over and over all day long: “Have you had lunch, Jako?” or “Coco, my little Coco!” And a kid of about ten, the son of the house, the great hope of the pharmacy, practices feats of strength by lifting weights with his teeth.

A piece of foresight which I find touching is that there’s always paper in the WC—
gummed paper
or, rather,
waxed paper.
It’s the wrapping from packages—they don’t know what else to do with it.

The pharmacist’s latrine is so small and dark that you have to leave the door open when you crap, and you can hardly move your elbows to wipe your ass.

The family dining room is right there, close by.

You hear the sound of the turds falling into the
can
, mingled with the sound of pieces of meat being turned over on the plates. Belches alternating with farts, etc.—charming.

And that eternal parrot! Right now it’s whistling: “I’ve got good tobacco, yes I do!”

The Song

Something has happened, in a house, and then something else has happened, but no one is bothered. The light, pleasant voice of a man begins to sing in an upstairs hallway, aimlessly, steadily. We hardly notice. Then, from the bottom of the stairwell, abruptly, comes the savage shout of another man: “Who sing!?!” The singing voice falls silent.

dream

Two Former Students

One former student told the other former student to go away, out there, in the snow, at night.

Go away, he said to the other. If she sees us both, she will label us both former students, forgetting that I am I and you are you.

He was the older former student. He had fought in a war. He had not reenlisted because he wanted to do something else with his life. He was deaf in one ear.

The other former student was young, but he had been to Europe.

It was true that as she looked out the window at them walking back and forth under the streetlight, they were, in her mind, two former students, more so than if each of them had been alone, fully himself, though also, unavoidably, a former student.

dream

A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates

A very kind man had made a little gift to her, on her visit to Vienna that fall, of a box of chocolates. The box was so small it could sit in the palm of her hand, and yet, as though by a miracle, it contained 32 tiny, perfect chocolates, all different, in two layers of 16 each.

She had carried it home from Vienna without eating any, as she always carried home food that she acquired on a trip. She wanted to show it to her husband, and she intended to share it with him. But after she opened the box and they both admired the chocolates, she shut the box again without taking a chocolate and without offering him one, and put the box away in her private workplace. There she kept it and looked at it from time to time.

She thought of sharing it with her students the next time she went to class, but she did not take it.

She did not open the box and her husband did not ask about the chocolates either. She could not believe he had forgotten them, since she herself thought of them and looked at the box so often. But after a couple of weeks, she had to believe he had forgotten about them.

She thought of having one chocolate each day, but she did not want to begin eating the chocolates without some special occasion.

She thought of sharing the box with 31 friends, but she could not decide when to begin that.

Finally, when the end of the semester and the last night of her class came, she decided to take the chocolates with her and share them. She was afraid she had waited too long, since four weeks had passed since the kind man had given her the chocolates in Vienna, and the chocolates might be stale, but she put rubber bands around the box and took it anyway.

She told her students how it amazed her to think that a box of chocolates so small could be shared with 31 friends. She thought they would laugh, but they did not. Perhaps they were not sure if it would be polite to laugh, or perhaps they did not think that what she had said was funny. She could not always predict their reactions. She herself thought it was funny, or at least interesting.

She took the lid off the box and handed it to the nearest student. She invited them all to admire the chocolates.

“Can we also eat one?” asked the student who was holding the box, “or should we just look at them?” He was perhaps joking, but perhaps she had not been clear that she was sharing the chocolates with them.

“Of course you should eat them,” she said.

“May I see the lid of the box?” asked another student.

The lid was almost as beautiful as the chocolates. It was green and closely decorated with little medieval figures and buildings in orange, yellow, black, white, and gold. On little white banners, black letters in German Gothic script spelled out what seemed to be proverbs—short sayings that rhymed. She could understand only a few words of each proverb. One recommended acting like a sundial.

The hungry students each took one tiny chocolate—or perhaps, since she was not watching them closely, some took none and some took more than one. She had planned to share the chocolates with 31 different friends, but now she felt sorry for the tired, hungry students and sent the box around the room again. One student, a young man from Canada, took responsibility for gathering up the tiny empty paper holders from inside the box and carrying them to the wastebasket by the classroom door.

After the class, she put the rubber bands around the box again and carried it back home.

She herself had not yet eaten a chocolate, and she was a little worried that she had waited too long. How long could one keep chocolates sitting in a box? She had been afraid the chocolates would taste stale to the students. But only one student was an expert in chocolates, she was sure. That student would not say anything, out of politeness, or perhaps had not even taken a chocolate, knowing how long ago she had been in Vienna.

Then, two days later, she could not find the box in her bag or her briefcase and was afraid she had lost it. She even thought for a moment that perhaps a student had stolen it.

Then she looked more carefully and found it. She opened the box and counted: 7 chocolates out of 32 remained in the box—25 had been eaten. Yet there were only 11 students in the class.

She put it once again in her workplace, on the old Mexican bench that she liked so much.

She wondered whether it was right to eat a chocolate by herself, and, if it was right, then whether one had to be in a certain mood or frame of mind to eat a chocolate by oneself. It did not seem right to eat a chocolate out of anger, or resentment, or greed, but only out of a lust for pleasure, or in a mood of happiness or celebration. But if one did eat a chocolate by oneself out of greed, was it less wrong if the chocolate was very small?

She knew that she did not want to share the remaining chocolates.

When at last she ate a chocolate, by herself, it was very good, rich and bitter, sweet and strange at the same time. The taste of it remained in her mouth minute after minute, so that she wanted to eat another one, to begin the pleasure all over again. She had planned to eat one each day until they were gone. But now she ate another right away. She wanted to eat a third, but did not. The next day, she ate two, one after the other, out of a lust for pleasure, in defiance of what she thought was right. And the next day, she ate one more out of a vague, indefinite hunger, not necessarily for food.

She found the chocolates so good that she decided she had not waited too long, after all. Unless she was not qualified to judge, and there was a difference, imperceptible to her but perceptible to an expert, such as the one student she believed was an expert, between the taste of a chocolate eaten right away and one eaten after four weeks.

Then she asked her student, the expert in good chocolates, where in the city she could buy the best chocolates. Her student gave her the name of the best store for chocolates, and she went to that store hoping to find tiny chocolates like those given to her by the kind man in Vienna. But the store offered only larger chocolates, chocolates of a more typical size, good in their own way but not what she wanted.

She did not like to eat larger chocolates, she decided. Now that she had, for the first time, experienced the tiniest of chocolates, that was what she preferred.

She had, some months before, been offered a chocolate in Connecticut, in the home of a rather severe Belgian woman whom she had known for many years. It had been a good chocolate, as far as she could tell, but she had found it a little too large, too large to eat quickly, in any case. She had taken many small bites of it, and enjoyed those bites, but had not wanted another chocolate when urged. The other people present had found that strange, and the Belgian woman had laughed at her.

The Woman Next to Me on the Airplane

The woman next to me has many fast and easy crossword puzzles to do during the flight, from a book called
Fast and Easy Crosswords.
I have only slow and difficult crosswords, or impossible crosswords. She finishes each puzzle and turns the page, as we fly at top speed through the air. I stare at one page and don’t finish any.

Writing

Life is too serious for me to go on writing. Life used to be easier, and often pleasant, and then writing was pleasant, though it also seemed serious. Now life is not easy, it has gotten very serious, and by comparison, writing seems a little silly. Writing is often not about real things, and then, when it is about real things, it is often at the same time taking the place of some real things. Writing is too often about people who can’t manage. Now I have become one of those people. I am one of those people. What I should do, instead of writing about people who can’t manage, is just quit writing and learn to manage. And pay more attention to life itself. The only way I will get smarter is by not writing anymore. There are other things I should be doing instead.

Wrong Thank-You in Theater

At the back of the auditorium, as the theater fills for the event, I stand up from my seat to let a woman get past me to her seat in the row.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Mmm-hmm!” I say in acknowledgment.

But I have misunderstood. She was not thanking me, she was thanking the usher, who is standing a few feet behind me.

“No, I meant
her
,” she says, without looking at me.

She just wanted to make that clear.

The Rooster

Today I paid a condolence call on Safwan, the owner of the Farm and Country Deli. His rooster was killed last week on the road. I had first stopped at the house across from the deli, where there are many chickens and three roosters—but it was not one of those that had been killed. I talked to Safwan for a little while. He said he would not be getting another rooster—the road was too dangerous. His rooster had often wandered into the road pecking at crumbs, Safwan said, instead of staying in the backyard, because of the dog in the yard next door, which frightened him.