The first weeks of their marriage were an unadulterated joy. They honeymooned in Italy in the spring, and every morning he rose early, went out and bought a bouquet, which he gave to her while she still lay in bed. The morning they left for home, he was too rushed to buy flowers, but their plane arrived in America with ample time to spare, and he bought her a rose at the airport. Upon their return to our city, he found a florist near the house they shared, and visited there every morning before the two left for work.
Soon, however, his office schedule was changed. He had to report to work an hour earlier than usual, well before the florist opened, and got off at half-past five, the very moment the florist closed. To get around this problem, he sometimes visited the florist on his lunch hour or, barring that, dropped in at the market on his way home. The resulting flowers were often less than fresh, but still fulfilled his promise.
When he went away to a business conference, he arranged to have flowers delivered to his wife at home each morning, and when his wife went away to visit her sister in a faraway town, he had them delivered to her there. But he was beginning to see how complicated life could be under this system, even in the best of times, and he found himself beset by worries that he would forget, or that, for some reason, cut flowers would suddenly become unavailable in our region. Then there were some close calls: a hectic day that ended with his snipping a rose from a bush in a public park; an evening of endless business meetings after which, near midnight, he brought her a plastic flower arrangement from his secretary’s desk; and a dreadful near-collapse that concluded with a fax of a drawing of a flower.
After this last, he began to tire of his promise, and brought the flowers in the most unromantic, offhand manner, plucking a few dandelions or a clump of clover from the yard on his way into the house, and once returning from the market with a sack of pastry flour and handing that to her, as a kind of awful pun. He began to hate himself for his weakness; and though his wife had many times told him that he needn’t adhere to the promise, she now began to resent his disrespectful, passive-aggressive tone, and fights ensued. One night they actually began shoving one another around, and the next day his wife filed for divorce.
While the divorce was pending, our friend sent daily bouquets of absurd proportions to his wife’s new apartment, accompanied by little cards printed with insults and vulgarisms, and on the day the divorce went through, he sent her one hundred black roses. The roses nearly wiped out his savings, and when he went snooping around her place that night, to see if she was having an affair, he found the hundred roses lying in the dumpster out back, along with the gigantic ornate vase they came in.
Our friend has since realized that she would have married him anyway, without the promise, a thought that pains him terribly. But, he says, he takes some small comfort in knowing that he did indeed keep his promise, and that, though deeply lonely, he is a man of unswerving dedication, which is not something most people can say about themselves these days.
Heirloom
I remember deer hunting with my father when I was a young man. He always carried the same antiquated rifle, its stock and trigger worn from use. Once he pointed out the nearly obliterated remains of a carved set of initials, and he told me the rifle had belonged to his own father, who killed himself when my father was still a boy. In fact, he said, the suicide was committed with this very rifle.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how horrifying this revelation was, so horrifying that I later convinced myself I had made the whole story up.
When my father shot himself, I inherited the rifle. By now I had a child of my own, but I had given up hunting in the fall. I put the rifle, along with some other possessions of my father’s I couldn’t bear to sell, into a self-storage warehouse outside town.
At those times when my unhappiness becomes most difficult to bear, I drive out to the warehouse and stare at the gray corrugated-steel door my father’s things are stored behind. This never fails to improve my mood. I don’t bring the key on these excursions, of course; I haven’t seen the key in years and would be hard pressed to tell you where it is.
Brevity
A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about our region and its inhabitants which, when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages. Exhausted by her effort, she at last sent it off to a publisher, only to be told that it would have to be cut by nearly half. Though daunted by the work ahead of her, the novelist was encouraged by the publisher’s interest, and spent more than a year excising material.
But by the time she reached the requested length, the novelist found it difficult to stop. In the early days of her editing, she would struggle for hours to remove words from a sentence, only to discover that its paragraph was better off without it. Soon she discovered that removing sentences from a paragraph was rarely as effective as cutting entire paragraphs, nor was selectively erasing paragraphs from a chapter as satisfying as eliminating chapters entirely. After another year, she had whittled the book down into a short story, which she sent to magazines.
Multiple rejections, however, drove her back to the chopping block, where she reduced her story to a vignette, the vignette to an anecdote, the anecdote to an aphorism, and the aphorism, at last, to this haiku:
Tiny Upstate town
Undergoes many changes
Nonetheless endures
Unfortunately, no magazine would publish the haiku. The novelist has printed it on note cards, which she can be found giving away to passersby in our town park, where she is also known sometimes to sleep, except when the police, whose thuggish tactics she so neatly parodied in her original manuscript, bring her in on charges of vagrancy. I have a copy of the haiku pinned above my desk, its note card grimy and furred along the edges from multiple profferings, and I read it frequently, sometimes with pity but always with awe.
Some of the stories in this collection originally appeared in 3rd Bed, Best American Short Stories 2005, Bookpress, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Fox Cry Review, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Lit Rag, McSweeney’s, Night Rally, Santa Fe Review, and Southeast Review, as well as on the radio shows Weekend America and Selected Shorts.
J. ROBERT LENNON is the author of six novels, including Castle, Mailman,and The Light of Falling Stars. His stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s, Playboy, and the New Yorker. He lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife and two sons, and teaches writing at Cornell University.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
1. Town and Country
Dead Roads
Election
The Current Event
Claim
Opening
Copycats
Town Life
Rivalry
Get Over It
Composure
Silence
The Pipeline
Leaves
2. Mystery and Confusion
Shortcut
Witnesses
Switch
The Wristwatch
Underlined Passages
The Mary
Intruder
Trick
Crisis
Twilight
Familiar Objects
Fingers
Plausible
Lucid
Virgins
Twins
Indirect Path
The Bottle
The Hydrangea
A Dream Explained
3. Lies and Blame
The Manuscript
The Belt Sander
Film Star’s Dog
Justice
Encounter
The Letters
Ex-Car
Almost
Treasure
The Bureau
The Cement Mailbox
Trust Jesus
Kevi
n
Terrorist
Directions
Distance
4. Work and Money
Sixty Dollars
The Pork Chop
Tool
Last Meal
Too Well
The Expert
The Uniform
Master
Money Isn’t Everything
5. Parents and Children
Lost
Wake
Expecting
The Mothers
The Fathers
Sons
Different
The Denim Touch
Mice
Tea
Deaf Child Area
The Branch
Kiss
Coupon
6. Artists and Professors
The Obelisk of Interlaken
The Nuns
Short
Conceptual
Two Professors
The Hollow Door
Impostor
Mikeworld
Meteorite
Lefties
7. Doom and Madness
Scene
Monkeys
The Names
Crackpots
New Dead
Koan
Shelter
Big Idea
Live Rock Nightly
Intact
Spell
The Mad Folder
Sickness
Unlikely
Smoke
Flowers
Heirloom
Brevity
Acknowledgments
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 13