by Michael Kun
I chopped up the eggs with my fork and dipped the toast in the yolk before eating it, washing down bites with mouthfuls of coffee. I read the comics. None of them were particularly funny, except maybe for the one where the cat was wearing a dress, though I suspect I would’ve found them all a lot funnier if I’d been in a better mood.
“More?” Susan asked. She was holding the coffeepot, poised to pour another cup.
I swallowed. “Yes, thanks.”
I finished the eggs, the toast, and the juice and turned to the front page, looking over the headlines. There was a pack of Marlboros in my jacket pocket, and I pulled it out and lit one, took a puff, then put the pack back and rested the cigarette in the ashtray. My cup was empty again, and when I started to signal to the waitress for more, she was already there filling it.
“You don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get to work today.” There was something odd about her eyes, other than their color, and I tried to figure out what it was. Maybe they weren’t straight. Maybe the left one was a little off. Not a lot. Maybe just a hair.
“Actually, I won’t be going in at all today. I’m taking the day off.”
“Not feeling well?”
Except for telling my secretary that I wouldn’t be in, except for ordering food from room service, and except for phoning Dot Hardy to tell her that she ought to go straight to hell for the things she does, I hadn’t spoken to anyone in three days. I wouldn’t have minded talking to someone, to tell you the truth, so I said, “No, not really. Things haven’t been going very well at home lately.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
She didn’t leave, didn’t even move an inch, so I decided to tell her everything, everything about how I met Julie, everything about our wedding, everything about our house, everything about everything we ever did together. Then, when I was finished with that, I told her everything about Julie. It took almost two hours, and I worked my way through four more cups of coffee, six cigarettes, and an apple Danish that Susan said was the only thing worth eating in the place.
It was lunchtime, and I still hadn’t gotten to the part about Julie wanting to be called Nell. The coffee shop had gotten busy. There was only Susan and the older woman to cover the whole shop, so Susan had to keep running off to wait on customers. My story wasn’t going anywhere, and she kept giving me apologetic glances, looking up from her notepad while she took orders.
I was still stuck at the part about Dot Hardy and the drapes, and every time she came back I had to start that all over again. After the fifth time, I swallowed the last of the coffee and stubbed my cigarette out in the ashtray, grinding it into the crumpled Sweet’N Low packets.
“Oh, don’t go,” she said. “I want to hear more.”
I took my wallet out and pulled out a five to pay my bill. “Look,” I said, “I’m staying up in Room 404. Why don’t you give me a buzz when the place quiets down a bit, and I’ll come down and tell you the rest.” I’d meant to be pleasant saying that, but listening to myself it sounded sort of sly, which I didn’t mind at all.
“Great,” she said, “Room 404.” She wrote the numbers on the back of her hand, then ran to the kitchen.
I took the elevator upstairs and waited for her call. There was nothing but soap operas on the television, and I didn’t feel like reading the news anymore. I took my jacket and shirt off and went into the bathroom, and I shaved again, using the hottest water I could bear. Then I dragged the phone into the bathroom and set it down on the toilet bowl, undressed, and stepped into the shower stall. I shampooed my hair again and scrubbed my armpits and neck, and I poked my index fingers in my ears to clean out the wax. I toweled myself off, being careful not to slip in the puddles that had formed on the tile, dressed, combed my hair, brushed my teeth, and slapped on some of the cologne Julie’d given me on my birthday. The phone didn’t ring. I took it back into the bedroom and put it on the desk.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking out my window, looking at the giant, red-and-blue Kmart sign down the block, thinking about whether I should call Julie to let her know I was okay, when someone knocked on my door. I opened it, and it was Susan, carrying a tray with two chicken sandwiches, cut into halves, and two large glasses of grape drink.
“I’m on my break now,” she said. “Half an hour. Think that’s enough time to finish up your story?”
I nodded and gestured for her to come in, and I thanked her for the food. She set the tray down on the bed and sat beside it, and I picked up a plate and a glass and took them over to the desk, then sat in the desk chair.
“I was telling you about the drapes, wasn’t I?”
“Right.”
I picked up where I’d left off, telling her about the drapes, and about the new hairdo, and about everything else, and Susan took little bites of her sandwich and little sips from her glass while I spoke. The whole time I was looking at her gray eyes, trying to figure out what was wrong.
Then I got to the part about Nell. “Now here’s why I’m here,” I said. “So you have the whole scenario now, these women getting together every week to bang their heads together, right?”
“Right.”
“And how they talk Julie into doing things she would never dream up herself?”
“Right.”
“And how Julie protects them and says they didn’t put her up to it?”
“Right.”
“Well, get this. The other day I come home from work and Julie’s up in the bedroom just lying there on the bed. I say, ‘Julie, is something the matter?’ And she says, ‘Don’t you dare call me that.’ Well, I don’t have the slightest idea what she’s talking about, and she says she doesn’t want me to call her Julie anymore. She says she wants me to call her Nell, because that’s the only way she’ll know that I love her. She says that’s the only way she’ll know that I’m not thinking of Julie. So I say that that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and how she’s out of her mind if she doesn’t think I love her and would I take her out to dinner all the time if I didn’t love her. But still she keeps getting all upset whenever I say Julie, and she either ignores me or says, ‘Oh, are you talking to me?’ or starts screaming.”
I looked over at Susan. “So tell me,” I said, “am I the one who’s crazy?”
“Yes,” she said, and I was so surprised that, for a minute, I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“No,” she said, “I think you’re crazy. I think you should call her Nell if that’s what she wants to be called.”
Again, I couldn’t think of anything to say. “But her name’s Julie.”
Susan got up off the bed. “It wouldn’t be that big of a deal. It wouldn’t be any great sacrifice just to call her Nell if that’s what’s going to make her happy.”
She paced while she talked, from the window to the bathroom door, waving her arms about. “I know sometimes Jeff thinks that the things that would make me happy are stupid,” she continued. “Jeff, that’s my boyfriend. He doesn’t understand women at all. He doesn’t think it’s a big deal to walk around with his hand on my rear end, but I don’t think that’s very ladylike. It makes a girl look cheap, and I told him that, but he just laughed. So he kept on doing it, and I kept on telling him to cut it out, and finally I just said, ‘Listen here, Jeff, if you do that one more time, I’m never talking to you again.’ So, what does he do? He puts his hand on my rear like he’s going to show me who’s the boss, and I hit him and walked home. The next day he came over to my parents’ house with a big thing of flowers for me.”
I put a piece of chicken sandwich in my mouth. Susan caught her breath.
“That’s the problem with men. All of you think you’re such big shots. You think it makes you a big shot if you can get away with being nasty to your girlfriends. You think that if you do what they don’t want you to do then it proves that you’re more important. Well, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to do a simple littl
e thing just to make your wife happy. It’d probably be pretty easy. I’ll bet she does a million little things like that just to make you happy. A million. And you can’t even do one because you’re such a big shot.”
Susan’s face was getting flush, and she kept talking faster and faster. I stopped listening to her and just watched, and she kept on talking, pacing, swinging her arms, her mouth getting bigger and bigger, bigger and bigger, her teeth getting larger and larger, her mouth getting bigger and bigger, moving closer and closer, until I felt it was going to swallow me.
Before I knew what I was doing, I balled up my hand and punched her, solidly, in the right eye. She didn’t fall backward, but stood right in the same spot, both hands covering the eye. I reached out and grabbed her wrists. She let me pull her hands away from her face, and I could see where my wedding ring had caught her, a thin red streak across the white of her eye, and I wondered if that was how the other eye had become that way.
She stood there, quiet, her eyes dry, her mouth closed, a thin line of purple on her lips, and let me hug her. I said I was sorry, over and over, and I called her Julie when I did, though I don’t know which one I’d meant.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Okay, let’s hold on a second.
That last story was called “My Wife and My Dead Wife.”
Didn’t we publish a novel by Michael called My Wife and My Dead Wife?
That was the book that had negative sales, remember?
Are the story and the book the same?
Hmm.
We really need to go back and check.
That’s very odd. Very, very odd.
Maybe Michael is just reusing the same title. Maybe there’s a very logical, artistic reason why he would have a short story and a novel with precisely the same title.
Michael’s uniqueness and inventiveness know no bounds.
That’s why his return to the public spotlight at the World Literature Forum was so touching.
Hold on.
We already set the record straight about the World Literature Forum, didn’t we?
Did we already mention that Philip Roth has no idea who Michael is? No? Well, it’s true. We tried to get Mr. Roth to give us a blurb for the jacket of You Poor Monster, and even Mr. Roth’s agent said, “Who?”
And Mr. Roth’s agent knows everyone.
Except for Michael, that is.
“My Wife and My Dead Wife” was still a nice story though, wasn’t it?
Except for the ending.
The ending was a bit of a shock, don’t you think?
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Are you ready for another shock? The author is writing these “Publisher’s Notes” himself. Every single one of them. Maybe you figured that out already. He’s making us publish them under threat of moving to another publishing house.
In fact, he just wrote that last paragraph.
And that one.
And that one.
Not that we’d really mind if he moved to a different publishing house.
It’s not like anyone actually buys his books.
In fact, you didn’t buy this, did you? You checked it out of the library, or someone gave it to you as a gift, right?
So, who cares if he tries to go to another publishing house?
Not us.
Good riddance, we say.
We’re the only publishing house that would publish him anyway.
Think Random House wants him? Think again.
Putnam? They had him and were thrilled when he left.
Atlantic Monthly? Same thing as Putnam. I heard they threw a party when he decided to leave.
Bloobedy-Bloobedy-Bloo Press? They’re the only ones that would publish him. And they don’t even exist.
Michael’s a very troubled man.
Everyone knows it. Troubled, troubled, troubled.
Just look at the photo on the jacket. Fat-faced and troubled.
How troubled is he, you ask.
Well, he just wrote all of this himself.
He needs to see a good doctor. Maybe two.
Here’s a tip for the doctors to save them a little time: Look up “schizophrenia” in those little medical books of yours. I mean, take a look at the stories in this collection. Do they look like they were written by the same person? No. They look like they were written by someone with two very distinct personalities.
And all the phony awards? Look up “delusional.” It’s right there in your medical books. Look under “D.”
STEVE SMITH
Steve Smith, his wife, Barb, and their two young daughters have just moved to Culver Point, Indiana. Their home is a nice one. It has two full bathrooms upstairs plus one by the kitchen, a bay window in the den, and a separate laundry room. It’s three blocks away from the elementary school and six from the grocery, and there are two trees in the backyard that are just far enough apart to hang a hammock between them. But it looks as if they might have to pick up and move to another town, maybe Fairfield or Heyward Heights, because there are already six Steve Smiths in Culver Point. Actually, it’s not so much that there are already six of them, it’s just that this one has green eyes.
Culver Point is a fairly small town. According to the last census, it has 684 residents, and, as you can see, there’s an unusually high percentage of Steve Smiths. This was a problem for some time. People were always dialing the wrong home on the phone. Mail was delivered to the wrong households. The department stores up in Harrison were always billing one Steve Smith for another’s purchases, or for another’s wife’s.
This problem was made worse by the fact that all six Steve Smiths fit the same general description. They don’t all look the same, mind you, but all are fair-skinned, six feet tall or thereabouts, with close-cropped hair.
There had to be a way to distinguish the men from each other, and the town council appeared to have found a solution. Since five of the Steve Smiths have brown hair and one has black, this one would be known as Black-Haired Steve Smith. Since five of the Steve Smiths are slim and one has a large midsection, this one would be known as Big-Bellied Steve Smith. And so on.
Well, the problem that the new Steve Smith poses to the community is quite simple: Culver Point already has a Green-Eyed Steve Smith.
The wives of the Steve Smiths have gathered at Mrs. Large-Eared Steve Smith’s house to discuss the situation over lunch. Mrs. Green-Eyed Steve Smith is late, and no one knows where she could be. They’re all nice women—in fact, everyone in Culver Point is rather nice—but they know they have a terrible problem.
“I think we’ll just have to scare them out of the neighborhood,” says Mrs. Poorly Dressed Steve Smith. “It’s our only way.”
“And just how are we going to do that?” asks Mrs. Black-Haired Steve Smith.
“Dynamite,” suggests Mrs. Big-Bellied Steve Smith.
“Phone calls in the middle of the night,” says Mrs. Four-Fingered Steve Smith.
“Set fire to their hedges.”
“Put on masks and scare the children.”
“Dead animals.”
“Spoiled eggs.”
“Turn off their electricity and make noises outside the house like lions and ghosts.”
Mrs. Large-Eared Steve Smith hasn’t said anything at all. She’s just sitting on the sofa eating a biscuit. She puts the biscuit on an end table and speaks up.
“Listen to yourselves,” she says. “We’re good people, and yet here we are talking about terrorizing a nice couple and their lovely children. We’re not monsters, are we?”
The women all shake their heads.
“I shudder to think what Steve would say if he heard us talking like that,” she continues.
“Or Steve,” Mrs. Black-Haired Steve Smith says, her head bowed.
“Now, let’s put our heads together,” Mrs. Large-Eared Steve Smith says, “and think of another way to handle this problem.”
The women are sitting still, completely silent. No one’s eating anymore, and th
e coffee and bacon are getting cold. No one can think of anything.
“I have an idea,” Mrs. Four-Fingered Steve Smith says, then when everyone turns to her, she shakes her head and says, “No, no, that wouldn’t work.”
They return to their silence.
Finally, there’s a knock at the front door, and Mrs. Large-Eared Steve Smith answers it. It’s Mrs. Green-Eyed Steve Smith. Her face is red. She’s been crying.
“What is it? What’s happened?” the women ask.
“It’s Steve,” she says. “He’s packed up and left me. He’s left with the girl from the Tastee-Freez. You know the one, Dolores. She isn’t even out of high school yet, and he’s just run off with her, just like that. Just packed his bags and he’s gone. He left me a note saying that he didn’t need me anymore and that they were moving to Sommerville to be together.”
Mrs. Large-Eared Steve Smith puts an arm around her, patting her back like a small child’s. “Well, well,” she says, “isn’t that convenient?”
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Don’t worry. We didn’t pay Michael a $500,000 advance for this book. Five hundred thousand dollars? That’s a laugh. Michael couldn’t buy a decent lunch for the advance we gave him.
Have we told you how many copies The Locklear Letters and You Poor Monster sold? Have we?
Do you want to come take a look at our balance sheets?
THE BAKER’S DOG
The baker’s dog is dead, and someone will have to tell the baker.
The last time the baker’s dog died, the baker was so upset that he couldn’t think straight. He put chocolate in the meringue, he put yeast in the Napoleons, and he left the crescent rolls in the oven so long that the bakery nearly burned to the ground. Engines came from as far as Harper’s Square to put out the fire. But, of course, the baker’s dog wasn’t really dead then. He was just sleeping, and when the ground where he was buried started barking, the baker ran with his shovel to dig him out. But this time he really is dead. The trash collector says so, and Mrs. Magruder is certain as well. She says that this is exactly what her dog looked like when it died. So someone will have to tell the baker.