Goings

by Gordon Lish

  With, beset with—let us call a spade a spade—dreams of pianistic glory at the Knabe and of the vilest carnalings under it, please God those enormously knobby toes of hers, at last liberated from their grim prison footwear, would, while twisting in passion, remain well out of view of the audience seated forever diligently in rapt attendance in my head.

  Yes, head—things, matters, what-have-you, they all came, more of less promptly (experience unfolded at a sprint back in those long-ago lassitudinous days), to a head—Natalie, or Lorraine, achieving unimaginable virtuosity on a trumpet she claimed to have pilfered from the school’s band-room but which was—this is surmise, to be sure, but an impeccably safe, safely reliable surmise indeed—taken from a cache of mendicant give-aways assembled, pertinent to the holiday season, for an act of discreet late-night trucking to the less fortunate condemned to dwell in the less fortunate town the next town over. But this was nothing, this! Hah!—and hah again! For as concerns my having seized the upper hand hands-down, there came the day when my teacher (the lusciously meager Miss Bugell) imparted to Mr. Lish (he ran things around there, ran them to the fabled faretheewell) her exaxperation with my refusal to play the notes as … well … as written. “Oh yes,” I imagine her having said to this progenitor of mine while the man stood leaning just inside the front door to his house, chest still heaving from the give-you-a-liftless walk home from the train station, good hand gripping the fat sad briefcase he in due course carried into the grave with him, “Gordon’s playing has something of a flair, it’s to be admitted, yes, but he simply will not bend to the rule of the composer’s wishes. Do we understand one another? Perhaps if the girl, your daughter (Natalie was it? Lorraine?) could practice her brass on the school grounds perhaps …” fat sad briefcase growing fatter by the instant still gripped in the man’s gripping hand, the stately, steely, stentorian Miss Bugell sighing in sympathy and, if it must be told, very ill-concealed impatience.

  So that was that.

  Love lost, but a version of perversion, as you will see, not long after, gained.

  No more improvident renderings of “Für Elise,” a squandermania ornamented with unheard-of Gordonesque (Gordonesque!) elements improvised for the love of Gertrude (Miss Bugell’s given name, I was to discover when I saw on my father’s desk the check that would conclude the fantastical interlude, abandoning crude, mean, joyless boyhood then to be endured Bugell-lessly).

  Thump.

  A period had come to its period.

  Yet in the days, the weeks, the months to come, a new period (of awakening—and of the cruel learning of the infamous lesson of tit-for-tat) came rushingly to the fore.

  For now it happened that Dad would, weeknights (and not weeknights), return from his various travails, never without the thunderous briefcase his desperately firm grasp of which would seem to send him wearily listing from one force of gravity to another, drop his burden where he stood, throw an incalculable accounting of exhaustion on the couch (sofa you say?), unlace his shoes, work them off with suffering toes, close his eyes, loosen his necktie, fairly moaning to me, “Sonny boy, your father’s darling sonny boy, sit, please, and please play for your father, cutie boy—that thing, that thing the mieskeit was going crazy to teach you, the Beethoven which makes the Brahms look sick.”

  Taking, in the tenderest (nay, most dramatic) fashion, my place at the centerpiece of our living-room décor, I would manage to produce a soulful simulacrum of the identifying bits hinting at the opening flourishes of Beethoven’s “Für Elise”; shortly thereafter, on detecting Dad’s heroically stertuous breathing, in merest moments, overtaking my musicianship, I would, cheered with a lifetime’s chance to put the full panoply of my genius on parade, fall to swaying with the rising emotion issuing into all the parts of my uncontainably responsive person at the first signs of proof in witness of Gordon’s (Gordon’s!) inspired revisions of Brahms’ feloniously overrated rival in this puerile contending for mastery status in the Germanic mode.

  My father would, thank the heavens, sleep, rest, curl into himself in the effort to regain his dignity, while I, Gordon (Gordon!), his beloved muse, would thereupon let fly with everything I had.

  “Can’t that stuck-up brat be made to shut up in there!” Natalie, or Lorraine, would yell from the kitchen, cueing my mother (Mother!) to call out, in pained affirmation, “Gordino, dear child, pianissimo, pianissimo, have mercy on us, have mercy, God Himself beseeches you, please!” Me, I’d scream back, this between brilliantly berserk runs from one end of the Knabe to the other, “But can’t you people tell Father needs his sleep?”

  Natalie, or Lorraine, she’d show up in the living room after enough of these refrains, blow a hellish blast of her trumpet-like hand-me-down into the poor devil’s ear, and at that, as they declared, I imagined, in all the better households on the block, dinner was served.

  Well, where I, in the opposition, dwelt, the occasion was referred to as “supper,” enough said? After which exercise in civilizing ourselves, the authentic brat in the family would repair to her room for homework and rearranging the demography of her dolls, Mother (Mother!) would take to bed with a migraine and to, nevertheless, a marathon of all-night mending or, more latterly in our family’s history, sewing and gluing glittery beads and spangles onto, what seemed to me, a perfectly presentable collection of handbags, reticules, purses, clutches, and those big wooden-handled carry-alls the ladies who crocheted, knitted, and embroidered carried.

  Dad (Father!) would return to the couch, flutter the evening’s newspaper for sufficient effect, and then, finished with the seriousness of the world, utz me piano-ward, cooing to me, “Sonny boy, softly, softly—please again, again, be a sweetheart, sweetheart, and serenade your father who adores you with that wonderful, please, you know, Beethoven piece.” I would.

  Of course, I would.

  Forever I would.

  To this day, just days from age eighty, how I wish and how I wish I could, that I could.

  He’d sleep.

  Or seem to.

  Then, eyes fast shut, thick hairy hand lifted to the ceiling in an act of death-prone importuning, wave me over to him there on the couch, make just enough room for me, then curve me bodily into his chest, his neck, his arms, his thighs, knees, legs, belly, groin, and, truly sleeping, or truly struggling to seem to be sleeping, take up either of my hands and, in time with his gentle rhythmic breathing, dig, with a dark ragged forenail, dig deep, and more deeply, again, again, into the skin, down into the flesh, one by one into the backs of the forgiving agony of his sonny boy’s virtuosic (mmm, how shall we say this?) fingers.

  My father.

  His son.

  Gordon.

  (That’s right—just like a family, all in all.)

  AVANT LA LETTRE

  THE TITLE, PAY it no mind. It does not apply. It does not appertain. I appended it strictly for pretention’s sake—also, for alliteration’s, or is it assonance’s? You would think, that for that sake, or, anyway, for those, I’d mooch on over to the dictionary to look to see what it’s all about, but I have aged past the stage when willing to submit myself to the care of the lexicographical community. Moreover (don’t you love it, moreover?), I, Gordon (Gordon!), don’t know shit of the lingo the title is empedestaled in. So where, then, did I, Gordon (Gordon!), get the thing from?

  Beats me.

  Sat myself down to tell you about a mystery (the vanishing of the

  man on the corner), and, lo, the title (“Avant la Lettre”) just more or less popped into my (into Gordon’s!), ah, let us say, frame of attention, still assonantially—or is it morphologically?—speaking.

  Unless it’s morphemically I should have, or should have ought to have, said.

  All this was—the foregoing, that is, or that was—moreoverly spoken.

  So what, it is wondered, popped into yours (head, frame of attention—Jesus, nay, consciousness, oh my Christ!) in the course of your making your way from up there, where a pompified affiliation was
claimed, to down here, where, get set, it’s in two seconds going to be pretty safely solid fare, a totally meat-and-potatoes rendering of the menu, bowls of nutriment fit for the most unforgiving of tables?

  I bet plenty.

  Or, better still, nothing, not a jot of the associational (tell Sartre, just to begin with) at all.

  So here we go—here comes the original play of the hitherto initial conditions—written (indited?) back before the occurrence of the poppitudinous event which I, Gordon (Gordon!), instants ago, just, you know, diktat-wise, mentioned to you.

  You ready?

  Because not all of the parties franchised to vote are yet agreed to the giving of an account of the long and the short of the matter hinted at (tell Barthes, tell Derrida, tell Badiou) in the title determined for this publication. Yes indeed, it’s, to be sure, the fruit vendor I, Gordon (Gordon!), am talking about—unless, now that such lengthsome time has elapsed, the version in your hands (tell Buber, tell Levinas, tell Harold, if you will, Bloom) is heading instead elsewhere, or elsewhere instead—careening, namely, for the Man on the Corner, providing one does not more popularly—or say I said conventionally—write “at,” this more aptly expressed, say, by shifting to, or by undertaking a shift to, italics—thus, or thusly: at. But we need not linger on the distinction (what distinction, who sees the least evidence of one stinking spicule of distinction?), save to observe that he, the fruit vendor, or appositely, the man on, or at, the corner, despite the bearing implied by the occupation explied, might (who the dickens has descried a datum otherwise?) have appreciated these various and sundry refinements in discourse—which, in the latest fashion, is to say: “the conversation.” Take it from me, Gordon (Gordon!), that whatever species of menace the man’s presence in our district posed, it must not be concluded the chap was lacking an education in the pickier formalities once the face and buttress of our language. To be sure, the fruit vendor seemed to me (you know whom) more a refugee from retail sales in exotic woolens (or is it woollens?) than toil in some expression of manual labor, albeit one not necessarily experienced in the hands-on kind. In another place, at another time (tell Trilling, go ahead and try to tell the snot—or is it instead your churlish practice to favor “try and tell”?), you could have thought this parvenu a miscreant in recovery from the medical arts or even an adventurer erstwhilishly exiled from the ultra-high sciences. But my sense (Gordon’s sense!) of the fellow’s history—when he, the very immigrant and his foodstuffs (this latter a klaxon of sonorous gaiety heaped into a harlinquinade of glistering comestibles borne gaudily aloft as raked—or is it banked?—levels of sylvan color sheltered ever so genially under a foursome of the palest blue cum faintly lavender pin-striped umbrellas superintended in the dispensation of their arrangement for to exact from the cannily misted perishables on such vivacious display beneath them the effect of a fairyland copia of abundance—excess, excess, pleonasm, pleonasm, redundancy, extraneity, the tautology of attraction—or the lure, the allure, of a trap, a trap?) appeared among us—was rather darker, you may tentatively certainly say, than the facts. Not that … not that … oh, please, please—feel free to finish, in suitable pursuit, with an adverbial subordinate clause of your (do, also, take note of the refuseniky absence of the possessively adjectival particle “own” reflexively hooked illegitimately illogically virtually universally parasitically vulgarianly prefatorally to some abused host of a nominative) minting.

  But how to adduce facts?

  There were (the facts, the facts—hey, are you, synthesizing-wise, making the merest effort at all?), and will remain, unknown to the lot of us, although much (though not—not by miles, not by leagues, not be measures galore—nearly enough) was revealed at the inquest arising out of the what, the what?

  Well, why not the street merchant’s “elimination” (in order that some instance of enthusiasm be solicited on your part)? Say I said “the death” of the street (actually, that of the sidewalk, ness paw?) merchant.

  But all seriousness, just between you and me—honestly, honestly—can you believe it?

  The demise of an appellation?

  Well, name it and (tell Schopenhauer, tell Schelling, tell Spinoza or Freud) it dies.

  Had one ever visited with the chap, passed the time of day with the chap, exchanged with this personage comments on the proverbial cabbage, for one, or, for two, the proverbial king? No, no, no, no—one had, in sum, indicated what was wanted, paid out currency (bills, coins, tendresse) from one’s pocket for one’s purchases, taken the sack ensacking these specifications, and, hastily, pushed on, or back, thank the gods, for home.

  That’s it.

  Apart from the coinciding of the big hellos.

  HELLO.

  Buyer’s, seller’s, each a hand held high a good half block distant.

  HELLO.

  In whole-hearted greeting.

  The fellow’s big foreign teeth agleam with, or agleam in, welcome—either with or in anticipation; either with or in an apprehension of the commission of an act of commerce in the offing.

  Sublime.

  Nah, forget it—fuck it!

  I can’t, I just can’t—and I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  Skip it—no can do.

  Keep keeping this pointillage up.

  Where’s in me anymore (in Gordon, in Gordon!) the discipline for the creation of the succession of elaborations, for the concatenation of the falsifications, for the accruing of the exhausting collocations?

  I’m sad.

  Plus: all-out, plumb-in—emptied, Jackson, emptied!—of whatever it takes.

  You understand me.

  Writing’s not the god of me.

  Corruption is.

  Not that it’s a tittle different for any of us.

  Listen, I, Gordon (Gordon!), am crapping out from cancer of the waist.

  Tell Seneca.

  Tell Longinus.

  Tell Young Doctor Malone, Old Doctor Zorba, and, for symmetry’s sake, Dr. Christian’s sidekick, performed ever so thrillingly by Rosemary DeCamp.

  So which is it, then—dying of or dying from?

  Oh, one more thing, a postscriptum, eh what?

  The Doorman’s Tale:

  “Where’s he gone to?”

  “Who?” says the doorman.

  I says to the doorman, “Are you fucking with me? Don’t you dare fuck with me. The fruit guy at the end of the block—where’d he go, didn’t you see?”

  Says the doorman to me, “Ill-phrased, Mr. Lish—rightly considered in the light of Kristeva’s commonplace—‘The speaking subject gives herself away.’”

  “You bum,” says I.

  “Besides which,” yon doorman says, preparing himself to misquote Lingis, “what is it, this imperative we suffer to perceive? What price,” the bastardo leans into me and cheekily, cheekily murmurs, “impercipience?”

  Mark you my words, Gordon’s (Gordon’s), isn’t this how our malignancies are rumored to gain the upper hand?

  And that, buddy-boy—that, for your information, that was just your on-duty doorman.

  Or—hyphenlessly—your doorman on duty.

  SPEAKAGE

  I SAID, “WHAT is it, die?”

  She said, “Who said such a thing?”

  I said, “What does it mean, somebody dies?”

  She said, “Never you mind, a child!”