Notes Toward The Story and other stories

by KUBOA

  “I’m with you, Gus,” I said, around a half-masticated donut. “What’s the process? I mean, you got like instruments, geigometers or whatnot?”

  “Hm,” he said, and his hesitation made me blanch. Another wild- goose chase, I assumed.

  Finally, he said, “We’re fishing for archetypes. Okay? Now, archetypes, they have to be rooted out, like truffles. The unconscious needs to be plumbed as if it were a piece of ground full of elusive buried riches. What we use, in each case, will be determined by the individual. Okay?”

  I could only say, “Okay—”

  “It would help,” my wife said, “if you had some understanding of Jungian psychology. Wouldn’t it? And, also, of Zurich. You can’t set your story in Zurich in the early 1900s if you have no feel for the place. What’s with the modern car, lingo, etc.?”

  Clearly, I was going to have to stop showing my pages to my wife.

  Now, for you out there unmarried, or perhaps married but oblivious to its various undulations and sea changes, I formulate this encomium: my wife is a wonderful wife. She is. Effie is a good woman, who, through years of living with a writer who is both abstracted and severe—if I may characterize myself in this way—has been driven into a certain blind alley of her customary personality, a blind alley which includes the desire to decimate my confidence as a creative person. Apparently.

  “Well,” I attempted, “the story is a, what?, experimental, possibly humorous, mock-CV? If you can see it that way—”

  “Jim, sweet—” Sshe cut me off. “Even so, one needs a grounding in subject matter. Take the time to do the research—if you want to parody something you need to know it inside and out. Know its strengths, weaknesses, places of vulnerability—”

  “If you’ve been following my writing at all, over the past ten years, you would know I’m working in what I might call anti-research burlesque.”

  “Uh huh,” she said, in that way of hers. An “uh huh” that transported more than its five letters and a space should be able to transport. Then she smiled a tight, light smile. She turned her back to me and stepped into our closet to get dressed.

  I could only stare after her. Her now- denuded back, with its moles and strawberry marks, was a lovely thing to behold. The way it sloped down to begin her fine rear end never failed—even after all these years—to stir me.

  “Effie,” “ I said, weakly. I was disappearing.

  Gus swung the car onto campus. It was a bright, spring day, and all around us walked the beautiful children of modern Zurich. They were clearly the master race and I felt foolish for interrupting their glittering existence.

  Gus was armed with only a notebook, a pen, and his charming smile.

  “This way,” he said, as if it mattered.

  He stopped the first lovely co-ed he came across, a young woman of indeterminate age—she could be sixteen16 or twenty20—a young woman with hair made of pure light.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  She fixed us with a practiced hauteur.

  “I’m conducting a scientific survey. Could I trouble you for a bit of your time?”

  “Survey?” she said.

  “Right. I just need to ask you a few questions and record what you say and we go from there.”

  “Sure,” she said, a sparkling jewel to make Europe proud.

  Her name was Joy Jacobi and she was majoring in bBiology. Dr. Jung and I accompanied her to a room in the copious student center on campus, a semi-private room with tables and chairs. Dr. Jung seemed to know about these rooms beforehand—perhaps he had been conducting these experiments for years.

  Dr. Jung put the sweet co-ed through a labyrinth of questions, mostly about her dreams, which she remembered too clearly. I suspected she was entertaining us, spinning out exciting scenarios, to spice up the interview. Joy had a quick and creative mind.

  “And I’m at an outdoor amphitheater, on stage. The audience is all men, sports stars, and actors. And I’m naked—” Hhere Joy touched the button of her shirt between her breasts. “And I’m enjoying being ogled—the men are clearly excited by my body. So I’m holding my breasts, offering them up, my nipples hard between my fingers. And the men, as one, take their stiff members out—and I’m looking at a crowd of beautiful erect phalluses—and my excitement grows until I’m touching my honey box. Then one man mounts the stage—his large member in his hand—”

  “Always with the sex,” Effie says.

  I had vowed not to show her anything else I’d written. But she had gone to the computer and pulled the file up uninvited.

  “You turn every story toward sex.”

  “It’s one of my themes, yes.”

  “It’s not a theme, Jim. It’s a prurient obsession. An author has a responsibility toward his characters, like a parent toward the child. It’s literary rape is what it is.”

  “That’s a little strong, isn’t it? I write about sex because it’s a major topic. It is the mystery inside us all. We have to investigate it. D. H. Lawrence said—”

  “You aren’t investigating, you’re seducing your own creations. It’s date rape!” Here she laughed. At least that.

  “Thanks, dear,” I said, with a bitter moue. I put the book I was reading—Goncharov’s The Same Old Story—closer to may face, signaling that I was through talking. She had cut me again. I sulked in my Russian apologue.

  I, James Royce, remembered a night from early in my marriage. Effie had taken longer than usual coming to bed. When she emerged from the bathroom she had on the most outrageously sexy outfit she had ever commandeered. Very brief panties—strings and a patch, really—a bustier I think they call it—and cowboy boots! A laugh escaped before other ambitions took over.

  “Ef-ffie,” I had sputtered.

  “You’ve sprung a leak, husband mine,” she said.

  “I’ve sprung more than that,” I riposted, and pulled back the sheet to show her a knoll of appreciation.

  “Mm, hm,” she said. “I like. All that just for this—” and here she wiped a palm over her whole provocative tenement.

  Then she had moved sinuously toward me—the memory is bittersweet in its singularity. I pulled my pajama bottoms aside and was revealed. She moved her whole erotic length against me, and, in the process, palmed my erection, a deft- enough move.

  As she began to pump it slowly, with a seemingly new genius, she whispered in my ear, “Don’t write about this, asshole.”

  Gradually, our “interviews” took on the nature of a fever dream. It became clear to me that Dr. Jung had other things in mind than amassing the collective unconscious. Or he had become dangerously sidetracked.

  “Ah, the slim, untouched bodies of youth, eh?” he allowed on the third morning of our collecting adventure. “A science beyond science, heh heh.”

  We began luring young co-eds to his dusty apartment. And once there it wasn’t long before Dr. Jung had insinuated them out of theire fashionable garments. Some of these young people seemed anxious to further science inquiry in whatever way necessary—such was Gus’s reputation. Others—and I will relate the tale of one such minx—wanted the titillation of it. Thrill seekers, Dr. Jung labeled them.

  It was with one such thrill seeker, on one sultry afternoon in sultry Zurich, that it came to a head, so to speak. Her name was Patty Bourgeois. She dressed like a hooker—or the approximation of a hooker for on-campus purposes. And she arrived at Gus’s appartement smoking a cigarette, striding in with the confidence of unbroken youth.

  “I hear we’re studying things formerly hidden here, my good doctor,” Patty said through a veil of smoke. Her cockiness did not bother Gus. He smiled like an adder.

  “Yes, my dear,” “ he simpered. “We’re gonna enter the dream world. Your dream world.”

  It was his standard patter, but with Patty it seemed iniquitous. I wanted no part of this—yet I could not leave. Was it loyalty, friendship? Was it pure animal desire? I lobbied for my better half to take over. My better half was on h
oliday. I was priapic, I admit. Animal, anima. What was at work, I half-heartedly grilled myself.

  Patty Bourgeois was short work. She was eager to get to the good part.

  “And in this dream, Patty, you desire these men?”

  “Oh, yes, Doctor.”

  “Both of them—in this, what, strange, darkened cave?”

  “Both, Doctor. And how.”

  Patty Bourgeois was playing a dangerous game. Yet, I wanted to go with her. God help me I did.

  “Now Patty, we will act out this dream. Okay? We will strip down to your basic shadow self, yes? We will move from thinking, feeling, intuition, to sensation. Are you with me?”

  “Yes, Doctor, anything.” Her trance-state was unconvincing.

  “Show me, Patty, just what your dream is like. I want you to—”

  Patty was already pulling her shirt over her head. I swallowed, an insensate assistant. She was naked before my saliva hit the floor. She had breasts like sea -swells, thighs crimson with heat.

  “You are naked?”

  “You’re so intuitive, Doctor. I love that.”

  Dr. Jung smiled his demon smile.

  “Tell us what these dream lovers do for you, Patty. Show us your dream.”

  Patty Bourgeois did not hesitate. Patty Bourgeois unbuckled Dr. Jung’s pants and pulled his sizeable manhood out into the fusty air. Jung is hung, I couldn’t help thinking.

  “Aaah,” Dr. Jung said. It was the most unmedical aah of his career.

  As she began to fondle him in earnest and Gus began taking off his shirt, Patty’s sensuous eyes met mine.

  “Come here, Igor,” she said. “Get behind me.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Effie howled. “This is beyond the pale, even for you. You’re sinking—willingly—into pornography. And your prose shows it. This is third-rate Cinemax coupling.”

  Goddamit. I had hidden the manuscript. Created a fictitious file called Lyrical and Critical Essays. She was uncanny in her ability to discover it.

  “You’re just jerking off,” she continued. “I mean, this isn’t for other eyes, right? You presumably are working on this between more serious projects.”

  I smiled my weak- cat smile. The one I use when I want to hit someone.

  “It’s an experiment,” I began.

  “Right,” she cut me off, her hand actually making a downward axe stroke. “The investigation to discover how horny you are.” She laughed at least.

  I could have countered that if I were horny the responsibility might be partly hers. I did not do it.

  “Where is this going?” she softened.

  I took the bait. She was playing good cop/ bad cop, playing both parts herself. She smiled encouragement.

  “Um, I’m trying to steer it in the direction of—” I was cornered. I had no idea what to say. In truth the story had no plan. My stories never did. I began with a line and if it took me someplace the fishing was good. If it didn’t I still got to sit in the sun by the river.

  Perhaps this is what I should have told her.

  “Let’s make it simpler,” Effie said. “I think I can help you with this. What happens next—I mean, right here—what happens next? After ‘Get behind me’.’”

  “Um,” I fumbled. “He gets behind her.”

  “Riding the train,” Effie laughed, in playful mode.

  “Yes,” I laughed, too. I was trying to relax.

  “So, they’ve got the threesome going, Dr. Jung, this surely buxom and nubile co-ed, and his assistant, who is a stand-in for you, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, warming, both to literary alchemy and fleshly pursuits.

  “What does she say?” Effie asked, placing the pages down on my desk and seating herself on a hassock.

  “What does she say?” I repeated Effie’s query to stall for time. Could I write for a woman under a woman’s scrutiny? Effie thought I was letting her fill in the blank.

  “Oh, Igor, yes, like that. Hold me by the ass.”

  Gulp, I said. To myself.

  “Okay,” I said, “ but she’s got Jung’s priapus in her mouth.”

  “Cock,” Effie said.

  “Cock,” I parroted. “How can she talk?”

  “She’s talking around it, so to speak.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take it out and show it to me.”

  I was hard, readers, hard as a piece of the nether millstone. Just like that. It was not unusual for me to arouse myself writing—sometimes I think, partly, this is why I write. To animate myself. I reached for my zipper.

  Effie laughed. “I was miming the co-ed,” she snorted. She actually snorted. “Sorry, dear, I was saying, she could say to her rearward partner, ‘take it out and show it to me’.’”

  “Of course,” I said, rezipping.

  “But then again,” Effie said. “Take it out and show me, Jim.”

  I looked long and thoughtfully at my wife. I wanted to understand what was going on. I wanted her to see me as the contemplative man I was. I also wanted to fuck her.

  She put her hand over my crotch, giving with the limpid eyes. She kneaded me for a minute.

  “This is exciting for you, isn’t it?”

  “Mm hm.”

  “I mean, this whole creation thing, this whole gGodlike creation thing, where you control your characters like puppets, pornographic puppets. It’s so Jungian, I see now. The literal dream and the symbolic dream, the sensation function, the anima, animus, the yin, yang. I see what you’re doing, where you’re going with this experiment. I think I can help you, would you like that? You know, there’s more to you maybe than I imagined. Isn’t that a funny thought after all the time we’ve been together? I think I haven’t spent enough time admiring your mind, your mind's eye, your powers of castle-building. It’s like a fever dream, isn’t it? It is interesting, the nexus of literature and sex, titillation. I see why it gets you excited. This is like an epiphany! Making people up is sexy, it really is.”

  To my wife’s credit, during this out-loud introspection, this aside, she never stopped stroking me. It was exegesis as foreplay. She did know where and how to touch me. And, my friends, she pulled me out, right there at my desk, with the blank page nearby, with my imagination fired, she pulled me out and very slowly, like the king’s best concubine, lowered her wet mouth onto me. She had not sucked me in a decade. I was a teenager again. And she my new girlfriend, the one I’d always desired.

  “Christ,” Patty said. “Goddammit.”

  “Umph,” Jung said as his penis fell out of her mouth like a punctured balloon.

  The three just stared at each other. Understanding this cosmic coitus interruptus was beyond them, beyond even the magisterial powers of Gustave Jung. It left them moony. It left them fish out of water. Suddenly the air had gone out of the story. With no conscious effort on their part everything just stopped, went south, stillborn like seed sown on rocky ground.

  What happened? A failure of the imagination, a failure of nerve? The three were embarrassed, standing there in the all-in-all. Their faces were blank, so blank there is a yen to fill them in.

  They are in hell, or perhaps in hell’s porte-cochêere, a limbo.

  They are abandoned gods, spirits left to wander. Though they could not wander.

  They could not even move.

 

  Haunted

  “Even when I watch TV

  There’s a hole where you used to be.”

  —John Lennon

  Start the story with its protagonist’s name: Bob Plumb. Start with the crux of his problem, the grit asking its oyster to pearl: Bob Plumb is haunted.

  He thinks he is haunted.

  Say this: he lives by himself. Because his wife left him.

  Her name was Honey, really Honey. Given name. Honey Plumb was, by all accounts, a beautiful woman, a leading light in life’s drama. She was accustomed to being center stage, when she was younger, for most of her days, when she was Honey Moser.


  Why she married Bob is a mystery, one of life’s mysteries. He came along at a time when she was floundering a bit. She had been dumped by a man who had just passed his bar exam. Honey had thought, she had been led to think, that her life was achieving shape through the fast-track success plan that graduating from law school represents. Honey Moser thought she was about to marry a successful, wealthy man. This man, this new lawyer, married someone else. Just like that. Honey cursed herself for planning, for attempting to plan, the future. She knew better.

  And suddenly, there in her path was this innocuous, fairly attractive man named Bob Plumb, a teacher of English at a private girl’s’ school. Bob Plumb had nice shoulders, a way of walking that was both hesitant and confident. A bounce.

  Bob Plumb was also coming out of a relationship with a fellow teacher, a young woman named Linn Bass. Linn, with an “i.” Bob was looking moony, standing in Honey Moser’s path, looking like a man who had just been kicked in the stomach.

  It was in the grocery store, this path, the one that contained both Honey Moser and Bob Plumb. Bob was caressing casabas. He had no idea why he was feeling them, rapping on their firm fruitiness like a spirit knocks on a table. But Bob was not thinking about casabas, their fruitiness, their secrets beneath the skin. Bob was thinking about Linn and her impossibly soft crotch and how, once he was welcome there and now would be welcome there no more. And Bob was thinking that this would haunt him for the rest of his days and, looking ahead because we can, we say, yes it will. Let’s not foreshadow; let’s return to the concrete moment in the produce aisle of Schnuck’s grocery store.

  “What are you doing?” Honey Moser asked, smiling her sucky-calf smile.

  Bob looked up as if the Lord had tapped him on the shoulder.

  Honey Moser stood there in the light, a glimmering eidolon.

  “I have no idea,” Bob answered honestly.

  “Put it down and walk away,” Honey said, tinkling.

  Bob thought perhaps it was time to smile, to chance a smile.

  He moved his mouth in a shuttering rictus.

  Honey Moser squinted, shifting her lovely weight.

  “Sorry, yes,” Bob said, putting the casaba down and stepping away from both it and Honey Moser.

  “Okay,” Honey said, beginning to roll away from this awkward man, this mooncalf.