Lucy, an excerpt: Part 4 of 4

From the kitchen, she eyed the lottery ticket.

The last square gnawed at her, its final, decisive shape still hidden. There was an urgency all through her body, a pressure building. She could break into a run at any moment, her muscles all pushed into a forward slant, coiled and compressed, like a spring. She could not wait any longer. She spread the ticket flat on the table, and with the coin clutched in her fingers, she scratched at the shiny surface. A palm tree appeared, curved cartoonishly to the left, with two coconuts nestled in the leaves—the whole thing looked practically perverted.

“Merde,” she said. She crushed the worthless ticket in her palm and threw it across the room.

Frustrated, she turned on the television, found the channel which showed game show reruns all day long, and settled back into a cushy leather armchair.

Match Game was her favorite. On the screen, Gene Rayburn crossed the stage wearing a disaster of a suit, and a tie that started out as red, was met halfway with a diagonal brown stripe, and ended with a diamond of pastel blue. He was a complicated, gangly mess, all legs and arms, completely devoid of the square-jawed charm that she preferred in a game show host. Rayburn was missing something—ego, perhaps, a broadness. He lacked fakeness. He never seemed in control of the game, rather he was running just behind it, trying to catch up to the celebrity panel, who never looked as if they had much at stake. “Mister Gene,” Lucy said aloud, “what sort of necktie are we wearing today?”

They spent countless Sunday afternoons, bleeding into evening and on into the night, on Helena’s frumpy sectional sofa, passing a bowl of popcorn back and forth, brushing salt and brewer’s yeast off their laps, sucking it from their fingertips—Helena’s nails thick and colorless; Lucy’s perfectly manicured in the old style, the pale half-moons left unpainted—solving puzzles and admiring (or not) the contestants’ clothing. Lucy wanted her friend home immediately.

Baroness crept into view, stretched her back toward the ceiling, and then sat silently in the doorway, not in or out of the kitchen. The cat stared at her with a look that was half boredom, half subtle judgment—engaged but still distant, remaining an external observer; Daniel sometimes called her The Auditor. Lucy thought perhaps she had been sent from heaven, or some greater place, to record the doings and misdoings of this particular household. The quality and consistency of meals provided. Toy mouse allotment, treat-time frequency. Crinkly plastic bag on the floor availability.

“Where is mother?” Lucy said.

Baroness merely blinked, as if she were seeing through a new pair of eyes.

Lucy, an excerpt: Part 3 of 4

There had been two husbands. The first was a Swiss banker who came through Le Havre periodically on business. He was small-framed and wiry, not handsome in any particular way (but certainly good-looking in Lucy’s eyes) with long skinny fingers and a thin moustache. After almost two years of once-a-month dinners and urgent sex in his bland hotel room, with bad sheets and bad paintings, he whisked her away from her uncharming family when she was twenty-one. He provided her with a weekly allowance and a lovely two-bedroom apartment in the Marais, leaving her to do as she pleased. They always got along, and their sexual life remained interesting, even toward the end, but they could never build anything outside of their private life together. There was a separateness that never disappeared, something always felt out of place. Mutual friends never gelled. A pea nagged from under the mattress. Their relationship eventually became rather like that of siblings, and after a short and unsentimental conversation one morning, they parted.

The second husband was American, a droll businessman from the Midwest. They were together for seven years, off and on—mostly on—and eventually they realized that they hated each other completely. Both admitted to twisted fantasies involving the unfortunate death of the other, poisonings or tragic parachuting accidents. His sagging features grew more prominent every season, his belly rounder and rounder until no belt in any ordinary store would fit him. He said it was her cooking, and somehow managed to make even that sound like an insult. And Lucy often started arguments on purpose. The divorce was painless at first and agonizing after.

There had not been children.

Lucy was the kind of woman who believed (Helena thought foolishly) that one can wear jewelry in silver, gold and copper all at once. Her bracelets jangled up and down her arm whenever she turned the page of a book, or pushed her hair, which was often frizzy and unkempt, away from her face. Helena realized—having been Lucy’s best friend for more than twenty years, and practically her only close friend in America—that older French women were allowed a certain freedom of behavior. A looseness of personality. If their lipstick was slightly smudged it was okay. If their hair was colored one shade too orange, their collar too severe, all was forgiven.

Helena was expected home some time in the afternoon. Lucy had come that morning to shower (she preferred Helena’s water pressure to her own) and spend maybe an hour making sure everything was put together, maybe get some soup going for dinner—an herb and vegetable concoction she was famous for; Helena’s favorite. There was an iron skillet on the stove, still shiny with butter from Daniel’s breakfast; he never cleaned up after himself. She could not determine what exactly he ate, the data were few and vague: a sticky spoon, no plate. She lifted the spoon to her nose, breathed in the bright smell of…marmalade, surely. She resisted the impulse to stick it in her mouth and suck on the tacky residue. Instead, she put the spoon into the sink.

Lucy, an excerpt: Part 2 of 4

She grew up in Le Havre. Her father, whose job had something to do with city planning, was aloof and wooden, and he tended to his houseplants as Lucy thought he should have attended to his daughter. He talked to them each evening, wiped the dust from their leaves with soft kitchen rags, played the sort of music he suspected they preferred—Brahms, mostly, but sometimes Liszt’s Foust Symphony. They thrived.

Her Chinese mother (whose devotion, it seemed, was bought out of the back pages of an adult magazine, though Lucy was only willing to admit this once she reached her own complicated adulthood) spent most of her life cajoling the neighborhood housewives into playing Mah Jong, which they claimed was difficult to grasp, and took too much of the afternoon to play. Lucy thought it was probably her mother’s opaque instructions, not to mention the cluttered, dusty living room and her mother’s odd, off-kilter hors d’oeuvres: cucumber sandwiches with whole-grain mustard, broken hunks of hard, salty cheese. They stopped coming after a while, one by one claiming that they had other obligations, something at church, shopping, or simply ‘a conflict.’ Her mother eventually gave up; the phone quit ringing all together. With her husband’s savings she opened a flower shop.

As a teenager, Lucy worked there every day after school and on Saturdays. It was an endless parade of anonymous happenings, strangers impressing upon her the utmost importance of the event: funeral, birthday, anniversary, funeral, anniversary, birthday, funeral. Lucy took the job very seriously—she took any kind of work seriously—and her mood was often affected by the customer’s occasion. It was too easy to absorb other people’s sorrow; she sopped it up unconsciously. Four funerals in one day and forget it, she was cooked, wilted like a piece of lettuce. There was once two fiftieth anniversaries in the same afternoon, and so she rode her bike home elated, taking two turns around the neighborhood, breathing the air and laughing.

She bounced into the house, and her father asked if someone had filled her skull with meringue. She pulled her diary from underneath her pillow, where surely it was safe from marauding intruders, drew a radiant sun, and next to it wrote (in English, should her mother discover it) the words ‘silver dust’ and ‘orange glass.’

Her mother spent all day on the phone to China, crammed into a closet masquerading as an office, leaving Lucy the details, and after a few years every event felt the same. She learned to translate the fumbled, emotional orders: the uneasy fastidiousness of a memorial arrangement, an attempt to say something memorable, but afraid to come off as clichéd; the basic anniversary bunch, requested by husbands with bad taste who usually defaulted to whatever she thought best; the murky, inside-jokey birthday requests. There were men who wrote dirty messages to their mistresses and widows who sent flowers to themselves. In the end, no one ever complained that their arrangement was wrong, or not what they ordered, or unattractive. And no one ever called to say that their arrangement was gorgeous, or especially fragrant, or just perfect.

“I would love to work in a flower shop,” Helena said, an hour after having met Lucy in line at the market years ago, back at the beginning of their friendship—they decided to have a cup of tea. “To be surrounded by so much beauty all the time,” she said. Lucy was enjoying the conversation so much, that when it came time to refill her cup, she neglected to replace the teabag, and for five or ten minutes drank only hot water laced with a brown cube of raw sugar. “But you have your paintings,” Lucy told her. Helena said the paintings were more like bills that needed to be paid, or else they were watched pots of water waiting to boil.

Lucy said that as for the flower show, indeed it was very beautiful. What she didn’t say—or had learned not to say after telling the story to heaps of reporters and having it read quite differently in print—was that when you work in a flower shop, you are constantly reminded that none of the flowers are for you. The blooming jungle encroaches—fronds of sweet alyssum, frangipani, St. Christopher’s lily—and you begin to disappear. She thought it was a little childish, and was embarrassed to admit that she felt that way.

Lucy, an excerpt: Part 1 of 4

I'm currently working on a new novel, and although I wrote this for it, I'm afraid it doesn't belong. So, here is a chunk of writing, presented in four parts over the next week or two.

Lucy Laurent stood in the middle of the living room naked underneath an ivory bathrobe, dripping water onto the floor. She had a wrinkled lotto scratch-off in one hand, a grimy quarter fished out of the bottom of her purse in the other, her body poised in a feminine rictus of anticipation: poised, articulate and sturdy. The coin warmed in her hand, seemed almost to sweat in her fingers. Her heart began to thump; she felt the pulse of blood pressing behind her eyes. Thoughts crowded her. Miles of deep black ocean is separated from endless blue sky by only the smallest molecular skin. Exactly when does water turn to air? Are surfaces beginnings or ends? Perhaps they are their own breed entirely. Lottery jackpots, car accidents. Brain diseases. We are always one flashing instant away from a new life.

Lucy took the edge of the quarter and pressed it to the flat silver panel of the ticket. She scratched back and forth, concentrating, moving fluidly from one side to the other, leaving no stray bit of gray. The printing came off in rubbery curls which stuck to the moist knot of her fist, and when she tried to brush them away foggy streaks appeared on the glass tabletop. First, two fat piggybanks appeared, bursting with green bills and grinning, their eyes morphed into shining dollar signs, almost possessed; Lucy blew air through her cheeks and groaned. The possibility that there could be another hiding underneath the third square was too much to consider, and her mind began to swirl with ideas, with new and ornate futures.

“Okay,” she said out loud. She took a deep breath and laid the ticket on the corner of the end table.

Lucy did not need the money. She was not exactly rich, though she once had been—two apartments in Paris, a Spanish-style beachside sprawl in Miami, a small farmhouse in the South of France, where she went when she didn’t want to be bothered—and as her career slowed down, she sold them all to younger, richer actresses whose breasts seemed to get larger and larger as the years went on. She lived comfortably, mostly off residuals from a French television series in which she starred. “Les Trois Reines” ran for five seasons in the early eighties, and was still in syndication around the globe, translated into twenty-three languages at Lucy’s last count, sometimes airing three or four times daily. The critics called the show predictable and derivative; audiences loved it.

Lucy never intended to be a great actress, just a working one—she once laughed out loud when she heard another actor talk of the indignities of doing your own laundry unless of course the part called for it—and the celebrity that came with a television career was both flattering and unpleasant. People named their babies after you, they wrote detailed sob-story letters asking for money, they acted like you were old friends. But restaurants often brought complimentary champagne, and she always got the best hotel rooms. Lucy was rather legendary in Europe though no one recognized her in California—the show was deemed “too French” for Americans. That was okay. Strangers did not expect her to be funny on command. (The show had been recently released in a DVD box-set, which Lucy habitually and mistakenly called DDD. It provided a new audience, a younger audience, and she had once or twice been recognized by admirers here and there—if she spent the day in San Francisco, for example—all of them proclaiming that they were her “biggest fan.”)

Overall, she was happier now than she had ever been, which in itself was something to be happy about, the gradual upward slope which proved so elusive, a life not benchmarked by weddings and children and other standard charts of successes, but more what she felt was the real deal.

Tom in Siena on TNB

I have a new short story, "Tom in Siena," which is up on The Nervous Breakdown.

Tom stepped out of the bar into a pool of yellow-ochre light from the streetlamp. Yellow-ochre is the color of this country, he thought, and terracotta. His brain, bathed in a loose veil of red wine and whatever the Italian football players made him drink, seemed to drift along behind him like an awkward, dumb animal. “Catch up,” he said out loud. “Put your hand in your pocket and find your keys,” he said, to the cracked sidewalk, to the slice of sinking moon, to anything listening. “Why is everybody so goddamn nice around here?”

Elizabeth had been gone for 37 days. Which is to say that his older sister had been dead for 37 days, although Tom was still unused to this idea, and still preferred to think of her as simply away. She was missing until further notice, and he needed only to locate her. She had gone to a paper-making workshop in India, to a yoga retreat in Western Massachusetts, to a vegan commune in New Mexico. She would return. Eventually. She would be renewed.

This is a story I've worked on in fits here and there throughout the years, as you can see in this post from a year ago and this post from 2006, where I didn't get it quite the way I wanted. It's finished now, though. I hope you enjoy it.

Read the rest of "Tom in Siena" here.

Doubling-Back

After Kip's birthday two weeks ago, a bunch of us ended up at Odessa, eating potato pancakes, kielbasa, and peirogis, and drinking beer. There were too many of us to sit at a single table, so we split into two, our table talking mostly about theater--shows we did and didn't like, the great performances of 2010, Patti vs. Bernadette. I think we bored Joe. Sorry, Joe. I thought to myself: Please let it be like this for the rest of my life. I really did think that.

It felt like old times. When I first moved to New York, my roommates and I always ended up at Odessa, or Veselka, or Kate's Joint, after having seen something (good or great or bad) at Theater for the New City, or PS122, or The Ontological-Hysteric. Or somewhere else. Then, the long--it seemed at the time--ride home on the F Train to Astoria. We felt like part of the culture. We were part of the culture.

I admit, I'm getting sentimental. Later the same week, I watched the Martin Scorsese documentary "Public Speaking," which is about Fran Lebowitz. Fran talked (among other brilliant things) about the richness of audiences back in the day--about how they demanded the best, every single time, because they had seen everything. In Patti Smith's "Just Kids," which I was also reading at the time, she writes about the opportunities artists had in the 60s and 70s. Opportunities that could never be now.

My tendency is to think that all this nostalgia is just, well, that. But then, we went to see the revival of "Angels in America," and during the intermissions of "Perestroika," the couple sitting next to us talked on and on about how the liked or didn't like the various choices that the characters were making. He said "I don't know any of these performers." His date (sister? friend? girlfriend?) said: "I hate plays like this where everyone is just talking." I felt a bit deflated.

It's a good thing that the play is a masterpiece. It lifted me back up. The Signature Theater's production is terribly, terribly good--even if one wonder's if Zoe Kazan's earthy strength is right for Harper, and why Christian Borle seemed to be playing everything so weird to me, or if, as my agent wrote, "why Joe seemed to be given the most unhappy ending. Well...besides Roy." Zachary Quinto's performance as Louis is nuanced and obvious at the same time--his technical skills are sometimes on the outside, and I liked that about it. The thing is, though, all these things make the play, the experience of being in the theater with a piece as fucking brilliant and difficult and striving as Kushner's, and actors as sharp and skillful as this ensemble, more exciting. It was really, truly fantastic.

The rest of this story is about me noting how everything seems to be talking to itself. Novelists recognize this as a message from the universe that it's time to get serious. Or, at least, I do. This kind of doubling back, these overlapping strains of thought are your subconscious trying to tell you something about what you're thinking about. Your job is to translate that into the work. Not that it's easy.

The second novel has been such a struggle. Huge roller coaster emotions, false-starts, insecurities. It must be going just like the first one went, but I don't remember making the first one that much. Really. It just kind of came out of me, boom, like a sad, confused hustler bursting out of a party cake the shape of a rain-soaked New York City. (Lol?) And for the last three years before it was published, there was 250 pages of it--lots of clay, as it were. When I sat down to work with it, there was lots to work with. This new thing is still a mess, stretched out in too many directions, too many characters that don't know what their stories are. Sometimes I don't know how I'm going to do it. No, really. I feel like I might explode. I feel like I'm going crazy.

I try to feel buoyed up by the life around me. But we're so close to the edge of crazy, we're right on the other side of this thin membrane. I feel totally pressed against it sometimes. It's a good thing there are so many things to keep us, the collective us, together. Friends who, half-drunk, say things like "Would Arthur Laurents just go ahead and die already?" And Kip. And potato pancakes and vegan turkey sandwiches at Kate's. And the F-Train. And Fran Lebowitz and Tony Kushner. And Patti Smith. And Patti vs. Bernadette.

(Who are we kidding? Bernadette, all the way.)

Three Upcoming Readings!

FRIDAY, March 26
7:30pm Doors, $15.00 (no one turned away)
One Arm Red
10 Jay Street, #903, Dumbo, Brooklyn
(F to York, or A/C to High Street)
as part of: Great Small Works Spaghetti Dinner.


WEDNESDAY, March 31
8pm, Free!!
Nowhere Bar
322 East 14th Street, Manhattan
as part of: LOVE PANIC!
also with Jimmy Lam, Nyna, Brandon Lacy Campos and Chadwick Moore.


SATURDAY, April 3
8pm, Free!!
envoy enterprises
131 Chrystie Street, Manhattan
as part of: Brother, My Lover
also with Justin Bond, Saeed Alan Siama, Aaron Tilford, and Colin Fitzpatrick