“I’ve already been married to a mathematician. He had a beard and wore neckties. He did math proofs on the wall of the shower stall. Were you tracing the contours of the multiplication table onto the foggy window at the neighbor’s house while the rain came down? Perhaps I am your shadow. Every story you tell me, I can think of one that matches. Your grandmother died of pancreatis; I had pancreatis and yet I lived. No. No. Don’t look sad.”
I opened my suitcase. Inside were six telephones—the old fashioned kind that plug into the wall and connect to the handset with a cord.
“What are you doing with those?”
“I need to make calls sometimes.”
“Can’t you just use your cell phone?”
What’s the use in arguing things when people have an attitude like that?
I have a bed for the first time in ten months. Now I need kisses, umbrellas, and plants in their pots. A little wheelbarrow, licorice, and a lock of gray hair. A Newfoundland, some pencil shavings, and a game of Red Rover. Knit pants, a baby-blue tie, and a week of tomorrows. I need an ostrich egg, a toy submarine, and a recycled legal pad. I need you, and me, and baby makes three. And also four—that poor Eleanor. But buy you one thing, then others you need—and all that you need, you can buy with a dime. I mean five. I mean one thousand times nine.
My story RAINBOW FISH in the new Asymptote.
If you’ve never read any of my stories before, this is a good place to start. If you have, this will remind you of why you like me.
I had a moment of joy today. I went for a long walk during which I listened to the audio book for The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, that he himself narrated. I looked at the geese by the river and the crew team rowing through the water with ease. Then at the end, I stopped in to one of the fine book shops in this town, and there are many fine book shops in this town. I could stop at one each day for a week, which makes it a dangerous city to live in. There was a sign outside the one I dropped by today that said there were new clearance books. That’s what drew me in. But in the basement (for the books there are in the basement) I remembered my friend Vi’s story was in the new Noon and that they sold Noon at this store. So I went to the newsstand and sure enough there was the new Noon with two ostriches on the cover unaware of my presence. The happy part was right above Noon was the new Lucky Peach which also, I knew, had a story by a friend. A piece about molten-centered cakes by Rachel. I stood there and read the two pieces in succession: Vi’s first, and then Rachel’s. Vi’s was industrial and discomforting like an Eva Hesse sculpture can be. I remembered when I started reading that she had sent it to me in an email one day and that I liked it very much then, and I liked it very much today. Then Rachel’s covered the history of molten chocolate cakes from the very first one to the ones you can buy on supermarket shelves today. I’ve never had any of these cakes, nor do they appeal to me. I like non-runny, non-oozing cakes, like the Irish cream cake I used to buy at the organic food shop here, but is no longer on their bakery-section shelves, much to my dismay. I didn’t buy either Noon or Lucky Peach. Vi told me she would mail me a copy of Noon. And I didn’t think Lucky Peach’s cover price of $13 made it a good investment, regardless of how good or hip the magazine is since I would only thumb through it once and maybe recycle it even, and for the same price I could buy any number of things I need more (new socks, bundles of vegetables, resumé paper, perhaps cake if the woman I asked out last night does assent to see me and I’ll ask her to have cake and ginger ale with me by the river). Then I left the store. On my iPod, I switched to the musical score to Godard’s Le Mepris which made everything feel sweeping in an epic way, and I walked home, where I ate two eggs and a slice of bacon while I wrote this.
In 2010 Mark Baumer walked across the entire United States (from Georgia to California) which he documented on his tumblr, The Baumer. This year he’s writing 50 novels. On Sunday he asked Tom Hanks for $50,000 dollars to cover costs for that project. Tom Hanks declined. So now he’s asking the rest of us for $50,000 on Kickstarter. He sent me this exclusive excerpt from his novel I Only Hang Out With International Couples, which is one of the fifty, to share with you.
The heat in Richard’s bedroom turned everything brown. He put on a beige raincoat and walked to a tanning salon.
Richard did not feel comfortable going inside the tanning salon so he pressed his face on the tanning salon and looked inside. His breath fogged up the window. Richard drew on the glass with his finger. The drawing began to wrinkle and bubble. A woman came out of the tanning salon and told Richard not to breathe on the windows. She had nice fingernails.
A bus stopped near the tanning salon. A man and a blond woman climbed off the bus. The man pulled a piece of gum out of his arm pit. The blond woman was already chewing gum. The two of them chewed each other’s gum for a few minutes until the man said, “I have to pee.” The blond woman said, “You should pee on that man in the beige raincoat.” The man asked Richard if he could pee on him. Richard shrugged and looked away while the man peed on his beige raincoat.
The man who peed on Richard ended up going to the movies with the blond woman. Richard followed them and watched their faces be tender to each other inside the movie theater. After the movie the man and the blonde woman went to an amusement park and played inside a room filled with the thought of children laughing until they made bad smells. Richard ate some cotton candy and watched the man and the blond woman make bad smells inside the thought of children’s laughter. When the man and the blond woman got home they ate hummus and sat on the couch. They watched the evening news, three episodes of an old sitcom, and a television court drama before they went in the bedroom. When they were both naked the man pointed at Richard who was standing outside their bedroom window, breathing on the glass. The man opened the bedroom window. Richard began to crawl inside, but the man peed on him so Richard stopped climbing in the window and went home.
A few weeks later Richard saw the blond woman at the fitness center. He waved at her. She was touching a machine that Richard didn’t know how to use. The blond woman stopped touching the machine Richard didn’t know how to use and walked over to where Richard had been laying on the ground doing his stomach movements. The blond woman said her name was Jenny and that she was married to a patent attorney who liked to pee on other men. Richard apologized for standing outside of her bedroom window while he husband was peeing. Jenny laughed and said, “My husband probably wouldn’t like it if he knew I was talking to you.” Richard tried to think of something funny to say, but couldn’t so he said, “I would like to eat your husband’s vegetables.”
When they got to Jenny’s house she said her husband would be home late and showed Richard a green pepper that her husband probably would have eaten. Richard asked if he could wash it off before eating it. Jenny pointed at the kitchen sink. Richard washed the green pepper and then went in the living room. He took off all his clothes and sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet while he ate the green pepper. Some of the green pepper seeds fell on the floor. Richard asked Jenny if her husband would be mad when he found green pepper seeds in the living room. She ignored his question and asked why he was so pale. He didn’t say anything and put his clothes back on. Jenny asked Richard if he wanted to see her husband’s collection of mannequins. Richard said he didn’t because he was tired and wanted to go home.
From Hawkes to Updike to Baker, I pass on these words to you, dear writer:
“To make him fly, I only wrote, ‘He flew.’”
