GOING BACK SOMEDAY

She discovered quite by accident that the woman was dead. She had stumbled on the article while searching on a product that carried a similar spelling to the woman’s name, enough so that when she and the woman were friends a decade earlier, the similarity had been the source of many affectionate jokes and then, as the friendship waned, a few less affectionate ones. Why had it waned? The initiating incident involved an unkind piece of gossip passed from one of the women to a third. A mixup with a man inflamed matters. The two women had last seen each other at a Christmas party for the company that employed both of them as contractors. One had been too drunk, one too defensive, and each had decided that they were better off without the other. A decade passed. Men were married. Children were delivered. Jobs were taken off and put on like coats. And then one morning, searching for something to buy, one woman had discovered that the other woman was dead. The back room of her mind flooded the front room: she remembered the woman’s shyness, the smeared look of her features, the sharp sense of humor that protruded from otherwise impeccable manners, the surprising occasional upjuts of libido and the shocking dirty talk that could accompany those moments. She zeroed in on one moment early in their friendship, a lunchtime spent sitting in the park, trading the names of favorite songs, thrilled when their lists overlapped. She knew that they had shared three songs in common, but could remember only two: “Time of the Season” and “Blue Bayou.” She tore at invisible hair trying to recall the third, to no avail. The product that carried a name similar to that of the dead woman was a kind of shortbread cookie. She bought a tin and tried to taste the cookie in the mouth of her mind, but the buttery crispness she expected was gone, and what was in its place was dry and ashy. The article did not mention how her friend had died. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

LIFE, SENTENCE

Talmadge Fowler had a name that in turn had a history, though he concealed it as if it were a thing of value, when in fact it was determinedly without value but for its concealment, the equivalent of paste gems hidden in an office safe, mentioned now and again with rapid lightness but never described in any detail and certainly never brought to light, which is why it was so surprising that he woke early that morning, turned to look at the woman on his left, sleeping deeply across the large mattress and the expensive sheets, and resolved to come clean with her: how he had been born to modest means in a crooked house in a run-down corner of the state’s second-largest city, had excelled at school but felt with each passing year none of the movement upward that had been promised by the proponents of education, instead bowing under the weight of what he was certain was thickening irrelevance, all these verifiable facts and unverifiable theories, no melody to it, no rhythm, to the point where his own achievement came to feel like nothing so much as failure, how he had found a shred of victory in a succession of women and then a whole tapestry of meaning in one, how he had encountered her on a staircase at a party, he going down, she coming up, but felt once again that the directions were a fundamental misrepresentation of the truth, for it was he who was going up, propelled by his rapid and terrifying apprehension of her beauty, which he understood more fully than he had understood any subject in any stage of school, in part because he saw what it did for anything that contacted it, himself included, how he had stopped there on the stairs, mouth dry, voice a croak, barely able to form a word, and made his case to her, been stared upon with eyes that enlarged him, there on the stairs, later at the party, and for months following, months that he did not account as part of his life because they were so far superior to it, that in fact reduced the time around them, months that ended when, one morning, she had not stared at him but in fact looked away from him, erasing him, and how in the wake of that he had renounced everything that had occurred in his life up until that very moment, invented his new name, his new history, founded the Fowler Agency, began to collect, appraise, and resell artifacts that stood as proof of the glory of this society of that one, acquired wealth and a new vantage, a type of bridge over the world’s gains and losses that he felt certain would remain intact even if the wealth beneath it began to drain away, found himself once again in the company of a series of women who were so similar and were replaced each by the next so quickly that it felt as if he was living in a motion picture, bought a rich man’s house that had been bruised and defaced by time, relaxed into the legitimacy it afforded him, and then met a new woman who placed him not at the same elevation as the who had stared at him but who at least suggested that he could once again find himself at the foothills, who could not restore him but who began to draw him again surely as the other had erased him, a few strokes that indicated the possibility of hope, and from the moment he woke that morning after the night she stayed with him in his rich man’s house, in his  expanse of a bed, from the moment the first shadows of the morning slid across it, slid across her and the sheet that covered her, as they negotiated flats and furrows, ridges and rises, turned these indentations and protruberances into a kind of music, he moved nervously to her side of the room, to a spot where he thought he might be best and most clearly heard, and he began to come to terms with the fact that the next words he spoke would be his real name.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

PLATE OF FRUIT

I was summoned to breakfast with the old man, whose name was known to all but whose ways were known to none. The table was covered with butcher paper. He clapped his hands with what I thought was theater and plates were brought to the table, some with fruit, some with bread, one with a silver pen. We started eating. He used the pen to write on the paper. The letters were too small for me to make out so he started reading what he was writing. It was a story about a young man who faced evil in his own heart. “The evil,” the old man said, “was not the kind anyone ever thought about. It was the evil of moving through the world without digging, overturning, feinting, focusing.” I could not tell if he was reading anymore or speaking to me directly. His face began to blur and wobble at the edges like a mirage in a desert. He asked me if I remembered what he had just said and I confessed that I did not. I knew I would remember nothing but how that face looked.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

DAWN RAID

A purple shoe steps forward and then a yellow shoe. They both belong to the man in the house you cannot see from the street, but he is not wearing either of them now. He is sleeping, dreaming that he is loved. The purple shoe is on the foot of a woman who has slept beside him. The yellow shoe is on the foot of a man who has betrayed him. Purple, yellow, royalty, sunlight: they go down the path toward the street, where their getaway car is waiting. Their pockets make music with the coins they have taken. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

FRIENDSHIP IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

She called me. “I’ve been working on this project for months now and it’s starting to kill me.” I paused meaningfully. “Don’t die,” I said. She shook her head. I couldn’t see it but I was sure of it. We’ve known each other that long. “You don’t get it,” she said. “I sketched this out back in May, and I had a quick way to do it, but the client came back to me with notes and concerns, and I overreacted. There’s no other way to say it. I was a good student in the worst way and now I have a hundred and fifty pages of notes and no energy left to go through them.” Toward the end, her voice became high and ragged, and I started to worry that she was losing it. It didn't seem like a controlled performance. It didn't seem like a performance at all. “You’re hearing a fact, not an act,” she used to tell me when we were dating, as a way of letting me know that I shouldn’t make the mistake of attributing the moment to calculated theatrics. “What can I do?” I said. The silence on the line took roots, bloomed, blossomed, until it obscured everything else. She still said nothing, but I understood her meaning, which was that existing with her inside her silence, giving her some small confidence that even in that moment she still had her piece of the world, and that she had someone to verify that she had it, was not only the limit of my capability but all that was wanted. Her breaths sketched out a faint punctuation.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE EDITING PROCESS

Leave it to a wigged friend to help an imperialist in need. Leave it to a deft friend to help a martinet in need. Leave it to a ripe friend to help an orator in need. Leave it to a coiffed friend to help a rifleman in need. He stacked the sentences one atop the other, masonry of a sort that produced at best one wall, at worst a heap of forsaken bricks, and then went off to meet her. He knew that at some point during the evening — the first drink, the second, the small bits shoved into mouths during gaps in the headlong conversation, the taxicab ride, the hand on top of hand, the body under body — she would fix what he had already eagerly ruined. Leave it to an old friend to help a paragraph in need. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

GIVE ME THE KEYS I WANNA DRIVE

I called her. She didn’t have a car. “I don’t want to live this way,” she said. “But I don’t want to die.” A pause stepped onto the line. “I am reading dialogue,” she said. “It does not reflect my own feelings about my own existence.” She still didn’t have a car. “Come pick me up,” she said. “But when you get here, I’ll drive.” She didn’t know enough about me to presume that I would go along with this plan. I had flowers and a box of candy, intending a surprise, but slipped up and told her that I was bringing them. “Don’t eat them both,” she said. “Don’t eat either.” The traffic was perpetual. Eventually there I was in front of the house: two stories, the second of which was hers, painted a shrieking red. I idled there, waiting. Idle, idle, idle. She called me, read some more dialogue. “A desire to try out a new life is a signal that your old one has succeeded,” she said. “You never made a mistake when we were together, and yet not being together is not a mistake,” she said. “The comedic elements of our existence only remind us how much is sad,” she said. “Okay,” she said. She was done. I heard the bound script slap down on a table or floor. “I see your car out in front,” she said. “I’m not getting out of bed.” I went in, unsure of what had happened, sure of what would.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas