Anything Can Happen Page 6

  Should Your Name Appear

  Should your name appear on a list of those about to be executed; should your name appear on a list posted in the town square of citizens slated for execution; should your name be, say, fourth or fifth on the list—there it is, no question of misidentification, it's you, it's your name, sure as shootin'—consider your next step very carefully.

  You can, of course, try to escape by boarding the next Greyhound out of town, and, if they haven't blocked the bus stations, train stations, and airports, you'll be in Grand Rapids by nightfall.

  You can go to the authorities and protest. You haven't done anything to make them want to execute you. You're innocent, and you can prove it. There must be some mistake.

  Mistake! That's it. Another person—one who truly deserves to be executed—happens to share your name. And, indeed, it must be that person, that doppelganger, whom the authorities want dead. So, if they would simply go out and find that other person, the one who has your name, well, this mess would be cleared up, and you'd be free as a bird.

  Then again, you can always walk up and tear down the list, tear it down and tear it up. And you can take the torn-up list and walk straight up to the authorities and wake them up and tell them that as long as they're up, they can shove it up their asses.

  Or you can be executed.

  Things I Can Take, Things I Can't

  I can take a punch. Maybe not two punches or three. But one, to the belly or the face. I can take a punch.

  And a snub. I've been snubbed a lot, so I know that I can take a snub. Walk past me here. Don't invite me there. I can take it.

  I can take extreme heat and extreme cold. The heat was overwhelming in Thailand and in parts of Lebanon and Israel. I climbed the Rock of Masada in a hundred degrees, which was no fun. But I could take it. And the cold, too, in Vermont and New Hampshire, those winters when the gas froze in the tank.

  And a slur. I can take a slur. Call me kike, Hebe. I can take that, too, though I'd probably want to find out if you can take a punch.

  The company of gossips. I can take that, as well. I don't like it, but I can live with it. And the company of fakes and tyrants and amiable accommodators—for brief periods.

  Disorder. It's difficult for a Virgo. But I can do it. And nameless fears. I deal with them as well as I can. And shocks, I can take shocks. And I can take a joke.

  And ingratitude; I kind of expect it. And cheapness and pettiness. Even rejection. I can take that. And an unlucky streak. Treachery, if you must. It gets me down, but I can take it.

  Things I can't take: Your pain, the children's pain, the verdict of your glance.

  Relax

  Everything you did that was worthwhile or worthless will be swallowed up by the same oblivion.

  Cliff's Other Notes (More)

  De Bello Gallico

  Every first-year Latin student learns from Julius Caesar that "all Gaul is divided into three parts." Well, well! All right!

  King Lear

  It's stupendous, of course. But didn't Lear notice some difference between the characters of his daughters before he divvied up the kingdom?

  The Prophet

  Sophisticates like to make fun of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. I don't know why. Here, for example, is a typical passage: "Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn onto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth. And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward." What's wrong with that, I'd like to know?

  The Bible

  From John 3:8: "The wind bloweth where it list—eth." Excuse me?

  Pope

  Alexander Pope, the proudest, not to say touchiest of men, wrote: "Thus let me love, unseen, unknown; thus unlamented let me die; steal from the world, and not a stone tell where I lie." The stone would have been unnecessary. Here's where he lied.

  Shakespeare

  If you wish to impress your friends, you can interrupt them every time they unknowingly quote Shakespeare. Here's a sampler: "The dogs of war"; "a charmed life"; "yeoman's service"; "thereby hangs the tale"; "foul play"; "melted ... into thin air"; "cold comfort"; "my mind's eye"; "for ever and a day"; "one fell swoop"; and "lay on, Macduff"—for which one has to know someone named Macduff.

  Tocqueville and Dr. Johnson

  Even though it is de rigueur to quote either or both of these men in any speech or article, they were not the same person. Johnson, particularly, has been misrepresented in history, mainly because Boswell was easily amused, and so he played up the wise guy in Johnson—"Sir," this and "Sir," that—followed by what passed for a zinger in eighteenth-century London. The real Dr. Johnson was a physically unattractive, tormented man who had a psychotic fear of death and yet showed a magnificent affinity for the underclass, of which he was one. If you want to quote the real Johnson, try this: "The test of a civilization is how it treats its poor."

  Kafka's The Metamorphosis

  Probably about a hangover, but still mesmerizing.

  Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca

  As much fun as these three novels are individually, think how exciting they would be if they were combined. Heathcliff storms after Rebecca, who laughs in his face; he kills her. Maxim de Winter marries Jane Eyre and treats her miserably. Rochester hires Catherine Earnshaw, who becomes his first wife and sets fire to the house, aided by Mrs. Danvers, who has set fire to Heathcliff's house. Everybody has a great time, and there is lots of sturming and dranging. And all packed into a single book that in no way violates the original three, which no one can figure out anyway. Narrated by Ethan Frome. Just a suggestion.

  The Inventor of Time

  If no one had invented time, everything would happen all at once. Your birth, your schooling, your preposterous behavior at the prom, your marriage, the birth of your children, the scorn of your children, your éclaircissements, your denouements—all would occur in the blink of an eye, and everything in life would be accordioned like the paper sheath of a drinking straw, just before a drop of water turns it into a writhing snake.

  But this simile is so inadequate. It is impossible to imagine a world without time, where no time hangs heavy, and no hands have time on them, and no one serves time because time serves no one, and there are neither the best of times nor the worst.

  Someone, you see, had to think it up—a Cro-Magnon, perhaps, after he had knocked off the Neanderthals because they could not speak and were a waste of something—perhaps one who noticed that this moment was not like the previous moment and who conjectured that the next moment, the moment to come, was likely to be different as well.

  I like to think of that person: The mother-to-be who watched her belly swell from month to month and realized that something miraculous was going to emerge; the artist who, displeased with the red ox he had just painted on the wall of his cave, realized that he could do another picture later; or the hunter who, as the lion was about to leap on his head, realized that something was not on his side.

  I could spend hours wondering who that person was, and how he or she realized in a flash of invention, that from then on, there would be a then on, and a there was, and an is.

  Oh, hell. I'll say what I mean. I want more time.

  Explanation to an Unprincipled Employer

  The monumental degree of athletic difficulty you will encounter when attempting it; the excruciating lower-back pain, nerve pain, and muscle pain you will have as body parts are made to do what they were never meant to do; the exposing nakedness required of you and the shattering embarrassment and humiliation you will suffer should passers-by catch you in the act; the unique conclusion, ending in no pleasure whatsoever, but rather in the opposite, a heaving sorrow, full of gasping and despair, especially when you realize that word of this will get abroad and that others will remind you of your ignoble behavior for all eternity. That is why I told
you to go fuck yourself.

  Signs of Accomplishment as Depicted in the Rear Window of a Volvo

  Groton; Harvard; Ambition; Infatuation; Love; Marriage; Ambition; Self-Inspection; Weakness; Doubt; Disintegration; Fear; Children; Ambition; Groton; Harvard.

  A Valediction for All Occasions

  Good-bye.

  A Brief History of Idiocy

  Let's throw a party.

  The Intervention of Facts

  She says: The first known bird is the archaeopteryx.

  He says: The Chinese invented the clock.

  She says: Larry Doby was the second Negro League player to make it to the majors.

  He says: Gyula is a town on the White Koros River near the Romanian border.

  She says: I paid the AmEx bill on time.

  He says: They say you didn't, and there's going to be a late charge.

  She says: They are in error.

  He says: There will be penalties.

  She says: Fine.

  He says: Fine, and flushed with anger, he goes to the bookshelf to take down the The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball.

  You Think I'm Kidding

  Here's what I don't like. I don't like knowing that I will have lived sixty, seventy, or eighty years without having rid the world of barbarians, tyrants, traitors, bullies, murderers, liars, thieves, crooks, and backbiters. What's more, I will not have cured all the world's diseases, from the sniffles to the Ebola virus. Neither will I have prevented droughts, floods, and earthquakes. I will not have eradicated world poverty and famine. I will not have put an end to injustice, or even to casual cruelty.

  I will not have established freedom and goodwill everywhere. I will not have seen to it that everyone leads a useful and productive life and exhibits only tenderness and generosity toward others—all others. I will not have unified the races, or equalized the genders, or protected and educated the children. Nothing I will have done will have resulted in a complete world reformation. In all my sixty, seventy, or eighty years—nothing. And that's what I don't like.

  You think I'm kidding.

  Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos

  The cover of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue shows a gorgeous blond, Ashley Montana, emerging from the sea, wearing a white bathing suit and a white straw hat. She appears to be bone dry. The caption reads: ASHLEY MONTANA GOES ASHORE IN THE CAICOS.

  We are aboard my sailing yacht, Ashley Montana and I. I, too, am named Ashley Montana, as is the boat. We are all three called Ashley Montana. Ashley and I have just made love four times in the past fifteen minutes. She is pooped. I am full of pep and vim. She stretches out on the poop deck and veils her vague blue eyes behind the lenses of her oversize Porsche sunglasses.

  "Pooped?" I ask.

  "Bored," she barely says.

  The word terrifies me. If Ashley is bored, she is bored with me. I know it's true.

  It was not so in the beginning, when love was young. Or as she put it, when the "relationship" was young. In those days, Ashley and I were new, everything was new. We were modern life itself! How the time flew by! We would lunch alfresco at those cramped, tiny restaurants on Madison Avenue with the little tables spilling out onto the middle of the sidewalk. We stared past each other and ordered water. How gaunt we looked! How pained!

  We read celebrity magazines from cover to cover. Often it took days. Yet we knew everything one could possibly know about Ben Affleck and J. Lo and Rosie and Chris Matthews. Our heads swam with knowledge.

  We took up ceramics. We bought each other stuffed animals. We gave them names! We called them both Ashley. We were invited to benefits for serious diseases. We went! How we laughed!

  We threw each other surprise birthday parties, where everyone brought hilarious gifts and everyone made hilarious toasts, and weren't we both surprised! Guests came dressed as their favorite diet. Such fun guessing.

  We watched Law and Order. We watched Law and Order. We watched Law and Order.

  We watched Masterpiece Theater. We saw another thirty-part series on the collapse of the British Empire. Britain had to give India back to India. We wept for weeks.

  We were on TV ourselves. We did the news. "Back to you." She said, "Back to you." I said, "No, back to you." We were journalists.

  We did a lot of soul-searching. No luck so far.

  We talked about our latest projects with other people. We talked about their projects. So many screenplays, so many movies of the week, docudramas, miniseries, so many first novels. (We had always wanted to write one.) We redid the kitchen. (We could not use the apartment for a year!) We bought land in Montana. That made Ashley happy. We renounced Ecstasy though neither of us had ever taken any. We were ecstatic. Nonetheless, we admitted ourselves to the Betty Ford Clinic. Everyone said it was a beautiful gesture. It made the columns.

  We found ourselves. We lost ourselves. We found ourselves again. We lost ourselves again. Someone found ourselves for us and returned them, but demanded a reward. We learned how to be ourselves. We learned how to be other people. Other people learned how to be us. It was confusing.

  We had breakthroughs and breakdowns and breakfast. We cleaned up our act. We were in a time warp. We were in a wormhole. We were in a worm warp. We were burned out. We reached critical mass. We experienced rapprochements and schadenfreude and vertigo and Fahrvergnügen. And déjàs vu. We had the flu. We decided to go somewhere completely different for the summer, at first, but in the end, well, when would we see our friends? We air-kissed everybody and everybody air-kissed us.

  We were OK. I was OK, and she was OK. We asked each other. "You OK?" We were.

  We came on to each other. We had it all together. We got on with our lives. We told each other: "Go for it!" It! We were there for each other. There! Our energy was palpable, our atmosphere electric. We refused to learn from history, and thus we were bound to repeat it.

  We were state of the art. We were on the cutting edge. We had our priorities straight. We had our heads on straight. We empowered each other. We crossed the line. We parented. We weren't parents, but we parented anyway—because we were superpersons: We were bank presidents in the morning, coached Little League in the afternoon, cooked coq au vin in the evening and were on-line all night. I don't know how we did it.

  We were caring persons. We cared for us.

  We saw Penn & Teller. We shopped at Dean & DeLuca. We called Jacoby & Meyers. We knew Crab-tree & Evelyn. Well, we knew Evelyn. We knew Sy Syms. We were educated consumers. We were his best customers.

  We had wellness. We had Botox. We had liposuction. We had hipposuction. We had rhinoplasty. We had elephantiasis.

  We lost thirty pounds with Ultra Slim-Fast. We got gravely ill.

  We woke up and smelled the coffee. It was Starbucks, from Rio, Rio Grande. We asked each other, "Whazzup?" "Zup?" "What up?" It was us. We were up.

  We were laid back. We were uptight. We were ripped off. We were on a roll. We were in a rut. We were boss! We were fly! We were bitchin'! We were dudes! Didn't you just love us? We got every joke that David Letterman made. We knew the names of every rock band on Saturday Night Live. We liked the way they dressed.

  We had brunch!

  We ate shiitake mushrooms and buffalo wings and a terrine of carpaccio with a paillard of chicken.

  We fought for animal rights. We opposed capital punishment. We opposed capital punishment for animals. A pussycat was electrocuted in Texas. A serial killer. Mice, mostly. We held a vigil.

  We collected Judy Chicago. We collected Robert Indiana. We loved Tennessee Williams. We admired George Washington. Naturally, we were crazy about Ashley Montana. And Joe Montana. And Joe Montegna.

  We were above the law. We were below the fold. We were beyond the pale. We were under a great deal of pressure. We were around the block. We were over the hill. We were beside ourselves. We were beneath contempt.

  We were into yoga. We were into yogurt. We were into prepositions.

  We were plugged in. We were
tuned out. We networked. We faced. We interfaced. We uploaded. We downloaded. We got loaded. We were caught in the World Wide Web.

  We were Eurocentric. We were Eurotrash. We faded in. We faded out. We cut to the chase. They picked up our option.

  We did construction work. We did Reconstruction work. We bought weapons of mass deconstruction. We were radiant, luminous. Both radiant and luminous.

  Our phone-answering machine left exceptionally clever messages. The phone never stopped ringing. The phone rang off the hook. We received calls from cars, from planes, from briefcases.

  We had eyeglasses made in one hour.

  We lost our contacts.

  We lost contact. We began to bicker. We began to find each other disappointing. We began to judge each other inappropriate.

  I wanted to switch to Verizon; she wanted to stay with AT&T. I said Certs was a candy mint. She said it was a breath mint. I said her shoes looked like a pump. She said they felt like a sneaker. I said: "Tastes great." She said, "Less filling."