Snow falls as I cross Fifty-seventh. A cold gust blows. I fold up
the collar of my windbreaker, wait for the ache to pass. The sky thickens to darkness.
“I'm looking for pajamas,” I tell the salesclerk at Bergdorf's, a man with a nervous twitch to his upper lip and thick lines shooting up the middle of his forehead.
“What size?” He seems completely uninterested.
“My size. But it's the pattern and colors that concern me.”
I follow the salesclerk's dispassionate back to a display case bursting with pajamas â diamonds, shields, polka dots â and, yes, stripes.
“Any wide ones?”
“Wide?”
“I'm looking for wide stripes. Red and gray, preferably.”
With a desultory air the salesman opens drawers. From one he withdraws a stack of striped pajamas. Second from the bottom, I see them: a pair with red and gray wide stripes.
“It's a medium,” says the clerk, unfolding them. “They run a bit large. These should fit you just fine.”
I nod thoughtfully into my index finger, which I've pressed against my lips as if to suppress a painful outburst â something between a groan and the mewl of a cornered, pocket-sized creature â then take a step back, and then another, as the clerk, a toreador dangling a red and gray striped cape, fixes me with questioning eyes and the department store walls (decorated in wide vertical red and gray stripes) close in on me like the bars of a colorful jail cell. Question: how did they kill him? Answer: they gave him everything he wanted.
(He was all I had. No
â
not exactly.)
I think I'm going to die; I
know
I'm going to faint. Minutes later I'm sitting with a Dixie cup of cool water to my lips, surrounded by concerned faces, including that of the desultory clerk, who
asks me do I still want the pajamas? should he ring them up for me? My mouth goes dry. I stammer.
“Well ⦠actually ⦠I really wanted ⦠pink and blue,” I say, merely to extricate myself. “You haven't got pink and blue, have you, by any chance?”
Spring. Together with my cousin I watched the magnolias in Central Park blow out again, flinging their snowy branches to snare the sky. The daffodils the gardeners had planted bloomed in sudden affray. By May's end I'd never felt better, only lighter, as if my bones had hollowed, like the bones of birds. I no longer floated; my lightness attached itself to earth. When the magnolia blossoms shivered, I shivered with them; when fat raindrops dimpled the glassy surface of the rowboat pond, my skin took their imprint, too. There was no obvious joy in any of this, mind you, only a great substantive indifference, as if the long, nearly total vacuity of the past year â my year of searching for red and gray wide-striped pajamas â had served its purpose, had scooped my longing for old comforts out like so much melon meat, had emptied me of something I didn't need
or
really want, and by emptying me had freed me â or at least delivered me from department stores.
I no longer suffer from fainting spells.
Standing on the stern of the
American Legion
, sifting my father's ashes into its wake, I watch the wind whip them into gray smears. I toss the plastic urn in; it bobs, floats.
O sweet gray banality of life! O bloody shank of day's end! O bourbon-and-ouzo-scented breath of night!
Under a red bay of sky Marcia wraps her plump arms around me.
Uncle Nick has asked me to go to work for him, setting up
his symposiums, peddling his chrome yellow manifestos. A man needs a purpose, after all.
A man without a purpose is a chameleon on a scotch plaid.
In celebration we locked arms across his dining-room table, drained each other's ouzo glasses, then hurled them synchronously into the fire grate, where they shattered like snowballs.
Stinyássas!
So I shall live on, lightening and lightening, until my body cells quaver in frequencies of every wavelength and spectrums of every hue.
Speaking of spectrums: next Sunday I've promised to take my cousin to the Rainbow Room.
Uncle Nick is pleased.
Swimming:
Literary Review
46, no. 4 (Summer 2003)
The Wolf House:
Missouri Review
26, no. 2 (2003)
Color of the Sea:
Missouri Review
27, no. 3 (Winter 2004)
Driving Picasso:
Boulevard
22, no. 1 (Fall 2006)
Sawdust:
The Sun
, no. 352 (Winter 2005)
Our Cups Are Bottomless:
Alaska Quarterly Review
23, nos. 3â4 (Fall and Winter 2006)
The Girl in the Story:
Wisconsin Review
38 (Fall 2003)
The Sea Cure:
Carve Magazine
(Fall 2005)
Wednesday at the Bagel Shop:
Oasis
6, no. 3 (Winter 1998)
El Malecón:
South Dakota Review
32, no. 4 (Winter 1994)
Boy B:
Global City Review
(Winter 2005)
The Sinking Ship Man:
Like Water Burning
(Summer 2005)
My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas:
Glimmer Train Stories
52 (Fall 2003)
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Evening Out
Leigh Allison Wilson,
From the Bottom Up
Sandra Thompson,
Close-Ups
Susan Neville,
The Invention of Flight
Mary Hood,
How Far She Went
François Camoin,
Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Molly Giles,
Rough Translations
Daniel Curley,
Living with Snakes
Peter Meinke,
The Piano Tuner
Tony Ardizzone,
The Evening News
Salvatore La Puma,
The Boys of Bensonhurst
Melissa Pritchard,
Spirit Seizures
Philip F. Deaver,
Silent Retreats
Gail Galloway Adams,
The Purchase of Order
Carole L. Glickfeld,
Useful Gifts
Antonya Nelson,
The Expendables
Nancy Zafris,
The People I Know
Debra Monroe,
The Source of Trouble
Robert H. Abel,
Ghost Traps
T. M. McNally,
Low Flying Aircraft
Alfred DePew,
The Melancholy of Departure
Dennis Hathaway,
The Consequences of Desire
Rita Ciresi,
Mother Rocket
Dianne Nelson,
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America
Christopher McIlroy,
All My Relations
Alyce Miller,
The Nature of Longing
Carol Lee Lorenzo,
Nervous Dancer
C. M. Mayo,
Sky over El Nido
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Large Animals in Everyday Life
Paul Rawlins,
No Lie Like Love
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The Quarry
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Under the Red Flag
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Winter Money
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Unified Field Theory
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Survival Rates
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The Edge of Marriage
Darrell Spencer,
CAUTION Men in Trees
Robert Anderson,
Ice Age
Bill Roorbach,
Big Bend
Dana Johnson,
Break Any Woman Down
Gina Ochsner,
The Necessary Grace to Fall
Kellie Wells,
Compression Scars
Eric Shade,
Eyesores
Catherine Brady,
Curled in the Bed of Love
Ed Allen,
Ate It Anyway
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Sorry I Worried You
Barbara Sutton,
The Send-Away Girl
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Copy Cats
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The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
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Spit Baths
Peter LaSalle,
Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism
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Super America
Margot Singer,
The Pale of Settlement
Andrew Porter,
The Theory of Light and Matter
Peter Selgin,
Drowning Lessons