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NY Tyrant: Lutz at Last

We all knew this was coming. Gary Lutz.

We all knew this was coming. Gary Lutz. A name that can trigger much opinion belching. Mostly ones of admiration like, "Jesus, how does he do that?" or, "If I could write one sentence as good as Lutz's worst…" or even as strange as, "I heard he was a wizard or something. " I'm not going to comment on any of these, but let it be known that I fall into the

group. On the other side, a lot of times you hear, "It's too clinical. I walk away with nothing. There's no emotion." I guess these are understandable, different people have different tastes, and maybe you were looking for a nice Zadie Smith novel to cuddle up with. Lutz's books don't cuddle back. And I take that back about different people and different tastes. If you would rather cuddle up with a Zadie Smith novel, then you have bad taste. A look at one of Lutz's books might not be the worst idea for you right now. A lot of writers try to do the Lutz thing and it's so sad but also very fun to watch them fail. He has his share of imitators, but Lutz has discovered a way to do something that no one else can. Once I overheard at a Lutz reading some guy say, "Ben Marcus can't empty out Gary Lutz's ashtray." I don't know enough about Marcus to comment on that, but it made me laugh uncontrollably and I got stared at hard by the rest of the crowd. While Lutz read, I kept imagining Marcus wiping down Lutz's ashtrays and asking if they were clean enough. I ended up having to excuse myself. Below is a Lutz story first published in Tyrant 3. For further elucidation, here's a spectacular interview Michael Kimball did with Lutz, which originally appeared in the Tyrant too. Gary says the story has been edited a bit, so even those who know it from Tyrant 3, we still managed to have something new for you. Dig in. IN KIND To hear me talk, I had been a browless child in shoes with an expressive swoop to the lacing, and I came out of college about the time the profs were just starting to get eerie about grades, and after graduation, I walked out warringly into society for a while. This was in a town without much in the way of vicinity—just groupings of confusable buildings and fields we were expected to treat as parks. I had no friends, just timid emergency contacts. I married the second woman to come along. The first had been clear-hearted, and hair-colored, and the few times she spoke, it sounded as if water were running over her words. Something was coursing through her speech that was other than what she was saying, even when all she was saying was: Tell me your news. -- My wife—in third grade, she had called her teacher at home one night to ask what he was up to. (He said he was right that very moment being dragged toward the door.) She was a hard-boned girl afraid her heart would halt between beats. She went around with her hand covering it, until somebody finally said, “Must you always be pledging allegiance?” Anything she related came only from this same short strip of girlhood. So one assumes, naturally, that there were years long ago set fire to, or put unsafely away into other, worldlier people. More likely, though, it was only that life had covered up her life. -- But when had either of us ever been one for bastions, strongholds? We lived, my wife and I, in a morbid swither, and were inaccurate in our passions, and now and again frightened ourselves into feeling on the verge of something that could lead to change or at least a better examining of who we already were—in her case, someone stuck to the world and active in its overdoings. I was endlong in my enclosing forties, chumpy, rump-faced. My tendencies boiled down to the tendency to have trouble seeing what was right in front of me, then to follow anyone else's eyes to maybe just a larger situation of noodles stymied in a dish. I had a heart cleaned out and in need of new keep. -- I liked telling people that their secrets were safe with me, but I was in fact a deadliness to them, each and severally. I wrote stapled manuals of policy and dampened encouragement for outfits that sold "financial products." I mostly just copied, substituting "should" for "shall," then substituting "might have at some point in the past" for "definitely should have." I insisted on "she or he," then cut out the "he" altogether. All the bosses, managers, executives, decision-makers, vessels of discretion in my clamping paragraphs were female in body, female in parts. -- As for my parents? They had let life drop away from them. And I had a brother, younger. We were not close, but something must have been jumping around in his feelings for me and sometimes hit against his heart in a scrubbing way. -- Rather, there was the city you called home, and there was a companion city, a comparison town, some miles downlake, and you went back and forth between the two, working in one and living in glaring well-being in the other, or elating your family by marrying in one and buying rousing flowers for some other in the second, until a third place went up in the neutral form of tents and tarps, thank goodness. This was where I came to associate my life with my body in ways that there was definite bloodied overlap. -- Or they judge you by what you make a run for, and I made a run for a kid not even out of the district. He had thorough hair, with a blonded backstream to it, and earaches, nose aches, and no sensation at all on one side of his tongue, and his family spoke to him only through block parents or glory holes. So which was the bad sign—that I had no influence over him, or that I came to him so often with militant doses of alleviatives I crushed with tablespoons myself? -- Women were ring fingers, toenails a pickled purple, powdered belittled features, panics laid bare on stationery, then sharpened in forthtelling agony over the phone. My wife taught eleventh-hour math to twelfth-graders. It was just glorified arithmetic—the friction of recipe fractions, check-cashing-service subtraction. The students were imaginative nincompoops quick to petition. I would awaken unquietly upcity, shower with some figure of fun, whoever it was. Often a colleague's son, a kid unbeaten at the comedy of his lengthening life and possessed of jabbing stops in his voice. It was a voice that dumped glassy vocabulary over the world immediate to him and his paining good nature. The muck wouldn't get into my days until later. -- I was otherwise talked about in an interested and summarizing way. There were uncles I saw mostly as pallbearers and peacemakers, and there were aunts who had been reared to throw themselves loftily at waning neighboring bodies in days stout with time. The grandmother on my father’s side was eye-sick, dry-throated; an upheavalist in the mornings, a regretter come night. Afternoons, she took her tragedies with tweezers and reasoning. It was my grandfather on the other side who brought the caustics to the bloodline. -- My office had a window, but it gave out on the corridor, not on the renewable contrarieties of the world outside, and I covered the glass with bare cardboard, though not quite completely: there was a narrow strip at the bottom through which anyone up for the bother could see clear through to where I was, often as not, leading a throwaway razor, without balm of water or foam, across a freshly despised portion of forearm, or simplifying an underarm snarl with pinking shears. These were things I did on the job, yes, as if the job were a base, a foundation, on which I threw myself around inside myself. -- Home, I was budged but unadvancing. For whole weeks what came to me in dreams went right back again into the stream of sleep, unminded. -- She talked aloud in her dozes, this wife, though much of what got said sounded only like toasts or alerts. The parts she had come from were mostly farms, with here and there the hardened variety of a village. -- And that neighbor I drank with during the stinks of summer: he was barely half my age, but his life was levelled against him in ways that made his past look ledged with trick precipices. I could never get the chronology right—construction first, or carpentry, then the pinching year or two as a package handler, the engagement (torched) to somebody unfavorable in baby fat, then the mono, the money damages, the meatlessness and drinking, the death of a friend with whom the friendship had been veiled and failing? I would have him over when my wife was out for sitdowns with sisters or another ireful, untiring walk before bed. I liked the differing trueness of him when he made his mouth unwelcome to mine, and the resting eyes he had, and always that raincoat, always those annulling motions he made with the hands. -- I had to get along with what I could gather of myself, and what I could gather was mostly this—that I had to answer every question with a question, and it had to be: What else might you miss? -- Two children, yes. There must have been nights when there was patience on offer in my heart, nights I sat beside them when they were still in school and could be ruled or at least feared without too much fright. These were a sturdying girl of vague obediences, a boy hidden in his hardihood. Their names, their first names, formed a blatty, honorary off-rhyme, I want to say. But they must have felt buttoned into each other, those two of ours. The excusatory note the girl had forged to her teacher: in forky penmanship, it said she had been "homesick," not "home sick." And the boy: the climbings and depressions in his backhand posterboard alphabet were, the teacher wanted to warn, without apparent parallel. He later shirked his gender or got himself ousted from it, and had a curt, spiking life, little of it limpid. The girl grew up to browse herself hourly for allurements. I am getting ahead of myself if I say that a ruin usually shouldn't start out as one. -- The outgoing manager was having me throw together a memoir for her, a dignification, really, of any dent she might have made in things behind the partitions upstairs. She was a woman of unhurrying readiness, and anecdotes already deserting her, and scarcely enough names to go with faces, faces I let putresce and appall in pagelong sketches in the chapter on hirelings, associates, lunchmates easily fathomed. There was, for each, a paragraph of fallacious acclaim, a word on domestic conditions, and a single, fair criticism. Myself I wrote off as a town wonder now toned down—low-spoken, overmuch of body, slow to show his undersides. -- People did not expect to stay on in my affections, but I never really finished with anyone, never really saw them off from places they had filled. I brought my work home, meaning I was still on the job, meaning I was athwart some notion of it. An afternoon might feel original and culminating, or else the hours had hardly a touch of time in them. My neighbor needed someone in front of him to express his difference from, and I was content to face his features whenever they afforded me the wide weekday arrays of his woe. -- There were the beginnings of a rip in her visage, and cakier gloomings of makeup on her eyelids, but still an ingredience of sympathy in our evenings overall. A lot of well-wishing went on just before we went to sleep, plenty of warmest regards and the like, though in remembered and confided dreams we were hurtful, encumbering, believable. -- I can’t take it upon myself to say there weren’t others, familiars for a day or two, thankless in kind. And a girl once, too, though she had seen herself formed into a woman who absorbed men only by accident, and with women was even less guiding. -- And a word about the house where I lived liably with this wife and these flimsily boned loved ones and whatever was kept drumming around inside them: it had several and a half baths, and was sectored into vestibules, entryways, and other prefatory thresholds. You had to take a breather from this person before reaching that one. In like manner, the big, fat lies added up. -- Months, and whatever else there might have been to catch or cadge; jury duty and cautions in the mail; a few more neighbors, every one of them a presentable disgrace with a body barely squarable with mine; an unmonstrous but consequential blotch on the upper leg; niceties it was in my nature to deny; replies that more and more often had to begin, “If what you say is true…” It is true that I had bought, some years back, at the one thrift store in town where men’s and women’s T-shirts were racked emboldeningly together, an armful of the women’s things, the plainest ones, varying from the men’s only in the girth and in the length of the sleeves, and under my dress shirts and sports jackets these held me closely for a decent while. I held up dearly in them, yes. I wore them to pieces. -- And then one whose bearings I shortly preferred to mine: he had done cruelly in school (maps were rolled down like window shades over anything he had sneaked up onto the chalkboard, the mystifying anatomies and such), and in college he had to raise just the right facts out of the chapters because the quizzes were quick and graded on machines that had to be wheeled in. He wanted me to declare him looted of youth. It was the truth, or there at least was truth arranged around in it somewhere, or it had been true enough of somebody else, anyone approximate who had wanted to be a girl and grew up to content himself with the offsloughs of a wife ruddily losing her looks. -- Case in point: whenever a large dog died, a cage even larger was left behind to fill. My friend—for I had a friend at the time I am considering, someone lonesome even in his chosen loneliness—knew somebody in just that sort of bind. The dog had been a huffy lug named after a seasoning or garnish. It had died of bloat and a heart hard to make out. My friend had the cage brought over, and we looked at the thing for a while until he thought to say, “You’ll fit.” This friend locked me in certainly. There were a couple of stainless-steel bowls to be hung—one for food, the other for water—and he promised to keep both of them topped off. There was a long, shallow pan for him to slide underneath, too. I must have let out a whimper, because he said, “You’re not a dog. You’re in a dog’s cage.” So for a few days I felt cramped, no argument there, and my skin was waffled from the wired sides and floor, but I have only one remaining complaint. My friend one morning brought me a magazine, a jubilating weekly, and I opened it and laid it on my floor, but there was no way to read the thing. My eyes were too close to the pages. So I spread the magazine up against the side of the cage. That way, though, I was just blocking the light. I told myself to remember to tell my friend to leave the lamp on the next time he came to refresh the bowls. But I never did. The magazine was eventually in the way, and I accidentally dirtied it, and my friend brought around someone who brought in bedding from his car—oversheets and undersheets, foam-rubber stuffings, an unfrilled duvet. The two of them went to waste on each other in stages upstairs. -- Inside of a month, I had already been living alone in a new apartment, adjusting to the parquetry and pilot lights, waiting for this to be the one time I thought better of myself and my marriage, when I began to hear, at unpredictable hours (once as late as weekday midnight), a couple of men on good terms of some stubborn sort in the apartment under mine. But whether what I was divining in these voices was the residential ease and ridicule of companions or the trucelike give-and-take of repairmen on call, I could not finally get it settled. In sum: whether the night befell the day or vice versa, the hours of either were soon bleedable for little else than these two vocal but unintelligible presences downstairs. So I brought over my wife. She pressed an ear humoringly to the floorboards, harked, pronounced the two of them father and grown son working puzzles in the paper, hand-minded folks finding holiday hours on the comics page. -- My wife once more: that little rizzle of hair on the upper spread of her foot, for one thing, and bullying breasts muted by a bra the color of those bandages you were expected to stretch resourcefully around a sprain. She would take her dinner to the telephone table—a treacly salad, a clod or two of chocolate—and wipe the hair out of her eyes when it came time to play it down again that something was considered forgiven, if only in a newsy sort of way. -- Then the teeming years after that, and then others, unpausing and plainer. Then the firming finality of another decade behind us. By "us," I mean my wife, still referring herself to me, and a bashfully explodent man and the lug-along dictionary he came to favor. The thing was a good half-century out-of-date, and thus handsomely absent of the latter-day nouns he hated—any new, crude alias of whichever old thing the dick inclined you toward. ILLUSTRATION BY ATTICUS LISH