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Sunday, October 25, 2015

=Hills Like White Elephants=

This is a story without any point; I'm telling you this straight off before the very first sentence comes to a close, so don't act surprised, don't cop an attitude, or complain that you've wasted your time or that you've been poorly used because you've been properly and priorly warned; proceed, if you feel so inclined, and, as the saying goes, at your own risk.  It's a story without a point comprised of a number of long and unnecessarily twisting sentences in cadenced rhythms  prettified every so often with a captivating image, or so they were intended when they were placed into the niches, where the alert reader will find them, glowing softly, like a phosphorescent dog. I've even borrowed the story's title, reasoning that it did well for Hemingway and it might just as well as be the title of the present tale as any other, since in addition to having no point, this story has no hills or elephants in it either.

We'll start with our main character: Martin, by name. Martin was the type of man who was fond of telling people this anecdote upon making their acquaintance at a bar or a cocktail party. "From the very first time I heard the expression 'He puts his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else,' I resolved that each morning I'd sit on the edge of the bed, lift both my legs up, line up the openings of my trousers, and thrust my feet through simultaneously." He thought this quite a clever thing to say, did Martin, but his interlocutors held a dimmer view, one that no doubt often involuntarily registered on their faces, an estimation readable beneath the polite forbearing smiles they answered with, legible, that is, to almost anyone but Martin, who never seemed to catch on what an asshole everyone thought he was.

Martin's father was a formidable man, a famous industrialist or race car driver, it was never entirely clear to me; maybe he was a circuit court judge. In any event, he was a large, bluff, imposing man, stern as a steer, with an inflexible, implacable face like the concrete boot adorning the foot of the statue of some great Roman military commander crushing the throat of an enemy, an Octavian Caesar, for instance. He disapproved of Martin massively on general principle, but disapproved of him specifically and in great detail, too; he could tick off the top ten reasons on his fingertips, starting with "momma's boy" and ending on his pinkie with "loser." You know what? I'm thinking that maybe  he was a cardiologist.

Martin had a secret lover, a pretty boy in pink panties, who he kept inside the closet, behind the suits that belonged to an abandoned period in his life. Two or three times a year, Martin had to take his lover's unconscious, cooling body down off the bar where it dangled from the clenched knot of a necktie decorated with some hideous Christmas pattern. The things we do for passion are beyond the computation of even the highest mathematics we've devised, although love can be readily reduced to a few relatively simplistic equations. This situation was designated by the ring finger on his father's first hand, which he flicked with extra violence, as if trying to remove some indelible incriminating booger. "Pansy," I heard him mutter, not knowing the half of it.

Martin had a mother, previously alluded to, because we all must have a hole through which we dropped upon entering this vale of tears, that's just the way it is, although test tubes and so-called "artificial wombs" are showing great promise of making an exception of even this heretofore ironclad rule. Of this mother we know nothing, so it turns out we are not an omniscient author, after all.

If there were to be a point to this story—or a vampire or a murder or a head-on  collision—this would be about the time to start bringing it around the bend. I thought that maybe I'd surprise myself, that if I started this story and just kept writing long enough something would come of it, the way I've read authors claiming that suddenly their story "just took off and from that point on seemed to write itself," or that this or that character "took on a life of her own".

No such luck here. No one in this story took any initiative, let alone life of their own; no one changed so as you'd notice. Martin remained an ineffectual, directionless, momma's boy; his father, a cold, domineering, disapproving statue of a man, the mother an unknown quantity. And the boy in the closet was just something I made up when I made up the part about hearing Martin's father muttering "pansy." In fact the only true part of this story is the anecdote which I overheard some guy delivering at a party. I ended up taking him home with me, if you can believe it, but I was coming off a bad break up at the time and I was trying to get back at the man who hurt me, or trying to prove something to myself, or something. The ways of passion are beyond computation, as I foreshadowed earlier. Anyway, the next morning I was watching to see if he really did do that thing with his pants but he gathered his clothes in his arms and took them into the bathroom to shower and when he came out he was fully dressed.

I'm sure I hardly need to tell you that his name wasn't really Martin, but his father, who, now it suddenly occurs to me, had some kind of important job with the State Department, looked like the writer Martin Amis, unless I have him confused with the real Martin Amis. Or someone else.



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