The First Lady (Redux)

I admit for the record – though I’m not sure that there is such a thing or that this reading would constitute an entry in it if one were to exist – that the other night, the night of the President’s long-delayed announcement of his “new strategy for success in Iraq” I dreamt I was in bed with his wife, the first lady. It was an innocent sort of affair, if affairs can be called innocent: we were in a log cabin, under the covers, while her aids waited on the other side of the door. For a woman old enough to be my mother, the first lady was remarkably child-like. Her innocence allowed her to do things that would make less innocent people cringe. I don’t mean that we did anything especially awful; there wasn’t any sex, in the strict Clintonian sense of the word; we were only cuddling under the sheets, but this was extramarital cuddling, with someone who did not vote for her husband and did not respect him - it was not conduct that would be considered fitting for a woman of her stature. For me, it was embarrassing, even at the time, the way that one feels embarrassed for people who are making fools of themselves, no matter how much one dislikes them, though I was also making a fool of myself, since, in my embarrassment, I got into bed with her.

Still, I’m not sure if this qualifies as an erotic dream. It was more of a sleepover party. At one point when we were cuddling, I remember, she said, “I think I need to masturbate now,” a sentence which one rarely hears these days, even in the most intimate situations, and it embarrassed me, as it would naturally, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I encouraged her to express herself, I don’t know, I’m a teacher: that’s the sort of stupid thing I might say. I know I didn’t stop her. I also know that she wasn’t naked, she might have been in her underwear, she might just have taken off her pants and shoes to cuddle more comfortably, she might have kept on her socks, I have no visual memory of this, but I remember thinking that she was going at it, so to speak, as if this were the first time, like the song “she’s a maniac, maniac, on the dance floor, and she’s dancing like she’s never danced before” that always stuck in my head when I was younger because it suggested two perfectly opposite interpretations. As does this dream, since I can’t figure it out if it was treasonous or dangerously patriotic.

That was the last thing I remember clearly. I think we came out of the bedroom into the foyer where her aid, a young girl with brown wavy hair and an air of Washington professionalism, was waiting with a clipboard. I greeted her with an embarrassed grin, as if only she and I understood what her boss had just done, and, for that reason, neither of us could say a word. The first lady, still oblivious, gave me a quick, girlish hug, saying something about how she hoped we would “play together” again soon, and they drove off in a black SUV with tinted windows. The next morning I was still humming “Maniac” when I read the president’s declaration that “our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen.”

The Art of the Novel #4:

ANOTHER AMUSING ANECDOTE IN WHICH I PRESAGE MY OWN DEATH BUT DISPLACE THE BURDEN ONTO A LITERARY CHARACTER TO AVOID MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY CALLING ME WITH FEIGNED CONCERN

Whoever said that nothing human is alien to him never lived in upstate New York. I bought a boat last weekend, a big boat. I offer this information to illustrate just how very far a man can fall. When I visit the boat on Saturday at noon with my family, I wink, and, shining in the sun, the boat winks back. We are in a great and secret communion, the boat and I—the deep blue sea, the message in a bottle, boys to men, these are metaphors which are false. I was once quite deep within the problems and question of metaphors. When I lived in Manhattan, for example, its own misleading metaphor, a city I also grew to distrust and dislike, like a sentence that cannot just come out and say what it means, I intended to write a novel, and I knew shit about boats. I said that word often, novel, and it became imbued with a sense of deep suffering whenever I mentioned it, as if, every time I went to work on my novel, I was secretly going to chemotherapy. My son, Butch, (yes, I know), often asks me about this, usually when we are boating. When are you going to finish the novel, dad, he asks me. Just as soon as I have sucked back these beers, son, I reply. It is a great joke between us, the kind of joke that makes you sick to your stomach, like when Butch pours bad milk into my cereal on April Fool’s day, or my wife forgets to look at her watch on Friday night when she is out with the girls, or when my neighbor snickers and guffaws over rising gas prices. Look, buddy, I never meant for this to happen. I wasn’t the kind of person who said buddy. I was the kind of person who said “my friend.” I am, I want to be honest here, terrified at the prospect that I no longer know myself. Alternatively, I am terrified by the prospect that I know myself all to well, and this is who I am, a man who boats, and so I have grown up and into myself, like a hand into a baseball mitt. I would rather, at the end of the day, remain mysterious to myself, for it was another wise man who said the day was darkest before the dawn, whereas in own my case I have found the day is darkest at noon, when the prow of my boat is beating and pulsing across the waves, and the beers are finished, and my wife and youngest daughter are waiting for me on the shore, waving wildly, holding up juice bottles or mock pirate flags to signal me home, and I want to do something reckless, very, very badly, but there they are, my wife and child, cheering at me, happy on this fine summer day, wanting Daddy to be brave.

Sent in from the Field by Luke West

We Thank You (A 21-Note Bricolage)

(1) Many thanks for thinking of [our literary journal] for your work. We aren't able to use this piece for the magazine, but we appreciate the opportunity to consider it. All of us at [our literary journal]. [sic] Thank you again. (2) Thank you for allowing us to consider your work. Though we find we are unable to use it, we consider it a privilege that you thought of us and regret that the volume of submissions precludes a more personal reply. (3) Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. We regret that we are unable to use it at this time. We wish you the best of luck placing your manuscript elsewhere. (4) Thank you for letting us consider your manuscript. We regret that it does not suit our present needs. (5) Thank you for sending us your work, but I'm afraid we can't use it in [our literary journal] at present. (6) Thank you for sending your manuscript to [our literary journal]. We will not be able to accept it for publication, but we appreciate your interest in the magazine. (7) Thank you for submitting your manuscript. We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest in [our literary journal]. (8) Thank you for submitting your work to [our literary journal]. Though it doesn't meet our current needs we appreciate the opportunity to consider it for publication. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere. We are doing everything we can to reply to manuscripts in a timely way, and hope that we haven't been too slow in considering this one. Keep up the good work! (9) Thank you for submitting your work to [our literary journal]. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept it for publication at this time. We wish you the best with your writing and thank you for your interest in [our literary journal]. (10) Thank you for the opportunity to consider your manuscript. We've read it with care but have decided not to accept it for publication. Best of luck placing it elsewhere. (11) Thank you for the opportunity to consider your work. The editors have read your submission and regret that it does not meet our present needs. We wish you the best of luck placing your manuscript elsewhere. (12) Thank you for the opportunity to read your work. We regret to inform you that we will not be able to publish it. Because we understand the time and effort that goes into writing a story, we're sorry for the brevity of this reply. (13) Thank you for your recent submission. We have given careful consideration to the material but we regret that your manuscript is not suited to the current needs of the magazine. We thank you for giving us the opportunity of reading it. (14) Thank you for your submission to [our literary journal]. Unfortunately, we must pass at this time. Best of luck placing your work elsewhere. (15) Thanks for sharing your fine work with us. We receive a large number of submissions but can publish only one in a hundred. Since our space is limited, we must often turn down well-crafted writing. We wish you the best of luck in placing your work. (16) Though your work has been declined by our editors, we thank you for allowing us to consider it. (17) We have read your submission carefully and found that it does not fit our current editorial needs. However, we do appreciate your interest in our magazine. Thank you for sending your work to [our literary journal]. (18) We regret that the manuscript you submitted does not fit our current editorial needs. Thank you very much for sending us your work. (19) We regret that we are not able to place your work in our magazine. We're sorry to disappoint you, and we thank you for submitting to [our literary journal]. (20) We thank you for having given us the opportunity to read your manuscript, but regret that it does not meet our particular needs at this time. (21) We thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript. Unfortunately, your work does not meet our needs at this time. Because we know how much effort went into this submission, we regret the use of this form. But the volume of manuscripts we receive makes a personal reply impossible.

With Our Sincerest Regrets

Dear Professor (and Mrs.) Weitzman:

Thank you for your letter requesting a joint residency at the Cuckchafe Colony. We greatly appreciate your interest in Cuckchafe, and enclose, for your convenience, our actual, paper application for residency, which is required of all our applicants, even those who are, or may once have been, "a household name." We also appreciate the enthusiasm for Cuckchafe implicit in both your demand for "the biggest and ritziest cabin [we've] got," and your avowal regarding the haste with which you intend to drive up to our "Godforsaken backwater" corner of Vermont—hence our speedy reply; our apologies if we've sacrificed sense for promptness. However, we tend to believe that all Cuckchafe applicants often feel "too damn busy to bother with the rules." Many are also, we imagine, equally "sick of the damn undergrads." Thus, we regrettably must ask all our applicants to let us consider their requests for residencies at least a few months in advance, and certainly never as soon as "next week." (I am hopeful, Professor, that you will receive this letter prior to your threatened departure date!) Please also note that in addition to the missing paper application, we also never received a writing sample; perhaps you sent it under separate cover—in which case, perhaps it went missing in the post?

Which reminds me of a further consideration: Professor Weitzman, your enthusiasm for your third wife's "creative spirit" and "untapped potential" warmed all of our hearts. It even tempered some of the ill-will some of us on the committee have harbored for you since your second wife's infamous suicide, not to mention your destruction of her last, unpublished manuscript—although I was somewhat surprised to discover that I was the only member of the committee who has always taken you at your word that the novel you burned was "the embarrassing effluvia of a crazy lady." Nevertheless, we do insist that, however many "fantastic anecdotes" the present Mrs. Weitzman might harbor in her "adorable little noggin," Cuckchafe Colony protocols, no matter how old-fashioned they might be, stubbornly require that such stories exist in material form—i.e., written down—and that the committee have the formal opportunity to consider between ten and fifteen pages' worth of said writing (again, I refer you to the enclosed criteria).

When you do have an opportunity to peruse our application, you'll also note that the Cuckchafe Colony, unfortunately, does not offer such a thing as a "joint residency." We cannot, even when our applicants insist that they need their spouse around at all times, as you so charmingly put it, to "keep the bottle on its shelf and the snake in its pants." Have you considered applying to, say, the Bodhidharma Center for Creative Expressiveness in upstate New York? Although some might balk at the compulsory meditation, as well as the steep residency fees, meal fees, etc., their application requirements are refreshingly unrestrictive. My fellow committee members also insisted that I protest your wife's caricature of Cuckchafe as a "pussy farm;" the portrait drawn of our institution in Grover Jablonski's 1972 play of that name was a gross exaggeration, and besides, the place has mellowed considerably since Dr. Lenox's ouster not long after the play won the Pulitzer.

On a personal note, if I may, Professor Weitzman, all of us on the admissions committee privately agreed that your stunning first novel, The Petulant Seed, was one of the most important and influential books any of us read in our teenage years—who, at the time, did not identify with Harry Seed's rage at a cold world, and an even colder mother? We all share a certain fondness for the book, if an understandably tainted one; without question, its portrait of the archetypal "angry young man" of the era may have been taken far too literally by some readers, but I personally have never blamed your writing for the assassination of Senator Berkholder, or the attempted assassinations of Senators-elect Hobbs and Comiskey. I still proudly, publicly profess my love of the novel, and at every opportunity I take issue with those who agree with The New Yorker's Janet Purser's legendary slandering of the book—with the ease of 20/20 hindsight, I might add—as a so-called "irredeemable template of sociopathic behavior."

I think none of us need convincing, Professor, that since then, your career has, as you mention on page five of your thoughtful note, "tanked." Indeed, it probably was a stroke of luck that you got tenure before "that little Harry Seed-wannabe bastard picked up a gun," although I confess that the extensiveness of the coffee stain on that particular page makes me uncertain that I'm quoting you accurately here. All of us on the committee share your hope that your best work is ahead of you, and your belief that Cuckchafe would probably be a great place for you to "bang out some classy stuff;" and although we sincerely hope we do not see you, your rental car, and your typewriter in our driveway later this week, we unreservedly look forward to you and your wife's timely, correctly assembled, and completely separate applications in the future.

Kindest regards,
The Cuckchafe Colony Admissions Committee

Found Short Stories, Volume 2

(Found in the Wikipedia entry for Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, imprisoned after the Nuremburg trials)

Later, Speer took to the prison garden for enjoyment and work. Heretofore the garden was divided up into small personal plots for each prisoner with the produce of the garden being used in the prison kitchen. When regulations began to slacken in this regard, Speer was allowed to build an ambitious garden, complete with a meandering path, rock garden, and a wide variety of flowers. The garden was even, humorously, centered around a "north-south axis", which was to be the core design element of Speer and Hitler's new Berlin. Speer then took up a "walking tour of the world" by ordering geography and travel books from the local library and walking laps in the prison garden visualizing his journey. Meticulously calculating every metre traveled, he began in northern Germany, went through the Balkans, Persia, India, and Siberia, then crossed the Bering Strait and continued southwards, finally ending his sentence in central Mexico.