the PARIS REVIEW by Jin Kil

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REVIEW 209

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The Paris Review (ISSN #0031-2037) is published quarterly by the Paris Review Foundation, Inc. at 544 West 27th steet, New York, NY 10002. Vo| 56, No,209, Summer 2014. Terry McDonell, President; William B. Beekman, Secretary; Lawrence H. Guffery, Treasurer. Plase give six weeks notice of change of address. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: please send address changes to The Paris Review, PO Box 23165, Jackson, MS 3922-3165. For subscriptions, please call toll-free: (866) 354-0212. From outside the U.S.: (601) 354-0384 * While The Paris Review welcomes the submission of unsolicited manuscripts, it cannot accept responsibility for their loss or engage in related correspondence. Please send manuscripts with a self-addressed, stamped envelope to The Paris Review, 544 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001. For additional information, please visit www.theparisreview. org. Printed in the United States. Copyright ÂŠ 2014 by The Paris Review Foundation, Inc.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

01 F ICT I ON 21

J.D. Daniels, Close Encounters

57 Ottessa Moshfegh, No Place for Good People 72

Rachel Cusk, Outline: Part 3

119 Zadie Smith, Big Week 137 Shelly Oria, My Wife, in Converse 183 Garth Greenwell, Gospodar

04 P O RT F OLI O 200 Raymond Petition, Real Dogs in Space

I NTERVI E W S

P O E T RY

Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223

146 Henri Cole, The Art of Poetry No. 98

Charles Simic, Four Poems

Nick Laird, Watermelon Seed

Ange Mlinko, Two Poems

117 Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Two Poems 134 Adam Kirsch, My Wife in Joy and Sorrow, 1911 144 Thomas Sayers Ellis,Polo Goes to the Moon 179 Henri Cole, Three Poems 199 Jane Hirshfieid, A Cottony Fate 222 Les Murray, A Denizen

05 NONFI C T I ON

14 Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014) 237 Contributors

223 Andrea Barrett, Dust

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01 F I CT ION Close Encounters J.D. DANIELS

When he opened his pay envelope and saw that Ermin, the bakery’s owner, had shorted him for the second time in a month, he wrote a note. “You owe me eight hundred dollars,” the note said. “I finished my route. I took the van and sold it. I’ll bring you the balance Monday morning.” He stapled his note to the screen door. He got back in the maroon van full of dusty trays and pulled out of the lot across the street from the bakery. He headed east on Oak Street and turned left on Floyd, and at Saint Catherine he took the on-ramp for I-65 North. It wasn’t a bad job, even if it was rough on his knee. He enjoyed driving, with its seductive illusion of getting somewhere, as if motion and progress were identical. He liked to look at maps: X marks the spot, you are no longer here. He often dreamt of driving clear across the country. Those double yellow lines kept coming at him. “I notice that in this fantasy you are alone,” caseworker had once told him, and it was as if she had said, I notice that your hair is hair colored. For a long time he had been the kind of person who didn’t have a cell phone. But one evening after dinner his wife had become enraged and had said, When are you going to get a cell phone, and he had said, I thought maybe it would be simpler to have a tracking device installed in my cervical spine, and his wife had said, For Christ’s sake will you just grow up and get a cell phone already, and now he was no longer the kind of person who didn’t have a cell phone. He crossed over the Ohio River into southern Indiana. There was nothing to stop him from throwing it out the window: his old life through a figurative window, his phone through an actual van window, everything. What would Jesus do, Jesus didn’t have a cell phone. He struck the phone on the knob of the gearshift several times, hard, until its screen cracked, chikt. He rolled down his window and he threw the phone out of the van. Now he was that kind of person. He pulled over and walked back and waited for a pause in the traffic and got the phone. It was ringing. “Margaret tells me you won’t be coming home

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this weekend,” his wife said. That Margaret, he thought. “How is Margaret?” he said. “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling.” “Not even myself.” “Why won’t you just admit what you’re up to?” “I don’t know that a man can be asked to admit what he has never taken the trouble to hide. If you see my point.” “I do see it,” she said. “If you look to the left and right of my nose, you will observe my eyes, which I use for seeing. But I understand if you have to fuck her. To say good-bye. I understand if you have fuck her to say good-bye.” “I don’t want to fuck her good-bye,” he said. “Just don’t fuck me on the same day,” his wife said. “If you have fuck her, I understand.” KAREN WAS WEARING a pale green sweater even though it wasn’t cold. She had cut her hair short again. He liked it long, he liked it short. Once, when her hair was short and she had sent him a photo of it on the cell phone, he had cut his off, too, and stood in front of the bathroom mirror at home and pretended to be her. “What are you doing?” his wife had said, and he had said, “What do you think I’m doing?” “YOU DRIVE A VAN?” Karen said. “Never mind. What time do you get off work?” “How does right now suit you?” She got in. “This van smells like a biscuit. I guess you remember I don’t go all the way on the first date.” “I don’t know if I go all the way at all any more.” “We’ll see,” she said. “ You look terrible.” She’d gone to school for years to study library science. He didn’t see how it could be so complicated. It seemed like a hoax. “Where are we headed?” “Kingman,” he said. “Barstow. San Bernardino.” She dimmed her fingers on the dashboard, thru. “Then it’s going to be a while.” “With my arm hanging out the window. And by the third day, your arm is so sunburned that you have to roll your sleeve back down. That’s what America means to me.” “Here. Hold this.” She pushed her purse at him. He was being

Close Encounters / J.D. Daniels

tested for subservience. He did not move. “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t touch it . You might break out in little purses and purse yourself to death.” He felt his headache coming on and took three tiny white pills. Karen turned the radio on and off and said, “Let’s play a game. Each of us will tell something he doesn’t like about the other person. I’ll go first. You don’t have a headache yet, you can’t be sure you’re going to get your headache, but you take a pill. It’s wasteful, showing that you are a bad steward of your resources. It’s impatient, anxious, panicked, I might even say cowardly. Your turn.” HIS PHONE RANG. “Can it possibly be true,” Margaret said on the other end of the line, “that you have blocked both of Ermin’s phones? You got shit jammed up back here. I am not delivering no dinner rolls on a bicycle.” “It’s not that I’m not interested in your personal problems, Margaret. It’s that, like any other self-respecting psychiatric caregiver, I charge two hundred and fifty dollars an hour to listen to them. That’s more than four dollars per minute.” “Tell me just one thing. Where are you?” “Monaco. Antarctica. Beautiful downtown Samarkand.” “Send me a postcard, baby,” Margaret said. “WHY DON’T WE STOP and get something to eat?” Karen said. “You’re too skinny. You look like an anteater.” He was looking at her but he couldn’t hear her. He was listening to the other people in the diner. “I feel as if you’re trying to control my every thought,” the woman at the table to his left said to the man with her, almost certainly her husband. “Try to focus,” Karen said. “I’m going to call my sister.” He thought he was staring into blank space, but space was not blank. Space was as full of people and objects as ever. Steak and poached eggs with Cholula sauce, wheat toast. He shifted his weight on the lumpy red vinyl of his seat. He was staring at the waitress. “Do you want something else?” the waitress said. “What do Americans want?” he said. “Read any newspaper. We want to kill each other. It’s not hard to understand.” “I’ll bring your check,” the waitress said. Karen came back and sat down. Now that she had his

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attention, she didn’t want it. She said, “There’s not much more to tell. My cousin Calvin? He dressed up like a circus clown and took a kitchen knife and robbed a woman out in front of a strip-mall jewelry store. And our spaniel died. Sarah has had dreams about it. She says the dog comes back and speaks to her.” “What does the dog say?” “Please don’t ask me questions like that.” “I knew a man who said he could talk to the spirits of dead animals.” “What kinds of animals?” “It was a hamster in the story he told me. His college-age son came back over the break with a pet hamster. The boy takes off and the father is supervising the hamster. He doesn’t like to see a living thing in a metal cage, he says. He lets it out to run around on the floor in the daytime. At night he puts it back in the cage. One morning he sees that the hamster has broken its jaw, almost broken it off, trying to gnaw through the metal bars. It dies. And in his dreams the dead hamster explains to him from the spirit realm that he had shown it freedom, and it loved freedom too much to stay in the cage.” “It’s a nice story about freedom. My favorite part is how it changes ‘I killed my son’s hamster’ into ‘I have magical powers.’” “I want hamster freedom.” “You are talking about hamster death,” she said. “You ought to try being a woman sometime. You’d learn a lot.” “Will you look at this jerk?” he said, gesturing to a nearby table, half hoping to start an argument with her or with someone else, it didn’t matter. “Playing with his mashed potatoes. Like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “That movie is better than people say.” “What people?” “It’s a movie about faith. They’re staring into the sky, saying Oh my God. Waiting for the angel Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God, to show them glad tidings. Or for Christ himself to knock them flat on the road to Damascus.” “They would be,” he said. “Waiting. What point is there waiting for something like that to happen. When you think of everything you yourself could get done.” “And you think because there’s no point to wanting what you want, you just aren’t going to want it anymore.” “I am gnawing through the bars of my cage.”

Close Encounters / J.D. Daniels

“You didn’t pay much attention to your friend’s story,” Karen said. “ Go on and tell yourself you can bite your way to freedom with your mighty mouth. I see your mouth moving. You think you’re biting, but you’re just talking. I see the cage. The cage is still there.” Richard Dreyfuss had not even looked at them. He was far away, in a Wyoming of his mind. THE LITTLE GIRL WITH HER HAIR in two braids who seemed to run the motel handed him a coupon for painkillers. The coupon had been cut out neatly from a larger sheet of newsprint and dotted lines ran along its perimeter. “Am I that ugly?” he said. She cocked her head, studying his eyes, then went in a back room and came out with the painkillers themselves. “You do not have to buy them,” she said. His whole life, the drugs that killed pain and the drugs that had caused it, the present wife and the disappeared ex-wife gone off to North Africa somewhere, all of it had begun years ago as a kind of performance art. Who was he fooling? Not even himself. Some nights he stared at the ceiling and wicked he had snapped out of it and gotten a sex-reassignment surgery, or something else contemporary. Instead he had made a face and it had stuck this way. The motel walls were striped. The upholstery was striped, the bedclothes were stripped. The room was full of lamps with their cords. In bed, the procedure was as had long ago been established. Nothing could excite her except being ignored. If he yawned and watched television, or pretended to watch television, she came, or pretended to be able to keep coming, until she had to vomit, or pretended to vomit. She locked the bathroom door behind her. The entire production was less convincing than he remembered. “Do you know the other tow kinds of close encounters?” he said to the bathroom door. The glass or plastic doorknob was faceted as if it were a cut gem. “The first is when you catch a glimpse. The second kind is crop circles, physical evidence. What are you doing in there?” “I’m praying on my knees to Jesus,” the bathroom door said. “What we just did was wrong.” “All right.” “You can leave me here. My sister will pick me up.” “Imagine that,” he said. He slept in the van, in the parking

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lot, and woke with a neck ache. He looked in the rearview mirror. There are visions a man can only tolerate in a mirror. To see them face-to-face turns him to stone. WHITE LINES AND YELLOW LINES. Green grass and yellow grass. Far-off hills. Mile markers. Telephone poles standing in line, waiting for what. He was ripping southward on the interstate just as fast as the other cars could get out of his way in a van he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t own. He had driven this stretch of highway all his life. It was haunted. He saw things he knew werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there. He wanted to close his eyes. He was glad he still had his phone. Someone, somewhere, might call him and have something useful to tell him. He considered that unlikely possibility for half an hour. He rolled down the window and threw his phone out of it. He pulled the van over to the shoulder and sat there, thinking and making decisions, reminding himself that he had for the most part freely chosen what at other times he claimed had been forced on him. He walked back toward his phone. His knee gave out as he bent to pick it up. On the road the cars roared past him, almost close enough to touch, on their ways to all the places they thought they were going. He waited there, on his knees.

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02 POE TRY Four Poems CHARLES SIMIC

Four Poems / Charles Simic

THE ESCAPEE The name of a girl I once loved Flew off the tip of my tongue In the street today, Like a pet fly Kept in a matchbox by a madmanGone! Making my mouth fall open And stay open, So everyone walking past could see.

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OH, MEMORY You’ve been paying visits To that hunchbacked tailor In his long-torn-down shop, Hoping to catch a glimpse Of yourself in his mirror As he sticks steel pins And makes chalk marks On a small child’s black suit Last seen with its pants Dangling from a high beam In your grandmother’s attic.

Four Poems / Charles Simic

THE FEAST Dine in style tonight With your misery, Adele. Put on your silver wig And that black dress With plenty of cleavage, And haughtily offer it a seat At the head of the table, Leaving the intimacies That are sure to follow This feast of empty plates To your neighborâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination.

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SCRIBBLED IN THE DARK

Four Poems / Charles Simic

Sat up Like a firecracker In bed, Startled By the thought Of my death. * Hotel of Bad Dreams. The night clerk Deaf as a shoe bruch. * Body and soul Dressed up As shadow puppets, Playing their farces And tragedies On the walls of your room. * Oh, laggard snowflake Falling and melting On my dark windowpane, Eternity, the voiceless, Wants to hear you Make a sound tonight. * Softly now, the fleas are awake.

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03 F I CT ION No Place for Good People Ottessa Moshfegh

No Place for Good People / Ottessa Moshfegh

A year after my wife died, I took a job at Offerings, a residential facility for adults with moderate developmental disabilities. They all came from wealthy families. They were slow, of course. You can call them “retarded”-that word doesn’t offend me as long as it’s used the proper way, without pity. I was already sixty-four when I took the job. I didn’t need the money, but I had the rest of my life on my hands and I wanted to spend it among people who would appreciate me. Of course I’d gone through the requisite training over the summer and was stable and willing, so there I was. I was responsible for the daily care of three grown men. They were reasonable enough people, kind and conversational and generally decent, and they seemed to benefit from my attention and company. Each day I guided them as loosely as possible toward whatever activities the facility had planned and away from things that could be harmful or self-destructive. Most evenings we ate dinner together in the dining hall, a room designed to look something like a country club-pastel tablecloths, dark floral wallpaper, waiters in white dress shirts and burgundy aprons refilling wine glasses. The place had a well-stocked bar. Smoking was even allowed in certain areas. The residents were adults, after all. We weren’t there to discipline them, change them, improve them, or anything like that. We were merely being paid to help them live as they pleased. The official tide of my post was “daytime companion,” though I stayed at Offerings later and later into the evenings as time went on. Paul, the eldest of my charges, had a real enthusiasm for food and fire. He liked to make jokes, mostly bad puns, and he had a few catchphrases that never failed to draw laughs at the dinner table. “The poop is in the pudding,” he’d say every Thursday, wideeyed, mouth hanging open in anticipation. Thursday was pudding day, of course. Paul’s IQ was up in the high sixties. He could have lived independently with occasional help shopping and cleaning, but he said he liked it at Offerings. He enjoyed himself.

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“Larry” Paul said one day, motioning for me to follow him. His room smelled of Christmas all year round. He was permitted to light candles, so he burned cinnamon- and pine-scented ones constantly, almost religiously. I d often find him spaced out at his desk, staring at the flickering flames, his hand moving robotically between a bag of chips and his mouth. “Check this out,” he said, pulling a cardboard box full of Penthouse and Hustler and Playboy magazines out from beneath his bed. He looked up at me and opened to a full-page spread of a blonde in soft light lying in a bed of autumn leaves, knees wide. She wore little leather moccasins on her feet and a feather tied around her neck, and nothing more-Miss November. Paul put a finger from one hand down on the page right over the girl’s private parts, then pressed a finger from the other hand against his pursed lips and grinned. He put the magazine back in the box and stood looking at me, beaming. “That’s very good, Pauli’ I said, punching him lightly on the shoulder. I hadn’t received much training in how to handle those types of situations. I did the best I could. There isn’t much to say about Claude. He was younger and more on the folksy side. He had his heart set on being a father one day, as though it were a status he could earn simply by being considerate and well liked’ and so he tried to be kind, cure even. He had an aunt who came to visit him every now and then, brought him stuffed animals and picture books and French pastries. “Is he happy?” shed ask me while Claude picked crumbs from his pale goatee. I’d just nod and put my arm around his shoulders’ Each time I did, he’d rest his head against my chest and close his eyes’ It was hard to have any respect for Claude. I had an even harder time with Francis. He was only nineteen, a fearful guy with nervous habits like picking at his skin and biting his nails and patting his hair down, habits I was suPPosed to try to curtail by handing him a Slinky or a Rubik’s Cube to keep his hands busy, but I rarely did. I just smiled when he got agitated, tried to say something soothing, did my best not to condescend. “It’s all right, Francis,” I’d tell him. “Nobody’s going to bite you.” But he was rarely soothed. I had to hold my tongue when he’d caution me not to drive too fast in the Offerings van on field trips or stir too much sugar into my coffee. “Rots your teeth,” Francis said, wiggling a finger. The others cast him as a party pooper, a wet

No Place for Good People / Ottessa Moshfegh

blanket. “Francis,” Paul called him. Francis looked like the runt of a litter—small shouldered, pale, with blackheads and pimples around the corners of his mouth and nostrils. His anxiety was ridiculous sometimes. “When I die, will somebody eat me?” he once asked. Most days they were all happy. Like children, the residents seemed to have the wonderful ability to forget themselves in simple activities. They could be moody, but rarely did a worry or care transfer from one day to the next. Each night I stopped by Marsha’s office to hand in my report. She and I shared a sense of humor about our work there, how an entire day could be spent playing tiddlywinks or watching cartoons or marathon episodes of Family Feud, a show that had a cult like following among the residents at Offerings Marsha was a kind and thoughtful woman, and troubled in a way I could never figure out. I tried to be friendly, compliment her on her earrings, wish her a good night, what have you. She was married and twenty years my junior, so of course nothing ever happened between us. NOT LONG AFTER MY WIFE had died, Lacey, my daughter, had come and emptied the house of its finer furniture. It was my wife’s stuff—her eye, her taste—and looking at all of it just sitting there collecting dust disturbed me. I was glad to see it go. I never cared much for nice things or money anyway. It had been my wife’s idea for me to go into business with her father. The man had started a company renting out construction equipment, built himself up, succeeded. I cared nothing for that business. He kept me on the inhouse end of things, which protected me from the gritty details. The worst I ever had to do was fire one of the cleaning ladies in the office for stealing food from the break room. “It came from upstairs,” I told her. “If it were up to me, none of us would work here.” She took it well enough, and I went back to my files, literally pushing papers around on my desk until I could go home. The best part of my day was the drive home at sunset on the freeway—the silhouettes of high pines black against the pastel sky, the sun smoldering as it disappeared. It went on like that for decades, me twiddling my thumbs behind that desk, my wife at home filling the house with antiques and fake flowers, dipping her fingers into cheesecakes and frostings and hollandaise and gravy. She died young of a heart attack, out of the blue. She wasn’t as fat as other women I’ve seen, and she was never crass or inarticulate, but I hadn’t found her attractive for years.

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sometimes I feel I barely even knew her. The only times she seemed truly joyful were when she was on her way out to go shopping or to get her hair and nails done. My poor wife. I didn’t know how little I loved her until she was dead. Once it was emptied of all my wife’s things, the house felt as though it had returned to the earth, some natural state of being. Maybe that is why, when Marsha Mendoza gave me a small succulent in a terra-cotta plastic pot for Easter, I stopped off at the public library and picked up a book about the species. They’re such hardy little bastards. Stick a leaf of one in a cup of dirt and it will sprout roots all on its own. Its ability to regenerate, to thrive, is astonishing. By mid-May I had propagated a dozen new plants in china teacups and platters and little soup bowls that my wife had kept in a display hutch. My daughter had taken the hutch and left the dinnerware in piles on the hard-wood floors. I wasn’t going to use the dishes for food. I ate everything off paper plates, a bachelor in the classic sense. It filled me with great pride to watch those succulents grow. I got in the habit of giving them out as presents whenever there was an occasion. I even gave one to Paul for his thirtieth birthday. “Fuck-you-lent,” he said, setting the little plant on the table. He spread his palm and held it out to me for a high five. We had all gathered around to watch him blow out the candles on his birthday cake. “What if it dies?” Francis asked. “ What if he kills it?” “Those plants are almost impossible to kill,” I said. “Their Latin name is Sempervivum. Live forever. Don’t worry about it.” Claude distributed huge chunks of cake around the table. I helped Paul up tout of his chair hugged him. He was about sixty pounds overweight. His parents lived in Florida, visited him rarely, took issue with the incidental costs he incurred at Offerings, mostly form extra food. At least once a week, a delivery guy would wander into the foyer looking for Paul with a satchelful of pizzas and chicken wings. Paul could sit contentedly for hours in front of the television with bags of yogurt-covered pretzels and caramel popcorn. Occasionally he overate to the point of being sick. “Gotta throw up now, Larry,” he’d say. Fifteen minutes later he’d be at it again. What could I do? I wasn’t there to keep him on a diet. Besides certain rules for safety within the facility, the residents could do whatever they wanted. The handbook only stipulated that a resident’s contract at Offerings could be terminated if he or she

No Place for Good People / Ottessa Moshfegh

violently attacked a staff member or another resident. And overnight visit were not permitted. I often wondered whether Paul understood what it meant to make love to a woman, just the basic practicality of what goes where, what it would mean to begin and finish. Perhaps he’d had some experiences with women he didn’t care to share with me, though I think if he’d had any, he’d have bragged about them plenty. “Sex o’clock, Larry,” he said daily before waddling over to his room, shutting the door, and pulling out his box of pornography, I assumed. A birthday trip to hooters had been his idea. He’d gone to a Hooters once in Las Vegas, he claimed, and had the time of his life. “Las Vaginas,” he joked. “Food and girls, girls and food. Mm,” he said. He liked frosting off his fingers. “Hooters has everything.” “I’ve got money,” said Claude, though I don’t think Claude had much sexuality. “They’ve got food here,” Francis reminded us, poking at the cake with his pinky. “Larry will take us to Hooters,” Paul announced, smiling proudly.”Girls,” he said. “Ooh.” He shut his eyes and lifted hi arms, twisting invisible knobs as though they were woman’s nipples. He gyrated, licked his palm. I hid my revulsion behind a cough. “Girls,” he cried again, his eye rolling back in ecstasy. “Girls,girls,girls.” LACEY AND I HAD NEVER been close. We never bonded. She loved me no more than I’d loved her mother, I guess—the sort of strained affection captured best in stiff family portraits taken at the mall, a hand cupping a shoulder, a benign tilt of the head, eyes wide and vacant for the camera. My wife had insisted on posing for those photos every Christmas, and I complied until I couldn’t stand to anymore. “Take the photo without me,” I said to her one year. “Mother and daughter.” I expected her to put up a fight, but she simply stirred the cream into her coffee, a smudge of bright pink lipstick on the porcelain rim. I watched her sip and squint as though she were imagining it—mother and daughter. “You’re right, Larry,” she said. “It’s better without you.” We talked like that, She bought herself expensive jewelry with her father’s money—gold tennis bracelets, heart-shaped pendants, something called chocolate diamonds—and wrapped

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them up and signed my name on the gift cards. “To my dear wife, with love, Larry.” “Oh honey, you really shouldn’t have.” she’d say after dinner, pulling the box out from under her seat cushion. She put the bracelet on, held her wrist out admiringly. Of course it felt awful. “I love you, Larry,” she cooed, getting up to kiss me on the cheek. Her lipstick was always thick and greasy. It took cold cream and a shave to get it off my face the next morning. Her jewelry sat in towering stacks of little boxes on her dressing table until she was dead and Lacey came and wept them into a plastic laundry basket along with a few items from the closet—a fur coat, a few purses, some fancy shoes. Everything else got donated. Her makeup and perfume I threw in the garbage, much of it unused, unopened. FRANCIS DECIDED TO STAY BEHIND while we went to Hooters. He joined a group in the TV lounge to watch Les Miserables. all the residents at Offerings loved Broadway shows. There must have been two dozen VHS cassettes of musicals on the shelf—Annie Get Your Gun, Bye Bye Birdie, The Sound Of Music, West Side Story, The Wizard of Oz, Grease was the big favorite. Everyone knew all the songs by heart. “Les Jizz,” said Paul, cackling. “How much money should I bring?” asked Claude, fingering through his wallet. “Bring it all,” said Paul. I did nothing to rein in their excitement. Claude put on a clipon tie. Paul paced in the hallway as I filled out the form to borrow the van. “Going out?” asked Marsha Mendoza as she waked past. “Birthday dinner,” I answered, gesturing toward Paul and smiling as best I could. Marsha gave Paul a hug. He groaned as they embraced, eyes widening lecherously. I looked away. “Hooters, huh, Paul?” I asked after Marsha had left. “Hooters,” he said and chuckled, wiping his mouth with his hairy forearm. On the way there, stopped at a red light in the Offerings van, i watched all the regular people mill down the sidewalk. I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn’t retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick. I glanced

No Place for Good People / Ottessa Moshfegh

up at Paul in the rearview mirror as he touched his fat, chapped lips. His hands always smelled of butane and the powdered cheese and spices that coated his favorite corn chips. I could hear Claude breathing from the backseat. He was always congested, his nose always whistling like a drafty window. i checked my reflection in the vanity. I sprayed my mouth with Binaca. “What’s that?” Claude wanted to know, but I didn’t answer. “Hoot hoot,” said Paul, slicking his hair back with sweat when the light turned green. I hand been to Hooters once before. Of all the nice restaurants in town, my father-in-law had taken me there for lunch on my fiftieth birthday. “No disrespect to my daughter,” he’d said swinging the door open to that nauseating aroma of french fries and cigarette smoke and beer. My birthday falls around Christmastime, so all the waitresses wore stockings with on with big white pom-poms, a tuft of fake mistletoe tried with silver twine like a pendant around their necks. Their “wifebeater” tops left very little to the imagination. I tried to hide my concern, but it was impossible. Hooters was no place for good people. “Be a man, Larry,” my father-in-law said, punching the menu I was holding with his fist. This was years before my wife died. “Life is short. Happy birthday, son,” he said. He was in his early seventies by then, with a gut that strained the buttons of his work shirts, his belt on its last hole. He loosened his tie, took a look around. “Not as good as the Hooters in Galveston,” he said, “but they’ve got a few good-looking girls. That black gal?” He nodded. the booth was brightly lit, the oblong, pale wood table lined with paper place mats showing large owls with huge dilated pupils ,as thought the birds were watching us, probing some deep subconscious level of our minds, priming us to be charmed. I turned my place mat over. I would not be hypnotized. “What can I get you?” asked our waitress a moment later. She was a lanky blonde teen with fake eyelashes, teeth like porcelain, nails and mouth a strange, neon purple. My father-in-law ordered for us both—an assortment of appetizers, burgers. “We’ll hang on to the menus,” he said, “in case birthday boy here wants dessert.” I tried to smile politely as the blonde’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding me,” she said. “Well, aren’t we lucky to have you come and see us on your special day? Now let me guess,” she cocked her hip, tapped her chin with a finger, looked skyward,

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up at the gypsum ceiling. “Thirty-eight,” she stabbed the air. “Am I right?” “A clean fifty,” my father-in-law answered for me smiling. “Someone’s been taking care of himself,” she went on. Where did young women learn to speak that way? I wondered. What school had she gone to? What did her parents do? “It’s nothing,” I said, awkwardly. “It is most certainly not nothing.” She pretended to look mad for a moment, then softened, looked down on me with a conspiratorial wink. “You hang on to that menu and let me know what dessert strikes you fancy, and it’ll be on me, A birthday treat. And me and the ladies will do a little something special.” “Please,” I said, putting up my hands. “Don’t sing.” “Don’t sing?” she said. “Larry, let them sing,” my father-in-law protested. “Don’t brother,” I said, “ It’s nothing. Thank you,” I said. I could feel my face burning. I gulped my ice water. She stood there pretending to look displeased at my self-denial. I said thank you a few more times. “Well, okay,” she said finally, voice lilting, and then she leaned toward me. I thought she might be trying to rub her bosoms in my face, but then she said, “Looky here” The charms on her bracelet jangled as she shook the mistletoe above my head. Her breath smelled like candy. “Aren’t you sweet.” said my father-in-law. Then the girl kissed me on the lips. It was terrible. I should have stopped her, but I didn’t want to embarrass the poor girl. I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “Happy birthday,’ said my father-in-law, slapping the table and chuck- ling as the girl rose, sweeping her hair back and fixing her Santa hat. “Want some more water?” she asked, not an eyelash out of order. She looked pleased, as though she’d just petted a dog. “You okay, honey?” She put a hand on my shoulder. “Yes,” I said. “Fine. Thank you.” Truth be told, I d lost my enthusiasm for women somewhere along the line. Later, as a widower, I was relieved to be celibate, continent, out of the sex game for good. After my wife died, my daughter encouraged me to date, and some gentle but sporty senior citizen to wine and dine. As if I’d ever had any interest in wining

No Place for Good People / Ottessa Moshfegh

and dining. “Or find someone young enough and you could even have another kid,” she said. “What would I want with a kid?” I replied. “’W’hat are you getting at?” “Mom wouldn’t mind,” she said next. “Trust me.” They’d had plenty of secrets between them. “I’m happy,” I told my daughter. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine here all alone.” WHEN PAUL AND CLAUDE and I arrived, we found that the Hooters had been closed and turned into a Friendly’s. Paul took it badly’ “Friendly’s is for kids,” he complained as we walked through the parking lot. I couldn’t imagine the decor or menu at Friendly’s would differ very much from Hooters’. They both had a lot of cream-colored plastic and tacky people, bright lights and bad food, I presumed. “It’s all the same,” I told Paul, swinging the door open. “They have a gum-ball machine,” Claude pointed out as we walked in. He fingered his tie, smiling politely. The place was full of fat ladies and their men who looked wrinkled and haggard, heaps of mashed potatoes disappearing under the crooked awnings of their thick mustaches. There was one table of pug-nosed young women, bored and stirring their milk shakes with their straws, a half-eaten plate of fries split between them. A few children fussed and lolled around in their high chairs. The air was humid, the lighting bright and fluorescent, the carpet gray and stained. It was not a happy place. As we waited for someone to greet us, an Asian family passed us on their way out. “Ching chang China,” Paul sang, tugging at the corners of his eyes. I ignored it. Then he turned to me and crossed his arms over his fat belly. “I hate it here, Larry. What happened to Hooters?” “Maybe a city ordinance. No idea,” I answered. Claude took my arm as though to comfort me. Paul shook his head and picked at his lips and stared out over the tables. We followed a short Latina woman to a booth. “This okay?” she asked, her smile wavering slitty as it registered that Claude and Paul were retarded. One must make certain adjustments—that’s normal. Paul squeezed in on one side of the booth, and Claude sat next to me on the other. The woman slapped down huge, laminated menus on the table from under her arms. I thought of Marsha Mendoza, her dark lipstick, the furrowed sadness of her mouth at

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rest. But our waitress looked nothing like Marsha. She bore no resemblance to any Hooters girl, either. She was heavy. Her lips and eyes were rimmed with dark liner, her hair maroon and stiff. Her hands were small and meaty. She looked like a hardworking woman, someone’s stern mother, eyebrows raised high i n expectation. She left us to peruse the menus. “You see, Paul?” Nice lady like that’s going to be our waitress. Now pick what you want to eat before she comes back.” “She’s not that nice,” Paul said, opening the menu. “Hooters got nicer ones.” I doubted that Paul could tell the difference. He had no clue what real beauty was. “I’m having ice cream for dinner,” Claude said, “because it’s Paul’s birthday. Happy birthday, Paul.” “Paul, what are you getting?” I asked, trying to sound chipper. “Chicken shit,” he said, laughing despite his disappointment. Then he banged at the table with his fat hands. “This place sucks,” he whined. Claude frowned in sympathy. When the Latina woman came back, I straightened Paul’s silverware. His pouting did not discourage her. She had her pad out, pen poised, smiling. Only those eyebrows—which now I realized were just painted on in two wide arcs across her forehead—seemed to quiver. She wore a red shirt and black trousers. Her figure was not very good, breasts and gut melded in to a solid tub of fat under her cinched apron. The pouch at her waist bulged with straws. Her skin was dark and pitted and silvery with makeup. Still, there was kindness in her eyes. She looked at Paul and nodded. “This,” he said, smudginghis finger over a picture of a large piatter of BBQ ribs. After Claude ordered his ice cream, the woman clicking and unclicking her pen during the pauses in his litany of requested toppings, I ordered the meatloaf. It was an item in the Seniors section. “That comes with a Happy Ending Sundae,: the woman told me. “Sounds fine,” I said, and thanked her. When she d gone, Paul promptly resumed his laments. I couldn’t blame him for being disappointed, but it seemed ridiculous for a grown man to sit whimpering at the table, blowing his nose into napkins and stuffing them in the pockets of his cargo shorts. I couldn’t look at him at all. His face became so apish and gross when he was upset. The sight of

No Place for Good People / Ottessa Moshfegh

him, I felt, would ruin my appetite. “They sell hats at Hooters,” he sniffed. He stared at me and moaned. It was clear that my succulent wasn’t a good-enough gift for Paul. He was materialistic, like my wife. How many blouses and bracelets does a woman need? How many terrible framed watercolors, throw pillows, little silver things shaped like birds or cats, or ceramic hearts filled with potpourri, or crystal ashtrays does a human being require? My wife had filled the house with that kind of nonsense. And she was a snob, on top of it. She would have rolled her eyes if she’d seen me eating at a Friendly’s with a couple of retards. She would never had understood why I was there. She had no idea what it meant to expand one’s horizons. I put my arm around Claude, hoping we could change the subject. “Excited for ice cream?” I asked. Our waitress stopped off to deliver sodas and small packets of colored crayons for Paul and Claude. Claude tore into them immediately, scribbling on the back of his paper place mat. Paul opened the packet and snapped each crayon in half, let the broken pieces roll across the table toward me. Claude collected them, herding the pieces in a pile, then continued to draw. “You can have my sundae, Paul, if it makes you feel any better,” I told him. “I don’t want your stupid sundae,” he said. “Ice cream melts, Larry. You eat it and it’s gone. You can’t take it with you.” He took another napkin, rubbed his eyes, blew his nose. “You can take your crayons with you,” I said. “ I could ask for a new pack. Should I ?” He grunted, wiping the tears off his face with the hairy backs of his hands. Then he turned to the window and began to peel the paper off his straw very slowly, like someone plucking a flower, lost in thought. “I hate life,” Paul said, and quickly sucked down his glass of Coke. “Guys. Ice cream,” said Claude, watching his silver dish float through the air, high on the huge tray our waitress carried. She set the tray down on a little stand next to our table, then distributed our plates, smiling. She seemed undeterred by the awkward tension in our group, which I took as a testament to her strong character. She was very professional. Nothing like the girls at Hooters. I caught her attention by staring into her eyes, which were big and black and set deeply under the fat, shining ridge of her brow bone.

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“Okay?” she asked. “It’s his birthday,” I said, pointing at Paul. “You wanna cake?” she asked, addressing Paul directly. “You wanna candle?” Paul said yes, licking his fingers morosely, his face already covered in BBQ sauce. He was not ashamed. Those strange painted eyebrows crimped and settled. When she brought the plate of cake, her grubby hand cupped around the lit candle, Paul pushed himself up and scooted out from the booth and stood next to her, staring down at the flame, and she sang to hime, in Spanish, softly, beautifully, glancing bashfully up into his small, swollen eyes. AT HOME THAT NIGHT, I sank deep into a bath, played a cassette tape of golden oldies, watched the water turn milky and still between my knees. I got wistful remembering how my wife would stand at the vanity in a pink satin robe, fixing her hair as though I’d care what she looked like when we got into bed. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she dressed well and had small, sparkling eyes. Emerald eyes, I called them when we first started dating. “Honey” was what she called me. When she first started calling me that, I felt it was dismissive, that she was using the pet name as a way to blanket over everything that was good and distinctive about me, that by calling me “honey” she might as well have been addressing a servant or a dog. But after a while I began to hear the love in it, to yearn for it, and eventually it felt so good, so soothing that when she used my name, Lawrence, it sounded dry and cruel, and my heart would flinch as though it were being pinched and gouged by her long, cherry-colored fingernails. I slept on the couch that night, the TV flickering like flame over my shoulder, the succulents creeping in cups and saucers across the mantle, the coffee table, all the window sills, the whole house full of them, my perfect little children.

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04 POE TRY Watermelon Seed NICK LAIRD

Watermelon Seed / Nick Laird

WATERMELON SEED If you extract the compact planet, roughly sketched with jungle, wetlands, I pick a knife with which to split it and you put back the iams and ketchup. The substantial rind is very chilly, the flesh wet cotton candY cleanly parted on the pressured edge to mirrored slabs of seeded red, undersown with more seeds that face eviction by your fork, I like watching you at work: one dangles from a tine, expelled and glossy black, hanging by a tendril of thin pink pulp till you flick it with Your index finger expertly at the sink. Plink.

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CONTRIBUTORS ANDREA BARRETT is the author of six novels and three story collections, most recently Archangel.

RA CHEL CUSK is the author of six previous novels, most recently The Bradshaw Variations.

J. D. DANIELS lives in Massachusetts.

THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc.

GARTH GREENWELL ’s first novel, What Belongs to You, will be published next year.

SAMANTHA HAHN is the author and illustrator of Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction’s Most Beloved Heroines.

JANE HIRSHFIELD ’s eighth book of poetry and second collection of essays are forthcoming next spring. She is a current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

ADAM KIRSCH is the author of two books of poems, TheThousand Wells and Invasions.

NICK LAIRD ’s most recent collection of poems is Go Giants.

TERRY MC DONE L L is president of the board of the Paris Review Foundation.

ANGE MLINKO is the author of Marvelous Things Overheard. She is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2014.