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 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, or, perhaps, more accurately, simply implied, actually taken for granted might best describe it, if only 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 lives a life of their own; no one even changes so as you'd
notice. Right to the end 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 about the pants 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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