“Come on,” I said.
“I insist. Your biggest. And not because I fail to imagine others loved the story. But in the years between its publication and No Please Don’t’s, I regularly looked for your name in the contents of any and every literary magazine I came across. At bookstores, I’d always go straight to the M’s, hoping, hoping…I mean, Belt, that story was—I hesitate to say ‘perfect,’ because it sounds so adolescent, but…in a way, it did everything I wanted to do. It was everything I wanted fiction to be. A veritable treatise on gender and power, on having and not, on father-killing and father-becoming and all the traps in language we’ve built around our notions of intention and perspective, or perhaps those traps in language, which have, on their own, without our intending them to, circumscribed our notions of intention and perspective…all in fewer than a thousand words. So arch yet so felt. So concise, so compressed, yet so outward-looking. So expansive, you know? Of course you know. You wrote it.”
“Thank you,” I said, and left it at that, afraid that my saying anything of greater substance might undermine the story’s importance to her.
* * *
Published in The Ferrier’s Review (i.e. not Fairchild’s Quarterly) in 2000, along with another, longer story called “Probably Nothing,” “Certain Something” was, for me, little more than a tiny, angry exercise in empathy I wrote in one sitting. Its protagonist, Mike, was inspired by a real-life Mike: a Lake County Community College student I used to see at the Wheelatine Denny’s, where I’d sometimes go to write in the evenings during the latter period of my ten-year search for the girl who talked to inans. There was nothing I liked about this Mike at all—not his always-on Cubs cap, his braided leather belt, the theatrically “gripped” faces he’d make while reading whatever textbook he’d brought along to study, nor the purple-mirror-lensed Oakley Frogskins hanging from his collar, beneath his cleft chin, and especially not his habit of rattling a tin of Altoid mints to get the attention of Brenda, my (and everyone’s) favorite waitress, a barely legal stunner who’d always refilled my bottomless cup of coffee (the only thing I’d ever order) without reproach no matter how long I sat there for. And maybe “exercise in empathy” is too lofty, or even too self-congratulatory a way to put it. I didn’t write the story with the intention of getting a reader to feel what Mike felt, but rather to convince myself of something I knew to be true about Mike, even though, while observing Mike, I didn’t feel that it was true at all: namely, that his inner life, though probably no little bit despicable, was nonetheless as complex as anyone’s. And mostly, I guess, I was trying to be funny.
To describe the story properly—a task that seems unappealing, anyway—would, I imagine, require more words than the story itself, so…
Certain Something
(Summer, 2000)
If Mike told Brenda he’d dreamed she’d died, she might let him kiss her, he thought. This was something that had worked on Liz, back in high school. He’d said he’d had a nightmare Liz had drowned in the lake, and that, all night long, through all his subsequent dreams, he’d wept and mourned for her having drowned, and he even once dreamed within one of the dreams that she was still alive, but he’d then woken up within that dream, only to realize it was only a dream, that Liz had in fact drowned, that his life was hopeless. Liz had started kissing him, right then and there, in the car. She’d started at the neck. How sweet it was. The dreams Liz had drowned were real, though, was the thing. That is: Mike had actually had them. Brenda, Mike had never dreamed of at all, though not for lack of trying. She served him coffee every day at the Denny’s and often they smoked out front together, flirting, unless it wasn’t flirting. Mike was never sure whether a beautiful girl was flirting. His father had taught him that what made the beautiful beautiful, and not merely pretty or sexy or cute, was “a certain something” about their face or their posture that suggested they were flirting, even when they weren’t. “They can’t help it, poor things,” Mike’s father liked to say. “That’s the curse of true beauty. Everyone thinks they’ve got a shot with you.” Mike’s father often said things with more force than was merited, but this “certain something” business didn’t seem to Mike to be so far-fetched. After all, there was Clinton. Everyone who’d ever met him, even his enemies, said that Bill Clinton had a “certain something,” too; that when Clinton shook your hand, you felt like you were the only person in the world who mattered. Obviously, you weren’t though—you weren’t the only person in the world who mattered (if you even mattered at all). The question, however, was whether Bill Clinton, when he shook your hand and made you feel that way—the question was whether Bill Clinton, during those few seconds, believed you were the only person who mattered in the world. Or maybe the question was: Did Bill Clinton think you might be the only person who mattered in the world. Because even if Bill Clinton only thought you might be, that would open up all sorts of possibilities, in terms of what you were, wouldn’t it? Because, that moment, when you were shaking the hand of the US president, could in fact be your one moment to shine, or to fail to shine. Maybe, in that moment, when Clinton was open to the possibility of your being the only person who mattered—if Clinton were open to the possibility of your being the only person who mattered—maybe, in that moment, you could say something to him that would put things in motion, gargantuan things that would define your life and change the course by which the country was steered, the very course of world events. And the thing about flirting in general was that when someone was doing it, what it meant was that you might be able to kiss that person if you did the right thing or said the right thing. But the thing about a beautiful girl who was flirting—if Mike’s dad was right, and what made her beautiful was that she always seemed to be flirting, whether she was or not—was it only might mean that you might be able to kiss her if you did the right thing or said the right thing. Or, inversely: even if you did the right thing, or said the right thing, you might not be able to kiss her. Like, it might be that there wasn’t any right thing to do. Or no. Wait. Was there even any difference? Oh, what was the difference! Mike was getting a headache.
He went out to smoke. He started to smoke.
Brenda came out to join him.
Mike lit her cigarette.
“What?” Brenda said.
“What?” said Mike.
“That look,” Brenda said. “What’s up with the look?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Not nothing,” he said. “Weird dreams,” he said. “Bad dreams,” he said.
“I hate those,” said Brenda.
“No kidding,” Mike said. “You know, you were in them.”