Work piles up on my desk at an alarming rate at this time of the year, but I can't resist the urge. The reading frenzy began with Robert Walser - eagerly awaiting a massive package from Amazon... - and in the meantime has taken me elsewhere.
One of the things that draws me to a writer's world is the capacity to render life's manifold absurdities and unexpectedness in the most down-to-earth register. At once funny and unsettling, playful and gloomy, a harsh light stubbornly illuminating your depths.
When reading Walser's tales 'The Man with the Pumpkin Head' or 'Nothing at All', I couldn't help thinking of Aimee Bender's wonderfully weird stories from Willful Creatures. And lo, I pick up a dog-eared copy from the shelf, and open it randomly only to find this absolute delight - which I leave here with an implicit dedication to kindred willful souls.
* * *
The Meeting
The woman he met. He met a woman. This woman was the woman he met. She was not the woman he expected to meet or planned to meet or had carved into his head in full dress with a particular nose and eyes and lips and a very particular brain. No, this was a different woman, the one he met. When he met her he could hardly stand her because she did not fit the shape in his brain of the woman he had planned so vigourously and extensively to meet. And the non-fit was uncomfortable and made his brain hurt. Go away, woman, he said, and the woman laughed, which helped for a second. He trailed the woman for a few days saying it was because he had nothing else to do, but in truth he did have plenty to do and he did not know why he was trailing her. His brain made a lot of shouts and static about his own brain's idea of color and sense of humor and what animals the woman he met would like (mammals) and his brain's own idea of how to be a member of the world, and everything that was sort of like him and yet different enough and still: this woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.
His brain was in utter panic at changing. His brain was very pleased with its current shape and did not want to shift, not one bit. This woman liked reptiles and fish. What sort of decent human being could possibly like reptiles and fish?
He said, Go away, woman. You go away, she said, shooing him with her hand. You're the one following me around all the time.
They went on a walk - or rather she went on a walk and he asked if he could join her - together over the small bridge which ran over a dry stream and looked down at rocks which jutted up like teeth. She talked significantly more than he expected the woman he met to talk and so while she was talking he thought she is surely, and clearly, not the woman for me. Blabbermouth, he thought. She paused at an oak tree and said, Did you stop listening? and so he started listening again and said some stuff himself, about this, about that. He liked talking to her. The woman said she did not know why she liked him, as he was being something of an irritation with all this static in his head and he said he was sorry, he liked her too, but his brain kept rejecting her and he did not know what to do about that. The woman said, Please, would you shut your brain down for five seconds and let the world participate a bit? No, said the man, I control the world. The woman's laughter bounced off the rocks below. The man laughed too but inside he still meant it.
The woman said goodbye and went to her cottage and made some spaghetti and the next day guess who was at her door. Good afternoon. How are you, how are you. The spaghetti was fine-tuned and she was beautiful in the filtered sunlight and they made love that afternoon with the green sunlight through her green curtains. Her body was new to him and he did not like the way her shoulders were so broad and he very much liked the slope of her hips and he was scared because he did not know how to navigate the curves they made together. Later, when he would become a ship's captain on the waves of the water of their bodies, it turned out that those broad shoulders were the thing he would think of with the most lust and the most tenderness. Those broad shoulders would be what he would recognize in a crowd if they all had paper bags on their heads. Those broad shoulders he could spot across an ocean.
[cont.]
Aimee Bender, 'The Meeting' in Willful Creatures (NY: Anchor, 2005), pp. 51-53.
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