No Lease on Life Read online

  No one would protect her.

  Rounded like a ball, her arms free, she could throw harder. She tossed another egg with energy. It catapulted from her and was lifted by a stronger summer breeze. The egg hit a parked car. The car alarm went off and screamed. It felt like her voice. One of the crusties clapped. Another crustie slapped him on the head. All the morons looked up in her direction. She was hidden in shadow. She’d made herself invisible.

  A man died and went to Heaven. When he got there, he met God. He asked God, Please, before I go to Heaven, would you show me Hell? I’ve always wanted to see Hell. God said, Yes, I’ll show it to you. First of all, he said, Hell’s divided into three tiers. And then God took the man to the first tier. It was a room with about eighty people. There was some wine and a violinist. Then God took the man to the second tier. It was a room with about three hundred people. There was a band and wine and some hors d’oeuvres. Then God took the man to the third tier. It was a large room with about eight hundred people, maybe a thousand. There was an orchestra, a band, champagne, and lots of food. The man was amazed and said to God, If this is Hell I can’t wait to see Heaven. So God took the man to Heaven. It was a bare room with about twenty people. There was no food and no music. The man said to God, I can’t believe it. This is Heaven? God says, For twenty people, I should hire an orchestra?

  She tossed another egg.

  This was her street, her club, it was a democratic party, an after-hours bar with beer in paper bags and morons on the sidewalk. The sideshow must go on. The moon was her night-light. Comic and tragic disruption was her nightlife. It was a joke.

  She dropped the rest of the eggs, one after another. They cracked and splattered out of time like a lame chorus line. The acerbic super would go crazy when he saw broken eggs all over his sidewalk.

  The morons threw themselves on each other and moshed in the street until a car came along. Then they split for the park. The cops arrived minutes later. They were useless.

  There’s no super. There’s no one to complain to. There’s everything to protest because she wanted everything, and she wanted more, and everything was wrong, and everything demonstrated, like a stupid protest march against herself, that she needed money, sex, respect, and her sleep, more of it all the time, so it meant she was getting old and cranky, and would die, because all good and bad things and people come to an end, and everything probably would before she did anything like buy a crossbow and arrow.

  It made her sick.

  The cops didn’t see what the commotion was all about, there were no unruly kids on the church steps, they didn’t see the eggs, they drove over some of them and crushed them into the street, they didn’t look up, they didn’t see her, they drove away.

  The ancient black woman fed her Chihuahua and wheeled herself to bed.

  The man in the third-floor window was frustrated. He couldn’t go back to sleep. It didn’t matter. It was Saturday. He didn’t have to go to work.

  Elizabeth hesitated. The street was dead. Then she climbed through the window into the apartment. Fatboy followed her obediently. She’d maintain a low profile, buy a white-noise machine, keep it next to the bed. Maybe nothing would happen. She slid next to Roy and poked him in his calf with her toenail. He was dead to the world, alive in another.

  No one deserved to sleep. She wondered if she could. Elizabeth pulled the sheet over her head and waited.

  ※

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank C. Carr for encouraging me to do a book set in New York; Tom Keenan for our discussions, his enthusiasm and acuity; the MacDowell Colony for giving me a wonderful place to write, and all the people who contributed jokes: David Hofstra, Joe Wood, Paul Shapiro, Bob DiBellis, Eiliot Sharp, Mark Wethli, Jane Gillooly, Rick Lyon, James Welling, John Divola. Marc Ribot, Dennis Cooper, Larry Gross, Charlotte Carter, Andrea Blum, Osvaldo Golijov, Martha Wilson, Michael Smith, Dick Connette, Charles Karubian, and many others whose jokes have become mine. I’d like especially to thank Richard Kupchinsksas, Debbie Negron, and Ginette Schenk for talking with me for this project.

  About the Author

  Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

  About the book, and a letter from the publisher

  This is a Red Lemonade book, also available in all reasonably possible formats: in limited artisan-produced editions, in trade paperback editions, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community.

  A word about this community. Over my years in publishing, I learned that a publisher is the sum of all its constituent parts: above all the writers, of course, and yes, the staff, but also all the people who read our books, talk about our books, support our authors, and those who want to be one of our authors themselves.

  So I started a company called Cursor, designed to make these constituent parts fit better together, into a proper community where, finally, we could be greater than the sum of the parts. The Red Lemonade publishing community is the first of these and there will be more to come—for the current roster of communities, see the Cursor website.

  For more on how to participate in the Red Lemonade publishing community, including the opportunity to share your thoughts about this book, read what others have to say about it, and share your own manuscripts with fellow writers, readers, and the Red Lemonade editors, go to the Red Lemonade website.

  Also, we want you to know that these sites aren’t just for you to find out more about what we do, they’re places where you can tell us what you do, what you want, and to tell us how we can help you. Only then can we really have a publishing community be greater than the sum of its parts.

  All the best,

  Richard Nash

  Credits

  This book was originally published by Harcourt in 1998. It was edited by Ann Patty.

  Jeffrey Yozwiak, Cursor’s first intern, scanned it from the Harcourt edition and hand-coded it to an ePub file.

  Lisa Duggan, Daniel Schwartz, and Mark Warholak proofread it.

  India Amos performed technical quality control.

  Further Reading

  If you enjoyed No Lease on Life, may we recommend other books by Lynne Tillman?

  Haunted Houses

  In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In Haunted Houses, Tillman writes of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.

  “In Haunted Houses, Lynne Tillman chronicles the loneliness of childhood and incipient womanhood, the salvation of friendship, and the neurotic chain that binds perpetually needy daughters to their perpetually self-absorbed parents… Her style is spare and compelling, the effect of clinical authenticity.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Ms. Tillman’s characters are rigorously drawn, with a scrupulous regard for the truth of their inner lives… this is one of the most interesting works of fiction in recent times… Fans of both truth and fancy should find nourishment here.”

  —LA Weekly

  “Lynne Tillman’s protagonists are so lifeli
ke, engaging and accessible, one could overlook, though hardly remain unaffected by, the quality of her prose, with its unique balancing of character interrogation and headlong entertainment. Haunted Houses achieves that hardest of things: a fresh involvement of overheard life with the charisma of intelligent fiction. Its pleasures pull their weight.”

  —Dennis Cooper

  “This complex and skillfully constructed novel has three separate storylines following the lives of three girls growing up in New York, maturing in a world of baffling freedoms and uncertainties… Childhood fears, passionate friendships, sexual explorations, and the uncomfortable interdependency of parents and children are depicted with intelligence, honesty, and dark humor. But if you are looking for comfort and consolation, you must look elsewhere: Tillman writes about life as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”

  —Times (UK)

  “Lynne Tillman’s writing uncovers hidden truths, reveals the unnamable, and leads us into her personal world of pain, pleasure, laughter, fear and confusion, with a clarity of style that is both remarkable and exhilarating. Honest. Simple. Deep. Authentic. Daring… To read her is, in a sense, to become alive, because she lives so thoroughly in her work. Lynne Tillman is, quite simply, one of the best writers alive today.”

  —John Zorn

  “Lynne Tillman’s haunted houses are Freudian ones—the psyches of three girls, Emily, Jane, and Grace, each wrestling with the psychological ‘ghosts’ that shape them… Frequently shifting points of view are expressed in crisp sentences. Rather than forming a modernist stream of consciousness, however, the writing remains controlled.”

  —Lucy Atkins, Times Literary Supplement

  Motion Sickness

  For the narrator of Motion Sickness, life is an unguided tour. Adrift in Europe, she improvises a life and a self. In London, she’s befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband, or may or may not be stalking her. In Paris, she shacks up with Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas. In Amsterdam, she teams up with a Belgian friend, who is studying prostitutes, and she tours Italy with deeply mismatched English brothers. And, as with an epic journey, the true trajectory is inwards, ever inwards, into her own dreams and desires…

  “A close reading [of Tillman] yields just how much her characters do want to connect, while preserving the right to their own process of intellection, the life of the mind. Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness and Absence Makes the Heart are nothing if not testaments to the belief that presenting the quality of one’s mind in public is a means of connecting to others beside the self. In scenes of degradation, annihilation or joy, she contends with the idea that one’s thoughts and gestures, while seemingly at odds, are married… attempts to accept the other not as a mirror but as a self.”

  —Hilton Als, Voice Literary Supplement, Best Books of 1991

  “Literature is a quirky thing and just when you start to believe it actually has been used up, along comes a writer, Lynne Tillman, whose work is so striking and original it transforms the way you see the world, the way you think about and interact with your surroundings…”

  —Los Angeles Reader

  “A firsthand account of one woman’s European journey and a riveting investigation of the troublesome notion of ‘national identity,’ Motion Sickness has true intellectual originality, a gorgeously sly dry irony, and a rich cast of thinkers and drinkers and eccentrics and hoods.”

  —Patrick McGrath

  “This is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road rewritten by the opposite sex in the form of vignettes of far-flung places and implausible encounters… Impressions, associations, and bits of conversation jotted during lulls in a mostly manic itinerary, coalesce into a densely descriptive narrative. The result is a keen portrayal of the postmodern world….”

  —Ginger Danto, Entertainment Weekly

  “An intense and personal narrative. People and events are approached obliquely and never fully explained, as if we might know them already. This lean book is a welcome change after the baroque excesses of much contemporary fiction. Recommended for sophisticated readers.”

  —Library Journal

  Cast in Doubt

  While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end.

  That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious—in short, she becomes his absolute obsession.

  But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.

  “Clever, witty, passionately written… Lynne Tillman writes with such elan, such spirited delight and comic intelligence that it is difficult to take anything but pleasure…”

  —Douglas Glover, Washington Post Book World

  “With Cast in Doubt, Lynne Tillman achieves several different kinds of miracles. She moves into the skin of a sixtyish male homosexual novelist so effortlessly that the reader immediately loses sight of the illusion and accepts the narrator as a real person. Alongside the narrator we move into the gossipy, enclosed world of English and American artists and madmen living in Crete, and at every step, as the play of consciousness suggests, alerts, and alters, are made aware of a terrible chaos that seems only just out of sight. But what impresses me most about Cast in Doubt is the great and powerful subtlety with which it peers out of itself—Tillman’s intelligence and sophistication have led her toward a quality I can only call grace. Like Stein, Ashbery, and James, this book could be read over and over, each time with deepening delight and appreciation.”

  —Peter Straub

  “Tingly, crisp, and wry… Delightfully clever and probing.”

  —Donna Seaman, Booklist

  “Tillman’s evocation of Horace and his life among ruins both geographic and aesthetic is a tour de force. Cast in Doubt recasts every genre it touches—the expatriate novel, the mystery, the novel of ideas—like a multiply haunted house of both form and identity.”

  —Voice Literary Supplement, Best Books of 1992

  “If you can keep up with him, Horace will take you all kinds of places… I was unwilling to close the cover and break the spell. I turned the book over and started over again.”

  —Boston Phoenix

  “A private eye in the public sphere, [Tillman] refuses no assignment and distils the finest wit, intelligence and hard evidence from some of the world’s most transient artifacts and allegories. This is a truly memorable book.”

  —Andrew Ross

  Someday This Will Be Funny

  The stories in Someday This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators—by turn infamous and nameless—shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shi
fting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention—stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.

  Praise for Lynne Tillman

  “Both entertaining and unnerving… If fiction is a mirror that shows the life and slime of our times, then this writer has her finger on the wavering pulse of our century at its closing.”

  —Time Out on No Lease on Life

  “Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine—not because I ‘admire’ her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That’s how I feel…”

  —Jonathan Safran Foer

  “One of America’s most challenging and adventurous writers.”

  —Guardian

  “Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman.”

  —Edmund White

  “Anything I’ve read by Tillman I’ve devoured.”

  —Anne K. Yoder, The Millions

  “If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the 00s, but in the last 50 years, [American Genius, A Comedy] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years.”

  —Blake Butler, HTML Giant

  Copyright © 1998 by Lynne Tillman.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data