Collected Fictions Read Free

sentence that would sponsor my exit.
    You see, like the fellow whose dishevelment I record, I too reside in urban circumstance. I had planned to do the household grocery shopping after hours that Friday night—to do as I have always done in order that I not have to do the household grocery shopping the Saturday morning following, the number of shoppers being half as many Friday nights.
    It was, and is, my custom—and I have come to be convinced that it is only the unbending observance of custom that sustains life in an urban circumstance. Those city persons strict and exact in their habits, and in possession of a hearty dispensation of them, make it through to their Mondays. I believe I have seen examples persuasive enough on either side of the question to propose the postulate.
    Such a postulate guides my conduct, in any case—whatever the validity of its content—and I had been too long drinking with this man and had good reason to be on my way.
    Moreover, there was nothing I wanted to hear from him. There would be no surprises in anything he would disclose to me—he, as I, knew exactly what to say.
    It is why I am not very interested in people—nor all that much in myself. We all of us know exactly what to say, and say it—the man who sat with me making an opera out of his glass; I, speaking to him then and speaking to you now; you, reading and making your mind up about this page.
    There is no escape from this.
    Nor is it any longer necessary to act as if there might be.
    It was only necessary to say: "Look, my friend, there will be another one after this one. Better to have made an end to the thing and to get a new thing on the march."
    He raised his eyes from his fraudulent musing, noticing me for the first time, I could tell.
    "That's a shockingly childish suggestion," he said.
    "You think so?" I said. "Perhaps my mind was elsewhere. What did I say?" I said.
    He studied my expression for a time. I could see what he was after. But I would not let him have it.
    "I'll get the check," he said, glancing at his wristwatch, and then, in a stylishly sweeping motion, lifting the same hand to signal for the waiter. "Got to run," he said, polishing off his drink and finishing with me as well. Then he said, "Dinner's early and I have to get the groceries done."
    DURING THE COURSE of the events I describe, my son's sled was stolen. Actually, it was removed from the premises by the custodian who services the little apartment building we live in. It was our custom to keep the sled right outside the door, propped against the hallway wall and ready for action—whereas it was the custodian's custom to complain that such storage of the sled interfered with his access to the carpet when he came once a week to clean it.
    He comes Saturdays.
    I could hear him out there with his industrial-caliber vacuum cleaner some Saturdays ago. The rumpus the thing creates is unmistakable, and I remember having to raise my voice to repeat "Your move." It was midday, a perfectly lovely piece of weather, but we were home playing checkers, my boy and I, while his chicken pox healed and while his mother was out running errands. It was only when she returned that the theft was discovered, the place where the Flexible Flyer had stood leaning now an insultingly vacant patch of clean carpet.
    She called the landlord and she called the police.
    The sled is, after all, irreplaceable, one of the last Flexible Flyers made of wood, a practice some while ago discontinued. We had to search the city to find it and buy it—and it was very satisfying to display it when the snow came and all those less demanding parents showed up with their deprived children and plastic.
    I know he took it. I did not see him do it—but I know, I know.
    It was a test of something, a clash of habits, custom pitted against custom—our resolve to show off our quality, his resolve to perform unstipulated work.
    On the other hand, it is our carpet that is now uniformly clean those last