The Laying Out of Bones

Abstract

Page 24 American Book Review Williams continued from previous page the stories is given to Vivian, who—after listening to Sid’s message saying he is “following [her] orders” and going on a “date”—is “so nonplussed that she nearly sat on her kitten.” In most of the rest of the stories, it’s not “nearly.” The kitten gets sat on. In “The Second Floor,” a sexual psychopath waiting in a run-down Philadelphia park to speak again with “schoolgirl” Abby finds himself sitting on the bench with another girl, Cincy, who, in her own endearingly confused and delusional phrase, is “not really that much of a hooker” but “down the road…an actress.” She gets herself taken to Jerry’s apartment, her new home, her “heaven,” her “paradise ,” where she breaks a cardinal rule and while the predator sleeps, climbs to Bluebeard’s second floor. She literally shuts her eyes against what in a lightning flash she glimpses and we do not see, but character and reader alike smell, leaving us wondering if Abby has not already met the enormity in store for the girl from Cincinnati. In “Robert and His Wife,” the narrator in a writing workshop finds himself mesmerized by an egomaniac—or drawn to a charismatic man, depending on how reliable we find his account. Robert offers him his first wife. Instead of taking Beth, the narrator in a Cheeveresque moment of envy, commits an act of perverse fulfillment of Robert’s philosophy of the “eternal moment.” In “Mayor Bat,” a moralizing sadist terrorizes a hapless drunk he picks up at a bar, to help her “move a little out of lockstep with the rest of the whores and zombies.” In “Dates in Hell,” as much prose poem as a story, Burgin puts us in the mind of a madwoman as she toys with men and women alike, to propagate and escape the Hell she “slid into,” or that has “slid into” her. In “Cruise,” two strangers end a late night of conversation and drinking on the lower deck of the ship enraged at one another, but one filled with a rage that keeps him from carrying out his final act of alienation, “to die among the people I could never live with.” Burgin offers the reader both comedy and pathos, as if God is a comedian and humans are the punchline. Even in the more comic stories (and there are comic moments throughout), there is an undertow of dread and unease. In “Jonathan and Lillian,” the biographer of an aging Hollywood actress is asked— commanded, really—to become her lover, while the butler, her former lover, arranges the theft of a Diego Rivera from her mansion. The butler, a failed actor, muses—“He didn’t have to impress himself, did he?”—he’s imagined Lillian as a man and sometimes thought of his girlfriend as a boy. But darker if self-pitying epiphanies press on (he’s a butler and he has, after all, just stolen “a million or two,” so it’s impossible not to laugh at his rationalizations). Career, work. All illusions. Everything vanishes. At the beach, the dark water is “surprisingly warm and inviting,” but it’s no illusion—“when it was ready it could fold over you forever.” The nervous, rulebound Uncle Simon in “Uncle Simon and Gene” wonders whether a father and son at a museum are what they appear to be and later follows his less-thanaverage , “not retarded” but charming and boisterous nephew through a maze called “the worm,” because he fears he’s being chased by a child molester. He frets his nephew Gene will leave him alone, “where he’d have no choice but to watch other people he didn’t know and see awful things of which the world has no end,” a world that is “a constantly unfolding vaudeville show of misimpressions, misinterpretations , and mistakes” and where “nothing would happen for a very long time and then suddenly too many things happened at the same time.” In “Duck Pills,” the narrator, a boy withAsperger’s syndrome, catalogues with unwitting clarity and tender precision the complete moral failings of the adults around him, not least...