Pure Slaughter Value - Hardcover

Bingham, Robert

 
9780385488556: Pure Slaughter Value
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385488556 ISBN 13: 9780385488556
Verlag: Doubleday, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

A collection of short stories by a frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine captures the disillusionment, indulgences, and wayward affections of the educated, privileged wing of the so-called Generation X. Tour.

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Aus dem Klappentext

ordinary debut collection, Pure Slaughter Value, Robert Bingham tracks the conscience of a generation that grew up educated, privileged, and starved for meaning. Bingham's strange sense of morbid fancy collides with a gutsy realism; the result is splendid wreckage: a young man is seduced by his first cousin (or maybe it's the other way around) at her brother's wake ("The Other Family"); a bored couple plot to kill a man during their ski-resort honeymoon ("Marriage Is Murder"); a yuppie banker risks his whole perfect life for an affair with a junkie ("The Fixers"); an insurance-company bounty hunter tracks down walkaways from drug and alcohol rehab ("Preexisting Condition"); and in the title story, an eleven-year-old boy is caught at the exquisitely uneasy intersection of the safety of childhood play and the pain of grown-up love and longing.

These lean, potent stories are utterly original, and yet by turns recall Salinger, in

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This Is How a Woman Gets Hit

They cheated on each other.  Now that was just the sad fact, but there was a difference in how it was done.  While his flings lacked focus, she was singularly loyal to her affair.  They'd been living together for three years and had grown skillful at dishing out abuse in a way that was quite memorable to both of them.  On the morning this story breaks the telephone rang.  She had a hang-up about the phone, and the hang-up was that she always had to pick it up before he did.  From the bed he listened with his eyes closed.  He knew her voices.  It took about two years to learn them all.  This was a what, where, and when conversation if he had ever heard one.  Her lover was calling.

"Where are you having coffee?" he asked, sitting up in bed.

She was bent over at the waist with her head wrapped in a towel.  When she stood up, her complexion was as red as the heart on the queen of all suits.

"Black it out, boy," she said.  "Last night, black the thing right out so it'll never come back to you again."

Her southern accent, so often in remission, rose from the swamp of her youth to frighten him.  She wore a pink nightgown and her dead grandmother's silk slippers.

"That must be the nice part about a real blackout," she continued.  "The next day I can usually remember the salient points, but you...for you the humiliation is blank tape, isn't that about what it is?"

"Where are you having coffee?" he asked.  "I need some coffee."

"You need a blood transfusion."

In the bathroom Ian Easley rummaged through her makeup bag for a Valium.  Nothing.  He dumped the contents onto the floor.  A thin bottle of eyeliner shattered dully.  He popped one of her birth control pills and got into the shower.  Then he poked at his ribs.  Some people, when they drank, got fat.  He was getting skinny.  He toweled himself off and shouted in the mirror, "If you loved me...If you loved me just the teeniest weepiest little bit, you'd tell me where you hid the Valium, Lidia."

She was dressed as if for an artist's funeral.  Black tights, a mid-thigh flowery print skirt, black tank top, and shades on top of her head forming a headband.

"I wish Gida would stop making me have coffee with her in the West Village," she said.  "It's like, 'I'm sorry, Gida, but why should I meet you at the corner of West Twelfth and Fourth Street?  How in the world is that a corner?'"

By all accounts Gida was a terribly screwed-up girl.  Her pets died awful deaths.  People stole from her.  From the icebox her roommates pilfered food she labeled under her name.  Recently someone had ripped off her calling card number and dialed numbers all over Nigeria.  Her health insurance policy didn't cover abortions because of a "preexisting condition."  Increasingly, Ian felt Gida did not exist, but perhaps he was being paranoid.

"What's wrong with Gida now?" he asked.

"You don't want to know."

"Come on, Lidia, I'm sure you can come up with something eccentric enough to appear plausible."

He had never voiced his suspicion of Gida's fictional qualities, and now a serene glee stretched itself inside him as he watched Lidia retreat into the kitchen.  Had it not been her lover on the phone earlier?  Was that not the voice she used with him?  From there deduction followed.  Gida was a front, a fraud, a lie.  A triumphant shudder of justification squirreled through his bloodstream, jolting his hangover.  He took Lidia's keys off the bedside table and slid them underneath the couch.  Then he began to dress.  He put on his father's button-down shirt.  He strapped on his grandfather's watch.  Both men were dead, and in putting on their possessions, he felt quite certain that he would soon be joining them.  He put on his jeans but couldn't find a belt.

"Where are my keys?" she said.  "I have to go."

He began to tear apart the closet searching for a belt.  Then he tried rethinking last night's disrobing process.  Coiled beneath the covers at the foot of the bed he found his pants and yanked the belt loose.  Then he stood facing her.  The buckle banged on the floor.

"How about we go get a cup of coffee, Lidia."

"I wasn't a tenth as drunk as you were last night so I remember where I put my keys," she said.  "I put my keys on the bedside table here.  It's a habit of mine you should monkey off of some day."

"Let's go get some coffee, Lidia."

"No, let's play Mr. Logical Deduction.  The game works like this.  If my keys aren't on the table where I left them, and I know I didn't move them this morning, then Mr. Logic says this, he says, 'Who else in the apartment could be an agent of displacement?' "

"Maybe it was the ghost of Gida's cat," he said.

She glared at him in silence.

"I don't know where your keys are," he said.  "But I have mine.  Isn't that unusual? I've got my keys and you've lost yours."

"Shit," she said, looking at her watch.  Then she began to scurry around the apartment.

She had a low center of gravity and wonderful breasts.  As for her face?  It was beautiful, but he'd exhausted her features.  Still, it was not a fallen face despite the gray half-moons beneath her eyes.  She liked to stab things in her bun of hair--snapped knitting needles, wooden letter openers.  Today she had a yellow number-two pencil in her hair which meant she meant business.  Ian watched the dirty pink eraser move around the apartment.  When he had his sneakers on, he found her keys for her.

"They were right here," he said, pointing down accusingly.  "Right here under the couch pillow."

"You know what?  You're turning me into a bitch, do you know that?  I have no choice with you.  It's survival of the bitchiest.  Do you want a Valium?  You're right.  You do need a Valium."

"Thank you," he said.

She opened a sugar bowl hidden behind the cereal boxes.  "Blue or yellow?"

"Blue, please."

"There aren't many blues left."

"Blue, please."

"Here."

He swallowed it dry.

"Ian, why don't you go back to bed.  Look, when I'm gone, you can go down and rent a porno movie and order out Indian.  Isn't that what you like to do on a hangover?"

She had a point there.  Why fight?  Soon the Valium would begin to work on his rattled nerves, and then while he was waiting for his Chicken Vindaloo, he could dip down to the video store and rent something fairly hard-core to accompany The Guns of Navarone.  He could get rid of it, switch tapes, and by the time his food had arrived, he'd be sunk in her bed soothed by the opening Technicolor credits of his favorite war movie.  But that cushy scenario spelled defeat.  He would take her drugs but not her...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385488556
ISBN 13 
9780385488556
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
194
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Doubleday
https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
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