Home Land: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte Page A

course, and after Marty was done finger-banging his waitstaff, came home to rest, he noticed that the Hazel who lived in his house was not much like the Hazel he’d hauled out from city years before. He decided to fall in love with someone else, and did. The ravishing flatware rep would leave him soon enough. He stayed in our house for a while after, never quite the philandering husband again, more a boarder with occasional cuddling privileges. Then came the sad-sack condo nearby. I tried to pretend I didn’t know what was going on, but Hazel made sure I knew.
    “Your father’s a fucking bastard,” she said, handed me her new play to read, “A Fucking Bastard.”
    It was a one-act, in verse.
    Spite was good succor. Hazel lost weight, her big shabby sweaters, picked up cigarettes again. Somehow they made her golden, lifelike. It was hard going, though. The world she figured she was finally rejoining was long extinct. The women executives at the agency, where she’d gotten temp work more out of loneliness than insolvency, ignored her bra-burner harangues. The Ivy League assistants gave grave mocking nods. The cradle-robbing septuagenarians she met through her Proust-fraught singles ads didn’t get her jokes, either. Her groups had disbanded. Nobody would read her plays.
    She had the house, though, decent alimony, a few friends left from the old days, divorcees all, puttering around their kitchens, nibbling on unsalted saltines, trying to disentangle themselves from telephone cords. Sometimes I wondered if Hazel had become a lesbian,
hoped that she had, but I knew she’d lost the spirit to learn new skin. Hers was rather wan now. The cigarettes hadn’t helped, after all. There was wilt, spoilage to her. I figured she was maybe due for another resurrection. Then she invited me over for meat loaf, told me the latest.
    Metastatic, she said. It sounded like a funk band.
    So, yes, Catamounts, the day finally came and I kissed her cold dead calves, the ones that would never take her anywhere dangerous or new again. Kissed her cold dead calves, I always say, but did I, Catamounts, or do I just say I did? I heaved myself onto her cold dead calves, I’m certain, bolted out of the chair I’d been dozing in when the doctor patted me awake, said to me, “She’s gone,” all that monotony of format in his voice—dim room, dead woman, numb son. Certainly I heaved myself down upon her then, her calves, sobbed into the stubble there. (No courageous vanity for Hazel, no razors, rouge, no mascara.) But did I really kiss her?
    “Gravy boat! Stay in the now!
    Who’s there? Where’s now?
    It was still just me, a guy at the end of his eggs, his runny suns.
    Good-bye, nubiles. Good-bye girls of Gala—
    “They hauled it up from Georgia.”
    “Huh?”
    “Georgia, I said,” said the counterman.
    “What?”
    “They bought this shithole diner and didn’t even fix it up. Just hitched it to a truck. Authentic. For that authentic shithole feel. It’s not your brain.”
    “Pardon?”
    “It’s not your brain. People worry it’s their brain. They shouldn’t worry.”
    “No,” I said. “They shouldn’t.”

His Truth Bazooka
    OKAY, Catamounts, enough with the morbid stuff, the dark unanswerables. The monumental questions will never be laid to rest. For instance, if God exists, why did He kill my mommy, or even Thurman Munson? Or how do morons make so much money? Or why were the Nearmont High Vikings mostly Italian kids, Armenian? Gary and I had a good laugh about that today on the way to the Bean Counter to visit Liquid Smoke.
    “Korean and Vietnamese, too,” said Gary. “And that Montagnard kid, Vance.”
    Gary said Montagnard as though he’d hacked through jungle with them, worn the sacred bracelet of the Rhade like John Wayne on the Unjust War Channel.
    But we weren’t hacking through anything. We weren’t even humping kliks to the next ville. We were driving past Cassens Park to the old downtown, the sun cooking