A middle-aged man beheads his wife, then calmly explains how she drove him to it . . . A fat little mafioso is going to war--in the clean, well-mannered streets of Minneapolis . . . A Jewish boy watches with wonder the rise and fall of a Hebrew school rebel--and sees the sadness at the heart of his own family. . . . Welcome to the world of Ethan Coen, one half of the filmmaking team that has unleashed a visionary, brutal, and uproarious portrait of America in such screen classics asFargoandRaising Arizona. Now Ethan Coen translates that vision to the printed page--in fourteen keenly imagined, sharply etched short stories. Blending parody with pathos, making the heinous heartbreaking, Coen demonstrates his unique gift for stunningly inventive narrative, brutal irony, offbeat characters, and crackling dialogue, delivering everything you would expect from such an original imagination.

A Morty Story

Uncle Morty asked to stay at my place last summer when he was coming to New York on a buying trip. He didn't want to pay fancy New York prices for a hotel. I said sure. I get along with Uncle Morty.

I asked my girlfriend, Astrid, if it was okay, not mentioning that I'd already said yes to Uncle Morty. It didn't matter because she said fine. She'd met him once and didn't mind him at all, and we have an extra little bedroom.

It was a hot day. The intercom buzzer sounded. I said, "Hello?"

"Hello, it's Uncle Morty. I'm here."

"Okay, Uncle Morty, I'll be right down." I'm on a third-floor walk-up and have to go down to let people in because there's no lock release on the intercom.

Uncle Morty had a little soft-sided suitcase and a worn brown briefcase. "Hello, it's Uncle Morty."

"Hiya, Morty, come on in." Uncle Morty is short and stocky and dark, with thick glasses. We went upstairs and Morty shook Astrid's hand. Astrid is tall and blond.

Morty said, "Morty Ruskin."

"You've met Astrid, Uncle Morty."

"Sure. I didn't know if she remembered."

"Your room is in here."

Later I said, "What do you want for dinner, Uncle Morty?"

"Oh, anything. You keep kosher, don't you?"

Uncle Morty had breakfast cereal. We offered to go out and get him kosher meat, but he insisted that the cereal was fine. The three of us sat on stools behind the kitchen counter and watched Matlock. Morty said, through a mouthful of cereal, "If she'd killed her husband she never would've left the gun. It's a weakness."

Morty left for his business the next morning before we got up. The bathroom was still steamy when I went in. Astrid got some kosher chicken that day. Morty returned at about five, carrying his worn brown briefcase, his tie loosened. It was still pretty hot.

When we were alone for a moment Morty said to me with his big unblinking stare, "Your girlfriend--is her name Trudy or Judy?"

"It's Astrid, Uncle Morty."

"Oh. Okay."

We ate watching TV again. Uncle Morty ate everything Astrid put in front of him, eyes glued to the TV. Afterward he insisted that he would wash the dishes. He asked Astrid if she had an apron. Up with the pillowcases and stuff she found one that released closet smells when she unfolded it. Morty stood at the sink in the creased apron, his sleeves rolled up, washing the dishes. Sweat beaded his temples. I was glad he was doing it. It gets hot in there.

I think it was the next morning there was a knock at our bedroom door. I put on a bathrobe and came out. Uncle Morty was wearing only his glasses and a towel around his waist. "The stopper inside the bathtub won't come up." He followed me into the bathroom. "I'm trying to take a shower and the water won't drain out." It was because the little lever that opens the drain gets stuck sometimes. You just have to play with it. I showed Uncle Morty, who stood staring through his glasses, his hands clasped behind his back, his belly pushed out.

I got back into bed but couldn't fall asleep.

For some reason Uncle Morty had reminded me of Edward G. Robinson. His face didn't particularly look like Edward G.'s. His lips weren't quite as big. And of course he didn't talk in that snarly way. But he had that short square-bellied body and his nipples were big and saggy with dark hair sworled around them. Not that I knew what Edward G. Robinson's nipples looked like.

Astrid was awake so I told her about it. She said, "You sound disturbed by it."

"It doesn't bother you?"

"Why should it?"

"Well, him and his body there, with his glasses on, waiting for the shower?"

". . . Yeah?"

Other than that, things went along okay. One day Uncle Morty told us he wouldn't be home for dinner. A friend had told him about the kosher dairy restaurant on Seventy-second Street and he was going to try it. Since Astrid, who was worried about the noise, didn't like having sex when Morty was in the house, we had it while he was gone. As I lay there afterward I imagined Uncle Morty in the kosher dairy restaurant, reading a folded-back newspaper through his big dark-framed glasses as he spooned borscht into his mouth.

The next day he ate at home again. I made spaghetti, which was a mistake because the kitchen alcove got all steamed up. We watched an old episode of Cheers. Uncle Morty's eyes were fixed on the TV as he lifted forkfuls of spaghetti to his mouth. He said, through a mouthful, "She was wearing a different dress the previous scene. It's the same day, though. What, she brings a change? It's a weakness."

In the evening Uncle Morty sat in the living room and read the paper and then a book about the history of China. I read a book called Captured by the Indians, a collection of first-hand accounts. Astrid was reading a murder mystery.

Morty fell asleep. His mouth gaped and his head lolled back, the overhead light sheeting his glasses. His hair, thinning at the crown, was tufted as if someone had gathered it into a fist and given it a long hard clench. He started snoring. At first the snores were just the dry rattle of breath sawing across his throat. Then, as he sucked more energetically, the snores warmed and moistened into a loud snarfing sound. They subsided for a mysterious moment, leaving the muted whoosh of distant traffic. Then they slammed back in, loud flaps of flesh and phlegm.

I was giggling. Astrid sat with her eyes fixed grimly on her book. I must say this pissed me off. She even silently shook her head, a judgment upon me.

Suddenly Morty strangled on a snore, his throat seizing up on an overly greedy inhale. He gagged, elaborately. His eyes shot open, and after a stupefied moment, his head swung round the room.

By the time I felt his eyes reach me I was looking back down at my book. I was still silently laughing, but my eyeline and an appreciative waggle of my head indicated some whimsy in the book. After a moment Morty cleared his throat and said:

"Dozed off."

I looked up, with Astrid.

"Did you?" she said.



Uncle Morty would telephone home. As Astrid and I sat reading and traffic noise floated in he would say "Honey? Honey? It's me. Honey?" He talked loud, as if they had just invented the telephone. "How is everything? Honey? How're the kids? How's Yaffee?" Yaffee was their dog. "Honey?"



"Say, you know," Morty said one day, "you don't have any fruit in the refrigerator." We have never had fruit in the refrigerator. We don't have stuff in the refrigerator. We go out and get stuff for dinner, night by night. Morty wasn't complaining, though. He wouldn't complain. He was only warning us that there was no fruit in the refrigerator.

* * *

I was laughing one day, just laughing, like a person will. Astrid said, "What?"

"I was just--I don't know. I was just thinking."

"What?"

"I was picturing Uncle Morty climbing up the stairs here to the apartment, with his briefcase, but he didn't have any arms and legs. Like that guy in Freaks. He was just wriggling up the stairs, you know, holding the briefcase handle in his teeth. Just a torso, you know. Wearing a diaper. Wriggling up the stairs."

"That's funny?"

"Well you know, he was still Uncle Morty, perfectly happy, coming home from work. He just didn't have any arms and legs. 'Honey? Honey? It's a weakness!' You know, still the same."

Astrid looked at me. She shook her head at me, which was bullshit, as if she were defending him, as if she were on his side and I wasn't. I like Uncle Morty. It wasn't a hostile thing.



It was the day for Morty to leave. He kissed Astrid goodbye, a little peck. I walked him down the stairs carrying his suitcase. At the door we shook hands and he told me to take care. He also said, "That girl Astrid is wonderful." This really pissed me off.

Later in the day we discovered that Morty had left us towels as a gift. A couple of months later Astrid dumped me.

---

Excerpted from Gates of Eden by Ethan Coen
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.