Please help me identify an old New Yorker story about giant companions?

Cafe Society
1

This would be about 10-20 years ago, I think. People had companions, confidants, who were giant (10 feet tall) and supposedly stupid, simple, and infantile. The story reminded me of how Scarlett treated Mammy, as a wise and valued advice-giver, but still ultimately subservient and inferior.

In the New Yorker story, the humans would take their companions with them everywhere, and rely on them in every social situation, snuggling up to their bodies and wanting to be carried like infants themselves when things got uncomfortable, turning to the companions for advice and comfort. They would attend social functions with refreshments tables specifically for the companions, stocked with non-alcoholic sweet drinks, because like all simple people, the companions were assumed to prefer sweet things. They were assumed to be sexless as well.

In reality the companions hated sweet drinks, enjoyed alcohol and sex as well as anyone, and when they could get away with it, would drink and smoke cigarettes and fuck without their masters’ knowledge.

2

Softies by Stan Nichols?

I can’t find much info about it online. IIRC The protagonist is a human whose companion is a huge teddy bear named Mr T. We go to a ceremony where a baby is officially bonded to his companion. Then, the protagonist finds that the companions are plotting revolution.

I read the story in the collection The Cat-Dogs.

3

Thanks for your reply! That might be it, except I’m remembering the big people as humanoid, not teddy bears. The humans would have loved teddy bears, though - they behaved like babies, truly needing their companions to help them them through what should have been normal adult interactions. They communicated with each other through the companions, like passing notes in class. They had a tendency towards emotional upset and very easily hurt feelings, and they would cry and be comforted, held in giant arms and cuddled in public. It was all very disgusting to the reader (or at least to me).

In front of the humans the giants acted like unintelligent children themselves, but very gentle and loving and protective of their masters. Then in private we learn that the giants aren’t stupid and HATE their pathetic owners, seeing them for what they are. Plotting revolution would fit right in with that.

4

Bah, probably not Softies then.

5

If this story actually appeared in The New Yorker between 1972 and 2011 and if the plot description you give is reasonably accurate, that greatly limits the number of possible authors. I would certainly say that any such story is really either a science fiction, fantasy, or horror story. There’s a database for all stories that can be described even vaguely as science fiction, fantasy, or horror:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi

It doesn’t matter if somebody wants to claim that The New Yorker doesn’t publish science fiction, fantasy, or horror. This database doesn’t use the definition of the magazine editors; rather, it uses the plot elements of the story which the compilers of the database consider to be science fiction, fantasy, or horror, and the plot you give is certainly within their definition of those genres. Here are all the issues of The New Yorker which contain science fiction, fantasy, or horror:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?26452

There are only 19 authors who have published science fiction, fantasy, or horror stories in The New Yorker between 1972 and 2011, even by a loose definition of those genres - John Updike, Mark Helprin, Woody Allen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Haruki Murakami, Martin Amis, Stephen King, George Saunders, Michael Chabon, A. S. Byatt, Jonathan Lethem, Kevin Brockmeier, Charles D’Ambrosio, Chris Adrian, Joyce Carol Oates, Gail Hareven, J. G. Ballard, E. O. Wilson, and Steven Millhauser. You can use the database to find the names of all those stories. Do any of them fit your memories of the story?

6

There were big, babylike, vaguely menacing genetically-engineered “people” in the very weird quasi-noir novel Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem, an author whom Wendell mentioned. They aren’t quite as described in the OP, though.

7

The story you describe is also vaguely similar to the novel The Mount by Carol Emshwiller:

8

Wendell - you are completely awesome; that is quite a resource, and thank you for those 19 authors you name. It will take some time to cross-reference their stories to the New Yorker, and I think the rabbit-holes will occupy the rest of my reading life (“My Mother She Killed Me” is already on order at Amazon).

Crazy that anyone thinks that magazine doesn’t go in for sci-fi, fantasy, or horror.

9

masonite, there is a common sort of literary snobbery which insists that all science fiction is terrible. When you ask such people for examples of such badness, they will give examples of notions that occur mostly in bad science fiction movies. When you point out good examples of science fiction literature that don’t include such bad writing, they will insist that those examples aren’t science fiction at all. In other words, science fiction is all bad except the parts that are good, which they don’t consider to be science fiction. I don’t know if the editors at The New Yorker are that kind of snobs, but some readers of the magazine certainly are.