The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  Christa looked at her skeptically. “What thing?”

  “The time in your childhood, during the Chicago riots, walking with your mother through the police barricades.”

  “Man, I lived that. Why should I want to write about it?”

  Agnes sighed. Maybe Christa had a point. “It’s just that I’m no help to you with this vampire stuff,” Agnes said. “It’s formulaic, genre fiction.”

  “You would be of more help to me with my childhood?”

  “Well, with more serious stories, yes.”

  Christa stood up, perturbed. She grabbed her vampire story back. “You with all your Alice Walker and Zora Hurston. I’m just not interested in that anymore. I’ve done that already. I read those books years ago.”

  “Christa, please don’t be annoyed.” Please do not talk when Mr. Stauffbacher is talking.

  “You’ve got this agenda for me.”

  “Really, I don’t at all,” said Agnes. “It’s just that – you know what it is? It’s that I’m just sick of these vampires. They’re so roaming and repeating.”

  “If you were black, what you’re saying might have a different spin. But the fact is, you’re not,” Christa said, and picked up her coat and strode out – though ten seconds later, she gamely stuck her head back in and said, “See you next week.”

  “We need a visiting writer who’s black,” Agnes said in the next depart mental meeting. “We’ve never had one.” They were looking at their budget, and the readings this year were pitted against Dance Instruction, a program headed up by a redhead named Evergreen.

  “The Joffrey is just so much central casting,” said Evergreen, apropos of nothing. As a vacuum cleaner can start to pull up the actual thread of a carpet, her brains had been sucked dry by too much yoga. No one paid much attention to her.

  “Perhaps we can get Harold Raferson in Chicago,” Agnes suggested.

  “We’ve already got somebody for the visiting writer slot,” said Stauffbacher coyly. “An Afrikaner from Johannesburg.”

  “What?” said Agnes. Was he serious? Even Evergreen barked out a laugh.

  “W. S. Beyerbach. The university’s bringing him in. We pay our five hundred dollars and we get him out here for a day and a half.”

  “Who?” asked Evergreen.

  “This has already been decided?” asked Agnes.

  “Yup.” Stauffbacher looked accusingly at Agnes. “I’ve done a lot of work to arrange for this. I’ve done all the work!”

  “Do less,” said Evergreen.

  When Agnes first met Joe, they’d fallen madly upon each other. They’d kissed in restaurants; they’d groped, under coats, at the movies. At his little house, they’d made love on the porch, or the landing of the staircase, against the wall in the hall by the door to the attic, filled with too much desire to make their way to a real room.

  Now they struggled self-consciously for atmosphere, something they’d never needed before. She prepared the bedroom carefully. She played quiet music and concentrated. She lit candles – as if she were in church, praying for the deceased. She donned a filmy gown. She took hot baths and entered the bedroom in nothing but a towel, a wild fishlike creature of moist, perfumed heat. In the nightstand drawer she still kept the charts a doctor once told her to keep, still placed an X on any date she and Joe actually had sex. But she could never show these to her doctor; not now. It pained Agnes to see them. She and Joelooked like worse than bad shots. She and Joe looked like idiots. She and Joe looked dead.

  Frantic candlelight flickered on the ceiling like a puppet show. While she waited for Joe to come out of the bathroom, Agnes lay back on the bed and thought about her week, the bloody politics of it, how she was not very good at politics. Once, before he was elected, she had gone to a rally for Bill Clinton, but when he was late and had kept the crowd waiting for over an hour, and when the sun got hot and bees began landing on people’s heads, when everyone’s feet hurt and tiny children began to cry and a state assemblyman stepped forward to announce that Clinton had stopped at a Dairy Queen in Des Moines and that was why he was late – Dairy Queen! – she had grown angry and resentful and apolitical in her own sweet-starved thirst and she’d joined in with some other people who had started to chant, “Do us a favor, tell us the flavor.”

  Through college she had been a feminist – basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say. She signed day-care petitions, and petitions for Planned Parenthood. And although she had never been very aggressive with men, she felt strongly that she knew the difference between feminism and Sadie Hawkins Day – which some people, she believed, did not.

  “Agnes, are we out of toothpaste or is this it – oh, okay, I see.”

  And once, in New York, she had quixotically organized the ladies’ room line at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Because the play was going to start any minute and the line was still twenty women long, she had gotten six women to walk across the lobby with her to the men’s room. “Everybody out of there?” she’d called in timidly, allowing the men to finish up first, which took a while, especially with other men coming up impatiently and cutting ahead in line. Later, at intermission, she saw how it should have been done. Two elderly black women, with greater expertise in civil rights, stepped very confidently into the men’s room and called out, “Don’t mind us, boys. We’re coming on in. Don’t mind us.”

  “Are you okay?” asked Joe, smiling. He was already beside her. He smelled sweet, of soap and minty teeth, like a child.

  “I think so,” she said, and turned toward him in the bordello light of their room. He had never acquired the look of maturity anchored in sorrow that burnished so many men’s faces. His own sadness in life – a childhood of beatings, a dying mother – was like quicksand, and he had to stay away from it entirely. He permitted no unhappy memories spoken aloud. He stuck with the same mild cheerfulness he’d honed successfully as a boy, and it made him seem fatuous – even, she knew, to himself. Probably it hurt his business a little.

  “Your mind’s wandering,” he said, letting his own eyes close.

  “I know.” She yawned, moved her legs onto his for warmth, and in this way, with the candles burning into their tins, she and Joe fell asleep.

  The spring arrived cool and humid. Bulbs cracked and sprouted, shot up their green periscopes, and on April first, the Arts Hall offered a joke lecture by T. S. Eliot, visiting scholar. “The Cruelest Month,” it was called. “You don’t find that funny?” asked Stauffbacher.

  April fourth was the reception for W. S. Beyerbach. There was to be a dinner afterward, and then Beyerbach was to visit Agnes’s Great Books class. She had assigned his second collection of sonnets, spare and elegant things with sighing and diaphanous politics. The next afternoon there was to be a reading.

  Agnes had not been invited to the dinner, and when she asked about this, in a mildly forlorn way, Stauffbacher shrugged, as if it were totally out of his hands. I’m a published poet, Agnes wanted to say. She had published a poem once – in The Gizzard Review, but still!

  “It was Edie Canterton’s list,” Stauffbacher said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  She went to the reception anyway, annoyed, and when she planted herself like a splayed and storm-torn tree near the cheese, she could actually feel the crackers she was eating forming a bad paste in her mouth and she became afraid to smile. When she finally introduced herself to W. S. Beyerbach, she stumbled on her own name and actually pronounced it “On-yez.”

  “On-yez,” repeated Beyerbach in a quiet Englishy voice. Condescending, she thought. His hair was blond and white, like a palomino, and his eyes were blue and scornful as mints. She could see he was a withheld man; although some might say shy, she decided it was withheld: a lack of generosity. Passive-aggressive. It was causing the people around him to squirm and blurt things nervously. He would simply nod, the smile on his face faint and vaguely pharmaceutical. Everything about him was tight and coiled as a door spring. From living in tha
t country, thought Agnes. How could he live in that country?

  Stauffbacher was trying to talk heartily about the mayor. Something about his old progressive ideas, and the forthcoming convention center. Agnes thought of her own meetings on the Transportation Commission, of the mayor’s leash law for cats, of his new squadron of meter maids and bicycle police, of a councilman the mayor once slugged in a bar. “Now, of course, the mayor’s become a fascist,” said Agnes in a voice that sounded strangely loud, bright with anger.

  Silence fell all around. Edie Canterton stopped stirring the punch. Agnes looked about her. “Oh,” she said. “Are we not supposed to use that word in this room?” Beyerbach’s expression went blank. Agnes’s face burned in confusion.

  Stauffbacher appeared pained, then stricken. “More cheese, anyone?” he asked, holding up the silver tray.

  After everyone left for dinner, she went by herself to the Dunk ’N Dine across the street. She ordered the California BLT and a cup of coffee, and looked over Beyerbach’s work again: dozens of images of broken, rotten bodies, of the body’s mutinies and betrayals, of the body’s strange housekeeping and illicit pets. At the front of the book was a dedication – To DFB (1970–1989). Who could that be? A political activist, maybe. Perhaps it was the young woman referred to often in his poems, “a woman who had thrown aside the unseasonal dress of hope,” only to look for it again “in the blood-blooming shrubs.” Perhaps if Agnes got a chance, she would ask him. Why not? A book was a public thing, and its dedication was part of it. If it was too personal a question for him, tough. She would find the right time, she decided. She paid the check, put on her jacket, and crossed the street to the Arts Hall, to meet Beyerbach by the front door. She would wait for the moment, then seize it.

  He was already at the front door when she arrived. He greeted her with a stiff smile and a soft “Hello, Onyez,” an accent that made her own voice ring coarse and country-western.

  She smiled and then blurted, “I have a question to ask you.” To her own ears, she sounded like Johnny Cash.

  Beyerbach said nothing, only held the door open for her and then followed her into the building.

  She continued as they stepped slowly up the stairs. “May I ask to whom your book is dedicated?”

  At the top of the stairs, they turned left down the long corridor. She could feel his steely reserve, his lip-biting, his shyness no doubt garbed and rationalized with snobbery, but so much snobbery to handle all that shyness, he could not possibly be a meaningful critic of his country. She was angry with him. How can you live in that country? she again wanted to say, although she remembered when someone had once said that to her – a Danish man on Agnes’s senior trip abroad to Copenhagen. It had been during the Vietnam War and the man had stared meanly, righteously. “The United States – how can you live in that country?” the man had asked. Agnes had shrugged. “A lot of my stuff is there,” she’d said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.

  “It’s dedicated to my son,” Beyerbach said finally.

  He would not look at her, but stared straight ahead along the corridor floor. Now Agnes’s shoes sounded very loud.

  “You lost a son,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. He looked away, at the passing wall, past Stauffbacher’s bulletin board, past the men’s room, the women’s room, some sternness in him broken, and when he turned back, she could see his eyes filling with water, his face a plethora, reddened with unbearable pressure.

  “I’m so sorry,” Agnes said.

  Side by side now, their footsteps echoed down the corridor toward her classroom; all the anxieties she felt with this mournfully quiet man now mimicked the anxieties of love. What should she say? It must be the most unendurable thing to lose a child. Shouldn’t he say something of this? It was his turn to say something.

  But he would not. And when they finally reached her classroom, she turned to him in the doorway and, taking a package from her purse, said simply, in a reassuring way, “We always have cookies in class.”

  Now he beamed at her with such relief that she knew she had for once said the right thing. It filled her with affection for him. Perhaps, she thought, that was where affection began: in an unlikely phrase, in a moment of someone’s having unexpectedly but at last said the right thing. We always have cookies in class.

  She introdnced him with a bit of flourish and biography. Positions held, universities attended. The students raised their hands and asked him about apartheid, about shantytowns and homelands, and he answered succinctly, after long sniffs and pauses, only once referring to a question as “unanswerably fey,” causing the student to squirm and fish around in her purse for something, nothing, Kleenex perhaps. Beyerbach did not seem to notice. He went on, spoke of censorship, how a person must work hard not to internalize a government’s program of censorship, since that is what a government would like best, for you to do it yourself, and how he was not sure he had not succumbed. Afterward, a few students stayed and shook his hand, formally, awkwardly, then left. Christa was the last. She, too, shook his hand and then started chatting amiably. They knew someone in common – Harold Raferson in Chicago! – and as Agnes quickly wiped the seminar table to clear it of cookie crumbs, she tried to listen, but couldn’t really hear. She made a small pile of crumbs and swept them into one hand.

  “Good night,” sang out Christa when she left.

  “Good night, Christa,” said Agnes, brushing the crumbs into the wastebasket.

  Now she stood with Beyerbach in the empty classroom. “Thank you so much,” she said in a hushed way. “I’m sure they all got quite a lot out of that. I’m very sure they did.”

  He said nothing, but smiled at her gently.

  She shifted her weight from one leg to the other. “Would you like to go somewhere and get a drink?” she asked. She was standing close to him, looking up into his face. He was tall, she saw now. His shoulders weren’t broad, but he had a youthful straightness to his carriage. She briefly touched his sleeve. His suitcoat was corduroy and bore the faint odor of clove. This was the first time in her life that she had ever asked a man out for a drink.

  He made no move to step away from her, but actually seemed to lean toward her a bit. She could feel his dry breath, see up close the variously hued spokes of his irises, the grays and yellows in the blue. There was a sprinkling of small freckles near his hairline. He smiled, then looked at the clock on the wall. “I would love to, really, but I have to get back to the hotel to make a phone call at ten-fifteen.” He looked a little disappointed – not a lot, thought Agnes, but certainly a little.

  “Oh, well,” she said. She flicked off the lights and in the dark he carefully helped her on with her jacket. They stepped out of the room and walked together in silence, back down the corridor to the front entrance of the hall. Outside on the steps, the night was balmy and scented with rain. “Will you be all right walking back to your hotel?” she asked. “Or—”

  “Oh, yes, thank you. It’s just around the corner.”

  “Right. That’s right. Well, my car’s parked way over there. So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at your reading.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I shall look forward to that.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So shall I.”

  The reading was in the large meeting room at the Arts Hall and was from the sonnet book she had already read, but it was nice to hear the poems again, in his hushed, pained tenor. She sat in the back row, her green raincoat sprawled beneath her on the seat like a leaf. She leaned forward, onto the seat ahead of her, her back an angled stem, her chin on double fists, and she listened like that for some time. At one point, she closed her eyes, but the image of him before her, standing straight as a compass needle, remained caught there beneath her lids, like a burn or a speck or a message from the mind.

  Afterward, moving away from the lectern, Beyerbach spotted her
and waved, but Stauffbacher, like a tugboat with a task, took his arm and steered him elsewhere, over toward the side table with the little plastic cups of warm Pepsi. We are both men, the gesture seemed to say. We both have back in our names. Agnes put on her green coat. She went over toward the Pepsi table and stood. She drank a warm Pepsi, then placed the empty cup back on the table. Beyerbach finally turned toward her and smiled familiarly. She thrust out her hand. “It was a wonderful reading,” she said. “I’m very glad I got the chance to meet you.” She gripped his long, slender palm and locked thumbs. She could feel the bones in him.

  “Thank you,” he said. He looked at her coat in a worried way. “You’re leaving?”

  She looked down at her coat. “I’m afraid I have to get going home.” She wasn’t sure whether she really had to or not. But she’d put on the coat, and it now seemed an awkward thing to take off.

  “Oh,” he murmured, gazing at her intently. “Well, all best wishes to you, Onyez.”

  “Excuse me?” There was some clattering near the lectern.

  “All best to you,” he said, something retreating in his expression.

  Stauffbacher suddenly appeared at her side, scowling at her green coat, as if it were incomprehensible.

  “Yes,” said Agnes, stepping backward, then forward again to shake Beyerbach’s hand once more; it was a beautiful hand, like an old and expensive piece of wood. “Same to you,” she said. Then she turned and fled.

  For several nights, she did not sleep well. She placed her face directly into her pillow, then turned it some for air, then flipped over to her back and opened her eyes, staring at the far end of the room through the stark angle of the door frame toward the tiny light from the bathroom which illumined the hallway, faintly, as if someone had just been there.

  For several days, she thought perhaps he might have left her a note with the secretary, or that he might send her one from an airport somewhere. She thought that the inadequacy of their good-bye would haunt him, too, and that he might send her a postcard as elaboration.