by Amy Hempel
I had not heard from Katherine for many years when her forwarded letter reached me. She was coming to New York, and she said she wanted to see me. I did not think this was coincidence; I felt I had conjured her by talking about her every night. I was excited and panic-stricken. I wanted to show them off to each other, and that would be a disaster. The three weeks’ notice had shrunk to a couple of days. I left a message at her hotel to hold for arrival.
Last night I found him looking at Raphael’s Alba Madonna.
He held the book so I could see. “Why is she facing left instead of right?” he asked. “Why the triangular arrangement of figures? Why a river in the background? Why is she wearing red?”
“Because a human being made this?” I said.
“Because a human being made this,” he said, pleased.
The window shades were up. I looked across the way to a window that was covered in sheer white fabric. The room was lit behind it so the woman in the room threw a visible silhouette. She was posing, or maybe doing a kind of yoga. Then a man joined the woman and she turned out the light.
“This dress is very beautiful,” he said, his arms around me.
“An old gift from Katherine,” I said. The seamstress had done a good job on the vintage navy lace. I had asked her to give it a lighter look by removing the silk lining from the knees down.
“I want to hear about your friend,” he said, undoing the hooks and eyes. “But first I want to fuck you on this couch,” he said.
“You do give it a gentlemanly contour,” I said, by way of welcome.
“Are these tears?” he asked, smoothing hair back from my forehead.
“It’s better in French.”
“What is?” he said.
I told him the part of a poem I was thinking about, one I’d had to learn in school in French as well as English: “… From hope and fear set free, … / … even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea.”
“You’re going to meet Katherine,” I said.
“It’s brilliant,” he said, “liberating the past for a revival in the present.”
His questions about Phillip had been abandoned some time back, but he started up again about Katherine and me. He suggested I bring her with me the next time I came to the loft. Well, of course he did. I said I thought we might do better in a gallery instead, with objects between us to look at, as we had. I knew he would be winning when I made the introductions. Katherine would be appreciative and intelligent and unimpeachably cordial to him. She might take a camera from her bag and take our picture, his and mine, then hand the camera to him to take one of her with me.
One kind of woman would phone him the next day. He would want to be helpful, and what would begin in passion and deceit would wind down to something ordinary. It would fill my mouth with stones. But maybe Katherine would do this too? Would Katherine require his gaze?
“Tell me again—”
Call-and-response.
Such an extravagant sense of what is normal. Depends on what you’re used to, I suppose.
All those questions, each one of them a version of just the one thing: Was I better served in another’s embrace than in his own?
“We might clear a space,” I said. “You can’t fill every hour.”
“Is that what we’ve been doing?”
I never wanted to tell him.
He wanted his suspicion confirmed, although it would be ghastly to have it confirmed. I watched his salacity turn to fear. All the nights I had drawn out the exchange, holding back information, scornful of his boyish need to know, yet protective of that boyishness, too—his insatiable urging, wanting the savor of the way women are with each other, what they say to each other, him begging for female truth.
“May I count on you to utter the next sentence?” he would say.
I never wanted to tell him. I said, “I’ll show you what she did to me,” and he said, “But you can’t show me, I’m not a woman—you have to tell me.”
He was eager for the thing that would undo him. He had disallowed my earlier squeamishness, insisted I tear it apart. Okay. I would give him some female truth. What would have made me seem compliant when we started was assault by the time I told him.
I told him in just one word.
I said, “The answer to your question is: Precision. I can tincture it with more patently sexual language, but really, that’s what you’re after. Katherine was precise. I mean what you think I mean.”
He looked me over to see if I was playing.
A thrilling calm settled over me.
He propped himself up on an elbow.
“Look at that,” he said. “The single word that brings an inquisition to an end.”
I leaned back on the couch and let my breath out. I held his hand and thought, What now? Not asking him, but myself.
Because it was up to me!
I would not introduce him to Katherine; I would not give him the chance to tell me she was more beautiful than he had imagined. Let him reside in his failure of imagination; I had been generous. I had more. But it was mine.
I led him from the couch back to the desecrated ground. I lay down next to him. I wanted to console him—I sent a herd of words and the dust rose and it was not enough.
He had told me to say we did it twelve times.
Well, maybe it was twelve times, and maybe it wasn’t any times at all.
You want the truth and you want the truth and when you get it you can’t take it and have to turn away. So is telling a person the truth a good or malignant act? Precision—that was easy. He had asked for it! There was more to tell; there would always be more to tell. If I chose to tell him.
In the meantime.
I was never more myself than when I was lying in this man’s arms.
We lay quietly, holding each other. Time was slown way down. Finally he said, “Did you ever wear a linen dress on a summer day? A wheat-colored linen dress whose hem fluttered in a breeze? And did you pin up your hair on both sides so that your long hair funneled down your back in that breeze?”
I did not know who he was describing, but I said yes, I had dressed like that in the summers when I was young.
“Darling,” he said.
I knew he was not entirely with me, and I had a shopworn thought: To be able to reverse the direction of time! But wouldn’t we have to go through the same things in reverse?
“Darling,” he said again.
So here we go, careening along in the only direction there is to go in, our bodies braced for transport—“Unimprovable,” he says.
NOTES
Page 35-36: The harpist who sings at the bedside of the dying is the musicologist and thanatologist Therese Schroeder-Sheker.
Page 63: The expert who defined animal happiness is Vicki Hearne.
Page 77: “Those who can’t repeat the past are condemned to remember it” is from Mark O’Donnell.
Page 102: The mystery writer is Patricia Highsmith.
Page 114: “We do not quite forgive a giver” is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Gifts.”
Page 123-24: The artist is Ray Johnson, in the film How to Draw a Bunny.
Page 129: The lines quoted are from “The Garden of Proserpine” by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deepest thanks to my editor, Nan Graham, and to my agent of 25 years, Liz Darhansoff. And to Pat Towers, friend and supporter for nearly that long. I am most grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for a Fellowship in 2000, and to Elaina Richardson, who was so generous with crucial time at Yaddo. My thanks to the staff of the Guiding Eyes for the Blind Whelping Center in Patterson, New York—especially Linda Hines and Fran Midgley—and to Jane Russenberger, Director of the Breeding Center.
My thanks to Bill Wegman and Christine Burgin for the cover photograph. My thanks to Sheila Kohler and Bill Tucker for their generosity and support. I want to acknowledge the various kinds of help I received from Jill Ciment, Norah Cross, Robyn Fields, Lynn Freed, Ma
rtha Gallahue, Fiona Maazel, Pearson Marx, Rick Moody, Kathy Rich, Jim and Karen Shepard, Julia Slavin, Flavio Stigliano, Syd Straw, and Abigail Thomas.
Gordon Lish has my gratitude always.
Beloved Robert Jones and Lucy Grealy—“Thou art not gone being gone.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMY HEMPEL is the author of Tumble Home, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and Reasons to Live, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Elle, GQ, Harper’s, Playboy, The Quarterly, and Vanity Fair. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College and lives in New York City.
“Beach Town” was previously published in Tin House and appeared in Bestial Noise (an anthology published by Tin House).
“The Uninvited” was previously published in GQ.
“Reference #388475848-5” appeared in Ontario Review.
“What Were the White Things?” appeared in Bellevue Literary Review.
“The Dog of the Marriage, Part 1” was published as “Now I Can See the Moon” in Elle and reprinted in Labor Days.
The Mississippi Review first published “The Dog of the Marriage, Part 4.”
“The Afterlife” was previously published in Playboy.
“Matinee”—now part of “Offertory”—appeared in Fence.