I almost wish I could be there to see the explosion. All the collection—hundreds and hundreds of years of hard work, so many yellowed envelopes. It makes me chuckle even now.
I have been meaning to ask you—how strong are your muscles? Before Jayu-dhidhi left, she put a whole rat into a letter, and I watched her heave the slim sheet of paper to the mailbox like it was attached to a dragnet filled with whales. It must be so much effort to consider and consider and consider every minuscule little detail of the creatures you capture, to hold all of their intricacies so they stay intact on their journeys. Dhidhi told me things about the rat I would never have known—about the dirt caught between the grooves of its nails, the microfauna within its guts. She said the last thing the rat had eaten was the stub of a pear and its stem. She said it took her five hours of considering to figure that out.
I cannot imagine how heavy the rest of the collection is, and would appreciate any advice you have to offer. If the deliveries are successful, Ammi has agreed to send me to where you and Dhidhi are, though I think Dhidhi must be off somewhere else again—she could never stay still. I asked if Ammi would want to come with me, but she says she has a letter of her own, and will be quite satisfied with where it takes her.
Meanwhile, the next time Dhidhi breezes through to post something, would you tell her to stop? I really like the beetles she’s been sending, but the whole point is to return them now, isn’t it? When I leave, I want to travel light, and I have beetles from twenty different places in my pocket already—my wallet almost won’t close. Just tell her to describe them to me next time.
Thank you,
Abhi
Elizabeth Tallent
Narrator
NEAR THE END OF what the schedule called the welcome get-together, two women—summer dresses, charm—stood at the foot of the solemn Arts and Crafts staircase where he was seated higher up, mostly in shadow. That could have been me his silence fell on: I had wanted to approach him, and had held off because all I had for a first thing to say was I love your work, and I had no second thing. Brightly, the women took turns talking in the face of his eclipsing wordlessness. This is you in real life? I said to him in my head. The women at the foot of the stairs were older than me, in their late thirties—close to his age, then, and whatever was going on with him, they looked like they could handle it, and this was a relief, as if being his adoring reader conferred on me the responsibility to protect us all from any wounding or disillusioning outcome. But they were fine. Unless they let it show that they were hurt, his silence could be construed as distractedness or even, attractively, as brooding, and who gained from letting his rudeness be recognized for what it was? Not him. Not them. They might feel the need to maintain appearances if they were going to be his students in the coming week, as I would not be, having been too broke to enroll before the last minute, and too full of doubt about whether I wanted criticism. I didn’t get to watch how the stairwell thing ended. A boy came up to me, and I made my half of small talk: New Mexico, yes as beautiful as that, no never been before—what about you, five hundred pages, that’s amazing. Throughout I was troubled by an awareness of semifraudulence; his confidence was so cheerfully aggressive that mine flew under his radar. The full moon would be up before long and if I wanted we could ride across the bridge on his motorcycle, an Indian he’d been restoring for years—parts cost a fortune. There was a night ride across the bridge in his novel and it would be good to check the details. Long day, I said—the flight, you know?
Enough students were out, in couples and noisy gangs, that I didn’t worry, crossing campus. True about the moon: sidewalks and storefronts brightened as I walked back to my hotel, followed, for a couple of bad blocks, by a limping street person who shouted, at intervals, Hallelujah! On the phone my husband told me a neighbor’s toddler had fallen down an old hand-dug well but apart from a broken leg wasn’t hurt, and he had finished those kitchen cabinets and would drive them to the jobsite tomorrow, and our dog had been looking all over for me, did I want to talk to him? Goofball, sweetheart, why did you ever let me get on that plane? I asked our dog. When my husband came back on the phone he said Crazy how he loves you and So the first day sucked, hunh? and They’re gonna love the story. Sleep tight, baby. Hallelujah.
Though I hadn’t done it before, the homework of annotating other people’s stories was the part of workshop that appealed to the diligent student in me. The bed strewn with manuscripts, I sat up embroidering the margins with exegesis and happy alternatives—if someone had pointed out that You should try X can seem condescending, I would have been really shocked. At two a.m., when the city noise was down to faraway sirens, I collected the manuscripts and stacked them on the desk. They were not neutral, but charged with their writers’ reality the way intimately dirtied belongings are—hairbrushes, used Band-Aids—and I couldn’t have fallen asleep with them on the bed. Where, in Berkeley, was his house, and was he asleep, and in what kind of bed, and with whom beside him? Before I left the party I had sat for a while on his step in the dark stairwell. All I had to go on were the narrators of his books, rueful first-person failers at romance whose perceptiveness was the great pleasure of reading him, but I felt betrayed. Savagely I compared the ungenerosity I’d witnessed with the radiance I’d hoped for. How could the voices in his novels abide in the brain of that withholder? The women had not trespassed in approaching, the party was meant for such encounters. Two prettier incarnations of eager me had been rebuffed, was that it? No. Or only partly. From his work I had pieced together scraps I believed were really him. At some point I had forsaken disinterested absorption and begun reading to construct a him I could love. Think of those times I’d said not His books are wonderful, but I’m in love with him. Now it was tempting to accuse his work of inauthenticity rather than face the error of this magpie compilation of shiny bits into an imaginary whole. He had never meant to tell me who he was. Nothing real was lost, there was no fall from grace, not one page in his books is diminished, not one word, you have the books, and the books are more than enough, the books will never dismay you, I coaxed myself. But the feeling that something was lost survived every attempt to reason it away.
The days passed without my seeing him again, and besides I was distracted by an acceptance entailing thrilling, dangerous phone calls from the editor who had taken the story, whose perfectionism in regard to my prose dwarfed my own. Equally confusingly, my workshop wanted the ending changed. The ending had come in a rush so pure that my role was secretarial, the typewriter chickchickchickchickchick-tsinging along, rattling the kitchen table with its uneven legs; now I couldn’t tell if it was good or not, and I needed to get home to regain my hold on intuition. At the farewell party in the twilight of the grand redwood-paneled reception room hundreds of voices promised to stay in touch. At the room’s far end, past the caterer’s table with its slowly advancing queue, French doors stood ajar, and two butterflies dodged in, teetering over heads that didn’t notice. They weren’t swallowtails or anything glamorous, but pale, small nervous slips dabbling in the party air, and my awareness linked lightly with them, every swerve mirrored, or as it felt enacted, by the consciousness I called mine, which for the moment wasn’t. After a while they pattered back out through the doors. Then there he stood, watching them go. And maybe because rationality had absented itself for the duration of their flight, what happened next felt inevitable. I stared. His head turned; when he believed I was going to retreat—when I, too, was aware of the socially destined instant for looking away—and I didn’t, then the nature of whatever it was that was going on between us changed, and was, unmistakably, an assertion. Gladness showered through me. I could take this chance, could mean, nakedly—rejoicing in being at risk—I want you. Before now I’d had no idea what I was capable of—part of me stepped aside, in order to feel fascination with this development. But did he want this? Because who was I? He broke the connection with a dubious glance down and away, consulting the proprieties, because non-crazy
strangers did not lock each other in a transparently sexual gaze heedless of everybody around them, and he wasn’t, of course he wasn’t, sure what he was getting into. If I hadn’t been so happy to have discovered this crazy recklessness, no doubt I would have been ashamed. As it was I was alone until he looked up to see whether he was still being stared at, as he was, greenly, oh shamelessly, by me, and he wondered whether something was wrong with me, but he could see mine was a sane face and that I, too, recognized the exposedness and hazard of not breaking off the stare, and this information flaring back and forth between us meant we were no longer strangers.
We spent the night over coffee in a café on Telegraph Avenue, breaking pieces off from our lives, making them into stories. At the next table two sixtyish gents in identical black berets slaughtered each other’s pawns. Look, I told him, how when one leans over the board, the other leans back the exact, compensatory distance. When I recognized what I was up to, proffering little details to amuse him and to accomplish what my old anthropology professor would have called establishing kinship—We’re alike, details matter to us, and there will be no end of details—I understood that delight, which had always seemed to belong among the harmless emotions, could in fact cut deep. It could cut you away from your old life, once you’d really felt it. The most fantastic determination arose, to stay in his presence. At the same time I understood full well I would be getting on an airplane in—I looked at my watch—five hours. He, too, looked at his watch. Our plan was simple: not to sleep together, because that would make parting terrible. We would stay talking until the last minute, and then he would drive me to the airport, stopping by my hotel first for my things. I didn’t have money for another ticket and couldn’t miss my early-morning flight.
He left it till late in the conversation to ask, “You’re, what—?”
“Twenty-four.” I stirred my coffee like there was a way of stirring coffee right.
“What’s in New Mexico?”
“Beauty.” I didn’t look up from my coffee to gauge if that was too romantic. “The first morning I woke up there—in the desert; we’d driven to our campsite in the dark—I thought, This is it, I’m in the right place.”
Another thing he said across the table, in the tone of putting two and two together: “The story that got taken from the slush pile, that was yours.”
A workshop instructor who was a friend of the editor’s had spread the word. “Someone”—the moonlight motorcycle-ride guy—“told me, ‘It’s lightning striking, the only magazine that can transform an unknown into a known.’ Not that I’m not grateful, I’m completely grateful but what if I’m not good at the known part.”
“Why wouldn’t you be good?”
“Too awkward for it.”
“You’re the girl wonder.”
That shut me up: I took it to mean that instead of complaining, I should adapt. I was going to go on to hear a correction encoded in other remarks; this was only the first instance. “You’re chipper this morning, kid”—that was a warning whose franker, ruder form would have been Tone it down. “You look like something from the court of Louis Quatorze” meant I should have blow-dried my long hair straight, as usual, instead of letting its manic curliness emerge. When he would announce, of his morning’s work, “Two pages” or “Only one paragraph, but a crucial one,” I heard, “And what have you gotten done? Since your famous story. What?” I understood that I could be getting it all wrong, but I couldn’t not interpret.
—
Those first charmed early-summer days he put on his record of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, which I had never heard before, and taught me to listen for the snatches of Gould’s ecstatic counter-humming. When I was moved to tears by Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” he didn’t say Where have you been? He played Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” He sang it bare-legged, in his bathrobe, while making coffee to bring to me in the downstairs bedroom. One morning, sitting up to take the cup, I asked, “Do you remember at the welcoming party, you were sitting in the stairwell and two women came up to you? And you wouldn’t say anything?”
He needed to think. “Esmé and Joanie, you mean. They just found out Joanie’s pregnant. Try getting a word in edgewise.”
My stricken expression amused him; he said, “You have lesbians in New Mexico, right?”
It seemed easier to make a secret of that first, accusatory misreading of him than to try to explain.
I hadn’t caught my flight. Instead we made love in the hotel room I hadn’t wanted him to see, since I had left it a mess. “Was this all you?” he asked, of the clothes strewn everywhere, and it was partly from shame that I lifted his T-shirt and slid a hand inside. When we woke it was early afternoon and my having not gone home became real to me. My husband had a daylong meeting that prevented his picking me up at the airport—at least he was spared that.
Where he lived was a comradely neighborhood of mostly neglected Victorians, none very fanciful, shaded by trees as old as they were. His place was the guest cottage—“So it’s small,” he cautioned, on the drive there—belonging to a Victorian that had tilted past any hope of renovation. In its place some previous owner put up a one-story studio-apartment building, rentals that, since he disliked teaching, provided the only reliable part of his income. His minding about precariousness (if it was) was embarrassing. It was proof that he was older. Even if they could have, no one I knew in New Mexico would have wanted to use the phrase reliable income in a sentence about themselves: Jobs were quit nonchalantly, security was to be scorned. With the help of an architect friend—a former lover, he clarified as if pressed; and never do that, never renovate a house with someone you’re sleeping with—all that was stodgy and cramped had been replaced with clarity and openness, as much, at least, as the basically modest structure permitted. This preface sounded like something recited fairly often. The attic had been torn out to allow for the loft bedroom, its pitched ceiling set with a large skylight, its wide-planked floor bare, the bed done in white linen. The white bed was like his saying reliable income—it was the opposite of daring. No man I had ever known, if it had even occurred to him to buy pillowcases and sheets instead of sleeping on a bare mattress, would ever have chosen all white—my husband, for some reason I was imagining what my carpenter husband would say about that bed. Sleeplessness and guilt were catching up with me, and there was the slight feeling any tour of a house gives, of coercing praise. I was irritated that in these circumstances, to me costly and extraordinary, the usual compliments were expected. “Beautiful light,” I said. The narrow stairs to the loft were flanked by cleverly fitted bookshelves, and more bookshelves ran around the large downstairs living room, off which the galley kitchen and bathroom opened, and, on another wall, doors leading to his study and the guest bedroom that would be mine, because, he said apologetically, he couldn’t sleep through the night with anyone in bed with him—it wasn’t me; he hadn’t ever been able to. Was that going to be all right? Of course it was, I said. I sat down on the edge of the twin bed. I can get the money somehow, I can fly home tomorrow. Even as I thought that he sat down beside me. “When I think you could have gotten on that plane. I would be alone, wondering what just hit me. Instead we get this chance.” In that room there was a telephone, and he left me alone with it.
—
He had his coffee shop, and when he was done working, that’s where he liked to go—at least, before me he had gone there. Time spent with me, in bed or talking, interfered with the coffee shop, and with research in the university library and his circuit of bookstores and Saturday games of pick-up basketball, but for several weeks I was unaware that he, who liked everything just so, had altered his routines for my sake. From the congratulatory hostility of his friends I gathered that women came and went—“Your free throw’s gone to shit,” said Billy, owner of the shabby, stately Victorian next door whose honeysuckle-overrun backyard was a storehouse of costly toys—motorcycles, a sailboat. “How I know you have a girlfriend.” I wou
ld have liked to talk to someone who knew him—even Billy, flagrantly indiscreet—about whether my anxious adaptation to his preferences was intuitive enough, or I was getting some things wrong. Other women had lived with him: What had they done in the mornings, how had they kept quiet enough? One was a cellist—how had that worked? His writing hours, eight to noon, were nonnegotiable. If he missed a day his black mood saturated our world. But this was rare.
The check came, for the story. Forwarded by my husband, who I called sometimes when I was alone in the house. “You can always come home, you know,” my husband said. “People get into trouble. They get in over their heads.”
The house was close enough to the university that, days when he was teaching, he could ride his bicycle. Secretly I held it against him that he was honoring his responsibilities, meeting his classes, having conversations about weather and politics. My syllogism ran: What love does is shatter life as you’ve known it; his life isn’t shattered; therefore he is not in love. Of the two of us I was the real lover. This self-declared greater authenticity, this was consoling—but, really, why was it? The question of who was more naked emotionally would have struck him as crazy, my guess is. But either my willingness to tear my life apart had this secret virtuousness, or the damage I was doing was deeply—callously—irresponsible.
By now I knew something about the women before me, including the Chinese lover whose loss he still wasn’t reconciled to, though it had been years. I stole her picture and tucked it into Middlemarch, the only book in this house full of his books that belonged to me, and when he admitted to not liking Eliot much I was relieved to have a book which by not mattering to him could talk privately and confidentially to what was left of me as a writer, the little that was left after I was, as I believed I wanted to be, stripped down to bare life, to skin and heartbeat and sex, never enough sex, impatient sex, adoring sex, fear of boredom sex. The immense sanity of Middlemarch made it a safe haven for the little insanity of the stolen photograph. Whenever I went back to Middlemarch, I imagined the magnanimous moral acuity with which the narrator would have illumined a theft like mine, bringing it into the embrace of the humanly forgivable while at the same time—and how did Eliot get away with this?—indicting its betrayal of the more honorable self I would, in Middlemarch’s narrator’s eyes, possess. But I didn’t go back often; sex and aimless daydreaming absorbed the hours I would usually have spent reading, and when I went up to the loft, I left the book behind—I didn’t want him noticing it. He had a habit of picking up my things and studying them quizzically, as if wondering how they had come to be in his house, and if he picked up Middlemarch there was a chance the photo would fall out. If I fell asleep in his bed after sex he would wake me after an hour or two, saying Kid, you need to go downstairs. On the way down I ran my fingers over the spines of the books lining the stairwell. If you opened one it would appear untouched; he recorded observations and memorable passages in a series of reading notebooks.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 6