The Middle Stories

by Sheila Heti

  The man, who was new in town, was startled because he did not expect city people to care about each other, but he answered saying, “It’s that the woman who came over last night seemed to really like me, but she left this morning without making plans to see me again.”

  “I know what it’s like. I thought it must be women that were troubling you because of that troubling look on your face. You ought to come to where I work tonight, because there are plenty of pretty ladies where I work.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “At a dance club.”

  “Oh no,” said the man who was from a small town. “I don’t mean that I want to pay a woman to take off her clothes.”

  That night as he sat in a booth by the wall, a tall voluptuous woman with red hair went and sat across from him. When she spoke her voice was tiny and girlish, and when he spoke back her eyes lit up, knowing a good man when she saw one. If he found her interest in him any consolation he did not show it, and continued to order drinks that cost seven dollars.

  “Let me put that next one on my tab,” she said, and adjusted her body in such a way that her breasts raised themselves parallel to the table. The man did not fail to notice this.

  “Would you like to come home with me tonight?” he asked. Growing suspicious, she said, “I thought you were a different sort of man, that’s what Henry told me, and now you ask me the question everyone asks.”

  “I’m so ashamed,” he responded sincerely. “I didn’t mean it that way, but I don’t like being alone, and you seem like a kind woman who would be a pleasure to spend good times with, even just talking.”

  She found this genuine enough and was touched that there was nothing of the brute in him; perhaps Henry was right. Even her so-called sisters, whom she hastily consulted in the back room, gave approving nods when they saw his modest eyes looking mainly at the fixtures.

  The apartment was sticky because of the heat, and it wasn’t long before they were lying in their underwear on his bed, and he was telling of how he had become a widower so young, which was a lie for he had never been married, or even in a real relationship twice. Since she had noticed him not noticing the dancers when she returned to the back room to get her clothes, she believed what he was saying, every word of it. There were simple ways some women had of telling a good guy from a bad, and her way was as stupid as any.

  Quite soon she found herself giving him head and was trying her best because he seemed so patently not to be enjoying it. When he laid her he did so with great care and the air of a depressive, which made her trust him all the more.

  It wasn’t three weeks before they decided to live in an apartment together, which caused tension between the man and his roommate until a replacement was found.

  Their life together was a gentle life of great delicacy and consideration, as they both felt sorry for the man, and he was also harboring a great confusion at his sorrowful mood not being alleviated by the presence of this woman with the red hair.

  Since in their hearts they both expected her to become pregnant, when she eventually did it was no great surprise. He merely stroked her arm as she lay at the base of the bed and cried about money. “I must go live with my sister,” she told him. There was no part of her that was enthusiastic about living the life of a dancer with a young child. “Do you want to come with me?” she asked.

  He grew anxious at this request and began taking long strolls. Her sister lived in a small town with a husband and three kids, and the man, who was from out of town, had deliberately moved out of his town and had barely been in the city a year. When he thought about it now, the woman with the red hair hadn’t been so difficult a catch. It was not so terribly hard to find a girl to spend good times with in a metropolis—he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it sooner. He declined and she ran away with her bags and her tears.

  But it wasn’t so easy the second time around to get a nice girl, and the man soon grew lonely. After a few months he was forced to take in a roommate, but the only one he could find was smelly and young with a belly that hung out without discretion. This situation made the man even more lonesome than before, and it was one day at one o’clock in the afternoon when he decided to visit the woman with the red hair. Walking past a fountain on his way to the train station, he passed a girl of late teenage years who was blond and who he supposed would like the companionship of a man like him. Dragging her into the park he tore out two-thirds of her hair.

  THE LITTLE OLD LADY AND THE LITTLE OLD MAN

  A LITTLE OLD man lived in a red-peaked house on the top of a hill in Dubrovnik. One day a woman came, and though at first he didn’t recognize her, when she started speaking he certainly did.

  “You’re the woman I almost married,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said. And they sat on the porch in two little chairs and looked out into the city over the hill.

  “You look like an old woman now,” he said.

  “After you raped me my hair turned grey.”

  “Did it?”

  “Within a week.”

  To this he nodded and sat back and said, “Would you like to go to the beach?”

  She said fine, it made no difference to her, so the old man and the old woman got up and walked down the hill and around to the other side, through a bramble of trees, and there was the beach leading into the sea, and the day was cold, and the old man and the old woman were warm.

  She said, “It’s beautiful, it really is. Look at how rocky it looks.”

  And he said, in a loud voice, “In fact, I think it’s very still,” and they stood there watching it, trying to understand who was right.

  He turned to her after a moment and said, “You have any man in your life right now? Any children?”

  And she said, “No one. I’m all alone and there’s no one to take care of me, and I’m not lonely, but I’m alone all the same.”

  He turned out to face the water and could see the little fishing village on the other side of the sea, and he said, “Sure you’re lonely.”

  She didn’t say a word.

  “Let’s walk along the shore,” he said, but this she did not want to do.

  He turned to her and said, “Why not?”

  And she said, straight out, “I do not want to walk along the shore with you.”

  “Well, I’m going to walk along the shore without you then. You can just stand right here if you want.”

  And she said, “I do want.”

  So off he started to walk, and his back was frail but it had a few muscles in it that she could see through his shirt, and he walked proudly but with a bit of difficulty, and she stopped following him with her eyes and saw instead the waves get rockier.

  She did not want to stand there by herself. It was silly. It was lonely. She had seen enough of the water. She watched him and watched his feet on the little stones, and she thought about how his view was constantly changing and how hers was always the same: the shore at the right turning that bit to the left, and the little pool on the left that had filled with clams.

  He was walking quite far off, and he thought angrily,

  “That’s right, she didn’t even come along.” He wanted to go back and grab her by the arm, pull her with him, force her down the shore, but that thought went out of his mind as he turned and walked back toward her, where she was standing and staring, in the very same place, obstinate, mad.

  He reached her face. There were their faces. There were their bodies. There were their toes.

  She said quietly, “Oh, I don’t know why I came. It seemed like a good day to do it. But now I’m tired, see, and I want to be getting on. You will take me to the railway station, won’t you?”

  And he said, “It’ll be my pleasure.”

  But neither his horse nor his cart would start and neither would his tractor, and she said sadly then, as if not quite believing it, or as if simply playing wistful, “Well, then, I’ll just walk.”

  “See you later then,” he
said hopefully. “Good of you to come by. I’m sorry you have no home.”

  THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE LANE

  STANDING IN THE road at two in the morning the young man with the moonlight in his hair made a terrible fuss before his girlfriend.

  “What sort of time? Who needs time?”

  “I need time,” the girlfriend said.

  He shook his head and left, stopping at a distance beneath a lamppost. An old man was leaning against it, and tipping his hat he said with a grin, “The institution of long apprenticeships has no tendency to form young people to industry.”

  In the darkness the young man formed a tear. “I know,” he said. “And it’s obviously another man.”

  “Always is.” But before the young man could begin his story the old man waved him away. “Come, let me show you something.”

  They walked for twenty minutes in silence through the desolate streets of the town. No cars passed, the moon hung down, and the younger man thought calmly of his girlfriend’s best friend, Sara.

  “No time is the right time for a second relationship,” the old man said. He stopped before a house that stood, squat, at the end of a lane.

  IN THE HOUSE it was warm and bare. They found, sitting on a fold-up chair, a red-haired woman named Stella, who was not only a fortune-teller but very vain. The old man said, “This is my friend. He’s good-looking, isn’t he? But he has got a long sad face, so I brought him here to cheer him up.”

  “Sit down,” Stella said.

  The young man sat down lightly. He had no reason to stand.

  “I am a young married woman working to put my husband through school,” the fortune-teller told him. “There is little time for study, but every spare moment is spent reading and thinking. My life is somewhat lonely in the sense that it is difficult to find people among those around me who care to think and discuss past the ordinary concerns of earning and spending money and such. I am young, but my years have been filled with unusual experiences.”

  The young man looked at her face. It was weary and soft and not at all the face of a woman who was young. He said nothing, but neither did Stella or the man who had brought him, and so he said, “You’re lying.”

  There was a little void, the old man coughed, a bit of shuffling, and the young man looked up and around. Stella got out of her chair, then sat back down. The old man turned to face the window. Stella adjusted a button. A woman was walking by.

  The old man said, “She’s here to see you.” The young man turned in his chair and saw the woman who had left him, now walking up the steps, now ringing the doorbell, now stepping inside to the tipped and welcoming hat of the older man.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve thought things through.”

  The youngish man was displeased and unmoved.

  “I want to be with you.”

  “No,” he said, aware of his resistance. His insides felt like stones.

  She asked him, “No?” ashamed and afraid. Her eyes had filled with tears.

  “I think no,” the young man said. “My mother was once young like you. Then she had three children and now she lives alone.” He left her through the open door.

  “Sit down, dear,” Stella said.

  “No!” cried the young woman. “My heart is breaking and it’s all your fault! You and all your talking!”

  “You mustn’t rush him,” the old man said, pulling down his hat. “A young man needs some time to find his mind.”

  COWS AND BREAD

  THE MAN PUSHED the three cows out into the field, then walked back to the house, closing the gate behind him. The thunderstorm was about to begin.

  He saw the woman waiting for him, hands on her hips. As he approached he saw that she was smiling. When he got to the porch she frowned.

  “I don’t like what you’re doing,” she said, and went into the house, shutting the door behind her. She would never forgive him for this.

  The man stood on the porch and saw that the cows were now walking in circles, away from each other, and toward each other.

  “Martha!” he called out, but she did not come. He wanted her to see this. “Martha!” he called again, but she still did not come. She had rejected him, just when he had created something beautiful for her.

  The thunderclouds gathered and it started to rain. It rained hard and cold, pelting down on everything. He ran into the house, leaving the door open. She was by the fireplace, knitting.

  “Martha, now! It’s about to start.”

  She did not look up. “I don’t want to,” she said, and continued knitting. There was a burst of light and a crash. “You’re going to hurt those innocent animals.”

  “It’ll be a wonderful spectacle!”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He sighed and went back outside, closing the door behind him. The animals lay charred and dead in the field. He walked back in and sat down on a chair.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I missed it,” he said, and looked up at her face. After a couple of minutes of sitting he went into the kitchen. There he found two pieces of bread and some salty butter. He laid the butter on thick, then took it up to bed with him. He sat down on the edge of the mattress and took a bite of bread, then put the pieces on the floor and went and stood at the pane.

  “Would’ve been a beautiful sight,” he said, pressing his nose against the glass. “Yup. A beautiful sight.” He was dead sorry he had missed it.

  THE MAN WITH THE HAT

  THE END OF the day will come. How the man with the hat is afraid of this. How he clutches at his newspaper tight and walks through the streets with his legs clenched tight and thinks about it not at all.

  Oh, how nothing matters, not at all, when the fact is: one day the lightning will come and the preachers won’t be able to stop it and neither will the famous.

  THE MAN WITH the hat was sitting at a bar the other day, see, the best bar in the city with all the best folks to talk to, and he was going on about some “mail-order bride” he was considering shipping in from Honduras or maybe the Dominican Republic, he’d have to see. Then thinking to himself as the others wiped their mouths of their sloppy joe sandwiches:

  “The tension of my audience will be transformed into an enormous burst of laughter, immediately drowned in applause. Frankly, I rather expect this will happen.”

  Then a voice from a typical boozer: “Tell us one of your stories, Joe.”

  “I just told you one of my fucking stories!” He rose with a bellow and shook his fist, peering around, looking for a fight.

  “Get out ya bum.”

  So the man with the hat was walking through the streets again, looking up at the sky where the stars were shining and he felt like a miserable sack of shit. If a child could see him, in this state: to be picking fights when there were stars in the sky! And didn’t he always forget the stars in the sky? What right had he? And didn’t he know the meaning and beauty of the world, though he was only a lonely schmo? He was not going to be forgiven for this one, oh no!

  And one block later: “I fear, concerning the manual labor of literary men. They ought to be released from every species of public or private responsibility. To them the grasshopper is a burden. I guard my moods as anxiously as a miser his money; for company, business, my own household chores, untune and disqualify me for writing. I think then the writer ought not to be married; ought not to have a family. I think the Roman Church with its celibate clergy and its monastic cells was right. If he must marry, perhaps he should be regarded happiest who has a shrew for a wife, a sharp-tongued notable dame who can and will assume the total economy of the house, and, having some sense that her philosopher is best in his study, suffers him not to intermeddle with her thrift.”

  Oh, his fucking thoughts! What difference were his fucking thoughts? That was it! For uselessness and shame and for crying out loud!

  The man with the hat prostrated himself on the sidewalk; but what good was it? It was three in the morning and who wou
ld be coming by to beat him up or step on his back? He crawled like a turtle into the middle of the road. Just run him over and make it quick, bud! The day would come but who the hell was he to live, talking about mail-order brides from Honduras or Barbados or the Dominican Fucking Republic. A beautiful girl never loved him, and his thoughts: Oh! His fucking thoughts were garbage. Let it end tonight!

  Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

  He scrambled off the road like a two-bit coward as the horn and the car blazed by him, and a man with a ruddy face leaned out the window yelling, “You miserable motherfucker get off the fucking road!”

  What right had he to kill himself when there were stars in the sky, twinkling all innocent and not noticing him and noticing nothing. They were suspended so far and so beautifully, and here he was putting himself on the road to get run over when he didn’t even mean it.

  THE NEXT DAY was sunny and he woke on a park bench with a bottle in his hand. He went at once to see his friend Jim.

  Sitting on Jim’s couch, while Jim was in the next room stirring macaroni and cheese, just listening, the man with the hat hung his head low and told his story like a man ashamed. Jim interrupted, stomping into the room with the wooden spoon held up.

  “You tell me the truth for once you godforsaken bastard.”

  Oh, if it weren’t the end of the world already! November thirteenth. A month and a half till the end of the world and everyone else had end-of-the-world plans but him. He didn’t know what he would be doing.

  The man with the hat started to sob and Jim went back to stir. Jim liked it real creamy. If it wasn’t real creamy it wasn’t worth shit. His friend had slept all night on a fucking park bench. Jim’s girlfriend walked into the room in a man’s shirt and looked so damn sexual the man with the hat moaned and covered his face with his hands.