Praise for The Blue Hour
“Desire, passion, and unexpected violence simmer in Pritchett’s dazzling new novel about the denizens of a tightly knit rural community grappling with a horrific tragedy. Graced with characters so alive, so full of quirky humanity, you miss them when you’ve finished the book, and written in prose as clear and gorgeous as a mountain afternoon, The Blue Hour isn’t just about the many ways love can end—it’s about how connection jumpstarts when you least expect it, too.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Cruel Beautiful World and the New York Times Bestsellers Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You
“Laura Pritchett’s exquisitely-linked novel of short stories—Jhumpa Lahiri comes to mind—manages to be all at once poetic and funny, heart-breaking and true. And the theme of sex—its role as social bonder, marriage breaker—is so beautifully, rarely addressed. This is a snapshot of the new West, as seen from that most breathtaking perspective—the inside out.”
—Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and Leaving Before the Rains
“Laura Pritchett has taken on love in all its complexity. In the vein of Charles Baxter’s Feast of Love, every chapter of this beautifully linked novel gives us a story of conjugal love, passionate love, unrequited love. Just when love is lost, somewhere else it is regained. Reminiscient of Alice Hoffman’s Turtle Moon and the classic Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Pritchett’s work feels unique in its humor and its exquisite writing on sex. I loved it in its parts and in its whole. A novel I’ll hold on to in my heart for a long time.”
—Mary Morris, author of the award-winning The Jazz Palace
“In Laura Pritchett’s new novel, women and men enter the crucible of fate and violence and desire, sex and the obscure reaches of near comprehension. They emerge as if bound in mist, walking the mountain they love, calling out across an abyss of loneliness and unrest. In this place charged with dusk, still held by light, The Blue Hour sets lightning on the sky.”
—Shann Ray, author of Balefire and American Masculine
“How many books does each of us come across in a year, a decade, a lifetime? No matter how many you’ve picked up before, The Blue Hour is one you should disappear with into a quiet room right now. The terrifically talented Laura Pritchett has written an immersive, sexy, singular novel, each of its characters beautifully drawn and direly infused with desire and sadness and joy. They are trying to find a way to love each other and the world and not be driven mad by their desires. This is the kind of book I am always searching for and am very grateful to have found in the lyrical and heartbreaking pages of The Blue Hour.”
—Christine Sneed, author of The Virginity of Famous Men
“Piercing . . . An original meditation on sex, love, and death.” —Kirkus
“Pritchett is boldly lyrical, whether she is writing about the eyes of archangels or the dawning of a new day, or especially the love lives of her diverse cast of characters, united in both a quest for love and a residence around the beautiful Blue Moon Mountain . . . In this elegant book, there’s an appealing verisimilitude in the way the characters are variously, tentatively connected.”
—Publishers Weekly
“I adore this community and the tender bonds among the characters. Their stories are by turns spiritual, sensual, emotional, and erotic, all set within a vividly rendered landscape. Here, we explore what it means to be a human in love: fear that love will end, unrequited love, violence in love, regret and loss, pain and mental illness, fantasy, perversion, swinging, the end of love, brand new love, and responsibilities in love. Gorgeous and honest and profound. Sparkles with gems of wisdom and beauty.”
—Laura Resau, author of The Queen of Water and Red Glass
The Blue Hour
ALSO BY LAURA PRITCHETT
FICTION
Red Lightning
Stars Go Blue
Sky Bridge
Hell’s Bottom, Colorado
NONFICTION
Great Colorado Bear Stories
AS EDITOR
Going Green: True Tales from Scavengers, Gleaners, and Dumpster Divers
Home Land
Pulse of the River
Copyright © 2017 by Laura Pritchett
Map © 2017 by Leslie Patterson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available
Cover design by Debbie Berne
Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González
eISBN 978-1-61902-889-0
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to the mountains,
the people who live among them,
and lovers of all kinds,
everywhere
Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! . . .
Smile, for your lover comes . . .
O unspeakable passionate love.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Contents
Chapter One: Creature of Blue
Chapter Two: Under the Apple Tree
Chapter Three: The Color of the Impression
Chapter Four: Calypso
Chapter Five: Recipe: Dandelion’s Devil
Chapter Six: Storytime
Chapter Seven: Last Bid
Chapter Eight: This Imaginary Me
Chapter Nine: You Win
Chapter Ten: Boxed Up
Chapter Eleven: County Road
Chapter Twelve: Water Out of Sunlight
Chapter Thirteen: Smoke’s Way
Chapter Fourteen: Painting the Constellations
Chapter Fifteen: Plan B
Chapter Sixteen: Pinball
Chapter Seventeen: Debitum Naturae
Chapter Eighteen: The Bear
Chapter Nineteen: Moon’s Solstice
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter One
Creature of Blue
Particular snowflakes fall on your head as you stand outside your home so as to see the sky darken and the first ones spiral down, and the snow that reminds you of the beauty and brevity of life, how much every person has in common, when measured against eternity.
If you turn away from the waves of blue mountains and look toward your house, you will see your wife. She is visible in the square light of the window, folding laundry in your bedroom, a singular woman who has the totality of all it is to be human flurrying around inside her.
Remarkable, the shallowness of love. You used to come up with grand hopes about probability and luck, health and good fortune. Meanwhile you forgot how ice-thin the space between love and not-love, fondness and irritation. You have lived with your wife in this small mountain town for nearly twenty years, and now your wife is disgusted by the sight of you, she is not i
n love with you, and you are not in love with her, and this fact has sent you outside to stand in the trees and to spiral alone in the dark valley. You see she is folding your stained undershirt, and you realize that the most popular story on earth is of falling in love, and the next most popular story is falling out.
There are many ways for love to end. For some, the lucky ones, there is an intense fight, an unresolvable issue. Okay! you shout at each other. It’s over! For others, there is just a quiet dissolution, a slackening and weakening, hardly perceptible. Love most often dies by ice and not fire.
Still, you must take action, otherwise you could be rightly called a coward. You know that it is a great sin, perhaps the greatest, to spend your short life pretending anything, especially pretending to be in love.
When your daughter Zoë was five, she was sick with pneumonia, and as you held her fevered body, she whispered, I feel like a tooth that’s dangling by one lousy thread.
You think of that now, because you’re thinking that sometimes it is your job to orchestrate the last yank.
Anya, you tell your wife, when you stomp your feet at the door to your bedroom, knocking off snow in the square patterns found on the soles of your work boots, I’m so sorry, but I am no longer in love with life, and I am no longer in love with you. I need to leave. But before I go, I’d like to get down on my knees (and here, you get down on your knee, as you did when you proposed to her), and you say, Anya, I’d like to bow to your more complex, passionate, and authentic original, which I know is in there somewhere. And I’d like to ask you to remember my truest and best version too.
She has turned from the laundry to look down at you kneeling among chunks of patterned snow, a quiet expression on her face. Quit laughing, Sy. It’s not funny. Nothing about this is funny.
I’m sorry, Anya. I don’t mean to be cruel. Look at this snow, melting. I’m getting everything all wet.
She crouches beside you and takes your cold hands. She says, Get up, Sy. I realize you don’t love me, Sy. You’re not capable of it at this point in time. But you could be. Sy, you have two children. Don’t you forget that. Please stop laughing. The kids will hear you.
While she’s talking, you notice, out of the corner of your eye, the purple-blue blur, like sheer fabric that is dancing. This dancing creature—sent from whatever God is out there—has been following you for about a month now. Every time you see her, she whispers in your ear. She says: There are many ways for love to end.
The creature is floating above you now, and she reaches out her wings to help you rise to your feet. She is a bit like a firefly and she is murmuring phrases about the blue moon, the rose moon, the hungry moon, the harvest moon.
You bring your wife into focus. She is standing in front of you, only inches away, tucking her short blond hair behind her ear. In the past, she has been angry with you, angry with your selfishness, angry at your supposed mental illness, angry with your physical body and its pains, and she has also showed signs of pity and compassion and fear. In the process, she grieved your loss, she has had an affair. Now you are dead to each other, only she refuses to participate in the final yank.
You used to love her, of this you are certain. Then she became the receptacle of all your talk, saliva, sperm, slights. She has become ugly from it.
Anya, you say, let me just try to explain. You tell her you recall things, such as dates and events, the tie you wore to your wedding, you recall Zoë and her tooth, you recall the birth of your son, Michael, you recall finishing vet school, you recall touching hundreds of animals, you recall fixing the throat of a chicken who had its neck slashed open by a fox and you recall that the chicken lived. Then you tell her that you cannot, despite your best efforts, catch what any of that felt like.
There are many ways for love to end. You know it’s gone for sure when you tuck your chin, look down at your own chest, and squint. It seems to be snowing in there and the snow has drifted into every watershed of your heart.
She grows gentle, seductive. She wants to bring you back. She changes from a clothes-folder to lover. She is on her knees with you in her mouth, and you are surprised, since neither of you have done this for so long, and she uses her teeth gently, her tongue in fluttering ways, so soft as to be nearly as transparent as firefly wings. For a moment you are imprisoned by her tenderness and you realize she is a different creature altogether, a life-form that is more fluid than substance, more energy than solid mass. This surprises you. It surprises you that in this moment you cannot escape the gentle sorcery of her touch, how she releases chemicals that soften and bind. Perhaps she is telling you good-bye.
Above you, the creature floats and laughs at your amazement, and her laugh is more of a golden sigh. She watches as you and your wife find yourselves on the bed, amid the laundry, and she sees how you glide your head between your wife’s legs and slide your tongue into her as deep as it will go, how you hum and lick, how you hold your wife down, one palm to stomach, so that she cannot escape you until she comes. The purple-blue creature watches your wife climb on her hands and knees and you slide inside her, and when you become too gentle, how your wife rocks back into you, hard, how you both finish with a gasp and a ducking of the head, as if in fervent prayer.
Anya, you whisper in her ear, when you are resting, I chose you. I didn’t fall for you, or find you, or fall in love. I flew into it. It was so sweet and simple. I could trust what I felt. I knew my mind.
Shhhh, Sy, shhhhh, she says.
Enough, she says.
That bear earlier today scared me, she says. That bear could have killed our children. It’s a good thing Gretchen saved them. I know you only worry about the mountain lions, but there was a bear, and it was big . . . and she starts to cry.
Outside, the coyotes yip, their cries sparkling through the air. You look up at the purple-blue creature floating above you and you ask her, Please? But she shakes her head. A golden purr escapes her mouth, like the beginning of a song.
Sy, we all get that way, as if we can’t feel. Sometimes. Have you been taking your meds? Please tell me you’ve been taking your meds.
You tell her you have not.
Oh, Sy, she says, rolling away from you.
You tell her you wanted to feel again.
Oh, Sy, she says. For how long?
You tilt her chin toward you with your finger. Anya, you say, there are many ways for love to end, and I want to do it right.
I can’t keep you, she says. You can’t make someone stay. The quiet rhythm of her voice reminds you that she has learned to soothe you through calm inflection of voice. You also know that you have given her one other great gift, which is the courage to seek love. You have just discovered that she is having an affair with Sergio, for she rightly needed some form of love in her life, and since you were not able to give it, she found the strength to embrace it elsewhere. You gave her infidelity, you gave her that strength.
You can’t make someone stay, she repeats, but I love you. The bear, Sy.
You nod.
I do love you, Sy, she says again. Sy, you can leave me later. You can divorce me when you’re well. I wish you were taking your meds, she says, and again she is crying. We need to stay together for the kids. There’s no such thing as a good divorce for a kid. There are bears. She hiccups with this last phrase, unable now to speak.
Anya, you say loudly, in the years that I was married to you, whenever I asked what you were thinking, your answer was never about death or the human condition or fear or joy or sorrow; it was about kids or house items or people on this mountain. Anya, I choose to believe you were lying to me. You never gazed into my eyes, or discussed your dreams. I used to think it was because you were not that kind of woman, but I choose now to believe I was simply the wrong man to do the asking.
Sy, she says, I do think of those things.
What a waste then, you say quite loudly, and even the purple-blue creature buzzes to the corner of the room, afraid. Yo
u should have tried to tell me! Did you think life would be more than this? I knew it wouldn’t last, but I did think it would be bigger, that it would simply be more joyful.
The children, your wife says. They’re a big thing. What are you looking at?
You are sitting up now, staring at the blur. Anya, you say, Anya, listen, I need to tell you this. At first, you think, I am out of love with life, but such thoughts are anomalies, quickly dispersed. Bad day, week, season. Or you notice the spiral of mountain mahogany seeds or the way a doe flicks her tail and picks up her hind leg at the exact same moment. Or the meadow beneath Blue Moon Mountain. Such information causes interference for a while. But the thoughts become more frequent until they are in your mind every day.
In fact, you realize, you are now thinking of this failed love as often as you used to think of love. You used to want to feel and see it all! You wanted to bury your nose in the fur of an animal you had just saved, you wanted to kiss your wife for a very long time, you wanted to see how light flies off water. But then one evening, such as this evening, you and your wife will tuck your kids into bed and it will be cold out, and just starting to snow, the season’s first snow, the day after Halloween, and your wife sends you outside to watch the sky and then she makes herself tea in a blue mug and she goes to finish the laundry.
And during this time you will simply decide to tell the truth. You are thinking clearly tonight. Clear as the stars. You love the sky at this time of night. You are in the l’huere bleue of your life, the blue hour, the hour of dusk, the hour when everything changes. And you know you are out of love, in the quietest sort of way.
Your wife says you should sleep. Despite your lovemaking, she is still wearing some of her clothes, and she stands up to remove them and to put on red pajamas. A few fine strands of her blond hair stand up because of the dry weather. While she pulls on flannel pajama pants, you tell her that you believe now that you must do the very things that frighten you.
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