Old newspaper pieces from back pages of the New York Times are bobbling around in his head, interfering with his reading. Annoying.
Indian from India hires hitmen to kill wife, he is out walking with her on a Sunday in some park in Queens, hitmen shoot him, too, in the leg so he looks innocent.
Naked man masturbating on roof of building, throws bricks down at women passersby below—Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Kills a woman before police get to him.
Why do they put crap like that in a fine paper like the New York Times? You’d think it was the Enquirer.
Why can’t he get this rot out of his mind? Fracking, fracking …
She doesn’t attend much to the music either—a requiem? An oratorio or opera, something big and Germanic and overwhelming with a chorus and an orchestra. And there is something terribly, irredeemably wrong with the recording, the speed is off, she doesn’t know what exactly, she tries not to listen, wouldn’t mind going deaf. In (graduated) prescription sunglasses, she sits at the table and chews without appetite the dwarf neutered bagels (bobes tam) with smoked salmon, onions, capers (hold the cream cheese), drinks black coffee, and reads and rereads the first paragraph of If This Is a Man while she tries not to remember what she said to him (did she really say …), what he said to her, and tries not to hear what she is trying not to say to herself: that she will never ever again shoot milk across a room for anyone, let alone for that slender wiry fellow with the thick head of bright brown hair who’d run for it mouth open as if it were manna; never ever hear again or even remember the sounds he made coming in her mouth or in her cunt or in her ass, the dear, dear sounds, never ever even hear him say again, “I’ve got the easy part, I’m dying.” That she would soon enough have the easy part, too, and she would spend the greater part of the time before that, that brief blink of an eye before the final blackness, with this blind, doughy, kindly man who couldn’t latch on.
They did not make love until they got to Luxembourg.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The person who is most responsible for Scary Old Sex coming out of the dark is Sandra Newman. She edited these stories with patience, respect, a few tears and belly laughs, without any prudishness, and always with the highest literary intelligence. And she introduced me to her agent, Victoria Hobbs, who knows publishers’ sensibilities so well that she managed to get three offers within a month on this first book, a collection of short stories by an unknown author—a miracle akin to Moses parting the Red Sea.
Alexandra Pringle, editor-in-chief, fell in love with Scary Old Sex and presented it winningly to Bloomsbury on both sides of the ocean; I am grateful. And Kathy Belden, my in-house editor, gently and respectfully suggested cuts and commas, and tried to keep me reality-bound: e.g., lilacs do not bloom in New York in July.
Judith Viorst, my friend for more than thirty years, read each of these stories in many different versions, some of them novel length, and shored up my confidence in myself as writer and person.
Ruth Ahntholz (pen name Ruth Lilian) has also read and reread these stories, besides novels and stories that didn’t make it into this collection, that didn’t make it anywhere; and she sat with me in writers’ groups and through dark nights.
Barry Malzberg’s hyperbolic appreciation of me as a writer has cheered me on since I was twenty-two.
Jo Anne Simson, friend of fifty years and polymath, taught me the science I needed to know to write “Artifact.”
Lisa Vergara, art historian, enabled me to write more confidently about the art world in the story “In Love with Murray”; and she proofread each story for me with precision and thoughtfulness.
Otto Kernberg and Jerome Levine helped in immeasurable ways.
Bernard Malamud was a climate to me—his jokes, his Jewish atheism, his aliveness, his loving-kindness, his feeling for art and for me, his total immersion in literature, and, above all, his writing.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Arlene Heyman earned a B.A. at Bennington College, an M.F.A. from Syracuse University, and her M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright, Rockefeller, and Robert Wood Johnson fellowships. Heyman has been published in New American Review, won Epoch magazine’s novella contest for an earlier version of “Artifact,” and has been listed twice in the honor rolls of The Best American Short Stories. Heyman is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst practicing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she lives with her husband. She is currently at work on a novel.
Bloomsbury USA
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First published 2016
© Arlene Heyman, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual organizations, business establishments, events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Versions of these stories previously appeared in the following publications: “Artifact” in the magazine Epoch, and “In Love with Murray” in the Japanese translation by Nobuko Katsui of Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life by Philip Davis. “Dancing” originally appeared in Epoch magazine. A version of “Night Call” first appeared in Podium, an online literary magazine of the Unterberg Poetry Center at New York’s 92nd Street Y, 2009.
“Rose-Marie,” lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II; music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart. Copyright ©1925, Renewed 1953. Bill/Bob Publishing Company/ASCAP/Bambalina Music Publishing Company/ASCAP/Warner Brothers, Inc./ASCAP. Copyright © 1924 Williamson Music (ASCAP), Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. and Songwriters Guild of America. Copyright © 1924, 1925 (Copyrights Renewed) WB Music Corp., Bambalina Music and Bill/Bob Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-233-4
ePub: 978-1-63286-235-8
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Heyman, Arlene.
[Short stories. Selections]
Scary old sex : stories / Arlene Heyman.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-63286-233-4
I. Title.
PS3608.E927A6 2015
813’.6—dc23
2015012211
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