The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  The first time, no one said anything. Or we talked about everything but. It was twenty-eight years since the river topped its banks, all that time since a flood skunked the reservoir and washed out people’s homes.

  We watched the water come, when it did. From patios late at night, the neighborhood watched the water move. A flash of light like strobe light would go off on the ground as the watery debris snapped a high-tension tower. When the wires touched the water, that part of town went black. This was the thing we watched—the city going dark along the path of the flood.

  It was not supposed to reach us.

  And then it did.

  Evacuation was calm and quick, except for Dr. Winton. Dr. Winton drank down most of his liquor cabinet and stared at the Red Cross volunteers who put their van in park and went in and hauled him out.

  Most of us saw that happen. But during the days of cleanup it was not what anyone mentioned. We talked about the racehorses loose from Centennial Track, how they had cantered over lawns and stumbled on buried sprinkler heads. Indoors were rolls of wet toilet paper swelling on bathroom rods. We found letters, and water had washed off the ink.

  We talked about Bunny Winton, who ordered a new living room the first morning after. She said she was happy to see her armchairs go, the padded arms cat-scratched down to cotton batting.

  “You open up or you shut down,” Bunny said, and went out and got her hair styled new.

  Film crews photographed the swim team at the club. They were lined up by the snack bar, waiting to get a tetanus shot so they could shovel mud. Bunny made the nightly news; the Vidifont spelled out VICTIM on her chest.

  They showed her in a tree wrapping washcloths around a branch so that the wet bent wood would not squeak against the roof.

  The first time was fifteen years ago, on what was, or on what would have been, Pool Night.

  “It’s all in the mouth,” he said, and showed me again and again. Grey said, “If the mouth is relaxed, the person looks good.”

  We were looking at pictures of ourselves and family. The looking was my mother’s idea—my mother, who was the thoughtful one. Here’s what my mother thought of when she heard that Bunny Winton had lost her photograph album: She put me to work on ours. Grey came over to help me—at her invitation, of course.

  Grey was Bunny and the doctor’s son, the child they could not now watch grow up in snapshots, page after page. Until my mother remembered that he grew up in ours. We would pull every picture that included Grey Winton, print up another, and present a new album to his grateful parents.

  Grey was a junior lifeguard at the pool. He tanned to the color of the corn flakes he ate each morning, and I knew girls who saved his chewed gum.

  Grey was the only boy excused from working cleanup. That was the week he was under observation.

  He and my brother were Aquazaniacs.

  They trained with a coach to do slapstick acrobatics off the high dive at the pool. There were six Aquazaniacs in 1890s stripes who hurled themselves into the water in syncopated ways. Grey would stand on my brother’s shoulders and together they dove as the Twelve-Foot Man.

  In the pratfall sport of Clown Diving, the Walk-Around Gainer is a popular stunt. This is where you run to the end of the board and then keep on running, out in the air, a cartoon, so fast you flip over backward.

  “Put gravity at your service” is how they said they did it.

  But during rehearsal, Grey candied out. He hit his head on the board coming down. It would have kept him from diving on Pool Night, if we had had Pool Night. But the rain date gave him time to try to perfect the Fire Dive.

  In the album there were pictures of Grey in water. The first one was in our bathtub, playing Stormy Ocean with my brother as a baby. Later, they pole a raft across a lake, poking an oar at snapping turtles. There’s a picture of the three of us on skates, on ice. Around my neck I wear snowballs of rabbit fur on black velvet cord. The pictures that follow show the boys pulling the snowballs off, then coming from behind, the velvet rope stretched out tight—a garrote.

  Some of the photographs were Polaroid ones. They were faded, but the fugitive images remained. Emulsion on others had turned metallic bronze; the snapshots held deep tarnish, like a mirror.

  There were quite a few pictures of Bunny, too. With the unphotogenic’s eagerness to pose, she increased her chances of the one good shot that would let her relax, having proof at last that she had once looked good, just once.

  The doctor couldn’t make it to the picnics or to the skating—so he didn’t show up in the pictures, either. The effect was of him saying after the flood: What I lose will always be lost.

  “His problem is the past,” Grey said about his father. “He says only do things you have done before and liked. Whereas me, what’s coming is the thing I’m looking out for.”

  I thought the present was the safer bet. We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

  Grey trusted water. He continued to trust it after the flood. He believed it would save him, and he counted on this for the Fire Dive.

  I saw him do it once, which is all the times he did it.

  When the swimming pool was filtered and rechlorinated, he carried a can of gasoline to the high board. He wore a sweatshirt with a hood and matching drawstring pants. He dove into the water with the top and bottoms on, then pulled himself out by the ladder on the side. It was night, and I had my camera ready.

  He sprinkled his wet clothes with gasoline as though he were watering plants. He said wet cloth would pull the fuel away from his skin.

  He said to imagine this: that the moment he hit the water aflame, when he made this dive on the next Pool Night, that’s when he would have a cannon go off!

  Then he struck a lighter and he lit himself up good.

  I got it all on film—the human torch, the flaming spiral twists that he scripted in the air, the hiss of reclaimed life when the water took him in.

  It only lasted seconds. It seemed an extravagant risk, and that is how I put it.

  He said, “I made those seconds live.”

  I took one more picture that night. It was after Grey had walked me home. He found a box of photograph corners, the black stick-on kind that frame the picture on the page. He opened up our album, pasted four of them in place.

  It was Grey who took the picture; the picture he took was of me. It was candid—I wasn’t posed—and the instant, the Polaroid, is what he used. When the blank square of film emerged from the camera, he tore it off and slipped it in the corners on the page, and then he closed the album cover before the image could develop.

  That picture is something I lost in the fire.

  One thing smoke does is lower your voice. It did not sound like me, thanking the firefighters. I said thanks, but I did not feel grateful. I stood aside and watched, breathing the tarry air. I watched myself lose all that I was losing, and I knew why Dr. Winton had stayed inside his house.

  I know about this now.

  I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.

  Three Popes Walk into a Bar

  Sydney Lawton Square is a park for a transient population; there are no benches. You can walk it end to end in minutes. The architect for the Gateway Condominiums squeezed it in between the barbecue place and the parking garage. You would put quotes around this “park” the way you might send traffic fines to the Hall of “Justice.” But this feeble attempt at nature is walking distance from the club—so that’s where I meet Wesley, at the Fountain of Four Seasons.

  The fountain yields dead earthworms, not coins; the worms outnumber pull-tabs, cigarettes, and leaves. At the nearby north entrance to the square there is a faded brick arch with a bronzelike plaque that says HISTORICAL SITE. All of it is contrived to suggest that something was once there, but none of it tells you
what.

  Wesley calls out “Ahoy,” so I know he has made up his mind.

  “You think it’s a crime to change your mind?” he says. “Just because you are able to do a thing doesn’t mean that’s what you have to do, does it? Because I could but I don’t want to,” he says as we walk the tarmac path.

  He is talking about performing. He’s still funny, and he wants to stop.

  “I could keep on,” he says, “and you know what I’d have to show for it? Ten percent liver function and a felony in my bed.”

  “I think what counts is timing,” I say. “As long as you try your first choice first.”

  Three popes walk into a bar.

  A guy in the airport Clipper Club recognized Wesley and bet him he couldn’t get a punchline out of it. They boarded a plane in Honolulu; Wesley had the five hours to San Francisco to make it a joke. Three popes walk into a bar. He lost money on this, but I didn’t ask how much. Coming off a tour he is sick with foreign germs. I met him at the gate and drove him straight to the club. It’s what Eve usually did, but she delegated to me. Eve Grant is Wesley Grant’s future former wife.

  “Eve cabled the hotel that she’s coming tonight,” Wesley said. “But she won’t laugh.”

  “You won’t hear her not laughing over the six hundred other people,” I said. “You’re sold out.”

  “But I always know. You know. She wants me to buy a boat, is all. After, of course, I have stopped performing.”

  “What’s it to her?” I said. “She’s leaving you.”

  “Or not,” Wesley said. “Maybe she’s not leaving if I buy the boat.”

  “That doesn’t put you on the spot or anything.”

  “You talk to her tonight,” he said.

  About Eve Grant, Wesley has said that he married the most beautiful woman he ever saw and learned the irrelevance of beauty.

  He met her at a club where she danced topless. She told him that Wesley was the name of the first monkey in space. She told him how NASA used that Wesley up and then abandoned him to an animal shelter for destruction. Then a group of women kidnapped that Wesley and took him to a zoo, where he lived out his life in comfort.

  Wesley knew the monkey’s name was Steve, but thought it was sweet of her to say otherwise.

  With Wesley’s encouragement, Eve stopped dancing and pursued a career in journalism. She thought she would be a natural at it because people always wanted to talk to her. She wrote an article on spec for the Sunday paper and had it returned six weeks later. Wesley asked the editor what was wrong with it, wasn’t it boring enough? Then he cashed a favor with a publicist and got Eve a job at a fanzine doing a monthly column on vanished TV actors. The column was called “Where Are They Now?” but we all called it “Why Aren’t They Dead?”

  Wesley signaled the waitress and placed a special order. In a moment, she returned with a bowl of canned peach halves. Wesley took a bottle of Romilar cough suppressant from his coat pocket and poured most of it into the bowl.

  “I really admire you,” I told him. “I couldn’t go out there and make people laugh if I were sick.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “You couldn’t do it if you were well.”

  He forced down the reddened peaches.

  “But I’ll tell you what you can do. You can tickle me,” he said.

  Eve usually did that, too. His grandmother started it when he was a boy. She used to tickle Wesley beyond fun, he said, until he felt trapped and helpless and would have cried except that he learned to give in to it, and at that moment felt relief and calm move in.

  It is this tickling and giving in that makes him funny, he thinks. Like every kind of recovery, comedy demands surrender.

  Wesley cleared away the chairs and squared off in front of me. At the signal I dove at his belt.

  I get something out of this, too.

  The club manager’s office was open and empty, so we took a couple of drinks in and closed the door. Wesley scanned the shelves of videocassettes, pulled one out, and popped it into the deck. He joined me on the couch.

  It was a tape of every low-budget commercial he had made for local affiliate stations. This, Wesley said, is comedy.

  The tape kicked in and there he was in suit and tie for the Cherry Hills Shopping Mall over in the East Bay.

  “Tell me when it’s safe,” he said, and covered his eyes with a hand.

  On screen, he said, “That’s Cherry Hills, between the MacArthur and the Nimitz. MacArthur and Nimitz—both fine men, both fine freeways.”

  “Oh, I hate myself,” he moaned.

  The machine sizzled with static.

  “This next one is Eve’s favorite.”

  The product was a deep-penetrating epoxy sealer that you pumped into cracked cement to bind it into one integral piece again. The homeowner in the background eyeing his cracked sidewalk was Wesley’s former partner, Larry Banks. They split up a couple of years ago when Banks ran for mayor on the campaign platform “Anything You Want.”

  The machine jammed on the tagline “Cement cracks, this we know.”

  Wesley turned off the machine and opened the door. He asked the waitress for vodka.

  “I tell you about the night I met Banks?” he said. “My manager brought him to watch me work. Then after the show we all go to this Polynesian place to get stewed. Banks, he was just starting out, he orders this sissy drink for two, only he doesn’t realize it’s for two. So the waiter shows up with this washpan of rum, and Banks is all embarrassed and so on. I told him, comics can’t get embarrassed.”

  Wesley sat back down beside me and said it was time to change his life. He wanted to. “But how does a person start?”

  “Small,” I said. “Start small and work up. The way you would clean a house. You start in one room. Maybe you give yourself more time than you need to finish that room, just so you finish it. Then you go on to the next one. You start small, and then everything you do gets bigger.”

  I myself have never done it this way.

  “Of course, I could be different,” Wesley said. “Maybe everything I do will get smaller. On the other hand, there’s still the stage, you know—when it’s good up there, when I stand up there and have nothing to say but it has to work! It’s—being human on purpose, it’s falling back on the language in your mouth. It’s facing these people and saying, You think Jesus had it rough! Ah, when it’s good,” he said. “And when Evie’s good, too. When Evie’s there. In the night. Do you know what I’m saying?” he said. “Because she’s the one who is there in the night. Before her I had what you’d call contacts. Like the last one, this one that was hanging around one of the clubs—so I asked her if she’d like to go out. And she said she did. She said she wanted to go all the way out.”

  Wesley swallowed vodka.

  “Which is something I don’t even understand,” he said. “How about you? Did you ever want to die? I mean, try to make yourself die?”

  “Only once,” I said. “I drove my car real fast and I was going to have an accident but then I wasn’t going to.”

  “Well, not me, not ever,” Wesley said. “I sometimes think this is how depressed the people who commit suicide get. And then I thank God I’m a Leo.”

  An hour before the show, Eve met us in the bar. She looked good; Wesley said so, and everyone else noticed right along with him. Marzipan skin, white-blond hair that always looked backlit. Eve would look good in barbed wire.

  “God, my jeans are full of me,” Eve said, and undid a narrow snakeskin belt.

  A waitress came to our table and asked what could she get us.

  “I’m not drinking,” Eve said. “Just a 7UP.”

  The waitress asked if Sprite was okay.

  “No—then make it a Tab.”

  “Eve here used to live next door to the vice president of 7UP,” Wesley explained, “so she’s hip to lemon-lime drinks.”

  “So who’s here?” Eve said. “L.A.?”

  L.A. is any Hollywood agent who comes north to
look at talent.

  “Supposed to be, but not,” Wesley said.

  “It’s just as well,” Eve said. “They’re such a tease. They fall all over you and then you never see them again.” She sighed. “Just like everybody else.”

  She touched Wesley’s shoulder, and he turned in his seat so that she could massage his neck with both hands.

  “She’s too good to me,” Wesley said.

  “Oh, I’m banking this,” Eve said. “I’m not just throwing it off a cliff.”

  A voice broke in behind them. “Who said comedians don’t have groupies.”

  It was the owner of the club, the man who would introduce Wesley onstage.

  The owner told Wesley to join him backstage. Eve and I blew a kiss and carried our drinks upstairs. We passed people in line at the ticket window. To one side of the box office there was an eight-by-ten of Wesley. It was a publicity shot from years ago, the sincere-looking one. It was the same picture he had on his mantel at home, only there it carries a caption: “He aimed for the top. He started at the bottom. He ended up somewhere below in-between.”

  We found the small round table reserved for us up front. Eve offered me the first sip of her Tab so that it would be me who would get the one calorie.

  “Look over there,” she said, nodding far right. I looked, and saw four men, twentyish, crowded together, a pitcher of beer on their table. They were novices who played smaller clubs on open-mike nights.

  “They’re something,” Eve said. “Watch them when Wesley’s on. When he makes you laugh, look at them. One will say, ‘That’s funny,’ and they’ll all nod their heads madly and none of them will smile.

  “A couple of months ago that little blond one opened for somebody here. He saw us in the bar after and asked Wesley what he thought of his act. Wesley said, ‘Well, Bob Hope can’t live forever.’ The guy took it as a compliment.”

  Eve smiled her great rectangular smile.