The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  People had been good to us; we had seen a lot of casseroles. We had offers of a ski house in Tahoe, of a beach house in the dunes on Monterey Bay. Someone offered us a boat—a new sixty-five-foot Chris Craft—and his captain for as long as we liked.

  That was the plan, Christmas on a boat cruising the inland waterways of Florida. Then my father and I attended a lecture on American art of the postwar period. The speaker illustrated his talk with slides. Nothing, given time, is random; one of the slides was a painting of yours. Another of the slides was a painting by Arthur Brookmyer. This particular canvas hung on a wall of our living room. It was one of a series that was the artist’s self-proclaimed obsession.

  The lecture ended, and my father introduced himself to the speaker. They spoke about Arthur Brookmyer. The speaker confided that he was worried about the artist—he was said to be depressed following his wife’s death.

  Driving home from the lecture, my father had an idea, the kind you can only explain as the partial result of shock, the shock of my mother’s death. He wanted Arthur Brookmyer to join us for the cruise, to put on boating togs and hoist a “sea breeze” with us.

  “You don’t know me,” my father said on the telephone, “and this may be impossible. But the invitation is given in concern and passionate admiration.”

  The artist said he could not join us on the boat, he had to sign new prints in Europe. So he suggested we come to his house, he would put us up in the guest quarters.

  My father and I chose a simple shirt, classically tailored in fine toast-colored suede. It looked like the kind of thing an artist could wear in the fancy Connecticut suburb where he lived.

  I did not want to spend that Christmas with a stranger, a reportedly depressed stranger who was an intellectual and aesthetic titan who would, I feared, nail me to the floor with pointy-headed lectures on modern art. I forgot to set my alarm clock for the morning we were to leave; we were the last to board the plane for New York after a race to the airport that cut through corner gas stations so as not to hit red lights.

  Brookmyer owned several houses on the property. It is not so far from your house. Since he did not own the manor house itself, he referred to himself as the tenant farmer.

  In his library upstairs, I found volumes of poetry, philosophy and erotic drawings, plus catalogs from his friends’ shows, including several of yours. In the guest house, the bedroom ceilings were painted the uncannily beautiful color that was, according to the tubes of paint we found in his studio, “cerulean,” but which we had always called Brookmyer Blue. We’d painted the ceiling of our kitchen this color, and it was comforting to find it here, as well.

  We took long walks on his property, and met up with our host at lunch and dinner. My father was in his element, but I felt immeasurably awkward. Brookmyer was thoughtful and gracious, and suffered my questions with patience. If I had known that I would meet you, I would have asked additional questions. How did he feel, I wanted to know, when a person looked at his work and said that a child could do as well? He said that it meant something when an artist arrived at a single line late in a serious career. Which did he like better, I asked, painting or drawing? “Drawing is a racing yacht cutting through the ocean,” he said. “Painting is the ocean itself.”

  My father showed him a photograph of the artist’s painting where it hung in our living room. Brookmyer told him to lower it an inch. “You should look into a painting, not up at it,” he said, “especially in a room where people are sitting down.”

  He took us to his favorite place to eat. I was just then old enough to order a real drink, and was sipping a Bloody Mary. “It’s good,” I said. “What would make it great?” he asked, and when I told him he signaled a waiter and asked him to bring Tabasco.

  He was a kind man with whom it was hard to talk. So I listened. I followed, somewhat, his periodic sentences as they wound to their elegant ends. My visit was years too soon. I did not make the most of it. I should have pressed him about the difference between originality and creativity, about his feeling that confusion was caused by the lack of genuine feeling.

  One morning he had business in town, and told us we should inspect his studio. Feel free, he said, to pull canvases out of the racks. Turned loose like that, I looked at everything he had done. It felt like meeting relatives. It was a lesson in revision and amplification, in devotion and experimentation. The irony everpresent: that my mother was the reason we were there. She was the one who, twenty years before, had directed my father, in New York on business, to the gallery that was showing Brookmyer’s work.

  We embarrassed him Christmas Eve. It was too much, he said.

  On Christmas morning when we went to the main house before leaving for the city, there was a large sheet of heavy paper rolled and tied with red ribbon on the dining room table. It was an artist’s trial proof, inscribed with Christmas wishes to us.

  I was entrusted to hold it, rolled, in the front seat of the rented car. When another car cut suddenly in front of us, I struck out my arm reflexively when my father pressed the brake, and put a dent in the painting which was eased out, at no small expense, by a framer.

  On a day early in the New Year, I looked through the catalogs my father kept in his basement. I found the transcript of a talk that Brookmyer had given in his youth, and entered in my diary this fragment of a quote about the importance of an artist’s capacity to absorb “the shocks of reality” and to “reassert himself in the face of such shocks, as when a dog shakes off water after emerging from the sea.”

  I have heard that when you taught, you were considered an excellent teacher. Every so often my mother and I tried to teach ourselves something from a how-to book. Mostly I did things around her, the way nurses change the sheets with the patient still in bed.

  When I turned fifteen, I asked if she would teach me how to drive. My mother wore pigskin gloves to drive, even though she drove a station wagon. She told me to ask my father for lessons. We made a date for a Saturday morning. I was ready before my father woke up. After a quick breakfast, we backed his car down the driveway. My mother appeared in the opened front door and called to my father that she needed his help. He called back to her that we would only be an hour. She yelled that she needed him now. She had been reading a magazine when we left, and had not looked up when we said good-bye. And there she was screaming for him as though she had opened a vein.

  It was hard for me to concentrate as my father showed me the H of the gear box. I was not able to coordinate the clutch, thinking what might happen when we got home. I still can’t drive a car you have to shift. Automatic is what I can manage. Isn’t there enough to pay attention to outside the car? All I want inside a car is music. When a favorite old song comes on the radio, I can never hear it past the first few notes. The song, evocative, will take me to the place and time where I first came to hear it. I’ll be taken over for the length of the song, and returned when it stops, having missed it, only knowing it was there because now it isn’t there. The same thing happens when I think about you. Although the trajectory is different—it is not the past, a past we haven’t shared, but the future I am taken to by how quickly you have left.

  I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand beside a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!

  A good day. The mound in the road was not cat, but tread.

  A photographer sat me down in his studio and positioned umbrella lights. He was going to make a portrait. His instructions left me hopeless—I could not look at the camera as though it was my lover. The photographer changed his tack. He said, “Give me your best ‘Fuck you’ look.” The camera, for an instant, was my mother. “Perfect!” the photographer said.

  When we can’t sleep, we sneak downstairs and into the chapel, take a front pew, and hope to hear the auditory ghost, the chord that sounds at night when moonlight hits the keys through the windows in the nave. I have yet
to hear it, but Chatty says it started the night the actress in the thirties made her escape.

  We love our lore.

  I wish I was content to think of that hour—innocent hour over cups of tea—as part of my own, a story to pass along. But I am afraid it is like the sprinkling of rain that draws the roots of plants to the surface where the sun then dries them out.

  What is enough? What is ever enough?

  Across the road there is an apple tree.

  Every so often a car will drive past, then come back around and park beneath its branches. People will get out and start to pick the apples, pausing to bite into one, a quality check. They’ll hold out the fronts of their shirts, making hammocks for the apples, and pick and take until apples are spilling out the sides of their shirts, dropping as the people return to their car hunched over from the weight of them. I have seen a woman fill her pleated skirt, then lose every one of them, slipping on the fallen ones on the way back to her car, and drive off without even one in her hand.

  In the chapel I write to you on the back of an Isaac Watts hymnal, “Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me?”

  Late in the fall, the sunflowers that fill a corner of the former hockey field will look like brown showerheads ready to shower seeds at the turn of a handle till the gardener clears them for compost. “A cold compost” is what Warren tells me to put on my head for a headache.

  I have taken to making bouquets, with an eye to successful still life. I know it is not your strong suit, but turns out it is mine. The counselors and guests have told me as much. One school of thought says a flower arrangement should feature one type of flower—a fountain of white tulips, say, or, in the bath, one fragrant tea rose in a bud vase on a commode. But I get good notices for odd combinations: lavender cosmos and purple flowering sage, bright yellow yarrow and orange day lilies, red rambling rose spiked with flowering chive. Desperate for a hobby on a college application, years ago I wrote, “Gardening.” Because my mother used to make me rake the leaves! And suddenly it comes to me that my mother never cut flowers and brought them into the house. Frustration pulls weeds; it does not arrange bouquets.

  In the Hostility Suite, Warren answers the phone. “Chatty?” he says, and holds out the receiver. He waits until she is beside him, reaching for it, before adding, “Phone call for Karen.”

  We are teasing each other.

  Maybe it is the gentle weather, but I notice we can give and take it. Dinner one warm night was a barbecue outdoors. Karen wore shorts and, for the first time, a top that was tight, a stretchy sleeveless knit. Warren looked at her chest and said, “That was a well-kept secret.”

  And Karen, she’s been reading her current events, she looked at the plate of hamburgers Warren was reaching toward; she said, “I forget how, but to produce the meat for one hamburger destroys an area of rain forest the size of a kitchen.”

  “That’s not very big,” Warren said, and helped himself.

  I think of Karen, saying, “I finally solved my problem of how to talk with people,” and Warren coming back with, “The hand puppets worked?”

  Our own wobbly tries.

  We sometimes forget why we’re here. And when in a flash we remember, it is a feeling like something we’re not fond of that has gone away but will be coming back. A quarrelsome mate off on a business trip.

  Diminution. This is often a comfort, to be satisfied with less. My grandmother told me that when I was born, she made my mother carry me straightaway up a flight of stairs. It is a superstition. You carry the infant up the stairs so the child will rise in the world.

  “Are you sure?” I used to ask her, my grandmother, because it felt as though I’d been carried instead to the basement, my job to just break even, to rise to the place where the rest were pushing off. This is not a complaint, just the way it seemed to me. Whereas take a person like Chatty. At Scrabble today, she made the word hepper. We challenged her. She said, “That’s Southern for ‘assistant’—‘He’s mah hepper.’” She was playing with us, but Warren looked it up and found it really is a word, the name for a salmon in its second year. And Chatty got to keep her points.

  I chose the F. That time I could have played the N or F?

  “It is up to you,” the counselor says. “And why is getting better up to you?”

  “Because,” I say, my answer practiced, “I am the one who cares the most.” Even when I am not.

  Remember last week’s storm that blew up from the tropics? Karen and I walked the beach the morning after, what beach there was left to walk. We saw four people haul in a large piece of something that, out of the surf, you could see was the hull of a good-sized sailboat. A hundred yards ahead, another piece of wood was being examined by an elderly man. He showed us the splintered stern with part of the boat’s name still stenciled on it in blue:—Wood.

  Karen and I continued down the beach, guessing at the name of the ruined boat: Driftwood? Hollywood? Firewood now, more’s the pity. Until the missing piece washed up at our feet, and all we had to do to complete the puzzle was bend down and turn it over, and—

  Touch. “Touch Wood.”

  So it was to the objects in the world around her that the letter writer turned.

  Please excuse the switch to notebook paper; I just ran out of the good stuff. And if my penmanship suffers, it is because I am not at a desk, but in a parked car, and using my knee for support.

  The driver this time is polite. He has not tried to hurry me along as other of the drivers have. He brought along a book of the stripe I could hold up to the unidentified object that flies. He brought a Thermos. And has not asked me what time it is, but has only excused himself to use the facilities across the street.

  It is rabbit hour, the time they come out into the open. I wish it never got any darker than this, the moment you can no longer tell that grass is green.

  If you say that you think you need to stay on, the management here says, “Of course.” If you tell them you feel you are ready to move on, these same people say, “That’s right.” I didn’t tell anyone I was trying to leave—circle of well-wishers reaching to say good-bye, reaching so that arms tangle and heads knock, yourself caught in the cross-love.

  I said I had to go to town to mail a letter, to get it weighed and buy the right stamps, being careful not to drop it on the ground before it is posted. That would bring bad luck. For us both.

  I asked the driver, as soon as he returned, to cut around to back behind the residential homes; there’s a corridor through the dunes where you can see the ocean waves and the saltwater pond, a sanctuary for birds. Terns are quarreling in a windswept, vine-hung pine. And—worthy of your brush—three egrets stop in different poses for a second, as if they were a single bird at three consecutive moments. Now they are in motion, alighting on the sand. The tide this time of year washes hundreds of tiny starfish up onto the beach. It leaves them stranded in salty constellations, a sandy galaxy within reach.

  Notes

  “The need for the new love…” is from “Wait,” by Galway Kinnell, in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

  “Not every clocktick needs a martyr” is from the poem “Turning to Look Back,” by John Woods, from Keeping Out of Trouble, Indiana University Press, 1968.

  The gorilla who uses sign language is Koko. Incidents cited are either from the author’s visit with Koko, or from documented exchanges and observations by Koko’s teacher, Dr. Francine Patterson.

  The artists referred to are Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar, whose conceptual art piece/poll was titled The People’s Art.

  “He opens a book at random and consults randomness,” is from the poem “Sortilege,” by Eric Pankey, from Apocrypha, Knopf, 1993.

  “Drawing is a racing yacht…” is from Robert Motherwell in “Thoughts on Drawing,” reprinted in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio, Oxford University Press, 1992.

  “…to reassert himself in the face of…” is from
Robert Motherwell in conversation with the author and in “The Place of the Spiritual in a World of Property” (later titled “The Modern Painter’s World”), and in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ibid.

  Catherine Tatge’s film, Robert Motherwell and the New York School: Storming the Citadel, for the PBS series American Masters, was also a valuable reference.

  The Dog of

  the Marriage

  Beach Town

  The house next door was rented for the summer to a couple who swore at missed croquet shots. Their music at night was loud, and I liked it; it was not music I knew. Mornings, I picked up the empties they had lobbed across the hedge, Coronas with the limes wedged inside, and pitched them back over. We had not introduced ourselves these three months.

  Between our houses a tall privet hedge is backed by white pine for privacy in winter. The day I heard the voice of a woman not the wife, I went out back to a spot more heavily planted but with a break I could just see through. Now it was the man who was talking, or trying to—he started to say things he could not seem to finish. I watched the woman do something memorable to him with her mouth. Then the man pulled her up from where she had been kneeling. He said, “Maybe you’re just hungry. Maybe we should get you something to eat.”

  The woman had a nimble laugh.

  The man said, “Paris is where you and I should go.”

  The woman asked what was wrong with here. She said, “I like a beach town.”

  I wanted to phone the wife’s office in the city and hear what she would sound like if she answered. I had no fellow feeling; all she had ever said to me was couldn’t I mow my lawn later in the day. It was noon when she asked. I told her the village bylaws disallow mowing before seven-thirty, and that I had waited until nine. A gardener, hired by my neighbor, cared for their yard. But still I was sure they were neglecting my neighbor’s orchids. All summer long I had watched for the renters to leave the house together so that I could let myself in with the key from the shelf in the shed and test the soil and water the orchids.