The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  In fact, I remembered pleading exhaustion that night, and sleeping by myself downstairs. But there was nothing for him in that. I gave him instead a scene from a live act I watched through a one-way mirror in a South-of-Market theater. Phillip had taken me there on a night when prohibitions turned into permissions. Neither of us had told Katherine.

  I dressed for him on the night that made it a month since I had started meeting him at the loft downtown where he waited for me “all pins-and-needle-y,” he said.

  I had had to go to a dinner first, a benefit for something worth giving money to. The transition was too quick, the way it is when you fly to a place that you need train time to adjust to. On the way to the loft, I had felt tired by what went on there, by the bottomless pit of it, the ever-ratcheted-up attempts to hold his attention on me.

  In the bedroom there was a movie playing. I recognized it as one of the red-boxed collection in his bedroom closet. We had watched this one before, the one in which the male star auditions Polish girls for his next film. Were they really in Poland in the film? Who could tell? What mattered was that these were girls who would do anything, anywhere.

  I arrived during the scene where the two girls, maybe nineteen years old, are lying naked beside each other in a hotel room. The star opens one girl’s legs, and then the other’s, for the camera. Both of the girls have shaved, or have been shaved. Then the star pulls the first girl, the blonde, into a sitting position on the edge of the bed and, standing in front of her, forces his cock into her mouth. It is possible that the scene is, to some extent, unacted—the size of his cock forces tears into the girl’s eyes.

  When the actor is finished with her, he turns to the second girl, who has been watching him with the first. He turns her over so that he can fit himself into her from behind; at the same time, another man (he had been lounging in a chair earlier, naked) pulls her on top of him and enters her from the front. While this is going on, the first girl wipes her eyes and breathes with her mouth open as she watches the girl beside her on the bed. After a while, the second girl cries out in Polish.

  “The thing about these films,” he said, “is that this really happened. We’re seeing something that really happened.”

  I tried to rally to the feel of his hand on my leg. But a part of me was still at the dinner, greeting guests in black tie.

  “You know why I want to see you with another lover?” he said, watching the screen. “I want to see a secret you—I would trade possession of you for it.”

  He had offered to bring in women who modeled for him, and I had declined. I knew there was no one he would rather see me with than Katherine.

  I thought of the photographs he had taken of me. He felt the results were not worthy, did not resemble the nature of what was. He said, “They do not convey the trance you occupy during those times, the trance both of us inhabit, one with the other, one on account of the other, during those times.”

  “So what is seen is not what is felt?” I asked.

  He said, “No instrument carried from a prior place could be expected to capture the feelings effected there.”

  I had already found the photographs he’d taken of others in a portfolio in another part of the loft.

  The moment I wished he would turn off the movie, he muted the sound and turned his attention to me. This quality of attention righted things between us.

  Then we were all flesh, and all feeling in that flesh. We abided in it, joined and rejoined, distance collapsed.

  “Harmony,” he whispered.

  I said the word back to him.

  Harmony sought, harmony required, “No life lost to us,” he said.

  There is an almost unbridgeable gulf between what an artist sees and what an artist paints. I knew this from my studies, and from looking at things myself. There are artists—Mondrian was one—who went from representation to abstraction by painting dying flowers, chrysanthemums in Mondrian’s case. With this man, it had happened in reverse. He had painted vases of dying asters, all the time getting closer to figuration. Early on, he gave me a drawing from this series, not the one I wanted, but the one he wanted me to have.

  He told me not to bring him flowers, but I often brought flowers with me, lately cabbage roses. He seemed pained to receive them and did not really look at them until they started to decay. He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.

  Renoir told Matisse he would pick flowers in the fields and arrange them in a vase, and then he would paint the side he had not arranged.

  On the walls of the loft there were portraits of this man’s mother, drawn while she lay in her hospital bed; he drew her as she got smaller, up until the day she died there.

  “No one tells me better stories,” he assured me. I was aware of the point at which a compliment becomes a trap, because you are expected to keep doing the thing you are praised for; resentment will follow when you stop.

  “Lie back,” I said.

  That night I had worn my grandmother’s diamond earrings. I thought I might leave one behind in his bed the next morning. The moment this occurred to me, I thought, Why should he require an object to bring me to mind?

  The music he had put on was a medieval motet. Two voices begin, and are joined by two more, then two more, until forty-eight singers are holding forth together. It has the hypnotic effect of chant, but it is song. I knew that if he ever heard this music out in the world, I would be the person he would think of. There it was again, thinking in terms of souvenirs, what you take away from a place to help you call it back.

  Obediently, he lay back in the barely lit room. I kept on a sea green slip and joined him, sitting on the bed so as to force his legs apart. I stroked him slowly and said, “The time in the pool at night? There was something I left out before.”

  “This was in Laguna?” he said, as though he could have forgotten.

  “Katherine and I drove down in a day. We left at dawn and took the Grapevine south—not much to see, but we wanted to make the best time. I wanted to watch the sunset from her sister’s pool, or, if we were too late for that, to see the full moon from the pool. We only stopped at that place that has the oysters.”

  “I know that place—”

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  “Her sister lived in one of those heavily landscaped compounds where several bungalows share a large pool. Night-blooming jasmine was planted around this pool, so the air smelled good when you swam after dark.”

  “You wear jasmine sometimes when you come to me,” he said.

  “We both gave in to the drone of the drive, that line down the center of the state. It was driving with a destination, but with nothing required of us when we got there.”

  “The way you can drive in California!” he said. “I used to love that about it.”

  I reached for a bottle of almond-scented oil. I poured a little in my hand.

  “We didn’t unpack at first,” I said. “We pulled on bathing suits from a duffel bag and wrapped beach towel sarongs around them. Except that I had been unable to find mine, and had packed a leotard instead, the Danskin kind with the narrow straps, flesh-colored.

  “There were only two other people in the pool. Two men were doing laps in the deep end. Katherine and I stood in water up to our breasts and held on to the edge of the pool with our arms stretched out behind us. The water was heated, and it swayed against us slowly from the motion of the swimmers doing laps.”

  “Time was slown way down,” he said, his eyes closed.

  “We stayed like that,” I said, “until the men climbed out of the pool and lay down on chaises spread with towels at our end.

  “Are you with me?” I asked.

  “Darling,” he said.

  “Katherine churned the water around her, and when she did a handstand, I saw that she had taken off her suit. The men saw, too, of course. They were quite a bit older than we were, and wore plaid swimming trunks. What an awful word—trunks.

  “Are
you listening?” I asked. “Because one of the things I just told you was a lie. Can you tell me what was the thing that I made up?”

  “You mustn’t tease an old man.”

  “But really,” I said, suddenly exhausted, “don’t you have something like this on video? Maybe we could just watch that?”

  My voice was raw, and when I coughed, he got up to get me a glass of water. On his way back from the kitchen, he stopped to play back messages left by callers during the night.

  We were not much for dreams. But one I woke him up to tell him went like this:

  “I’m driving on a bridge.”

  “Transition,” he said.

  “When my car breaks down.”

  “You have a breakdown,” he said.

  “And suddenly the water is rising.”

  “Feelings,” he said, “rising,” he said.

  “Your car needs a tune-up,” he said, and drew me back to bed, where the Nice Man made the Bad Dream stop.

  Sometimes he would reminisce about another woman. When I was chilly because I suspected the woman had been to the loft the day before, he would say, “Oh, come on. Now, come on. What does that take away from you?”

  “Dignity?” I said. “I find it humiliating.”

  “You said in your letter that humiliation brings the softness of heart that allows you to listen to God.”

  “If you believe in God,” I said.

  “Or in humiliation,” he said.

  And when I grabbed a stack of photos of another inamorata and made a spray of them across the bed, he refused to speak to me for nearly a month.

  During that time I caught up on sleep and made the acquaintance of whatever turned up in the woods. I tutored some of the kids at the lake in drawing. I swam with the dog after dark. One night we followed a woman in a bathrobe down the lane to the little beach. She dropped her robe in the sand, and walked naked into the water. I didn’t hear a splash, and I didn’t see her again. But the robe was gone in the morning.

  When the month had passed and we broached the borders of accord, we went to a screening of a documentary film about the life of an artist he used to know. Why this painter had had to go and kill himself was the least of the mysteries about him. He had had a lively sense of fairness; the film director interviewed a patron who had balked at the asking price of a new canvas, and suggested he pay the artist three-quarters of the price instead. The artist agreed, and shipped his patron the painting with one-fourth of the canvas cut out.

  On the way to the theater we had reviewed the movie rules: He said there was to be no talking, no eating, no touching, and that if I needed to cross my legs I was to cross them in his direction. Before the lights dimmed, he had tucked his sweater up under my chin and around my shoulders. Soon, both his arms were around me. His lips brushed mine on the way to whisper in my ear. He said my composure was remarkable. He said, “It is your forbearance we have to thank for what could be a new tranquillity.” He said he believed life could be, if we would strive for composure, “all affirmation.”

  “Are you happy?” he asked me. It was a serious question. He meant, Was I happy sitting beside him about to start up again?

  I touched his face.

  “Then let us go and consecrate the desecrated ground.”

  On the night his best friend died, he said, “Stay with me.”

  It was almost morning and we had not slept and had not let go of each other all those hours, and he said quietly, “Stay with me.”

  I said, “You know I will.”

  He said, “You know what I mean.”

  I did know. He meant not all the time, but for all time. He meant despite everything he would do that would make me want to leave.

  I said, “I know what you mean, and you know I will.”

  The dog disappeared.

  For days I did what a person does when her dog has disappeared. No one at the lake had seen her. No one found a collar. I showed up crying at the loft days later. He walked me into the part of the loft where he worked. I saw that he had hung a new painting. It was a scene of Central Park on a sunny summer day. I saw a dog, as I had described my own to him, painted into the park.

  “She came here,” he said.

  I didn’t know what my neighbors at the lake thought of me, out all night and coming home just after dawn, walking a dog and then not walking a dog, not showing up for potlucks or Flag Day. But I kept the lawn mowed and put a flag decal on my car.

  He asked about the place on the lake but he never came to see it. He had done all the traveling he was ever going to do; that was the impression he gave. Now he traveled in time, taking me with him to where he had gone when he was a go-er. I was not so eager to go anywhere, really, so this didn’t bother me, except for once when I thought we should drive to Maine. I wanted us to drift in a canoe across a calm, cold lake, and listen to loons.

  He had been to a lake in Maine with someone else years before. He said his Maine had been a week at a famous fishing camp whose pricey guides took your family out at dawn and then fried your catch for lunch. What occupied him now was seeing how far a person could go in the realization of pleasure, without leaving home, two people in a bed.

  “Where do you look first?” he asked, holding me from behind. “What do you look at first?”

  He stood behind me after putting on a film. We looked at it together. In this one, a series of couples was glimpsed by a woman who made her way alone through a villa. There were no closed doors in this villa, so she kept finding men and women, or women and women, lying on beds or lounging in chairs naked. Those people were pleased, were excited, to have the woman see them. It seemed a good bet that one of those couples would invite the woman to join them.

  His question was not rhetorical. He wanted to know what I looked at first. What anyone looked at first. His was a life of looking—he was an artist, and he said he wanted to see it all. I disappointed him. I did not know what I looked at first. The people onscreen were less interesting than what he was doing with me.

  He kept the sound turned off. I was able to make him look away.

  He said he wanted to see everything, but did he, really? Does a person want to know the thing he is asking you to tell him?

  I wanted to get his voice on tape. I wanted to ask if he would mind repeating something he had said, this time into a microphone set on Record. The way he said “Darling,” for example, with all seriousness. I would want to hear him say this over and over, the way he looked at the photographs he took of us in bed “to preserve our best behavior,” he said, “against the times we are estranged and there is no one to divine our souls and pick us out from the rest.”

  The moment this would occur to me, I would feel a spur in my side, like the anxious spur of misalignment just before the two of us would subside into each other. I would kiss him roughly then, and he would kiss me back, and when we had fulfilled ourselves, we would fall asleep together. Waking later—I would wake up because he had—he would turn on the television and we would hold each other and watch the current events, “just lying still,” he would croon, “while the world worlds up at us.”

  I had not heard from Katherine for many years when her forwarded letter reached me. She was coming to New York, and she said she wanted to see me. I did not think this was coincidence; I felt I had conjured her by talking about her every night. I was excited and panic-stricken. I wanted to show them off to each other, and that would be a disaster. The three weeks’ notice had shrunk to a couple of days. I left a message at her hotel to hold for arrival.

  Last night I found him looking at Raphael’s Alba Madonna.

  He held the book so I could see. “Why is she facing left instead of right?” he asked. “Why the triangular arrangement of figures? Why a river in the background? Why is she wearing red?”

  “Because a human being made this?” I said.

  “Because a human being made this,” he said, pleased.

  The window shades were up. I looked across the
way to a window that was covered in sheer white fabric. The room was lit behind it so the woman in the room threw a visible silhouette. She was posing, or maybe doing a kind of yoga. Then a man joined the woman and she turned out the light.

  “This dress is very beautiful,” he said, his arms around me.

  “An old gift from Katherine,” I said. The seamstress had done a good job on the vintage navy lace. I had asked her to give it a lighter look by removing the silk lining from the knees down.

  “I want to hear about your friend,” he said, undoing the hooks and eyes. “But first I want to fuck you on this couch,” he said.

  “You do give it a gentlemanly contour,” I said, by way of welcome.

  “Are these tears?” he asked, smoothing hair back from my forehead.

  “It’s better in French.”

  “What is?” he said.

  I told him the part of a poem I was thinking about, one I’d had to learn in school in French as well as English: “…From hope and fear set free,…/…even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

  “You’re going to meet Katherine,” I said.

  “It’s brilliant,” he said, “liberating the past for a revival in the present.”

  His questions about Phillip had been abandoned some time back, but he started up again about Katherine and me. He suggested I bring her with me the next time I came to the loft. Well, of course he did. I said I thought we might do better in a gallery instead, with objects between us to look at, as we had. I knew he would be winning when I made the introductions. Katherine would be appreciative and intelligent and unimpeachably cordial to him. She might take a camera from her bag and take our picture, his and mine, then hand the camera to him to take one of her with me.

  One kind of woman would phone him the next day. He would want to be helpful, and what would begin in passion and deceit would wind down to something ordinary. It would fill my mouth with stones. But maybe Katherine would do this, too? Would Katherine require his gaze?