Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Instead, she began thinking about what to leave behind. Her panties seemed like the best choice. They were of an ordinary sort, simple, relatively new, and fresh that morning. She could hide them at the very back of his closet. Could there be anything more appropriate to leave in exchange? But, when she took them off, the crotch was damp. I guess this comes from desire, too, she thought. It would hardly do to leave something tainted by her lust in his room. She would only be degrading herself. She slipped them back on and began to think about what else to leave.

  Scheherazade broke off her story. For a long time, she didn’t say a word. She lay there breathing quietly with her eyes closed. Beside her, Habara followed suit, waiting for her to resume.

  At last, she opened her eyes and spoke. ‘Hey, Mr Habara,’ she said. It was the first time she had addressed him by name.

  Habara looked at her.

  ‘Do you think we could do it one more time?’

  ‘I think I could manage that,’ he said.

  So they made love again. This time, though, was very different from the time before. Violent, passionate, and drawn out. Her climax at the end was unmistakable. A series of powerful spasms that left her trembling. Even her face was transformed. For Habara, it was like catching a brief glimpse of Scheherazade in her youth: the woman in his arms was now a troubled seventeen-year-old girl who had somehow become trapped in the body of a thirty-five-year-old housewife. Habara could feel her in there, her eyes closed, her body quivering, innocently inhaling the aroma of a boy’s sweaty T-shirt.

  This time, Scheherazade did not tell him a story after sex. Nor did she check the contents of his condom. They lay there quietly next to each other. Her eyes were wide open, and she was staring at the ceiling. Like a lamprey gazing up at the bright surface of the water. How wonderful it would be, Habara thought, if he, too, could inhabit another time or space – leave this single, clearly defined human being named Nobutaka Habara behind and become a nameless lamprey. He pictured himself and Scheherazade side by side, their suckers fastened to a rock, their bodies waving in the current, eying the surface as they waited for a fat trout to swim smugly by.

  ‘So what did you leave in exchange for the shirt?’ Habara broke the silence.

  She did not reply immediately.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said at last. ‘Nothing I had brought along could come close to that shirt with his odor. So I just took it and sneaked out. That was when I became a burglar, pure and simple.’

  When, twelve days later, Scheherazade went back to the boy’s house for the fourth time, there was a new lock on the front door. Its gold color gleamed in the midday sun, as if to boast of its great sturdiness. And there was no key hidden under the mat. Clearly, his mother’s suspicions had been aroused by the missing shirt. She must have searched high and low, coming across other signs that told of something strange going on in her house. Her instincts had been unerring, her reaction swift.

  Scheherazade was, of course, disappointed by this development, but at the same time she felt relieved. It was as if someone had stepped behind her and removed a great weight from her shoulders. This means I don’t have to go on breaking into his house, she thought. There was no doubt that, had the lock not been changed, her invasions would have gone on indefinitely. Nor was there any doubt that her actions would have escalated with each visit. Eventually, a member of the family would have shown up while she was on the second floor. There would have been no avenue of escape. No way to talk herself out of her predicament. This was the future that had been waiting for her, sooner or later, and the outcome would have been devastating. Now she had dodged it. Perhaps she should thank his mother – though she had never met the woman – for having eyes like a hawk.

  Scheherazade inhaled the aroma of his T-shirt each night before she went to bed. She slept with it next to her. She would wrap it in paper and hide it before she left for school in the morning. Then, after dinner, she would pull it out to caress and sniff. She worried that the odor might fade as the days went by, but that didn’t happen. The smell of his sweat had permeated the shirt for good.

  Now that further break-ins were out of the question, Scheherazade’s state of mind slowly began to return to normal. She daydreamed less in class, and her teacher’s words began to register. Nevertheless, her chief focus was not on her teacher’s voice but on her classmate’s behavior. She kept her eye discreetly trained on him, trying to detect a change, any indication at all that he might be nervous about something. But he acted exactly the same as always. He threw his head back and laughed as unaffectedly as ever, and answered promptly when called upon. He shouted as loudly in soccer practice and got just as sweaty. She could see no trace of anything out of the ordinary – just an upright young man, leading a seemingly unclouded existence.

  Still, Scheherazade knew of one shadow that was hanging over him. Or something close to that. No one else knew, in all likelihood. Just her (and, come to think of it, possibly his mother). On her third break-in, she had come across a number of pornographic magazines cleverly concealed in the farthest recesses of his closet. They were full of pictures of naked women, spreading their legs and offering generous views of their genitals. Some pictures portrayed the act of sex: men inserted rodlike penises into female bodies in the most unnatural of positions. Scheherazade had never laid eyes on photographs like these before. She sat at his desk and flipped slowly through the magazines, studying each photo with great interest. She guessed that he masturbated while viewing them. But the idea did not strike her as especially repulsive. She accepted masturbation as a perfectly normal activity. All those sperm had to go somewhere, just as girls had to have periods. In other words, he was a typical teen-ager. Neither hero nor saint. She found that knowledge something of a relief.

  ‘When my break-ins stopped, my passion for him began to cool. It was gradual, like the tide ebbing from a long, sloping beach. Somehow or other, I found myself smelling his shirt less often and spending less time caressing his pencil and badge. The fever was passing. What I had contracted was not something like sickness but the real thing. As long as it lasted, I couldn’t think straight. Maybe everybody goes through a crazy period like that at one time or another. Or maybe it was something that happened only to me. How about you? Did you ever have an experience like that?’

  Habara tried to remember, but drew a blank. ‘No, nothing that extreme, I don’t think,’ he said.

  Scheherazade looked somewhat disappointed by his answer.

  ‘Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn’t remember. Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how its glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that’s the story of my ‘breaking-and-entering’ period.’

  She made it sound like Picasso’s Blue Period, Habara thought. But he understood what she was trying to convey.

  She glanced at the clock next to the bed. It was almost time for her to leave.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ she said finally, ‘the story doesn’t end there. A few years later, when I was in my second year of nursing school, a strange stroke of fate brought us together again. His mother played a big role in it; in fact, there was something spooky about the whole thing – it was like one of those old ghost stories. Events took a rather unbelievable course. Would you like to hear about it?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Habara said.

  ‘It had better wait till my next visit,’ Scheherazade said. ‘It’s getting late. I’ve got to head home and fix dinner.’

  She got out of bed and put on her clothes – panties, stockings, camisole, and, finally, her skirt and blouse. Habara casually watched her movements from the bed. It struck him that the way women put on their clothes could be even
more interesting than the way they took them off.

  ‘Any books in particular you’d like me to pick up?’ she asked, on her way out the door.

  ‘No, nothing I can think of,’ he answered. What he really wanted, he thought, was for her to tell him the rest of her story, but he didn’t put that into words. Doing so might jeopardize his chances of ever hearing it.

  Habara went to bed early that night and thought about Scheherazade. Perhaps he would never see her again. That worried him. The possibility was just too real. Nothing of a personal nature – no vow, no implicit understanding – held them together. Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be terminated on that person’s whim. In other words, they were attached by a slender thread. It was likely – no, certain – that that thread would eventually be broken and all the strange and unfamiliar tales she might have told would be lost to him. The only question was when.

  It was also possible that he would, at some point, be deprived of his freedom entirely, in which case not only Scheherazade but all women would disappear from his life. Never again would he be able to enter the warm moistness of their bodies. Never again would he feel them quiver in response. Perhaps an even more distressing prospect for Habara than the cessation of sexual activity, however, was the loss of the moments of shared intimacy. What his time spent with women offered was the opportunity to be embraced by reality, on the one hand, while negating it entirely on the other. That was something Scheherazade had provided in abundance – indeed, her gift was inexhaustible. The prospect of losing that made him saddest of all.

  Habara closed his eyes and stopped thinking of Scheherazade. Instead, he thought of lampreys. Of jawless lampreys fastened to rocks, hiding among the waterweeds, swaying back and forth in the current. He imagined that he was one of them, waiting for a trout to appear. But no trout passed by, no matter how long he waited. Not a fat one, not a skinny one, no trout at all. Eventually the sun went down, and his world was enfolded in darkness.

  (2014)

  Translated by Ted Goossen

  Deborah Treisman is the Fiction Editor of The New Yorker and the host of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

  ★

  TESSA HADLEY

  This story, set probably in the 1910s or 1920s but written much later, through the long perspective of memory, is about an uncomfortable date between two people not at all suited to each other. They begin with high hopes, but quickly realize they don’t like each other – don’t understand each other at all, don’t speak the same language. It’s an odd, sideways-on, quirky little fragment. When the narrator gets home at the end of the story, she puts away the new pink underwear she had bought specially for the occasion. At first the women in Rhys’s stories seem crushed by the overbearing men. The men are so certain of the rules they live by, the codes. You mustn’t, for instance, shoot sitting birds; you mustn’t make up stories. And you must either be a lady or a bad girl, there’s no space for ambiguity in between. Yet the women are tougher really, they see what the men don’t see. They see the absurdity and comedy of the rules: and that nothing in life is actually so clear. At the end of their awful night – how that bed looms, in the corner of the private dining room! – there’s such satisfaction for her in putting away the pretty underwear. She’s saving it for something better, another time, another man – a better one. And then she falls asleep without a qualm. It’s a good story about sleeping alone, the pleasures of sleeping all alone.

  On Not Shooting Sitting Birds

  by Jean Rhys

  There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you’d never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father’s pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It’s in this way that I remember buying the pink Milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel.

  I had started out in life trusting everyone and now I trusted no one. So I had few acquaintances and no close friends. It was perhaps in reaction against the inevitable loneliness of my life that I’d find myself doing bold, risky, even outrageous things without hesitation or surprise. I was usually disappointed in these adventures and they didn’t have much effect on me, good or bad, but I never quite lost the hope of something better or different.

  One day, I’ve forgotten now where, I met this young man who smiled at me and when we had talked a bit I agreed to have dinner with him in a couple of days’ time. I went home excited, for I’d liked him very much and began to plan what I should wear. I had a dress I quite liked, an evening cloak, stockings, but my underclothes weren’t good for the occasion, I decided. Next day I went out and bought the Milanese silk chemise and drawers.

  So there we were seated at a table having dinner with a bedroom very obvious in the background. He was younger than I’d thought and stiffer and I didn’t like him much at all. He kept eyeing me in such a wary, puzzled way. When we had finished our soup and the waiter had taken the plates away, he said: ‘But you’re a lady, aren’t you?’ exactly as he might have said, ‘But you’re really a snake or a crocodile, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh no, not that you’d notice,’ I said, but this didn’t work. We looked glumly at each other across the gulf that had yawned between us.

  Before I came to England I’d read many English novels and I imagined I knew all about the thoughts and tastes of various sorts of English people. I quickly decided that to distract or interest this man I must talk about shooting.

  I asked him if he knew the West Indies at all. He said no, he didn’t and I told him a long story of having been lost in the Dominican forest when I was a child. This wasn’t true. I’d often been in the woods but never alone. ‘There are no parrots now,’ I said, ‘or very few. There used to be. There’s a Dominican parrot in the zoo – have you ever seen it? – a sulky bird, very old I think. However, there are plenty of other birds and we do have shooting parties. Perdrix are very good to eat, but ramiers are rather bitter.’

  Then I began describing a fictitious West Indian shooting party and all the time I talked I was remembering the real thing. An old shotgun leaning up in one corner of the room, the round table in the middle where we would sit to make cartridges, putting the shot in, ramming it down with a wad of paper. Gunpowder? There was that too, for I remember the smell. I suppose the boys were trusted to be careful.

  The genuine shooting party consisted of my two brothers, who shared the shotgun, some hangers-on and me at the end of the procession, for then I couldn’t bear to be left out of anything. As soon as the shooting was about to start I would stroll away casually and when I was out of sight run as hard as I could, crouch down behind a bush and put my fingers in my ears. It wasn’t that I was sorry for the birds, but I hated and feared the noise of the gun. When it was all over I’d quietly join the others. I must have done this unobtrusively or probably my brothers thought me too insignificant to worry about, for no one ever remarked on my odd behaviour or teased me about it.

  On and on I went, almost believing what I was saying, when he interrupted me, ‘Do you mean to say that your brothers shot sitting birds?’ His voice was cold and shocked.

  I stared at him. How could I convince this man that I hadn’t the faintest idea whether my brothers shot sitting birds or not? How could I explain now what really happened? If I did he’d think me a liar. Also a coward and there he’d be right, for I was afraid of many things, not only the sound of gunfire. But by this time I wasn’t sure that I liked him at all so I was silent and felt my face growing as stiff and unsmiling as his.

  It was a most uncomfortable dinner. We both avoided looking at th
e bedroom and when the last mouthful was swallowed he announced that he was going to take me home. The way he said this rather puzzled me. Then I told myself that probably he was curious to see where I lived. Neither of us spoke in the taxi except to say, ‘Well, good night.’ ‘Good night.’

  I felt regret when it came to taking off my lovely pink chemise, but I could still think: Some other night perhaps, another sort of man.

  I slept at once.

  (1976)

  Tessa Hadley has written six novels, including Accidents in the Home (2002), The London Train (2011) and The Past (2015), and two collections of short stories. She publishes short stories regularly in the New Yorker, reviews for the London Review of Books, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. In 2016, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction.

  ★

  The Dream

  by Theodore Roethke

  1

  I met her as a blossom on a stem

  Before she ever breathed, and in that dream

  The mind remembers from a deeper sleep:

  Eye learned from eye, cold lip from sensual lip.

  My dream divided on a point of fire;

  Light hardened on the water where we were;

  A bird sang low; the moonlight sifted in;

  The water rippled, and she rippled on.

  2

  She came toward me in the flowing air,

  A shape of change, encircled by its fire.

  I watched her there, between me and the moon;

  The bushes and the stones danced on and on;

  I touched her shadow when the light delayed;

  I turned my face away, and yet she stayed.

  A bird sang from the center of a tree;

  She loved the wind because the wind loved me.