by Amy Hempel
Such an extravagant sense of what is normal. Depends on what you’re used to, I suppose.
All those questions, each one of them a version of just the one thing: Was I better served in another’s embrace than in his own?
“We might clear a space,” I said. “You can’t fill every hour.”
“Is that what we’ve been doing?”
I never wanted to tell him.
He wanted his suspicion confirmed, although it would be ghastly to have it confirmed. I watched his salacity turn to fear. All the nights I had drawn out the exchange, holding back information, scornful of his boyish need to know, yet protective of that boyishness, too—his insatiable urging, wanting the savor of the way women are with each other, what they say to each other, him begging for female truth.
“May I count on you to utter the next sentence?” he would say.
I never wanted to tell him. I said, “I’ll show you what she did to me,” and he said, “But you can’t show me, I’m not a woman—you have to tell me.”
He was eager for the thing that would undo him. He had disallowed my earlier squeamishness, insisted I tear it apart. Okay. I would give him some female truth. What would have made me seem compliant when we started was assault by the time I told him.
I told him in just one word.
I said, “The answer to your question is: Precision. I can tincture it with more patently sexual language, but really, that’s what you’re after. Katherine was precise. I mean what you think I mean.”
He looked me over to see if I was playing.
A thrilling calm settled over me.
He propped himself up on an elbow.
“Look at that,” he said. “The single word that brings an inquisition to an end.”
I leaned back on the couch and let my breath out. I held his hand and thought, What now? Not asking him, but myself.
Because it was up to me!
I would not introduce him to Katherine; I would not give him the chance to tell me she was more beautiful than he had imagined. Let him reside in his failure of imagination; I had been generous. I had more. But it was mine.
I led him from the couch back to the desecrated ground. I lay down next to him. I wanted to console him—I sent a herd of words and the dust rose and it was not enough.
He had told me to say we did it twelve times.
Well, maybe it was twelve times, and maybe it wasn’t any times at all.
You want the truth and you want the truth and when you get it you can’t take it and have to turn away. So is telling a person the truth a good or malignant act? Precision—that was easy. He had asked for it! There was more to tell; there would always be more to tell. If I chose to tell him.
In the meantime.
I was never more myself than when I was lying in this man’s arms.
We lay quietly, holding each other. Time was slown way down. Finally he said, “Did you ever wear a linen dress on a summer day? A wheat-colored linen dress whose hem fluttered in a breeze? And did you pin up your hair on both sides so that your long hair funneled down your back in that breeze?”
I did not know who he was describing, but I said yes, I had dressed like that in the summers when I was young.
“Darling,” he said.
I knew he was not entirely with me, and I had a shopworn thought: To be able to reverse the direction of time! But wouldn’t we have to go through the same things in reverse?
“Darling,” he said again.
So here we go, careening along in the only direction there is to go in, our bodies braced for transport—“Unimprovable,” he says.
Notes
The harpist who sings at the bedside of the dying is the musicologist and thanatologist Therese Schroeder-Sheker.
The expert who defined animal happiness is Vicki Hearne.
“Those who can’t repeat the past are condemned to remember it” is from Mark O’Donnell.
The mystery writer is Patricia Highsmith.
“We do not quite forgive a giver” is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Gifts.”
The artist is Ray Johnson, in the film How to Draw a Bunny.
The lines quoted are from “The Garden of Proserpine” by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
With special thanks to Gordon Lish,
editor of my first and second books,
for the conversation of thirty years.
About the Author
AMY HEMPEL is the author of The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and Reasons to Live, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Elle; GQ; Harper’s; Playboy; The Quarterly; The Yale Review; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Vanity Fair. She is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and she teaches at the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College. She lives in New York City.
Reasons to Live
Certain stories originally appeared in the following periodicals, sometimes under different titles and in slightly different form: Tendril, Mademoiselle, California, and The Missouri Review. “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” originally appeared in TriQuarterly and has been reprinted in The Editors’ Choice: New American Stories. “Going” and “Why I’m Here” originally appeared in Vanity Fair. “San Francisco” originally appeared in Harper’s.
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
“The Most Girl Part of You” was published in Vanity Fair and reprinted in New American Short Stories, Vol. I. “Du Jour” was published in The Mississippi Review. “Rapture of the Deep” and “The Day I Had Everything” were published in Grand Street. “At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom” appeared in Columbia. “The Harvest,” “The Lady Will Have the Slug Louie,” and “To Those of You Who Missed Your Connecting Flights Out of O’Hare” were published in The Quarterly. “And Lead Us Not into Penn Station” appeared as “Litany” in 7 Days. “Murder” was published in Mother Jones and was reprinted in Louder Than Words. “In the Animal Shelter” appeared in Tampa Review. “Under No Moon” appeared in Zyzzyva. “The Rest of God” was published in The Yale Review. “The Center” appeared in Witness. “Tom-Rock Through the Eels” was published in Taxi. Flower Lore and Legend, by Katherine M. Beals, from which a verse of the Mary Clemmer Ames poem is excerpted, was originally published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Wesleyan University Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Approaching Prayer” by James Dickey from James Dickey Poems 1957–1967. Copyright © 1964 by James Dickey. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Tumble Home
“Weekend” appeared first in Harper’s; “Sportsman” appeared first in GQ; “The Annex” in The Yale Review; “The New Lodger” in The Quarterly; “Church Cancels Cow” in The Alaska Quarterly Review; “Housewife” in Micro Fiction. Parts of “Tumble Home” appeared first in Epoch, Elle, and Salmagundi.
The Dog of the Marriage
“Beach Town” was previously published in Tin House and appeared in Bestial Noise (an anthology published by Tin House). “The Uninvited” was previously published in GQ. “Reference #388475848-5” appeared in Ontario Review. “What Were the White Things?” appeared in Bellevue Literary Review. “The Dog of the Marriage, Part 1” was published as “Now I Can See the Moon” in Elle and reprinted in Labor Days. The Mississippi Review first published “The Dog of the Marriage, Part 4.” “The Afterlife” was previously published in Playboy. “Matinee”—now part of “Offertory”—appeared in Fence.
