Missing women & others - Brossura

Spence, June

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1573227374 ISBN 13: 9781573227377

Casa editrice: Riverhead Books, 1999

Riassunto

A collection of short stories explores the hidden lives of so-called ordinary people--including our neighbors, our co-workers, our relatives, and ourselves--by the winner of the 1995 Willa Cather award. Reprint.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

June Spence' s stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1997, The Southern Review, Seventeen, and The Oxford American. The winner of the 1995 Willa Cather Award, she lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she was born.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

“These stories are not only rich in characters, events, and perceptions of the way we feel and think, they are also imaginatively written on every level, from the choice of particular words to the flow of sentences to the shape of whole stories. One sees great promise in this writer—and then one thinks, No, it isn’t promise—this writer has just plain entered the city.”

—Leonard Michaels

“Spence’s skills in depicting the ordinary and in conveying the fragility of even the closest relationships make this a strong collection.”

—Booklist

“The people in these stories walk that fine line between happiness and loneliness, sorrow and joy, contentment and fear. They are merely human and trying to make their way through a world that is often daunting and confusing, a world that can shift and change suddenly and without warning. In her beautiful sentences June Spence writes about them with knowledge and intelligence, with wit and insight, and a generous helping of compassion.”

—Larry Brown

“Deep, rich language filled with metaphor and meaning is unquestionably one of the more stirring aspects of this collection. These stories . . . tap into and try to make sense of the hurts and pleasures common to all by virtue of simply being alive.”

—Greensboro News & Record

“Short stories that write of life as it is, in language measured and sure. A promising debut.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Many thanks to

Gloria Hickock

of Helicon 9 Editions,

Leonard Michaels,

Cindy Spiegel,

and Nicole Aragi

CONTENTS

OTHER
HALVES

The couple in the other half of Fay’s duplex has been gone about two weeks now. The rhythmic creaking of their lovemaking has ceased, and now the night sound is mostly faded, somber crickets. She misses the soothing racket of her neighbors. They were familiar details, if not friends. The girl played bagpipe music at six A.M. and had a pleasant, horsey smell. The guy had no muffler in his jeep and often left his mud-caked thongs out to dry on the front porch. Fay is wondering where they went, why.

She has never been so interested in anyone’s business before now. Alone, she pays attention to the background noises. More is at stake. A rustle at the window, and she listens for distinctions: unintentional, the wind at the branches again, or deliberate, a hand parting the brush.

When the front door swelled from the heat a few nights ago, Fay couldn’t push it shut enough to make the bolt click locked. With Cliff around, she’d have just put on the chain and gone to bed. But she sensed how fragile the chain was, how just a shoulder braced against the door could snap it. She slept in the foyer that night, ready to greet the intruder right off.

Evenings alone are sometimes more difficult than Fay would like to admit. A little wine tends to soften this knowledge and make the night noises less interesting. Fay usually buys Chablis or Rhine in two- or three-liter jugs for greater economy. She prides herself at how long it took to finish the last bottle at the rate of one or two glasses a day: two and a half weeks. She figures this surely is a normal rate of consumption for a single person. She paces herself by taking occasional delicate sips. She traces up the stem of her glass, cups the bulb in her palm, lifts it slowly to her lips, tips the cold, tart liquid gently into her mouth.

Drinking must remain a deliberate act, she feels. Developing and adhering to new routines, certainties to rely on, has been a nice distraction for Fay. Breakfast is always an apple or a pear, a glass of tea, and two Dexatrims. She enjoys the anxious spurts that the capsules send thrilling through her veins all day. They don’t seem to break her appetite; by lunch she is usually hungry for a cheeseburger, fries drenched in gravy, and a salad with blue cheese dressing. Dinner is the cautious intake of wine.

She has tried to explain this to Cliff, how it illustrates the control she has begun to exert over her actions. He appears to be listening, but his response is then to ask about the car or whether she needs money. He stops over now only to pick up leftover items: a tire iron, his aftershave, the jacket with suede elbow patches. He cannot stay long; a tic begins to pulse at the corner of his mouth, curling it into a snarl.

Fay considers it bad sportsmanship on his part. After all, she stayed with him and was faithful for a full year after he tore up her car and slapped a bruise on her cheek, six months after he was rumored to be dating the seventeen-year-old waitress at Captain Nemo’s. These things had pissed her off, of course, but she was slowly deadening to them. Then Lou.

Lou had gotten apprenticed to Fay’s uncle Bert shortly after the Cliff-waitress talk began. Bert, a crusty old sign painter, whose hand was still true but whose eyesight was going fast, was glad to have him. Bert wanted someone to pass on the business to, since his own uninterested children had gone into banking, used-car sales, and prison. Lou was an art school dropout with a care for detail and an eye for color that gladdened Bert’s heart.

Before Fay got the accounting job at Fritzi’s Junior College, which offered medical insurance, she kept the books at Bert’s shop and ran the vinyl letter cutter that he never quite got the hang of. She had made a point of not talking too much to Lou when he was first hired; her suspicions of Cliff still made her crave revenge sometimes, so she felt it dangerous to get to know any new men. Still, she watched with interest as he learned the rudiments of sign painting. Bert had eaten apprentices for breakfast for a good two years before Lou. Fay lost count of how many had broken under Bert’s rasping criticism. She was ready for the day that Lou would be driven cursing from the shop.

Curiously, Lou lingered on, undaunted by the abrasive instruction he was given.

“You call that blob an oval?” Bert would taunt. “I said serifs, not tree branches sprouting off the goddamn letters. Give me a good clean Times, not some psychedelic hippyshit.” Lou might snort in appreciation or shift to get a better angle on the board, but he never wavered in his gaze, never stopped painting. Bert’s razzing began to take on a more affectionate tone.

“Look at that crazy sonofabitch,” he’d tell Fay, palming the greasy shock of white hair off his forehead. “Works his sorry ass off for six an hour and no benefits. Look at him! Barely even pencils in his designs. Fucking Rembrandt up there!”

And Fay looked. No harm in that. Only there was such focused power in his stance, the sweeps and arcs of his arms, his wrists, the fluid motions of his hands. She’d never seen a more deliberate man. Fay began to ponder what all else those graceful, capable hands could do, and found she could barely look him in the eye after that. I am married, she told herself often, but that only underlined the fact that she needed to be touched with some skill.

Lou’s and Fay’s birthday fell within a few days of each other, so Bert brought a cake to the shop. It had Happy Birthday Fay written in pink cursive frosting, with & Lou added in blue. Bert is an economical man. If two birthdays could be covered with one cake, then so much the better. Now he feels somewhat responsible, as if by pairing them on the cake he set something inexorable in motion.

In a way, he did. The very notion of sharing a birthday cake with Lou, their breaths mingling over the blown-out candles, proved too much for Fay. She devoured the mealy white cake. When Lou leaned over and gently brushed a glob of frosting off her chin, something inside her just shifted out of place.

That oddness inside still remains, keeps her perpetually dissatisfied. She surveys her half of the little duplex: the bad gold rug, her carefully framed seascapes on the walls, Cliff’s extravagant big-screen TV, which takes up so much space. She despairs at how all the furniture slants expectantly toward it. She doubts the couple next door even has a television. She has never heard the dim murmuring through the walls, never glimpsed a pulsating glow through their windows when she came home late.

She has heard their most intimate sounds, though, and wonders what they might have heard from her. She remembers one night when she was unable to keep from yelling at Cliff. Her tirade was incomprehensible to him, something about skilled hands versus hands that slap, hands that touch other women. “Which do you think I have chosen?” she shouted imperiously. But he simply had no idea yet what or whom she meant. How much did they know?

But the couple is not here to be asked, and Cliff is no longer around to fuel her anger by shrugging helplessly at it. Fay takes a measured gulp from her glass and ponders her next move. Once she would have gargled, changed panties, run a brush through her hair, and headed back over to the shop. Lou would be there even now, probably, practicing his curlicues, airbrushing shaded spheres onto scraps of resin board.

That first night she went, she found him straddling a bench with a pint of whiskey, quietly regarding a steer-shaped sign Bert had left him to finish. Sample Sadie’s Succulent Sirloin, it read. Exit 22 miles. The letters were painted a raw-meat red, streaked white with fat. Fay had come to talk to him but had some leftover paperwork to finish in case she lost her nerve.

He greeted Fay with a surprised smile, then gestured at the sign for her opinion.

“Gross,” she offered. “But . . . technically brilliant?”

“Story of my life.” He sighed, offering her the bottle.

Fay sat next to him on the bench and took a long swig. It made a good burn down her throat. She thought if she could just break down and cry, he’d have to comfort her. But she felt too happy. She said to herself, My marriage is wrecked; sometimes that thought would cause tears to well up. But now it just made her giddy with desire. She tried it aloud: “My marriage is wrecked.” She felt her face smirking around the words. “Oh God,” she cried, covering her face with her hands, too late to conceal the laughter erupting from her.

She shook with it for a few moments. Lou, bewildered, sipped the whiskey in silence. When she had quieted down some, he handed her back the bottle. She took another long pull and felt her face and chest flush.

“My marriage,” she said, “is wrecked.” She snorted, giggled, howled with laughter. She reached again for the bottle.

“Good Christ,” said Lou. “Drink up.”

“You have such nice hands,” she told him, laughter suddenly gone. She touched his wrist lightly, then pulled back, frightened.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Come here.” And with those deft, gentle hands, then the length of his body, he drew her in.

There had been a brief period of halfhearted subterfuge before Cliff found out. Fay might say carelessly to him, “I’m out with the girls tonight,” as she left, or, “Late night at the shop,” as she came in. Barely adequate, but they went unchallenged. Soon she dispensed with even the lamest excuses, just came and went.

Then Fay drifted in one morning about three A.M. She wriggled out of her bra, peeled off her panties, glimpsed herself in the dresser mirror, her body contoured by moonlight. Another shape loomed in the reflection, and she whirled around. It was Cliff, sitting straight up in bed.

She got that caught feeling, of course, but like at age six, standing before her mother, who asked her, “Were you eating candy?” and though she was sticky with it, hands, face, hair, the lie spilled easily from her mouth. So she was then, sticky with evidence: face and neck scraped raw by Lou’s stubble, dried and peeling spots on her breasts and stomach, and the lie spilled easily from her mouth.

It wasn’t so much her sleeping with Lou but the consummate ease with which she did it that angered him most. Cliff threw some clothing into a gym bag and left; Fay slept like a sated baby.

She longs for that easy sleep now. But with night coming and no word yet from Lou, she is coiled tight, expectant. There is no rule that says he will come, that she will even hear from him, but something prevents her from seeking him out instead. Not pride, exactly, but she tallies his advances and hers, tries to keep them even.

The girth of him, the fit. It is as though her body has been indelibly molded by his. The curve of her cheek conforms to the nape of his neck; her belly presses flush against the small of his back when they sleep like spoons. They shift and relink in endless combinations, multiplied, the sum of parts: a shoulder wedging into an armpit, hair meshing, palms cupping hips, buttocks, the soft thudding of pelvic bones, nails dancing down a spine, a tongue glistening a nipple erect, breath caressing hollows, the dip between breasts, the navel, tickly parting hairs, working slowly into the warmth, the clasping, the tugging in.

When she runs into Lou around town, it is as though this never was. He greets her with a curt nod, if at all. It is like getting punched in the stomach, this public denial. She wants to tell him how she gave up everything for him, but in truth she lost little or nothing. The old constancy, perhaps. The deadening feeling. And he never asked her to, anyway.

It grows late, and Fay feels with grim certainty that there will be no call, no visit, tonight. The house feels hollow, silent, in need of blotting out, but Fay empties her wineglass into the toilet and turns out the lights.

A sputtering, mufflerless jeep careens into the driveway, its headlights illuminating her bedroom for a swift moment. The neighbors are back, Fay realizes with delight. She pauses in the doorway of her bedroom, relishing the door slams, the familiar clapping of his thongs, the crunching of her boots on gravel as they approach the house. They enter and their footfalls become soft wooden creakings that quickly fade into silence.

She undresses slowly, deliberately, then stretches out on top of the bedcovers. It is as though she is unwilling to penetrate that layer of down without damn good reason. After Lou stays over, the bed takes on a ravaged, haggard look: the pillows are flung away, the sheets and pad wrenched back to expose striped, stained ticking. It is small consolation that the bed will require only a light smoothing tomorrow morning.

Fay listens hard, hoping to be lulled by the neighbors’ sounds, but the house has settled and grown still again. They must be tired from a long trip. She imagines them lying together, their bodies linked and quiet in the dark, and for now it is enough. She pats the empty space beside her and lets the trees whisper her to sleep.

A NICE MAN,
A GOOD GIRL

Emile does sometimes, idly, consider his alternate life, add eighteen years to the day his baby might have made it to birth alive, blood illuminating the skin. Her skin, a daughter. Assuming no other mishaps occurred, by this time he might have watched her graduate high school, hauled her possessions to a college dormitory in a nearby city, walked her down the aisle—any number of touching fatherly things. Her face is a...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Riverhead Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1573227374
• ISBN 13: 9781573227377
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 208