The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (34 page)

There is another side to this; it makes a pretty picture. The folks who raise the pups and then have to give them up? When the dogs get old and retire, the raisers can get them back. They can take them back in their well-earned rest. Raise enough puppies over the years—a steady stream of dear ones returning home.

Fran doesn’t hold a grudge. She says she liked the invitation, and we walk together to the office to have it copied.

There are people whose goodness brings them to do this work, and there are those of us who come here
for
it. Both ways work.

Although, metaphorically, I am still in the lake, priding myself on a strong Australian crawl while nearby a hammerhead waits. Never mind the fact that this ravenous shark, in real life, is found in warm seas. It is with me in the lake where I mourn my lost status as someone who doesn’t cause problems, and prove again that life is one long medley of prayers that we are not exposed, and try to convince myself that people who seem to suffer are not, in fact, unhappy, and want to be persuaded by the Japanese poem: “The barn burned down. / Now I can see the moon.”

Did I invite this? It is like sitting in prayers at school when the headmistress says, “Who dropped lunch bags on the hockey field?” and although you went home for lunch, you think,
I did, I did.

When my mother died, my father’s early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached. He was kind, cultured, youthful, and good-looking, and many women tended to him. They cooked dinner for him, and sent their housekeepers to his Victorian near the Presidio Gate. My brothers were away in college, but I, who had dropped out of school, spent a good deal of time at the house.

Some of the women who looked after my father banked their right actions for later, I felt. One woman signed him up for a concert series, but it was a kind of music he didn’t much like, and he had been at a concert—chamber music—the night my mother died.

One woman stocked his kitchen with candied ginger and snail shells and bottles of good red wine. I would prop bags of Oreos and Fig Newtons alongside so my brothers would find something familiar when they came home.

One woman sang to him; another, when he asked if she could sing, said, “If I were to sing, it would sound like talking louder.” A couple of the women courted me as the best bet. There were shopping trips, lunches in their gardens, suggestions for cutting my hair. I was not used to that kind of attention, and seeing through it didn’t mean I didn’t also like it.

One woman was impatient with his mourning, another seemed excited by it. She didn’t wear underwear when she came to visit; I knew because I heard her tell him. He told me she sent him pictures of herself naked; he was midwestern enough to be stunned.

The woman I liked—for a while she came over every night. She would get to his house when it was still light enough to see fog blowing down the street from the bay window in the living room. He would make her a drink in the kitchen, stirring in the Rose’s lime juice with a chopstick from the Japanese take-out place. He would carry it in to where he had seated her on the toast-colored Italian couch in front of the fire. The house was a hundred years old, but the furniture was futuristic.

She
was futuristic. She was forward-looking, although the past was what they had between them. Jane Stein had known my mother in college. She had married a friend of my father’s, and then had not seen my parents since. She still lived in the Midwest, but not with her husband anymore. I had looked her up the month before when I was in Chicago. When I found out she was going to San Francisco, I told my father to take her to dinner. On their second date, she arrived at the house with a black cashmere sweater for me—a “finder’s fee,” she said.

On their third date, the three of us went to dinner. Other of the women had wanted me along so my father could see them draw me out. Jane wanted me there because we thought the same things were funny. When my father complained about a nosy woman who detained him in the grocery store, Jane said, “That’s the trouble with people in general—you have to run into them.”

When I hung back a bit walking to the car, she said, “Take up space!” and pulled me along by the arm. The next week, she didn’t mind that I saw my father walk her to the front door in the morning.

One night: “I made a fool of myself on that trip,” I heard my father say. “Staying in the places I stayed with their mother years ago—I was posing the whole time,” he said, “playing the part of a man in grief, from St. Petersburg to Captiva.”

He was telling her about the time he’d gone by himself to Florida, only a few weeks after my mother died. Jane and my father were in the habit of travel. Every night they returned to his house, he mixed her a drink with a wooden chopstick, and took her on the trips he had taken to China, and Switzerland, and Venice with his late wife. Jane told him she would have thought she would be more interested in hearing about the places she had not seen herself, but was, in fact, more interested in where they had gone in this country, especially the places that she knew, too, along the coast of Florida. “What year was that?” she would ask, then do the math to see what she had been doing at the time.

When it was time for her to leave for the night, or the next morning, my father would put an object in her hands for her to take; he would divest himself of yet another
thing
—a Waring blender, a toaster oven—he could not imagine using again. He gave her classical CDs, a copper omelet pan, several crystal vases, a Victorian planter, a set of good knives, sweaters if the temperature had dropped the slightest bit, a comforter, books, a pumpkin pie he had made—he gave her something every day. Most of it she gave to the women’s shelter she was in town to advise. Then she would reappear, note all that had been given up or given away—the travel, the glass stirrer for drinks—and let him return to a place she’d never been.

On the last night she visited my father, she asked him if the two of them might go somewhere together. And he said, “Darling, I don’t go to the
dining room
anymore.”

“Is there a place you
could
go and be happy?” she asked.

My father said that maybe he could go back to Aspen. That was where he and my mother, and sometimes we kids, went every summer for a handful of years. None of us were skiers, and in summer the town hosted a music festival in a huge tent set up in a meadow. World-class musicians filled small hotels, and swam in the pools with tourists like us. My father knew a lot about classical music, so he was happy discussing the afternoon program with the First Chair Violin while my mother read on a chaise in the sun, and my brothers tried to land on me in the deep end from the high board.

This was when we had lived in a suburb of Denver, and went rock-collecting weekends in the foothills. The lichen-covered rocks we brought back in the car ended up in the yard framing native flowering plants. I got to stay in the car and drink Tab after a rock I picked up freed something I still have dreams about. The mountains had nothing for me, and I did not yet know that
water
was going to be my place on earth, not swimming pools at small hotels, but lakes, the ocean, a lazy-waved bay, ponds ringed with willows, and me the girl swimming under low-hanging branches brushed by leaves for the rest of my days.

I heard Jane ask my father if he was happiest when he was in Aspen. He said, “I was, and then I wasn’t.” She said, “You can
was
again.” He said he didn’t think so. And she didn’t come back the next day.

In a note to me a couple of weeks later, Jane wrote from Chicago that she would miss us. She said she understood that my father’s life had ended with my mother’s death, and that what he inhabited now was a kind of afterlife—not dead, but not alive to possibility, to what else one might still choose, and “Who would choose to live less?” she asked.

I didn’t mention the note to my father, but I asked him if he wished she still came over. He said she was a terrific person.

The women that followed included a self-styled libertine, and a beauty whose parents had called in a priest to exorcise her when she was a child. Some of the women were contenders—generous, brimming, game.

The woman he sees now seems decent and kind. I met her at his house this morning. She was clearing his garden of weeds, advising him on the placement of a eucalyptus tree.

She left before I did. My father waved to her from the bay window, and asked if I didn’t think she looked a little like Jane Stein.

I said, “That was a long time ago,” and he said, so I understood him, “
Nothing
is a long time ago.”

Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?

We did it twelve times—made love, all of us, to one another twelve times, the two of them doing everything two people could do to me twelve times. I was going to say only twelve times, but it wasn’t “only,” was it? It was wonderful.

I began, last night, at the beginning. The rule was I had to tell the truth, and I had to tell him everything. I could start where I liked. I told him the story every night; he asked for it, for some version of it, every night. Sometimes I left out a detail so he would prompt me, and thus participate after a fashion. “The inevitability of orgasm?” he might say, and I would say, “The way she moved her hip into me first.”

Sometimes I changed their names. Names were not the details that mattered to him. What mattered was the most refined particularity of our actions, and the declarative nature of my narrative. He did not want me to use language that said anything other than what it was. For me, I mean. Well, for them, her. All of us.

“I want you to give me points on the body—nuanced, subtilized, exact,” he said. “I want fine-grained diction in the reportage, and I want it to be plummy. I want the ring of inexpressible reality—yet lyric.

“Were there photographs?” he asked, knowing that there were.

“Tell me,” he said he wanted to know, “who took the pictures of you?”

Sometimes I tried to tell a different story. But he liked best when I told him about the man and the woman together—together with me. I learned that the more
froideur
in my tone, the more heated, the more insistent he would become—until I would be unable to continue because his mouth would be stopped up.

“Don’t let the game warden see you,” said the man painting the dock. “Indians the only ones allowed to net fish.”

The net I was sweeping through the shallow part of the lake was a child’s butterfly net I had found in the sand. The dock painter who warned me against the game warden was the same dock painter who had told me that a black racer was a water moccasin. I didn’t tell him I knew he was wrong, but let him think I was rash for reaching in after it.

People on the lake were ready with the rules, rebuked the fantasy daily. The vision had been: Swim with the dog, shoulder-to-shoulder, every morning, to the other side. But a hand-stenciled sign was posted when the season started:
NO DOGS ON BATHING BEACH
, though dogs were not the nonreaders leaving Band-Aids and cigarettes in the water.

The seven hundred dollars I had paid in dues covered plowing snow, but I would not be getting the benefit of winter. I had moved here for the lake, and then would not go in the lake; I’d be gone before leaves began to fall.

The former tenant said she had recovered here. From what, she did not say, but she said she had given herself five years to do it in. Well, was there anybody who wasn’t here to get over something, too?

His letter was forwarded to me here.

“I believe I need another look at someone who writes such a charming letter,” he said.

I had written to him after our meeting two years before. I had told him everything in that letter as though he had asked for me to. I had written him the whole time I was away, a woman he had met just once. And then he wrote me back. He invited me to see his new work. He had a show opening soon, he said, and the paintings were not, he said, anything like what he had done before.

He said he liked the way I described the place where I had been, where the small group of us lived, and got better. He said he liked the sound of the beach where we went when we were given a pass. He said he had tried to paint such a place, and maybe I would like to see it.

I had twenty years to go to get to be as old as he was, and then, if I got there, I’d have to go counting almost twenty years again. I was still in my thirties, but I was the one of us who was old. Anyway, he said he was nostalgic for my past.

I had a past, and my past contained a marriage and a job and friends. But I had long since dispensed with this past. I had spent the year before moving to the lake at a place where people recover from the bad things that seek them out. For the time I was there, I wrote to this man although, or because, I had met him only once, and because I felt our talk had been not an exchange of words, but of souls.

I read about a famous mystery writer who worked for one week in a department store. One day she saw a woman come in and buy a doll. The mystery writer found out the woman’s name, and took a bus to New Jersey to see where the woman lived. That was all. Years later, she referred to this woman as the love of her life.

It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.

I lived in small rooms with heaps of bleached shells on distressed white tables and antique mantels. His place had the original brick arches between the large open areas of the loft. There were polished wood floors (slate in the kitchen and bath), and a frosted glass–and-steel screen hid the staircase to the upper bedroom. His paintings were hung in the enormous studio on the first floor, the range represented by portraits and landscapes following the early “systems” paintings. There were ordinary workday scenes supported by strict and intricate organization that a critic had commended as “art that conceals art.”

Lying in bed early on: “We had rules,” I reminded him. “I could fuck the wife anytime I wanted. I could fuck the husband if the wife was also present. The wife could, whenever she wanted, fuck either one of us—her choice: together or alone. The husband needed no rules, both we women felt, because, we also seemed to feel, we would have no idea where to start in the drawing up of them.

“They took me up,” I told him. “I was young,” I reminded him. As if he, of all we did, needed reminding!

“Which of you would make the first move?” he asked.

“The first time or any time?” I asked.

“Maybe the wife started it?” I said. “Maybe the first time she made a preemptive strike? Maybe she saw the way her husband was looking at me—I guess she made up her mind to beat him to it? You know, later on she told me that was exactly what she was doing.”

“Tell me what you had on,” he said, “the first time, and every time.”

“The wife said any dress looks good in a heap on the floor by the bed.”

He said he wanted me to tell him about myself and about the woman when the two of us were in bed before the husband came home, how we would not let him join us at first, but let him crouch beside the bed, his eyes at the level of our bodies on the mattress, first at the side of the bed, and then at the foot of the bed. And who had undressed first—had we undressed each other?

“Would you do anything—everything—they wanted?” he asked, although the real question was, Would I do everything with
him
?

Let him find out!

“It wasn’t always like that,” I said. “Sometimes we just let the cats sleep in the bed.”

“Oh?” he said. “Did they come into it in some way? There was cat hair in the sheets? On the two of you? On the three of you?

“And did you like to be watched?” he prompted. “Did you like it more when she watched you with him, or when he watched you with her?”

“Don’t forget the neighbors,” I said. “The couple who watched at the window where the curtains didn’t close all the way. The man I didn’t mind, but I thought the woman wanted to take my place, and I felt she resented me for it.”

“You had never done anything like this before?” he said.

“I saw no reason not to.”

“It was the great experiment,” he said. “Did you wait until evening? Often you couldn’t wait.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I was supposed to be available.”

“Every day,” he said, “they touched you every day? Even on Sundays—you made yourself available to Saturday night’s predations?”

“All the better,” I said. “The better it was, the better it was.”

“You mean the more, the more of them?” he said.

“Repetition fueled us,” I said.

In the bed where I described the couplings years ago, he would suddenly roll me over so that I was on top. He would tell me to lean over and show him how my hair had made a tent over the face of the husband or of the wife.

The enclave at the lake had begun as a German settlement. The original developer built cabins for his family, and more cabins for their friends. The row of mailboxes at the end of Valkyrie Drive still featured mostly German names.

After an evening in the city, downtown, I would drive myself at dawn up the parkway and back to the lake. Before going to bed for a couple of hours, I would walk the dog through the woods and up the small mountain that is the backdrop for the place. At a point near the top, on the edge of an overlook, are the two cedars the German founder planted to stand for himself and his wife.

There were motion-sensor lights throughout my yard, and the few nights I was there, all night animals set them off. My heart used to race at the thought of intruders, but then I would see the doe nursing a fawn not many feet from a window, or a procession of bucks crossing the front yard to drink from the lake. So I came to look forward to these sudden illuminations.

Replacing lightbulbs, taking out trash, watering plants: exigencies of the tiny life, a life that opened up inside me at night in a downtown loft on an ugly street in a city rebuilding itself.

It started up with us at the place we went for dinner after leaving his friend’s opening at a gallery in Chelsea. I had strained to say something kind, and he had pointed out the flaws in the artist’s logic; he criticized the concept as well as its execution, and was not wrong.

His voice, doing so, was—sophisticated. It was a young man’s voice; it was dignified and persuasive, and made me feel like an accomplice. Under the words, his voice seemed to say, “You and I are looking at this together, and we see the same thing.” When I could keep up with him, that was true.

We walked easily together; I leaned into him, my head almost to his shoulder.

He continued the analysis over dinner, and as we were finishing, he said, “What if one told every truth! Recorded the most evanescent reactions, every triviality, an unimpeded account of lovers’ minute-by-minute feelings about the other person: Why didn’t she order the braised beef the way I did? She raved about the sea bass, wrongly. I set my watch three minutes fast; she set it back.”

Here he took us into the future—he reached across the table to stroke my hair. “And I’d say, ‘What about her hair across the pillow? I had thought it would be finer.’ ”

His stance was not unlike the one I had proposed to him in my letter, that we observe the Wild West practice: We put our cards on the table.

We moved into what he called “the precincts of possibility,” of anything-goes, of nothing undisclosed.

He wanted to hear “cock” and “cunt,” but I was more likely to want to show him what the man and woman did to me all those years ago. He had told me to say we did it twelve times. Did what? What we did, well, wouldn’t that be up to me? Didn’t it have to?

I told him what they did to me the first time, and the second, and the third through the eighth and ninth—some nights I teased him: “That’s it. I can’t remember the rest. Sorry. Only remember nine.”

But he was persistent, encouraged me to continue, to say more, to remember, to get it right. And when I really could not remember what happened the tenth time, I made something up. I made up something I guessed would be what he wanted. For example, he wanted to know when the husband was with both of us at once, whose name did he cry out when he came? He asked for the tenderest time, the most violent time, the most nonchalant time, the classiest time, the first time and the last time, all twelve times.

“And everyone was the better for it?” he said with admiration. “You were each made to feel more yourselves?”

“Of ourselves,” I said.

I was never more myself than when I was lying in this man’s arms. But was I ever much
of
myself in them?

“Don’t you ever get jealous?” I asked.

“Of course I do,” he said. “I admit to ineluctable jealousy—comparisons, comparisons, real and imagined. And, as it happens, there exists in me—not pathologically, but all too humanly, I think—a species of delight arising from this knowledge. Darling,” he said, conspiring, “are these conflicting sentiments and the mystery they point to not at the core of our alliance?”

The town whose main street ends at the river draws tourists who come to shop for antiques. The prices aren’t bad, and the town is picturesque and you can walk off the train and be pricing iron garden chairs before you’ve caught your breath. Boaters wave from the river that is, at this point, miles across. But the Jet Skis are annoying, and dogs are not allowed on the restored promenade. I had been there just long enough for the owner of the delicatessen to know how I took my coffee, and to avoid the speed trap on the other side of the bridge.

There was a backup generator on the north side of my house. It kicked on on its own once a week at noon, startling me each time. It ran for a while to give the impression it would be in good working order when it was really needed. An engineer down the road explained it to me; he said that during a snowstorm mine would be the only house with lights and heat. He told me not to use more than two appliances at a time.