The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (13 page)

“Something something something never / Love for an hour is love forever.”

If that’s true, I thought, then we’re in business.

I showed the inscription to Jean, there in the used books store, and she said, “Maybe we should have married Jim.”

Jean had five boyfriends, all named Jim. Aren’t two of the Jims best friends? I asked. No, she said, this is a whole new crop of Jims. Isn’t one of the Jims a scientist? I asked. She said I must be thinking of the Jim who had a Ph.D.

The Jim she thought we should have married was the Jim that got away.

Jean said, “Here,” and handed me a newer used book, a book that, in its day, had been a best-seller.

She said, “This book gave me the will to live and have fun.” She said, “I read this book and went right out and got myself asked out by a man—a man who liked me,” she said, “and who didn’t even have another girlfriend.”

Jean and I are bridesmaids. At last night’s rehearsal dinner, the bride spoke to us in the plural. She said, “You’ve been going ninety in a locked garage.” She said, “We’ve got to get you out on the open road.”

By “the open road,” the bride did not mean the Stretchmark. The Stretchmark is more of a locked garage.

In a biker bar called the Stretchmark Cafe, the tables of loudly muscled men ignore the strippers and leer at slides of choppers projected on the cafe walls. A chair in front of the stage is where the gals lob their T-shirts, bought in Laguna at Big Wave Dave’s. The house cat wears a turquoise metal-flake collar and runs from the strippers’ children, who are, quite naturally, back in the dressing room, playing slash fighting.

The Stretchmark is across from the used books store. Every time Jean and I make our entrance, the bartender sings in a Bugs Bunny voice, “I dream of Jeannie, she’s a light brown hare.”

Jean, the flutter of every male heart.

The bartender also has a crush on Sister Marianne, the former nun who moved to Phoenix for her health, then moved right back when she heard that the tarantulas there can jump eight feet, that some of them have landed on the saddle of a horse.

Sister Marianne, when her mind is someplace else, is not aware of the sound she makes there sitting at the bar—like a sprinkler kicker head going
kk-kk-kk-
kk-shooshooshooshooshoo.

Sister has her eye on the fellow from the post office. When you buy a sheet of stamps from him, he rubs the gluey side of the sheet across his hair. He says that the oil from human hair will keep the stamps from sticking to one another in your purse. It’s a handy tip, and a gesture you want to remember when you go to lick a stamp.

The fellow from the post office wants to fix Jean up with his friend from downtown. I have met the friend from downtown. He tried to sell me some sort of coin that he said was owned by Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan and Bobby Kennedy—“Only twenty dollars—okay, make it eighteen-fifty.”

I warned Jean that the postal worker’s friend was arrested one time for whipping taxicabs with a child’s jump rope, the wooden handles rapping the windows and chipping paint off the hoods.

“Dust him,” I said.

Jean could take him or leave him, she said, and I say it is a good way to be.

The day of the wedding, before a S.W.A.T. team of beauticians arrived to do the bride, the young son from the groom’s first marriage gave his new stepmother a picture he had drawn of a scowling Green Beret with a sword through his flaming head.

The bride fitted the drawing into her vanity mirror. She looked beyond it and made a wedding face.

For her second time around, the bride chose ivory tea-length lace, better flowers and better food, better music and a better man. In the wedding suite, a.k.a. the bride’s parents’ bedroom, the bride reached for her earrings; Jean reminded her to put her jewelry on last so she wouldn’t snag the weightless Belgian lace.

The bride’s first husband divided his time between Davis, San Pedro, and Encinitas. Say the word “home” and he could not stop talking about his rent, about the place he had for $37.50 when it was twenty years ago, and then, when the new owner raised his rent to $60 there at the top of Emerald Bay, he could not stop himself from telling us that he had said, “Fuck this,” and moved out.

Say the word “home” and you can watch the bride’s heart drop through the floor.

The new groom is like a Force-O-Nature. But the bride plays down his looks, his size. “It’s about trust,” she says. “And—yeah,” she says, “it’s about—who
knows
what it’s about. We just go for these damn walks and listen to coyotes.”

I dipped a finger in the prenup champagne and dabbed the cold fizz behind my ears, back of where Jean had pierced them with a kilt pin back in school.

Jean said, “Men.” She said, “They hate you at first. But all you have to do is be funny and sad and tall and thin and short and fat and wear them down, wear them down.”

“You can look on the bright side,” I said, “but think of the men who have unexplainably fled after they got to know us a little.”

The bride’s parents’ dog came in just then and offered a frantic display of devotion, leaping about our legs.

“I used to think I wanted to be loved like that,” I said. “But I don’t want to be loved like that.”

Pushing the dog from her skirt, Jean said, “Would it help if you thought it was insincere?”

The bride, gowned, was called away for pictures.

Jean let a strap of her pink dress fall. “Oh, Jim—please don’t,” she said in a breathy voice.

“Oh, Jim—please,” I said, all in my throat.

“Oh, Jim—” Jean said.

“Oh,” we both said together.

Jean recalled the time she asked the bartender about Sister Marianne, if he had ever considered the
M
word, and the bartender had said back, “Murder?”

“Imagine that it’s you,” Jean said to me. “Imagine it’s you that is getting married today.”

I do.

I imagine myself waking in some Jim’s bed.

His telephone rings. I imagine it is a woman calling, and because I am the wife, I answer in the voice that says, I’ve had it ten times today and
I live here.

This is what marriage means to me.

When Mrs. Lawton phoned in the threat, the threat was already a fact. Her estranged husband said that he could hear it in her voice. So he called for an ambulance, scheduled an appointment with the city’s finest doctor, left his office early, and drove to the Lawton country home, where he closed up the house and boarded the dogs, then returned to the city and his hospitalized wife.

Mr. Lawton brought Mrs. Lawton flowers—freesia and yellow iris—and he brought her a bill for five hundred dollars, plus the cost of the opera tickets he had been unable to use, plus another hundred dollars for what he called same-day service.

At home a week later, Mrs. Lawton received callers. She laid an alarming buffet of Budweiser and crullers, and answered the question on everyone’s mind—whether or not she had paid her husband’s bill.

I heard Mrs. Lawton’s story at the weekly meeting. My friend Lee brought me, six months after the Club was formed.

Lee died ten years ago; she can’t stop talking about it. No reason
to
stop; that’s what the Club is for, she explained.

When Lee and I got to Mrs. Lawton’s house, the other members were already in Mrs. Lawton’s living room. The other members were women, too. Lee told me there had used to be a man who came, a man who had died on the operating table. When it would come his turn, the man would laugh nervously and say, “I can’t tell you what it was like—I slept right through it.” After a couple of times of coming, Lee said, the man had not come back.

I watched a youngish woman with shiny black hair, who was leaning over Mrs. Lawton’s baby grand, pick out a slow-as-a-dirge version of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” rather pointedly, it turned out, for, as Lee filled me in, the woman at the piano had just been deserted when she told her intended about the relapse and that this time she was going to really lose one, maybe even both.

I walked over and stood to one side of the piano in an attitude of listening. The woman looked up and past me, out the opened window.

“The devil is beating his wife,” she said.

It was a sunny day, and a rain shower had begun, and I had not heard that expression—that explanation—since I was a child.

Outside was the kind of garden people want for summer weddings. I reached out the living room window and picked a plum from a tree. The sun made me squint, while the rain was cold on my wrist.

The plum I left on the windowsill. It reminded me of a time when I had not been dying, but had thought that I was, from nausea that ruled until I sucked the pulp from a dozen umeboshi plums, those pickled pits that are packed in glass jars and shipped to this country from Japan.

“How did you die?” the woman at the piano asked.

“Me?” I said. “Oh, no. Well, I mean, I got a divorce. Talk about
dying
.”

I can be so lame.

“I was engaged,” the woman at the piano said listlessly, and then said nothing.

Who knew what to say to that? Sometimes I play dumb when it would be so much better to—
be
dumb?

There was a bang of chords as the black-and-white cat jumped up on the black and white keys he was using as a launching pad to get himself onto the coffee table where he was going to skid into the tray of refreshments.

Mrs. Lawton looked in from the kitchen. “Lee’s friend,” she said to me, “will you keep Steinway out of the beignets?”

The women took their places on Mrs. Lawton’s tailored white couch and side chairs as Mrs. Lawton carried in a tray of Mimosas. When the drinks had been handed out, Lee was the one who spoke first.

“Many men named Pablo entered my life this week.”

It was always Lee saying, “Politics?
P.U.
Can’t we talk about men?”

Or it was Lee saying, “Religion?
P.U.
Where are the boys?”

That was during Religious Emphasis Week, when ministers in the business of bagging souls would come to the schools and pass around, in jars, the brain of an alcoholic and the lungs of a smoker, show photographs from prom-night wrecks, speak diatribes against “jungle music,” and screen a film advertised as Triple-X for attendance but which was, in fact,
The Birth of Triplets
and too disgusting to even neck in the dark to.

It was around that time, back in Colorado, that, until a short time before, I had last seen Lee, heading into a cemetery after midnight, there to make time on the grave of Alfred Packer, the state’s famed cannibal. So when I got Lee’s message, fifteen years after Lee had dropped out, I called back right away. I thought, This can only be good or bad news. The news, as Lee proceeded to tell the Club, was tango lessons, and what those lessons had yielded: a fiancé known as Pablo. Pablo the fellow taker-of-lessons, as distinguished from Pablo or Pablo, the instructors.

“He’s very, as we say in psychiatry, ‘inappropriate,’” Lee said.

“But he’s nice to you?”—the words another woman put in Lee’s mouth.

“He’s nice to anyone who’s around him,” Lee said. “I just happen to fall into that category a lot.

“We don’t speak the same language,” Lee went on, “so we
assume
that we like each other. Cuts out a lot of the ‘What did you mean by that?’s.”

As Lee went on, there in Mrs. Lawton’s living room, I recalled Lee’s first husband, the one she had left school to elope with. Lee, the girl who was always very something I’m not, married a man who did not like dogs.

“Do you see,” Lee was saying, “what can happen when you take your body and push it out the door?”

I saw the woman at the piano turn around to offer Lee a grim smile.

“Oh, Jean,” Lee said to the woman on the piano bench, “come take a lesson. Come meet all these Pablos and Raouls.”

And then Jean told a story about the man she would have married, about a dinner they had shared, the point of which seemed to me to be that things get worse before they get really terrible.

“I had just placed my order,” Jean told the Club, “and Larry went, ‘Ew.’ ‘
That
was fast,’ I said, and Larry said, ‘What? What was fast?’ I said, ‘Why, only a week ago you would have said, “What a delightful selection,”’” Jean said.

“Next thing,” said Jean, “I’m telling Larry what is really on my mind, that things with us are Out of sight, Out of mind, and he says to me, ‘
Please
don’t talk in clichés—it’s so not-you you wouldn’t believe it,’” Jean said.

“And I thought, He knows me,” Jean recalled. “He knows that clichés are not me.”

Jean said she thought she might still hear from Larry but that hoping he would call was like the praying you do after the bowling ball has left your hand.

Several of us reached for our drinks.

“And the guy still breathes?” Lee said to the room.

Another woman said to Jean, “I’m reminding you that you asked me to remind you that if things got nasty, I was supposed to remind you that at first you found Larry a little bit boring.”

Jean looked genuinely pleased. She said, “Larry is the kind of guy who says, Did I ever tell you about the time I was attacked by a pack of sled dogs in Alaska? No? I was in Fairbanks at the time, he starts out,” Jean said, “and two years later you find out it was
one
sled dog and it was a puppy.

“And his family, my
God
,” Jean said. “These are people so boring it would have to come from a gene.”

I listened as Jean explained how scientists had already isolated a gene for shyness, so why not a gene for being boring?

“The deeply boring give themselves away first by the exchange of facts,” Jean said. “It’s a family reunion. It’s been five years. Relatives walk in. ‘Hey, how are you? How’d you get here?’ ‘We took 101 south…’”

“I just know he is going to call you,” said a woman who had not spoken before.

“We’ll see,” Jean said.

“We’ve seen,” said Mrs. Lawton.

The party was planned for a week before Jean was scheduled to go into the hospital. Mrs. Lawton canceled the male stripper, having had a brainstorm in the night. Mrs. Lawton telephoned the members of the Club and asked each woman to bring a piece of lingerie. She gave out Jean’s measurements over the phone.

“You remember the last time she went in?” Mrs. Lawton said to Lee. “She wore that old white faux-quilted robe that looked like a panty liner?”

Mrs. Lawton instructed Lee to buy something in satin—tap pants, maybe, or what she called a “pop-up bra.”

We learned that she had made Patsy Kendrick the designated photographer (she would have to stay in focus in the face of white wine spritzers) and told her to bring a jar of Vaseline to smear, centerfold-style, on the lens.

Mrs. Lawton had figured the Club would have to get Jean tanked to agree to the pictures. But after only one spritzer, Jean was lounging on Mrs. Lawton’s sofa in a champagne teddy and marabou-trimmed satin high-heeled slippers. She slipped a strand of pearls into her mouth, made as though biting them, and pouted for Patsy Kendrick.

“This one is for the surgeon,” Jean said and dropped a strap, exposing the breast she was going to lose.

“I was once given a teddy,” Lee said. “A man I had been out with only once gave me half a dozen teddys. Some were banded with Alençon lace, some were embroidered with seed pearls. I know I should have returned them in a huff,” Lee said, “but you should have seen them. So I
kept
them in a huff.”

“Don’t shoot me from that angle!” Jean cried out. I saw her motion Patsy Kendrick to aim from above, not below. Jean sucked in her stomach. “Three months in a gym and I’d weigh what I lied on my driver’s license,” she said.

None of the women seemed to be expected back home. The luncheon was heading into its fifth hour when our pixillated hostess told us the story of the love of her life, which was not, it turned out, Mr. Lawton.

It seemed to be a story she had told before because for one thing it had a title: “The Day I Had Everything.”

Mrs. Lawton began. “The man told me a story about the day he had everything. He was eight years old, he said, and was spending, in a hospital bed, what his parents believed was the last day of his life. And his parents brought from home every one of his toys, plus new ones bought for him just for that day, everything the eight-year-old boy had ever wanted.

“The next day, the man told me, the doctor said he was not going to perish, after all; that he instead had another, a highly contagious, disease. The boy would live, the doctor said, and then ordered all the infected toys destroyed.

“‘One day I had everything,’ the man said, ‘and the next day I had nothing.’ He said this as though he were giving instruction.

“‘But your life,’ I said to the man. ‘You had nothing but your
life,
’” Mrs. Lawton said.

She waited a beat, then went on.

“Now, I wish that that man had told me something that began, ‘No one else knows this…’ so that I could tell the thing to every one of you. What is the point of these hot collisions if not to be able to prove you were there?

“Listen to what he said to me,” Mrs. Lawton said. “He said he almost fainted from not touching me,” she said. “He said that to me the first time I saw him and the last time I saw him. The day was the same,” Mrs. Lawton said. “The day I had everything.”

I wish I could say smart things just by saying them. Because Mrs. Lawton’s story made me feel something. But the moment was lost; the story seemed to be a sort of cue, or simply a conversation stopper. The Club members were on their feet, not exactly reeling, but neither were they moving with dispatch toward the door.

Jean, the soft-porn guest of honor, was changing in the open into another of her gifts, a black lace camisole and matching tap pants. Her face was flushed. She no longer looked as though she found the world intolerably apocalyptic.

I heard a perfectly groomed blond woman talking to Jean while she was undressing. “A facial didn’t seem like enough,” the blond woman was saying, “so I pointed myself toward the jeweler. When people ask me how I’m doing, I say, Look at these pearls! Later,” I heard the blond woman say, “I put the necklace on the living room floor because what I really need is a new Oriental.”