The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (37 page)

“Are these tears?” he asked, smoothing hair back from my forehead.

“It’s better in French.”

“What is?” he said.

I told him the part of a poem I was thinking about, one I’d had to learn in school in French as well as English: “…From hope and fear set free,…/…even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

“You’re going to meet Katherine,” I said.

“It’s brilliant,” he said, “liberating the past for a revival in the present.”

His questions about Phillip had been abandoned some time back, but he started up again about Katherine and me. He suggested I bring her with me the next time I came to the loft. Well, of course he did. I said I thought we might do better in a gallery instead, with objects between us to look at, as we had. I knew he would be winning when I made the introductions. Katherine would be appreciative and intelligent and unimpeachably cordial to him. She might take a camera from her bag and take our picture, his and mine, then hand the camera to him to take one of her with me.

One kind of woman would phone him the next day. He would want to be helpful, and what would begin in passion and deceit would wind down to something ordinary. It would fill my mouth with stones. But maybe Katherine would do this, too? Would Katherine require his gaze?

“Tell me again—”

Call-and-response.

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.

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.

A
MY
H
EMPEL
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.