by
Lucia Berlin
project/stunt-story
Jennifer Egan,
Percival Everett,
James Salter,
Miranda July,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Ingmar Bergman,
Mavis Gallant,
Clifford Odets,
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Jay McInerney
I freshened up the onion dips and chips and guacamole and went out on the steps. No one else was outside, and I was too depressed to call anybody to come see the unbelievable sunset. Is there a word opposite of déjà vu? Or a word to describe how I saw my whole future flash before my eyes? I saw that I’d stay at the Albuquerque National Bank and Bernie would get his doctorate and keep on painting bad paintings and making muddy pottery and would get tenure. We would have two daughters and one would be a dentist and the other a cocaine addict. Well, of course I didn’t know all that, but I saw how things would be hard. And I knew that years and years from then Bernie would probably leave me for one of his students and I’d be devastated but then would go back to school and when I was fifty I’d finally do things I wanted to do, but I would be tired.
inspo for the paramedics scene
Why married people have affairs: you feel luckier, with a happy secret place in your imagination in which to refresh yourself. My mistake in the past has been to keep it on the front boiler, cooking briskly, instead of turning off the gas and letting it go cold.
The real football reason, in all its inevitable real-reason banality, was that, over the course of weeks of dawns of watching the autosprinklers and the Pep Squad (which really did practice at dawn) practices, Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired sophomore baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut from a distance through the diffracted spectrum of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field's dewy turf, a twirler who'd attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers Orin and his strabismic B.U. doubles partner had gone to, and who danced the same way she twirled and invoked mass Pep, which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin's body watery and distant and oddly refracted.
Orin Incandenza, who like many children of raging alcoholics and OCD-sufferers had internal addictive-sexuality issues, had already drawn idle little sideways 8's on the postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds. But this was different. He'd been smitten before, but not decapitated. He lay on his bed in the autumn P.M.s during the tennis coach's required nap-time, squeezing a tennis ball and talking for hours about this twirling sprinkler-obscured sophomore while his doubles partner lay way on the other side of the huge bed looking simultaneously at Orin and at the N.E. leaves changing color in the trees outside the window. The schoolboy epithet they'd made up to refer to Orin's twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time. It wasn't the entire attraction, but she really was almost grotesquely lovely. She made the Moms look like the sort of piece of fruit you think you want to take out of the bin and but then once you're right there over the bin you put back because from close up you can see a much fresher and less preserved-seeming piece of fruit elsewhere in the bin. [...] The big hair was red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zygomatics indescribable and her eyes an extra-natural HD green. He wouldn't learn till later that the almost pungently clean line-dried-laundry scent that hung about her was a special low-pH dandelion attar decocted special by her chemist Daddy in Shiny Prize KY.
Hans remembers her smile and her breasts, but the way she looks overall, he perhaps doesn’t know. But there she is, turning onto Schiffbauerdamm, and he recognizes her right away. She’s swinging her handbag as she walks, she’s dressed all in black, and as she comes closer, he sees she’s put up her hair and tied it with a black velvet ribbon. Exposed, he thinks, her face. He wanted to be straight with her today, he knows now he will have to be. It’s his only chance. He gives a nod as they pass the two waiters with long white aprons at the entrance, who are performing France for French soldiers over from West Berlin who like to have a cheap meal in East Berlin’s expensive Ganymede.
We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything? The black velvet ribbon moves him, it makes her look like a schoolgirl. If he doesn’t manage to say quickly what he needs to say, it’ll be too late. And you can’t expect any sort of public acknowledgment — I know, and you know, and that will have to do. That’s fine, she says, and smiles. Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future. All yesterday and today she was afraid he would just toss her out.
Two weeks ago, when Ingrid was taking Hans’s jacket to the dry cleaner’s, she found a passport photo of Katharina in the inside pocket and wouldn’t talk to him for three days. He didn’t tell Katharina. In October Katharina cried for the first time about the fact that he was married, and in November for the second time, and since then he’s avoided mentioning Ingrid’s name. And if Katharina now sometimes looks deadly earnest, he knows she’s making an effort and is repressing something she ought really to talk about. Anything the matter? No. Because everything is avoided that might make one or other of them sad, sadness suddenly comes to occupy a lot of space between them. He is old enough to know how the end likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present. Without my marriage I wouldn’t be the man I am. That’s what he told Regina as well, the newscaster, and Marjut, the Finn. They went along with it until he’d had enough. Where Katharina is concerned, the sentence carries a different meaning, but she would deny it if he were to write it to her. Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning. Not the content of their love, but factors that energize and quicken it. Just as if/ in a gallop/ an exhausted mare/ thirsted for the nearest well. Thirsting. Another one of those dead words. The marriage that threatens and attenuates their affair is also the ground that nourishes it. And probably, if Hans were honest, the other way around as well. Wasn’t Ingrid — when at the end of three silent days she started to speak again, and during the ensuing scene to cry, and when the makeup ran down her face and she picked up the nearest thing that came to hand, which happened to be a clothes brush, and threw it out of the window into the yard — wasn’t Ingrid in her desperation more beautiful and desirable than she’d appeared to him in a long time?
— I didn’t leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been for more than a year. He said it evenly, almost as if it had happened to someone else. It was my son’s tutor, he explained. I fell in love with her.
— And you began something with her? Morrissey suggested.
— Oh, yes.
There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even breathe.
— Within two or three days, he confessed.
— There in the house?
Phil shook his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was abandoning himself.
— I didn’t do anything in the house.
— He left his wife and children, Adele repeated.
— You knew that, Phil said.
— Just walked out on them. They’d been married fifteen years, since he was nineteen.
— We hadn’t been married fifteen years.
— They had three children, she said, one of them retarded.
Something had happened—he was becoming speechless, he could feel it in his chest like a kind of nausea. As if he were giving up portions of an intimate past.
— He wasn’t retarded, he managed to say. He was . . . having trouble learning to read, that’s all.
ooof
None of them could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.
— I talk to her, he admitted.
— And your first wife?
— I talk to her. We have three kids.
— He left her, Adele said. Casanova here.
— Some women have minds like cops, Phil said to no one in particular. This is right, that’s wrong. Well, anyway . . .
He stood up. He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled his life.
— Anyway there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the chance.
— It’s right up there, he gestured. It doesn’t look like anything, just like another small star. It’s that extra one, by the Pleiades. He knew all the constellations. He had seen them rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts.
— Come on, you can look at it tomorrow, she said, almost consolingly, though she came no closer to him.
— It won’t be there tomorrow. One time only.
oh i FINALLY get this story lmao
She had told them she had a doctor’s appointment and needed extra time for lunch. She told him that. As she entered the hotel elevator he could not help but notice her fine hips. Then, incredibly, they were in the room. His heart was uncontrollable and everything was prepared for them, the sleek furnishings, the chairs, the thick fresh towels in the bath. There had been four murders in Brooklyn the night before. The brokers were going wild on Wall Street. On Fourteenth, men stood in the cold beside tables of watches and socks. The madman on Fifty-seventh was singing arias at the top of his voice, buildings were being torn down, new towers rising. She rose to draw the drapes and for a moment stood in the space between them, in the light and looking down. The splendor and newness of her! He had known nothing like it.
Her apartment was borrowed, from someone on assignment. Even at that, it was sparsely furnished. He wanted to give her something every time he saw her, a gift, something unexpected, a chrome and leather chair that he showed her in the window before he ordered it delivered, a ring, a rosewood box, but he was careful to keep nothing that came from her— note, e-mail, photograph—that might betray him. There was one exception, a picture he had taken as she half sat up in bed, from over her bare shoulder, breasts, smooth stomach, thighs, you would not know who it was. He kept it at work between the pages of a book. He liked to turn to it and remember.
ack