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The Rembrandt

Edith Wharton — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:09:05 -0800

“You’re so artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the last literary obscurity of the moment: trial to be evaded or endured, as circumstances dictate: whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was no refuge from her beneficent despotism.

Outside Elko

Porter Fox — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:56:34 -0800

The two men sat across from each other. A pair of car keys rested on the table between them. One of the men held a glass mug, the other his head in his hands. A waitress stood by, waiting for their order. She coughed and scuffed her sneaker across the floor.

Get to it, Bill finally said.

What?

Order something.

Order for me.

I don’t know what you want.

Neither do I.

Bill looked at the waitress, tapped his mug. Two Buds.

Draft or bottles? she asked.

Either.

Which?

Bottles.

Bill watched her walk away. He whistled and winked at Ted. Then he went to the jukebox and punched in three songs.

How bad was it? he asked when he sat down.

Bad, said Ted.

What’d he do?

Nothing. Yet.

He hit you?

The Structure of Bubbles

Emily Raboteau — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:15:20 -0800

After a lifetime of smoking Virginia Slims, my grandmother was dying of lung cancer in the oncology ward of Milwaukee’s Aurora Sinai. It was the Fourth of July. My Aunt Patty and I were sitting in the hospital cafeteria sharing a lukewarm plate of Salisbury steak and waxed green beans.

We were supposed to contact the priest to deliver last rites as soon as we finished eating dinner. I can’t say I loved Grammy Livy, but I can say I felt sad. I drank a little carton of milk as if I were in elementary school, and my aunt drank a little airline bottle of Maker’s Mark whiskey as if it were normal.

“Don’t tell your mother,” Aunt Patty winked, blotting her lipstick with a paper napkin. I noticed that her hands were trembling. Of the two of them, my mother was the more accomplished at handling death, having already buried my older brother. And as everyone knows, losing a parent is a piece of cake compared to losing a child. Right then, my mother was upstairs on the fourth floor, attending my grandmother. That’s just who my mother was—a caretaker.

Stone Boat

William Kittredge — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:13:49 -0700

The Mexican Steers were shades of orange and blue, even green, color like rock moss over their tight, shorthaired hides. Twelve hundred and seventy-four came down from the Northern Pacific railroad cars, quick animals with horns like opalescent hooks, gathered off the Sonoran deserts. They had been nine weeks in New Mexico because of the wartime shortage of railroad cars, before being shipped north to Oregon, then been in the cars a week, only unloaded twice, watered in Fresno and Redding.

Sonora lay south of Arizona on the boy’s creased, heavy-paper National Geographic map, an area colored pale yellow and almost empty. Damon Booth, who owned the steers, said yellow was the color for Mexico. Orange blossoms had smelled yellow at twilight. Children played between thick-walled adobe houses. At the Booth Acreage, an unpainted shiplap building on the Klamath Marsh, on an alkali knoll beside a horse corral, timbered mountains blue off in the distance, Damon would squat on salt grass in the midday silence, a few flies moving, and talk of Mexico. The summer was dry as the worst years of the thirties, the creek empty but for the holes where frogs survived. The peat cracked in rifts wider than a horse could leap. Summer Mallards circled and flew on.

Palm Court

James Salter — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:15:38 -0700

Among the contemporary masters of the short story, none surpasses James Salter. We have followed his work for decades and have heard him reading many times but never more wonderfully than at a nightclub in the Bowery in November 2005 at our first Narrative Night, where he performed “Palm Court” from his collection Last Night. Salter’s readings are rich with his ability to embody the characters he dramatizes, in this case two lovers whose story spans early and late midlife. The recording here is a transcendent occasion of storytelling art. Salter also spoke extemporaneously about the nature of art and of a life lived for art.

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Palm Court (00:58 preview)

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Palm Court (36:28)

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Find and Replace

Ann Beattie — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 11:46:47 -0700

Here you’ll find an audio recording of Ann Beattie giving a signature performance of her story “Find and Replace” from her collection Follies. The reading is vibrant, humorous, and timeless, and Beattie, as always, stays out at the leading edge of the story form, transforming the art with the originality and genius that belong to the masters. The reading took place at the Narrative Night in Santa Fe in October 2007.

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Find and Replace (0:32 preview)

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Find and Replace (29:41)

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The Lady’s Murder

Eliza Frye — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:01:18 -0700

In Search of Celilo

Heather Brittain Bergstrom — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:18:08 -0700

I found these photos of Celilo Falls while doing research for an earlier story. They haunted me. Though I’d grown up near the Columbia River, I had never heard of Celilo Falls. In grade school I went on numerous field trips to dams, including the one that inundated Celilo Falls. My grandfather worked his whole life at pumping stations bringing irrigation water to farmers on the dry plains of the Columbia Basin. My dad still delivers parts to dams every week. Every summer of my childhood I swam in reservoirs and canals. As a teenager I escaped the sadness of my broken family by driving out to a small diversion spillway, where my mom and dad as teenagers had bravely or stupidly—but hand in hand—taken a dare to jump off the ledge into the raging water. I left Washington after I graduated high school and swore never to return.

Three years ago my husband and I made a quick trip north to Washington for a Pearl Jam concert by the Columbia. I didn’t tell my dad I was coming home. It had been too many years since we’d talked. My husband and I spent a day driving along the lower Columbia searching for the place where Celilo Falls used to roar and where salmon used to leap. In a guidebook I read there was a marker commemorating the now silent falls. After all, Celilo had been the prime Indian fishing site on the lower Columbia for ten thousand years. It deserved at least a plaque. Frustratingly, we never found the marker. We saw a few Indians fishing from piers in tiny fenced-off areas called “In-Lieu Fishing Sites.” The water they dipped their nets into was deep and mute. We saw the enormous concrete dam that blocked the Indians’ view (both backward and forward), to say nothing of the salmon trying to journey home to the streams of their birth. Loss is what these pictures represent—unfathomable loss for Native Americans. For me: guilt and loss and longing. All the stuff of life illuminated and, to a certain extent, redeemed in fiction.

—Heather Brittain Bergstrom

Photos courtesy of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society, Spokane, Washington. The top left photograph is negative no. L95-66.10, and the photographer is Clarence Colby. The bottom right photograph is negative no. L94-14.50, and the photographer is unknown.

Osby

Josh Weil — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:41:06 -0700

By the time the sun was over the ridge, Carl Veltre had already been up for three hours. He had milked the Holsteins before Lynne was awake, washed down the milking house while the kids were eating breakfast, and brought the school bus around to the house just as Lynne was handing lunch bags to their two boys and sending them down the driveway. For the past forty-odd minutes, he had nursed the aging bus along winding back roads, practically standing on the gas pedal to get it to crawl up the steep hills and stopping at all the least convenient places—blind corners, the very bottoms of long climbs—to pick up kids as young as five and as old as nineteen, an age bracket that, on mornings like this, Carl understood as the widest range of possibilities for obnoxiousness that the school system would allow.

“Hey, you all,” he shouted to the wide, oblong mirror that framed pretty much the whole bus. “Whoever threw whatever that was I saw come from somewhere back there—are you smilin’ at me?—whoever that was better not be smilin’ an’ better not do it again, neither.”

He pressed his hand to the windshield in front of him, slowly enlarging the clear spot in the foggy glass. The defroster had been working yesterday, when he didn’t need it. Any day now, he figured, the board of education was going to vote to include colicky one-year-olds and divorced, depressed, middle-aged dope addicts on welfare in the Eads County school system.

Blood

Richard Bausch — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:40:08 -0700

Walker Clayfield’s older brother, Max, started the subcontracting business—house painting, carpentry, and wiring—upon his return from a hitch in the army in 1995. Back then he and Walker and Sean, the youngest, all lived with their mother, Minnie, in the old place on Highpoint Terrace. The house had been added on to decades ago, when Minnie was a newly married lady, and happy. It had a narrow backyard, at one end of which was the partial spine of an unfinished boat under a cracked plastic tarp—the failed project of Theodore Clayfield, the boys’ sad excuse for a father. The old man had begun to build it out of wood from scratch before his madness and his drinking and other forms of excess got him—a fatal heart attack at fifty-one. Growing up, the old man had apprenticed to his own father as a boatwright.

That man too had mental troubles—and bottle troubles.

Walker, after he entered high school, began helping Max during summers, and when he graduated the two of them worked together full-time. By this time Max was chasing after Jenny Glass, whose family didn’t like him. Once, when Jenny was having dinner at Paulette’s Restaurant with Bill Jonas, whom she had started seeing, Max stormed in and overturned the table where they sat and then went after Jonas. The two of them fell over another table, breaking several plates and glasses. Max ended up in the hospital. Jenny forgave him for it because he was bruised and beaten and because he was so contrite. But when, with her mother’s encouragement, she went out with Jonas again, there Max was, wet eyed and penitent and hurt—still wanting to fight.

When the Flock Changed

Maud Newton — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:14:50 -0700

My mother was a preacher until the cops shut her down. Well, okay, she kept at it halfheartedly in our living room for a while, but the fire had wiped out not just her warehouse church and the halfway house she ran out of it, but her passion, her commitment, and maybe even, deep down, her belief. All those years of serving the Lord, of taking to the streets to let the homeless and addicted and just plain lonely know what a friend they had in Jesus, and now she had no proper house of worship, no sea of folding chairs or repository of sermons on tape. She was practically a layperson. Worse, her flock knew it and was slipping away.

The church ladies saw the blaze as a sign of God’s disfavor. Mom had created a makeshift dorm in the sanctuary, a commercial space, and one of the guys had fallen asleep with a joint still burning. Maybe she shouldn’t have spent so much time ministering to the riffraff when there were perfectly normal people’s problems to attend to. Our Heavenly Father wouldn’t have let the church burn down if she’d been in tune with Him and His Word. So the flock was saying.

The Story of an Hour

Kate Chopin — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:59:29 -0700

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

Letters to a Young Writer

T. Coraghessan Boyle — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:04:23 -0700

In our Letters to a Young Writer series, Narrative’s featured authors respond to comments and questions from younger authors reflecting on the nature of the writer’s work. We inaugurate this series with a correspondence between Dennis O’Reilly and T. Corghessan Boyle:

The Race Card

Dennis McFarland — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:50:54 -0700

At first glance, it looked very much like all the others facedown on the table, which probably accounts for the otherwise odd fact that no one gasped when it appeared. It’s possible too that no one gasped because when guys get together in stag situations they tend to be extra careful to avoid displays of emotion that might make them seem like women. We were at Bobby Cravinho’s dark-paneled place in the Heights, the four of us regulars, and using Bobby’s vintage Coca-Cola deck, with the headshot of the happy vintage babe holding a Coke bottle in a swimming pool and the tagline Sign of Good Taste. It takes a pretty good eye to spot this particular joker-card, for the features of the girl in the bathing suit are just slightly altered, suggesting an indefinite mixed-race origin, though I have to say she looks, without question, way less than happy. In any case, suddenly prostrate in the middle of Bobby’s water-ringed, cigarette-singed, cork-top table, the card with its morphed visage possessed all the sour gravity of a Supreme Court justice.

Slow Dance

Matthew Dickman — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 07:32:44 -0700

More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin

For Woody

Stuart Dybek — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:22:04 -0700

The boy in row nineteen has a cold.

“Don’t lean on my armrest,” he cautions his sister. “You’ll get germs. They’ll stuff you up, it will hurt to fly, and like last vacation we’ll all have to listen to you whining, ‘I can’t unplug my ears.’ ”

The boy sits on the aisle and his sister, a little girl in braids, has the window, although—germs aside—she’s agreed to switch seats halfway through the flight, which means she gets to see the plane rise from Detroit, and he to see it land in Paris. She’ll probably grow into a beauty, but she needn’t contend with that yet, nor with the censorship that physical beauty can sometimes impose. Without a hint of self-consciousness, she sings an unrecognizable song, no doubt inspired by the view, as its only lyric seems to be floating, floating, floating . . .

It’s her brother who’s embarrassed.

“Do you always have to hum?” he inquires.

She ignores him. Perhaps she’s one of those people who always hears music. The song expands to: Floating, floating, floating on the clouds . . .

“I’ll always be older and taller than you,” he brags.

Gargoyle

Joyce Carol Oates — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:19:53 -0700

What to make of loneliness. Can you imagine? Three-fifteen a.m. and you lie spread-eagled in bed in your cocoon of a bed in your ripe swollen cocoon of a body while I drive through the snowy drizzle querying myself about life.

Driving along a deserted boulevard. Yellow street lights high atop slender poles. Rain, snow. Mist. Wind. What to make of loneliness. Not anger, not rage, not the wish to die or even the wish to murder. I’m too exhausted for all that. Just loneliness. What to make of it. Aloneness. Can you hear me? Can you guess? Never. You are eight months pregnant now and lie sleepless beside my lover, your spine aching, your stomach bloated, you are a beached bewildered mammalian creature gasping in the air.

Can you guess at me? Never.

But do you sense me, do you fear me?

Three-sixteen a.m. on a Friday morning, or do I mean a Thursday night. I drive too fast, and then slow down, skidding on a patch of ice a quarter-mile from your bed.

My loneliness has turned sinister.

I can’t be trusted.

Your husband sleeps beside you and in the confused instant of waking he could not know—he could not possibly know—which woman lies with him beneath the covers.

Thigh and Digression

Emily Walter Seitz — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:55:51 -0700

Between his girlfriend’s legs,

Euclid wouldn’t
admit the moon is a circle or an olive pit
is round as a fig or ripe plum.

Five Poems

Han Shan — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:50:52 -0700

4

Looking for a refuge
Cold Mountain will keep you safe
a faint wind stirs dark pines
come closer the sound gets better
below them sits a gray-haired man
chanting Taoist texts
ten years unable to return
he forgot the way he came

Bosnia Bosnia

June Jordan — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:49:02 -0700

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs

that 4-year-old Muslim girl and
her 5-year-old sister
and the 16-year-old babysitter
and the 20-year-old mother of that 4-year-old/that
Muslim child gang raped
from dawn to dark to time become damnation

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs