“You could love someone simply because he stepped forward and spoke.”
Electric Literature’s latest Recommended Reading pick, like Lindsay Hunter’s Peggy Paula story of a few weeks ago, is a short and staggering piece of new fiction. “At the Fairmont” by Peter Orner details five days of thrilling, unstuck autonomy in a woman’s life as she waits from her husband to come back from the war — and, upon his return, the resulting sense of thick physical finality that decouples love from expectation, and sets both ideas off at sharp angles, forever askew.
His voice echoing, booming off all that shiny porcelain. “What a life, what a life.” And what surprised her most was how unvoracious he was. She’d prepared herself for him to be voracious, to leap on her with his usual frenzy, burrowing his head into her neck like an excited gopher, and jabbing, jabbing. She’d been ready to do her part for the war effort. Out of appreciation and gratitude and patriotism. All those hours on that terrible ship. Now what Seymour wanted was love, and she couldn’t possibly give that to him. After two years away he was lean, tan, and wanting to be held — held? — and that first morning after that first endless night of his tenderly cooing (My darling, my precious darling), she’d kept inching away from him across the sheets, his fingers gently kneading her upper arm, until, sometime after dawn, she dropped off the bed.
The story is recommended, and described with rare thoughtfulness, by the great short story writer Ann Beattie:
No, we won’t last. But the stories we tell ourselves sustain us in ways we never would have suspected. Mere anecdote rarely achieves profundity, yet it does here: we’re implicated, because whether or not we want to know certain things, the revelation is indelible. It is for the character, and it is for the reader. Private moments have been exposed so that the story is no longer merely personal. When the light “leaked from beneath those heavy drapes,” the moment is almost Shakespearian, as in the moment when Polonius was discovered behind the curtains. In Orner’s story, the light — that almost deathly light — portends the illumination of the present. Once lit up, the present can only flicker and eventually fade, as life does… the prop becomes the focal point for our understanding that there is no power, no one possesses it, that hovering cherubs and pseudo-thrones aside, we are mortals with the most ordinary aspirations, and even those are compromised, more or less impossible to attain.
I don’t want to spoil the plot’s single surprise, but “At the Fairmont” is a damn good example of a male author writing a woman not just believably but pretty spot-on, and one of the few stories I can think of where a female character enacts a specific transgression in a way — detached even when it’s resonant — that is often reserved for men.
Photo via Alden Jewel/flickr