Table of Contents:

The Start of Something

Between

Dark Ages

Fedora

Fiction

The Start of Something

Sewers and subway grates, steaming tamale carts, charcoal braziers on which chestnuts roast, the breaths of the pedestrians outpacing stalled traffic, the chimneys Gil can’t see from the window of the airline bus, all plume in the frigid air.  It’s cold enough for Gil to wear, for the first and only time, the salt and pepper woolen trousers he bought at an estate sale last summer.  He’d stopped on a whim when he saw the sale sign, an excuse to tour a mansion that looked like it might have belonged to Jay Gatsby, had the novel been set on Chicago’s North Shore. Perhaps the deceased had willed only debts, for the heirs, haughty with grief, were selling off the furnishings.  Those who’d come to buy spoke in subdued voices as if to seem less like scavengers.  Gil browsed the echoey sunlit rooms, already striped of their carpets, with no intention of buying anything, then in an upstairs bedroom he found an open cedar wardrobe filled with old, handsomely made men’s clothes.  He selected the trousers and held them up before a walnut-framed, full-length mirror, and told himself he might wear them for cross-country skiing even though he hadn’t skied in years.   Later, when he tried them on at home they fit as though they’d been tailored for him.  It made Gil wonder who the deceased man who’d worn them had been. In one of the pockets there was an Italian coin dated 1921, and Gil thought it might be worth something to a collector.  He kept it in a cuff link box with buttons, a St. Christopher medal, a class ring, and the cuff links he never wore.   Even after he’d had the trousers dry-cleaned they smelled faintly of cedar.

The airline bus has nearly reached downtown when the woman in the seat across the aisle leans toward Gil and asks, “Are those lined?”

“Pardon?” he says.

“Are those lined?  They’re beautiful but they look itchy.” Wings of dark glossy hair and a darker fur collar frame her narrow face. Her smile appears too broad for her, but attractive all the same.

“Partially,” he says.

“Knee-length?”

“Not quite.  Actually, they are a little itchy, but they’re warm.”

“They look right out of the Jazz Age. They’ve got that drape. I love anything from the twenties—music, furniture, the writers.”

“Some of my favorite writers, all right,” Gil says.

“They still read so alive! Like that liberated, new, modern world hatched out of the devastated old order and wild with possibility was just yesterday.”

He smiles at her excitement, nodding to agree. Her hairstyle and the coat she’s bundled in both suggest another time. The coat has a certain Goodwill-rack look that exempts a woman from the stigma of wearing fur.  Gil has no idea what kind of fur it is. It matches the luster of her hair.  He has the vague feeling they’ve met before which makes talking to her effortless, but Gil doesn’t say so for fear it would sound like a line.  She’d know a man would remember meeting someone who looked like her.

“Where’d you find them?” she asks.

“At a kind of glorified garage sale.”

“I didn’t think they were new.  Even when they try to bring back a style they never quite get it right.”

“They’re the real deal all right, complete with little buttons for suspenders.  I probably should be wearing suspenders.”

“Not even half-lined though, huh? Bet it feels good to get them off.”  She smiles again as if surprised by what she’s just said.

“You sure have an eye for clothes,” Gil says.

“Don’t I though?”

Outside, snow settles on Chicago like a veil, as if it is the same veil of snow that was floating to earth earlier in the day when he boarded the plane in Minneapolis, returning from his father’s funeral.  The airline bus has stalled again in traffic. She’s turned away, staring out the window. He doesn’t know her name, has yet to ask where she’s traveling from, if she lives in the city or is only visiting, let alone the facts of her personal life, but all such questions are already set in motion between them.

Why not end here, without answers?

Aren’t there stories in each life that seem meant to remain ghostly, as faint and fleeting as the reflection of a face on the window of a bus?  Beyond her face, snow swirls through steam from exhausts and manholes.  Why not for this one time let beginning suffice, rather than insist on what’s to come: the trip they’ll take, before they know enough about each other, to Italy; those scenes in her apartment when she’ll model her finds from vintage stores, fashions from the past he’ll strip from her present body. Her name is Bea. She’ll say they were fated to meet.  They’ll play at being reincarnated lovers from the First World War.  Sometimes he’s a soldier who died in the trenches, sometimes a young trumpet player poisoned by bathtub gin.  Scene added to scene, fabrication to fabrication, until a year has passed and for a last time he visits her apartment in the art deco building on Dearborn with its curved, glowing glass brick windows. There’s an out-of-place store on the ground floor that sells trophies—an inordinate number of them for bowling.  It’s burglar alarm, prone to sound after hours, as if the defeated have come by night to steal the prizes they can never win, is clanging again. She’s been doing coke and tells him that in a dream she realized she’s been left with two choices, one of which is to kill him.  She laughs too gaily when she says it and he doesn’t ask what the other choice is. She’s mentioned she’s been “in touch” with her ex-boyfriend—a man who over nine years has come and gone at will in her life, a relationship it took her a while to fully reveal because, she explained, she didn’t want to give the impression she has a taste for “damaged men.”  If she’s implying its a relationship that redefines her, she has a point.

“Does he know about me?” Gil asked.

“I’d never tell him you exist,” she said, her eyes suddenly anxious and her voice dropping to a whisper as if an omnipotent master might overhear.

“In touch” means that Gil will notice welts on her body. She’ll have asked for them, he knows, she’ll have kissed the cat ‘o nine tails and begged, “Mark me.”  The boyfriend is a rich, connected guy whose family owns a chain of pizza parlors.  Beside his mail order whip, he carries a gun, which she says makes her feel safe, though what she really means is that she finds it thrilling, and when she disappears into her bedroom Gil isn’t sure whether she’ll emerge armed or wearing a chemise from the thirties she’s found at some flea market.  No matter how often he strips the past from her body, she finds a way to wear it again. His impulse is to let himself out, but he doesn’t want her or, for that matter, doesn’t want himself, to be left with a final image of him running for his life.  An escape might make it seem as if the choice in her dream was justified.  He doesn’t want to admit she’s made him afraid, and so he sits and waits for her to reappear.

The heirs were selling off the furnishings.  Gil browsed sunlit rooms that echoed his footfalls, with no intention of buying anything, but in an upstairs bedroom he found an open wardrobe smelling of cedar.  He held the trousers up before a full-length mirror that like everything else in the house wore a price, everything except the clothes—for those he’d have to bargain.  His reflection, gazing back, fogged behind layers of dust, appeared ghostly.  The trousers looked as if with a little tailoring they’d fit, and maybe he could wear them for cross-country skiing.  How could he have known then that he was only at the start of something?

Between

guilt and desire, thought and act, deja and vu, between ampersand and cross, wing and air, all she made possible and all she made impossible, between river and eel, loving and leaving—a life like the exhalation that separates wine and whine—between mute and mime, between the rhyme of night and light, dream and waking from a nap in the afternoon darkness of what could have been a total eclipse but was actually an April thunderstorm, I thought the sound of men lifting long lengths of rain gutter from a pickup truck was a meteor shower rattling against the metal awning over Sun’s Oriental Food Store.

Dark Ages

After midnight, when the only café insists on closing, they follow the corkscrew street that leads, like every street in the village, to the fountain.  If they can find the fountain, then, even in this darkness they’ll find their hotel, which overlooks the fountain, although their room does not.  Through their shuttered hotel window that opens outward into palm fronds, they can hear the fountain keeping time all night with it’s plashing racket. Or is it that, rather than keeping time, the fountain makes time inconsequential--at least for as long as their money holds out.  Each night the cascading echoes of water have lulled them to sleep.  When they wake, it’s as if the turbulent water has calmed in the presence of daylight.  Not even a burble is audible above the hubbub of foreign voices going about the morning’s business.

Of course, it is really their own voices that are the foreign ones here where they have no business to be, where they’ve come as if by accident—another in a succession of accidents between them, but, so far, an accident in which no one’s been hurt.  Even their laughter sounds foreign and out of place as they walk back tipsy.  She trails her fingers as if feeling their way along the rugged walls of the stone houses that line the unlit narrow street.

“Shhh,” they shush each other, and then laugh.  He can hear in her laughter and its echoes, the musical pitch of water.

“We have to keep it down,” he says, and they stop and kiss hard as if to seal each other’s lips, dizzily lose their balance, and steady themselves against a wall.  With her back braced against stone, he draws her hips toward him, and their bodies press together.

“You’re not following your own advice,” she says.

“What advice?”

“To keep it down,” she whispers, and then bursts into a drunken fit of giggling.

Above the cratered cobblestones, the moon is a blank in the sky. No stars. When the café sign blinks out behind them, he tells her they’ve just reentered the Dark Ages.

In the entire village, only the single streetlight beside the fountain burns.

Gawking above the ancient square, the streetlight seems an anachronism.  Instead of electricity, it should be burning beeswax or whale oil or kerosene.  Given its glare, it’s probably a lucky thing that their room doesn’t face the fountain.  In the yellow glare, the fountain appears fissured with cracks. It’s pool walls are crumbling, eroded by the gush of water.  During the day, they’ve noticed workmen patching the cracks and skimming leaves and debris off the surface of the fountain pool with long handled nets that look as if they’d be good for catching butterflies.  But like a recurring troubled dream, after dark the cracks reappear, the leaks spout anew and puddle the cobblestones so that it seems as if a rainstorm has just swept the square.  Tiny tributaries, each with its own current, trace the decline of the street that slopes down towards “the thousand steps.”  Step by step, water trickles towards the village on the hillside below. The village below doesn’t have a fountain.  That village is famous for the corpse of its patron saint, which refuses to rot.  Given the choice of the village with the fountain or the village with the incorruptible saint, they chose the fountain.

Tonight, with no one else awake, she slips her sandals off, hikes her skirt, and wades into the pool.  Spray plasters her blouse against the contours of her body and she opens the buttons. Her wet breasts gleam.  He watches her standing with her throat arched back, her eyes staring up at the night, and for the moment he’s glad they’ve come here, for however long it lasts. Maybe they needed a reason to feel foreign, he thinks, needed to find a place they had no place in beyond being strangers.   Since meeting her, he’s been a stranger to himself.

“That could be a step in the right direction,” she told him.

He watches her and wonders how, when the village wakes to the greetings of roosters and doves, it would look to them to find her half bare, waist deep in the dark swirl, her hair slicked back with spray--a strange woman among their familiar nymphs.  The nymphs’ breasts are also bared as they pour out their bottomless urns. Her arms are graceful like theirs. Her eyes, like theirs, appear implacable, intent upon some mystery only they see.

“Look! The nymphs are coming to life!” a child cries out.

A crowd gathers beneath the streetlamp that’s now pale and flickery in the light of day.  They’re here ready to believe that marble can miraculously become flesh, ready to welcome the return of their ancient gods and goddesses. But the statues, in no hurry, stand staring off as always, poised, detached even as the fissured walls collapse, and torrents floods the cobblestone street, tumbling down the thousand steps like a waterfall, a flood that sends the men from the town below rushing out of their cathedral, carrying their incorruptible saint above their heads and praying in a dialect they themselves don’t understand—that no one, perhaps not even God understands—as they ascend the steps, fighting their way upstream with the mindless ardor of spawning salmon.

Fedora

Remove it and there’s sunlight.  Terraced vineyards, a grove of olive trees, the netting of an old bridal gown shading the staked tomato plants, the sound of a distant accordion squeezed in time to the swish of the sea.

Remove it and it's as if you've lifted off the weight of memory.  Memory that was once so companionable, and that now has turned into an assassin.  Memory with its offended honor, with its vendetta, giving you the evil eye like the godmother of a jilted bride.  You work the razor along your throat while, veiled in dust, the bride stares back from a mirror that is framed in black like a sympathy card, an antique mirror whose fly spots have become freckles of age, whose spidery cracks and broken capillaries have reassembled into the image of your face juxtaposed upon her face, a mirror whose motto is “J’accuse.”

Remove it and there's the tintinnabulation of shells as the sea laps the sand.  Crystalline blue water spattered by flying ‘fish.  A lemon grove in blossom.  And beyond the bees, the sound of a river.  And across the river on a distant bank of sunflowers, someone cupping a harmonica.

But put it on and its brim of shadow extends until there’s barely enough light to see the five stairs leading down to the wet street.  Moon the backside of a mirror; streetlamps in tulle.  And from a black framed doorway, exactly like the doorway you've stepped through, straightening his hat as you straighten yours, an assassin also descends five steps, pausing only to strike and cup a match.  In the blue flare, you recognize the face as your face, the same face imprinted on all you've come to kill.

Fiction

Through a rift in the mist, a moon the shade of water-stained silk. A night to begin, to begin again. Someone whistling a tune impossible to find on a piano, an elusive melody that resides, perhaps, in the spaces between the keys where there once seemed to be only silence. He wants to tell her a story without telling a story. One in which the silence between words is necessary in order to make audible the faint whistle of her breath as he enters her.

Or rather than a sound, or even the absence of sound, the story might at first be no more than a scent: a measure of the time spent folded in a cedar drawer that's detectable on a silk camisole.

For illumination, other than the moonlight (now momentarily clouded), it's lit by the flicker of an almond candle against a bureau mirror that imprisons light as a jewel does a flame.

The amber pendant she wears tonight, for instance, a gem that he's begun to suspect has not yet fossilized into form. It's still flowing undiscernibly like a bead of clover honey between the cleft of her breasts. Each night it changes shape—one night an ellipse, on another a tear, or a globe, lunette or gibbous, as if it moves through phases like an amber moon. Each morning it has captured something new—moss, lichen, pine needles. On one morning he notices a wasp, no doubt extinct, from the time before the invention of language, preserved in such perfect detail that it looks dangerous, still able to sting. On another morning the faint hum of a trapped bee, and on another, there's a glint of prehistoric sun along a captured mayfly's wings. Where she grazes down his body and her honey-colored hair and the dangling pendant brush across his skin, he can feel the warmth of sunlight trapped in amber. Or is that simply body heat?

The story could have begun with the faint hum of a bee. Is something so arbitrary as a beginning even required? He wants to tell her a story without a beginning; no, rather a story that is a succession of beginnings, a story that goes through phases like a moon, the telling of which requires the proper spacing of a night sky between each phase.

Imagine the words strung out across the darkness, and the silent spaces between them as the emptiness that binds a snowfall together, or turns a hundred starlings rising from a wire into a single flock, or countless stars into a constellation. A story of stars, or starlings. A story of falling snow. Of words swept up and bound like whirling leaves. Or, after the leaves have settled, a story of mist.

What chance did words have beside the distraction of her body? He wanted to go where language couldn't take him, wanted to listen to her breath break speechless from its cage of parentheses, to wordlessly travel her skin like that flush that would spread between her nape and breasts. What was that stretch of body called? He wanted a narrative that led to all the places where her body was still undiscovered, unclaimed, unnamed.

Fiction, which he'd heard defined as "the lie that tells a deeper truth," was at once too paradoxical and yet not mysterious enough. What was necessary was a simpler kind of lie, one that didn't turn back upon itself and violate the very meaning of lying. A lie without denouement, epiphany, or escape into revelation, a lie that remained elusive. The only lie he needed was the one that would permit them to keep on going as they had.

It wasn't the shock of recognition, but the shock of what had become unrecognizable that he now listened for. It wasn't a suspension of disbelief, but a suspension of common sense that loving her required.
Might unconnected details be enough, arranged and rearranged in any order? A scent of cedar released by body heat from a water-stained camisole. The grain of the hair she'd shaved from her underarms, detectable against his lips. The fading mark of a pendant impressed on her skin by the weight of his body. (If not a resinous trail left by a bead of amber along her breasts, then it's her sweat that's honey.) Another night upon which this might end—might end again—for good this time—someone out on the misty street, whistling a melody impossible to recreate. . .

I wanted to tell you a story without telling the story.

Acknowledgements

These pieces have previously appeared, sometimes in earlier versions, in the following publications: “The Start of Something” and “Fiction,” Tin House; “Between,” Colorado Review, “Dark Ages,” first published as “Among Nymphs” in The Story of Mist, State Street Press, and also in The Alaska Quarterly Review; “Fedora,” Connecticut Review.  “Malaria,” was recorded for and published in verb.  My thanks to the editors who first published these.

TAGS: authors, excerpts, Stuart Dybek

STUART DYBEK is the author of three books of fiction: I Sailed With Magellan, a novel-in-stories, The Coast of Chicago, and Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Each was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Dybek also has published two book of poetry: Streets in Their Own Ink and Brass Knuckles. All his books are currently in print. A chapbook of short short fiction and prose poems, The Story of Mist, was published in 1993. Dybek’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, Tin House, Paris Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares. His work has been translated into several languages and is frequently anthologized, including anthologies from Norton and Scribners that are widely used in college classes. His work is often chosen for best of the year anthologies including work in both Best American Fiction and Best American Poetry. His stories are read frequently on NPR stations and have been adapted for film and stage, most recently productions of The Coast of Chicago at the Lookingglass Theater in Chicago in 2006, and I Sailed With Magellan at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago in 2007. In 2007, Dybek was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and in the same year, the Rea Award for “significant contribution to the short story form,” and the Mark Twain Award for “distinguished contributions of Midwestern literature.” In 2004, The Coast of Chicago was selected for the “One Book, One Chicago” program. Other awards include the Prize for Fiction from the Society of Midland Authors for I Sailed With Magellan, which was also selected by the American Library Association as one of the twenty-six best books of 2005. Dybek has also been the recipient of a Lannan Award, the PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize “for distinctive achievement in the short story form,” an Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the NEA, a residency at the Rockefeller foundation’s Bellagio Center, and a Whiting Writers Award. His stories have received four O. Henry Prizes including an O. Henry first prize for his story “Hot Ice.” His story “Blight” was awarded the Nelson Algren Prize, and his collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, received the Prize for Fiction from the Society of Midland Authors, a Special Citation from the PEN/Hemingway Prize Committee, and the Cliff Dwellers Award from the Friends of Literature. He has received a Michigan Arts Award, two grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. Dybek earned an MFA from the University of Iowa where he took workshops in both fiction and poetry and was awarded a Teaching/Writing fellowship and the Academy of American Poets Competition Prize. He has an MA in Literature from Loyola University--Chicago. He is currently, the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University, and professor emeritus of English at Western Michigan University. He is a member of the permanent faculty for the Prague Summer Writing Program, and he has taught as a visiting professor at Princeton, the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, The University of Chicago, and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.

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