Half in Love: Stories by Maile Meloy.
Title: Half in Love: Stories.
Author: Maile Meloy.
Genre: Fiction, short stories.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2002.
Summary: A collection of 14 short stories. In Tome, when an attorney is unable to help a workplace-injury client who has been screwed by his company in the settlement, he takes a hostage and demands her presence. In Four Lean Hounds, CA. 1976, two couples face a complicated grief when one of the four dies suddenly. In Native Sandstone, a couple planning to build a house sets out to convince a local elderly man to sell them a pile of the original native sandstone that is located on his land. Ranch Girl follows the life and dreams of a poor foreman's daughter who is intent on keeping her virginity until marriage. In Garrison Junction, a man and his pregnant girlfriend are forced to wait for a mountain pass to be cleared after a fatal wreck involving a car and a truck, with a group that counts the only survivor of the accident - the driver of the truck - among them. In Red, the night before he's due to be shipped off to France and his first real taste of World War II, an American soldier makes an unexpected connection with a young woman he meets in line for a restaurant. In Aqua Boulevard, a man contemplates life, death, and all his blessings after running into an old friend, and having an accident with the family dog while walking the streets of Paris. In The River, a man who suspects his wife is seriously ill spends a day with her and her best friend on the river. In Kite Whistler Aquamarine, a woman deals with a difficult custody client, while her husband desperately tries to save a new-born foal who was frozen at birth. In Last of the White Slaves, a group of people vacationing in Greece hears a story of an ambassador to Saudi Arabia who, while trying to extradite a British girl who killed her lover, has to deal with his own romantic upheavals, as well as a seemingly thieving servant. In Thirteen & a Half, while a mother contemplates her life and future on an isolated property as she finds out a young armed fugitive is on the run in the area from her distant and uncaring husband, her daughter has a run-in with an intense stranger at her eighth-grade dance. In Paint, a man bleeding out from a construction deck accident while his estranged wife is oblivious in the house, contemplates the break-down of his marriage and likely upcoming demise. In The Ice Harvester, as families enjoy a skating day on the lake, an elderly ice harvester mysteriously continues his obsolete trade. In A Stakes Horse, a woman with a dying father raising his horses for races with her ex-husband as the jockey runs into a moral dilemma when she realizes the races are fixed.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ The lawyer said, “You have no tort claim.”
Sawyer said, “Okay.”
I thought, That’s what it’s like to be a man. If I were a man I could explain the law and people would listen and say, “Okay.” It would be so restful.
♥ A week later my phone rang in the middle of the night. I was sleeping alone then, and there was nothing to do but answer it. A call in the night could mean anything. This one meant Sawyer had a hostage and a gun at the state fund building and wanted me to look at his workers’ comp file.
♥ The officer who helped me fasten it had written a report for a child-support case of mine, including the line, “The defendant instructed me to consume feces.” I’d always liked him.
♥ It was a tolerable plan but I couldn’t focus on it. What I did was watch the sky. As it changed, as the clouds stretched out and the orange flared up and pink reached out to meet the blue, I started thinking of it as a description, a letter, not a lawyer-sounding one, and not a tome, but a start, an account for Sawyer and for me of what the day did out here, and what it was like.
~~Tome.
♥ The first time Hank slept with Kay-the only time-was the night her husband drowned. Her husband was his best friend, had been for years. Duncan was a great diver, a crack shot, a good storyteller.
♥ ..the idea that Duncan was dead sank in. He was dead and Hank had left him alone on the lakeshore, after leaving him alone down below, but now getting to Kay seemed as important as getting back to Duncan.
..Watching Kay hang the clothes, with the blue mountains in the distance, he felt weirdly calm, as if everything had settled down into a space Duncan didn’t occupy anymore, a space that would never be any different than it was now.
♥ Hank stood there looking at the toys, and Kay stood looking at him, and then he comforted her in the only way that made sense at the time. She put her arms around his neck, and he lifted her to the tall pine log-frame bed Duncan had built, and he undressed her and held her, still feeling the calm in Duncan’s absence that seemed to ring in his ears, until she cried out and clung to him, her body wrapped around his own, and then she began to cry for real. It wasn’t the thing he would have chosen to happen, but he felt strangely relieved. They’d broken the dead space Duncan had left behind and it seemed that now things would start changing.
♥ The night they saw Duncan dead, she told Hank she couldn’t believe it had happened, because she’d worried about it so much; you worried so a thing wouldn’t happen, and then it did.
♥ Kay had a shovel, and she dropped the first dirt on the lid of the coffin. It didn’t thud as Hank expected it to; it was dry and loose and fell evenly, like sand. Digging it out was no preparation for hearing it go back in.
♥ “I think Duncan must have sung it to her,” Kay said. “I think it’s a poem.”
“Four lean hounds crouched low and smiling, the merry deer ran before,” Annie sang on the tape.
..Annie, on the tape, sang, “Four red robots at a white water.”
Four red roebuck, he corrected her in his mind. He’d thought of hunting season when Demeter sang that line in the car, the season that would be coming soon, and all the past seasons with Duncan. The shorter days, the gloves pulled off to fire a rifle in the wind, the look of a buck as it stared you down, unafraid, then crumpled and fell. The rush of a shot fired well, and the sad feeling of the heavy body that had to be dragged bleeding back to the truck. Now he thought about how you can not know the songs a man sings when he’s alone with his little girl, or with your girl.
“Softer be they than slipper-sleep,” Annie’s voice sang, “the lee lie deer.”
Lean lithe deer, Hank thought. He looked around at Duncan’s friends, and wondered what they knew.
♥ He said, “He was my best friend,” and he didn’t know what he was talking about, Duncan’s sleeping with his wife or his sleeping with Duncan’s, or Duncan’s drowning on his watch. He thought again of Duncan’s pale face, the sickening feeling of his friend’s cold, still mouth under his.
“That didn’t make him yours,” she said.
♥ ..Hank couldn’t stand to sit around that cable-spool table where the four of them had sat so many nights, eating food they’d shot or caught, smoking the communal stash and singing Texas songs to Demeter’s guitar. He used to go outside with Demeter after those nights, and if it was winter she’d be wrapped in a shearling jacket with the collar up so her hair bunched out of it like corn silk. He’d have kissed Kay good night, on her smooth bony cheek, and Demeter would have kissed Duncan-years of that-and the sky would be so bright with stars, out where there weren’t any lights at all, that it made him dizzy with the bigness of it. Demeter’s breath would hang cloudy in the air, and she’d hug her guitar case and laugh, and Hank had felt so lucky on those nights, especially early on-he didn’t think any man had ever felt luckier. Duncan said he was born lucky, but Hank had come into luck.
♥ “We brought you some firewood.”
“Oh, that’s too much,” she said. Hank could see her realizing that Duncan wouldn’t be around to cut the wood anymore, and he opened the tailgate so he wouldn’t have to see that fact take hold on her face.
♥ When he turned back to give Demeter his work gloves, the two women were in each other’s arms, holding on tight and dry-eyed, each looking fiercely over the other’s shoulder. Hank felt like he shouldn’t be there, like he wasn’t there: they had no awareness of him. He dropped the gloves, loaded up his arms with wood and tried not to look at the women. Duncan had wronged him, but all he could hate his friend for was that Duncan had been loved.
~~Four Lean Hounds, CA. 1976.
♥ “Albert,” she said, trying not to sound like she was trying to sound as if it had just occurred to her.
~~Native Sandstone.
♥ If you're white, and you’re not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle, it’s hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch. It doesn’t matter if your dad’s the foreman or the rancher-you’re still a ranch girl, and you’ve been dealt a bad hand.
♥ Virginity is as important to rodeo boys as to Catholics, and you don’t go home and fuck Andy Tyler because when you finally get him, you want to keep him. But you like his asking. Some nights, he doesn’t ask. Some nights, Lacey Estrada climbs into Andy’s truck, dark hair bouncing in soft curls on her shoulders, and moves close to Andy on the front seat as they drive away. Lacey’s dad is a doctor, and she lives in a big white house where she can sneak Andy into her bedroom without waking anyone up. But cowboys are romantics; when they settle down they want the girl they haven’t fucked.
♥ “Be interesting in your twenties,” Suzy says. “Otherwise you’ll want to do it in your thirties or forties, when it wreaks all kinds of havoc, and you’ve got a husband and kids.”
♥ In grade school, it’s okay to do well. But by high school, being smart gives people ideas. Science teachers start bugging you in the halls. They say Eastern schools have Montana quotas, places for ranch girls who are good at math. You could get scholarships, they say. But you know, as soon as they suggest it, that if you went to one of those schools you’d still be a ranch girl-not the Texas kind, who are debutantes and just happen to have a ranch in the family, and not the horse-farm kind, who ride English. Horse people are different, because horses are elegant and clean. Cows are mucusy, muddy, shitty, slobbery things, and it takes another kind of person to live with them. Even your long curled hair won’t help at a fancy college, because prep-school girls don’t curl their hair. The rodeo boys like it, but there aren’t any rodeo boys out East. So you come up with a plan: you have two and a half years of straight A’s, and you have to flunk quietly, not to draw attention. Western Montana College, where Andy Tyler wants to go, will take anyone who applies. You can live cheap in Dillon, and if things don’t work out with Andy you already know half the football team.
♥ “You’re so lucky to have a degree and no kid,” Carla says. “You can still leave.”
And Carla is right: You could leave. Apply to grad school in Santa Cruz and live by the beach. Take the research job in Chicago that your chemistry professor keeps calling about. Go to Zihuatanejo with Haskell’s friends, who need a nanny. They have tons of room, because in Mexico you don’t have to pay property tax if you’re still adding on to the house.
But none of these things seem real; what’s real is the payments on your car and your mom’s crazy horses, the feel of the ranch road you can drive blindfolded and the smell of the hay. Your dad will need you in November to bring in the cows.
Suzy lays out the tarot cards on the kitchen table. The cards say, Go on, go away. But out there in the world you get old. You don’t get old here. Here you can always be a ranch girl. Suzy knows. When Haskell comes in wearing muddy boots, saying, “Hi, baby. Hi, hon,” his wife stacks up the tarot cards and kisses him hello. She pours him fresh coffee and puts away the cards that say go.
~~Ranch Girl.
♥ She hadn’t slept since she told her mother she was pregnant, and the long nights were worse than the sick mornings, the dark patches flowering like bruises under her eyes. Her mother had said, “So you’re going to be a whore like the rest of us.” Her mother wasn’t well, she knew that, but still she had sat up that night and thought about those women, her mother and grandmother, her lonely aunts, their absent men. Going to college and teaching school had seemed to put her in a separate category from them. No one was marrying when she met Chase-marrying mattered only to her mother, and life with him was good. No reason to change it, no need to.
Now it was ten years later, and the most militant of her college friends had tied various kinds of knots in courtrooms and churches and meadows. A wrongful-termination case in Missoula had brought on two bad years, when Chase was gone all the time, staying nights in a motel instead of driving home. Gina wasn’t sure they had made it out of those years intact. She had seen the baby as a happy accident after Chase won his case, drunk on wine and praise, but Chase just saw it as an accident.
♥ Gina went to the door and rubbed a clear spot in the pane. The driver had no truck, and there was nothing but the one-pump gas station out there. The blue denim jacket headed neither toward the gas station nor toward the police roadblock, but straight for the empty road. A cigarette burned in his hand. He would be invisible in the snow in a minute. She put up her hood and stepped outside, the air cold and bright in her lungs, the snow blowing against her face, and she could smell the smoke he left behind. On the other side of the highway were mountains, invisible now but leading, she knew, straight up into the white sky. She watched the dark jacket disappear into white, and then the legs that carried it, until the figure had vanished in the storm.
She shoved her hands in her pockets to keep them warm. She could find the frostbitten policeman and tell him the driver had wandered off. She could follow and see if she could find the man, though it was cold, and he was far away, and what would she say to him? She could tell Chase he was gone; Chase would have an idea about what to do. Or she could just let the driver go, and walk where he wanted. He might be accountable in some way, but no one could say the accident was his fault. Her face was wet and tingling with snow, and the smell of his smoke was gone. She wanted, with an unexpected force, for him to come back. But she imagined feeling what she’d seen in his eye, and what it might be like to walk away, and she went back inside, and let him go.
~~Garrison Junction.
♥ “Someone told me about a shop in Wimbledon. But you need to know someone to get anything. Men think stockings are a luxury, but you’ve never worn a skirt in the cold.”
“Never assume,” Red said, and a flicker of a smile crossed her face, then vanished. She frowned at the menu, and Red was as grateful for the frown as for the smile-two quick ripples on the surface.
♥ It was his last night as a man who’d been good at his training in Florida. In the morning he’d be a man who was at war.
♥ Red didn’t kiss her again. He walked back alone in the direction from which they had come, and every few steps he stomped his foot and swung one arm to strike at the air. He’d been cruel to her, and yet he was in. There was no play in it, no beauty. He wanted to go back to America, to soft girls on porches, and blouses wet from dancing, and the old fight over who belonged to whom, or if anyone belonged to anyone. Instead he was going to France, and he’d be lucky to get there alive.
♥ He’d meant to tell the girl about the movies he’d seen with the men in Ranger training, when they’d crawled around in the swamps without a girl in sight for days, then found themselves in a dark room with Lana Turner begging for love. He wanted to tell her about men’s desire-his own desire-and how little came in return for it sometimes. He thought, there in the rooming-house hallway, he had some important point to make, but now he didn’t know what the point was, and couldn’t find the words he meant to say.
~~Red.
♥ It was thirty years ago I knew Mia, the grandmother, and we were not so careful about what we said thirty years ago; Mia had three bambini, all with a German father, and we used to say they were not black or white, they were gray. They were green, we said. We called them les petits verts. But you see-the eldest of les petits verts grew up to be a film actress like her mother, and had this daughter who can stand on her head on a horse in the Polo Club in Paris. The little girl came from the horses and kissed me hello, on the left and right, with a shining face and blue eyes. Life is long, when you live a long time-that seems a simple fact, but you don’t know it until you have a lunch like this one.
♥ I played guitar then, and I was young. You have to be young to play the guitar, unless you are very great.
♥ They went to La Dominique, with the moving sands. There is a big sign there that says, dangerous beach. The water is very shallow and the sand is loose and deep, like quicksand. It sucks you down into the water, and the currents pull you out into the sea. The laughing girl, home again, swung her legs on the deck of the boat. The beach is not authorized, but Renard went swimming. With his debts and his adopted children and his family and his gambling, he went in at the unauthorized beach. He was a strong swimmer, but a strong swimmer is not what you need at La Dominique. What you need is to stop fighting, let the arms and legs go limp. If you let go, and don’t fight, the sand sucks you down, but then the water takes you back to the surface. Spits you out. If you fight and try to swim, you die. They didn’t find Renard’s body. His friends on the boat looked a long time. I went to the beach myself when I heard, and walked up and down, as close to the water as possible without slipping into the sand. I stayed there two days, looking at the water and thinking about my friend, then I flew back to Paris, where I was getting a divorce and had a job. They found a jawbone a month later-the drowned body all eaten by sharks or whatever was there.
♥ I had nowhere to be at that moment, so I walked back along the rue de Babylone, where I lived when I was young. I used to walk to work from there, and brought girls home to the apartment with the purple bathtub sunk low into the tile. Each job and each girl, at that time, was the most important thing in the world, and demanded everything. I was still young enough to play guitar not so well.
♥ Since I realized I was too old for guitar and married, I have had two good lives, with two good wives. I am a lucky man. When I ride in the country, not in circles but moving forward, all alone, I think what could happen, to leave behind a widow. Nothing much would have to happen; my brother is younger than I, and already dead. But sometimes I think I will fall from the horse, hit my head or break my spine, with no one to help. I would leave the widow that much sooner, and she would marry again and have two lives, too, with two husbands. She is young enough for that, the way she shines. And then sometimes I think I can outlive them all.
♥ Gaétan is seven, the age of reason, the age of charm.
♥ I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.
♥ I leaned my head against the green glass, the warm dog still against my chest. I said thank you for my children and listened to the rushing of the waves that did not stop but came and came again.
~~Aqua Boulevard.
♥ Up close, Jo has a knowing look, a canniness that Inger lacks. But Inger doesn’t need to be knowing, as far as I can tell. A Minnesota heiress with dairymaid braids and a lineless tan, she’s like something you’d make up, and she treats the world like something she made up. We hear from her only when she’ll be in Utah or when she wants us to go with her somewhere else. She stretches her arms over her head, in a man’s white undershirt. Jo thinks there’s something permanently unfinished about Inger-like the missing “id” of her name, though I guess it’s not an id that’s missing-and that’s why she’s never with a man very long; there’s an absence in her that doesn’t seem to need filling, or that other people can’t fill.
♥ I always thought Jo would grow out of me. She didn’t have a dad and I thought I was the replacement dad, and one day she would leave home. Or she’d decide she wanted kids and a guy who could pay for them. Or I thought I’d do something stupid on the river and she would be a young widow who gets to have another twenty or thirty years with someone else. I used to think who it might be: a doctor like my dad, a divorced guy with kids, one of our friends living in a converted garage in Telluride. But I didn’t plan for a second life without her.
♥ “I don’t like to be without you,” I tell her.
“We needed ice,” Jo says. “We can’t leave Inger alone with the coyotes.” She drops the jar of cream into a drawstring bag.
“I mean I don’t ever like to be without you,” I say.
Jo’s smile starts around her mouth, tentative, like I’ve caught her off-guard, then lifts her whole face and her fragile-looking eyes into an unexpected coughed laugh. “Since when?” she says. “We’re apart all the time, we’ve been apart all our lives.” She puts half an apricot in my mouth and tells me they’re good for me, I need to keep up my strength.
♥ I think of Jo in the water, holding on against the current as sand slipped away downriver, bound for the Pacific. I know Jo wants for me what she thinks I would want for her, but I imagined a second life for her only because I didn’t believe in it. I never believed I could give her up.
~~The River.
♥ “Is there another way to put her down?”
“I wish she could die on her own,” he said. “But she’d just be hurting.”
I took his hand off the revolver, leaving the gun on the table. His skin was clean from tap water, chapped from lifting the baby outside without gloves. I raised the hand to my face to feel it rough and cold on my skin, and he moved to let me sit on his knee.
He made a noise that sounded like a sob but couldn’t be; I’d never seen him cry. The baby was outside waiting, and Cort’s hair against my face smelled like shampoo and hay. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and we sat there a long time, not saying anything, so the filly could stay.
~~Kite Whistler Aquamarine.
♥ Miles was an asset to everyone; he made a living at it. He knew every name that came up at any dinner, and the stories he told made his listeners wish he would tell stories about them. He had left his legal studies to take a job with the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where he made himself indispensable. He was the ambassador’s lover and his protégé, and he assimilated to Arab life faster than anyone since T. E. Lawrence. When the old ambassador died, Miles stayed on. When I asked what he did exactly (it was something for the embassy still, some diplomatic role), he said he was the last of the white slaves. By which he meant last of the colonials: a fixer, a smoother-over, a friend of British oil interests.
♥ The sky had grown dark, the pink light fading in blue. Christopher looked at him with sadness but without hatred, and Miles felt again that his heart might be safe.
♥ I stopped liking me, and stopped liking you-that’s what happened. I’m sending this with your friend (isn’t it funny how everyone we know is “your friend”? We don’t call anyone “our friends.” It’s always “Miles’s friends.” I keep noticing things like that lately. Someone corrected me saying “a mute point” yesterday and I realized I got it from you. Did you know it’s wrong?).
So, no love to you except the old love, and that was real enough.
♥ “My father worked in Kenya before,” she said. “D’you know what the pidgin name for a solar eclipse is?”
“What?” He was disturbed by how much it sounded like “wot.”
“‘Hurricane lamp belong Jesus gone bugger-up,’” she said.
He shook his head with surprise. “Is that a joke?”
“It’s real,” she said. “I keep thinking about it. That’s what my life feels like here.”
~~Last of the White Slaves.
♥ On the morning of the eighth-grade dance in June, Gina woke to the sound of running water and the smell of papaya-mango-dewberry steam seeping under the door. She had an acute sense, listening to her daughter in the shower, that this was a fleeting moment in her life: the papaya-scented girl in blue eye shadow and body glitter would disappear as quickly as two and six and twelve had gone. Within a year, Amy would want to smell like perfume in tiny cut-glass vials, and Gina would never again wake to this tropical fog.
Her second-graders were already out for the summer, so the morning felt blissfully free. They exhausted her, but there was something comforting about the endless march of seven-year-olds. They never got any older; they wanted love more than independence; they would never be thirteen. Gina lay thinking of that unchanging procession of small bodies, then followed her daughter downstairs.
~~Thirteen & a Half.
♥ He took a great gasp of air to make room for the surge of hope in his chest.
♥ Sleep didn’t have to be sex, his son once told him when Jack found a yellow-haired girl in Michael’s bed one morning, the two kids tangled in sheets. Sleep didn’t have to be sex. As if they really had only been sleeping there, the girl bare-shouldered, her clothes and Michael’s in a heap at the foot of the bed. Jack had joked about it with Marie. Then Marie, when she moved out of his bedroom, said sex didn’t have to be sleep.
~~Paint.
♥ He began to work again, cutting and stacking the ice. He had lost time talking to the girl. But she had made him think about swimming, about how the ice he worked so hard to break would melt away in summer until people could move through it instead of over it. He had never learned to swim; if a harvester fell in, it was not his ability to swim that was called on. It was his ability to kick and climb his way out in his heavy clothes, and to keep himself warm. The ice harvester knew he could kick his way out, if needed. He was not a man who would drown.
~~The Ice Harvester.
♥ So when Connell lost what should have been a hand ride, and a purse that had our money in it in entry fees, I lost patience with him. I’d guessed before at what went on in the jockeys’ trailers, when it was someone’s birthday or someone was owed a favor or wanted revenge. When I’d asked Connell, he said what my dad said: “A guy works awful hard keeping his weight down to be throwing races.” But there’s such a feeling of impotence when a horse comes out of the gate representing everything you’ve worked for, and there’s nothing more you can do. I wanted to keep what wasn’t left to chance where I could see it.
♥ “Did she really win because she was the fastest?” I asked him.
“The fastest doesn’t always win,” he said. “But yeah, she’s the fastest.”
“Did you know she’d win when you told me she would?”
He studied me for a minute. “You know what, Addy?” he said. “This is a business. The track has to make money to stay open. The state has to make money just like they do off the lottery. Me and the other jockeys, we have to make money to eat. Those horses are running so the old boys in the stands can waste a Sunday and the rest of us can live our lives. That’s all.”
..“Connell says it’s all about money,” I said. “He says it’s just a business. Getting and spending.”
“He’s got it backward,” my father said. “The money stuff goes on so we can all watch them run.”
The yellow aspen quaked along the fence. The deck needed repainting and I picked at the flecks on the weathered wood. I tried to think of something that seemed important enough to say but not too sad to talk about, and could think of nothing.
♥ She looked good: healthy and watchful. She never sweated before a race, never got uptight. Her stall was dark, with the musky chemical smell of clean horses and their medicines, and she knocked her head against my hands. I slipped under the rope to stand near her, and she shivered in one rippling motion from her neck to her haunches, and swished her tail. She lifted one foot to step away from me, then stayed. I felt a sudden, aching rush of love for her, a tightness in my lungs. I ran my hand along her nose, told her she had wings.
♥ He looked hard at me. “You mad at your dad about something, Addy?”
I blinked stupidly for a second. I was-I was mad at him for getting sick. For having faith in jockeys. For being corruptible in body and incorruptible in mind.
“God, no,” I said.
~~A Stakes Horse.