#465 Dark Matter- Katherine Heiny

#465 Dark Matter- Katherine Heiny

Maya is having an affair with her mentor and boss. They began the affair the night she was celebrating her engagement to Rhodes, her fiancé. This is a kind of last fling affair, probably.

She has a theory that the smarter the man, the more likely it is that after sex, as part of a pillow-talk ritual, he will spout off some kind of inane factoid. That a clear mind inspires this kind of knowledge. The story here is glued together with these little facts, like dark matter that glues together the universe.

This story is less about the affair than about relationship dynamics between men and woman. Maya has had men tell her facts her whole life, like she needs to be taught something, but the one time she gives a fact, its truthfulness is questioned. Heiny’s style is impeccable and light. There is a seamless flow to the dialogue and well articulated shape to the story.

Rating: 9-6-7-8 Total= 30

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

#409 Fun With Problems- Robert Stone

Hampton was a prison town, Mathews was a public defender. He used to be married but he is a drunk and messed all that up. Now he has settled into an existence of complacency and greyness.

“Matthew’s life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.”

“His ambitions had faded, and life could be various and perversely satisfying in Hampton.”

While conferring with a client at the prison, he meets a social worker and convinces her to meet him for drinks, although she herself a recovering alcoholic, only drinks juice. Mathews is like the devil on her shoulder and is extremely pushy about getting her to drink again. He is successful, she drinks, and they hook up.

“His life was lonely enough, but he was not shopping for a friend or a comrade in the service of the poor. His attraction to her was sensual, sexual, and mean, which was how he wanted it. Spite had taught his detachment. The trick was to carry indifferent to his own feelings without pity for things."

Her life goes back down the drain, and his stays in that middle purgatory. If he can’t be happy, the next best thing is to make others unhappy as well.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29

#353 Lauren Groff- L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story

#353 L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story- Lauren Groff

You could call this amazing story: Love in the Time of Spanish Influenza. Like the great love tragedies of Gabriel Garcia Marques, this one leaves you heavy with grief, and envious of the love lost.

Lodovico Debard is a famous man. “He’s a swimmer, but he is other things, too: a forty-three-year-old with a mighty set of pectorals, one chipped front tooth, and a rakish smile; a rumored Bolshevik; a poet, filler of notebooks, absinthe drinker, cavorter of the literary types.”

He begins giving swim lessens to Aliette Huber. She was a beautiful and accomplished young woman before being stricken by polio. Now in a wheelchair, this protected heiress hopes to gain strength, and other things, from her new savior.

“She knows L. from his book of poetry, which she reads when she was recuperating from her illness. She feels he knows him so intimately that now, freezing on the dock, she is startled and near tears: she has just realized that, to him, she is a stranger.”

Their love affair is careful but passionate. As their fate runs its course, so does the global epidemic of Spanish Flu, swallowing the world in death and fear. They hardly notice:

“Who in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recent decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues, and poems fill the world?”

Notable Passage: “Their kiss is long and hungry. If they knew how often they would remember it, for how many years it would be their dearest memory, this kiss would last for hours.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#308 Oragami Prunes- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

#308 Oragami Prunes- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

This story was kind of all over the place for me. Two displaced wealthy Mexicans meet in Laundromat in Austin. She is older and cynical, he is young and naïve. They have a torrid lost-weekend and then part ways never to met again. There is some symbolism attached to wild fires, tumbling inside of dryers, and Michael Jackson’s death, but it’s not apparent to me what they mean.

That said, it wasn’t without some entertainment. It had a few good lines. The first is probably my favorite first line in the 300 stories I’ve covered in this blog:

“I first met Laura at a washateria the day both my washer and Michael Jackson died.”

And then it also had probably the creepiest line I’ve read in the 300 stories covered in this blog:

“Laura’s helplessness was wrapped in a thin layer of arrogance that made her sexy and unnerving, a thing you wanted to put your hands on.”

So, there’s that.

Notable Passage: “Nostalgia is the saddest form of glee.”

Rating: 7-6-5-6 Total= 24

#135 Airplane: Or, How He Talked To Himself As If Reciting Poetry- Haruki Murakami

#135 Airplane: Or, How He Talked To Himself As If Reciting Poetry- Haruki Murakami

A twenty year-old man is having an affair with an older woman. Neither of them are entirely sure why the affair exists, they don’t love each other, nor do they hate each other. Their love-making is cold and mechanical, but yet, it seems to have meaning.

“Far more meaningful than age differences, he felt were the different tendencies that each individual possessed. He couldn’t help thinking that this was an important key for unlocking the riddle of life.”

While they spend time wondering about seemingly important things, she cries often, and he talks to himself in poetic verse. These odd, personal idiosyncratic tics is what makes them unique. It’s in the others reaction of these traits that their own being becomes apparent. It seems that we only know ourselves through each other’s eyes. There can be something so apparent and germane about yourself to the outside world but it is something that we can only see through the help of others.

We often spend time worrying about the wrong things, things we have no control over, things that will go on ticking even if we had not noticed:

“…she looked at the clock again. It had done its job: in the five minutes since her last look, it had advanced five minutes’ worth.”

Subtle and impossibly simple at first, Murukami can be utterly florid when we look slightly deeper. A point made by the following passage, that at first can seem like a cliché point, but when read in full context of this piece, sticks with you:

“I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”

Notable Passage: “She seemed to have lifted the edge of the world, and now she was loosening its threads little by little—perfunctorily, apathetically, as if she had to do it no matter how long it might take.”

Rating: 9-8-10-9 Total= 36