The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels Read online

  Best Contemporary Women's Fiction

  Six Novels

  Elizabeth Benedict, Jenna Blum, Molly Gloss, Nicole Mones, Maggie O'Farrell, and Ann Patchett

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  About the Authors

  Contents

  ALMOST

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  The City

  1. A High Note

  2. I'd Rather Eat Glass

  3. Today, During

  The Island

  4. The Wild Wood

  5. Island Marxism

  6. Clare's Funeral

  7. Slipping

  8. Diving into the Wreck

  9. The Morning After

  10. Later the Same Day

  11. The Chicken Coop

  12. The Humane Society

  13. In Search of Another Note

  14. The Night Before

  The Garden

  15. A Happy Ending

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth Benedict

  THOSE WHO SAVE US

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Trudy and Anna, 1993

  Anna and Max, Weimar, 1939–1940

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Trudy, November 1996

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Anna and Mathilde, Weimar, 1940–1942

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Trudy, December 1996

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Anna and the Obersturmführer, Weimar, 1942

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Trudy, January 1997

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Anna and the Obersturmführer, Berchtesgaden, 1943

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Trudy, February 1997

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Anna and the Obersturmführer, Weimar, 1943–1945

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  Trudy, March 1997

  44

  45

  46

  47

  Anna and Jack, Weimar, 1945

  48

  49

  50

  51

  Trudy, April 1997

  52

  53

  54

  55

  Anna and Jack, New Heidelburg, 1945

  56

  57

  58

  Trudy, May 1997

  59

  60

  61

  62

  Acknowledgments

  THE HEARTS OF HORSES

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Acknowledgments

  THE LAST CHINESE CHEF

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Let us begin with two ...

  Acknowledgements

  THE MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT

  Copyright

  Dedication

  At the Intersection of George Burns and Gracie Allen

  Nebraska

  Acknowledgments

  Almost by Elizabeth Benedict

  Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

  The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss

  The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell

  The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Boston New York

  2010

  Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Publishing Company.

  Almost by Elizabeth Benedict.

  Copyright © 2001 by Elizabeth Benedict.

  Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum.

  Copyright © 2004 by Jenna Blum.

  The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss.

  Copyright © 2007 by Molly Gloss.

  The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones.

  Copyright © 2007 by Nicole Mones.

  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell.

  Copyright © 2006 by Maggie O'Farrell.

  The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett.

  Copyright © 1997 by Ann Patchett.

  About the Authors

  ELIZABETH BENEDICT is an acclaimed novelist, journalist, teacher of creative writing, editor, and writing coach. Her novels include the New York Times bestseller Almost and The Practice of Deceit.

  JENNA BLUM is the author of the New York Times bestseller Those Who Save Us and The Stormchasers. She currently runs master novel workshops for Grub Street Writers in Boston.

  MOLLY GLOSS is the author of the national bestseller The Hearts of Horses, The Jump-Off Creek, a finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award, and Wild Life, winner of the James Tiptree Award.

  NICOLE MONES began working in China in 1977 and she brings to her fiction writing an in-depth understanding of the country and its culture. She is the author of the novels The Last Chinese Chef, A Cup of Light, and Lost in Translation, a New York Times Notable Book.

  MAGGIE O'FARRELL is the author of five novels, including The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and The Hand That First Held Mine. Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, O'Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland.

  ANN PATCHETT is the author of five novels, including Bel Canto, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, The Magician's Assistant, The Patron Saint of Liars, and Taft. She has written for the Atlantic, Gourmet, New York Times Magazine, Vogue, the Washington Post, and others.

  Contents

  Almost [>]

  Those Who Save Us [>]

  The Hearts of Horses [>]

  The Last Chinese Chef [>]

  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox [>]

  The Magician's Assistant [>]

  ALMOST

  Elizabeth Benedict

  A MARINER BOOK

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON • NEW YORK


  First Mariner Books edition 2002

  Copyright © 2001 by Elizabeth Benedict

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Benedict, Elizabeth.

  Almost / Elizabeth Benedict,

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-618-14332-7

  ISBN 0-618-23161-7 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-618-23161-4 (pbk.)

  1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Islands—Fiction. 3. Massachusetts—Fiction. 4. Runaway wives—Fiction. 5. Childlessness—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552E5396 A79 2001

  813'.54—dc21 2001024528

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  DOC 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Tin House,

  where part of this book first appeared.

  For our friends and families,

  then and now

  Author's Note

  Although there was in my life a man to whom I bore roughly the same relationship that Sophy bears to Will, and although I have aimed for an autobiographical tone, this is a work of fiction. Swansea Island exists only in my imagination and is populated by characters of my own invention. The details of Will's professional, personal, and family life are fiction and should in no way be read as posthumous truths.

  The names of well-known individuals and those unnamed in their orbits are used fictitiously throughout, and any overlapping situations are purely coincidental.

  I am indebted to the many friends and colleagues who made available the quiet houses where most of this book was written.

  The City

  Should we have stayed home and thought of here?

  —Elizabeth Bishop,

  "Questions of Travel"

  1. A High Note

  I HAVE this boyfriend who comes to visit me—it's mostly a sex thing. Unless I visit him, in which case it's mostly a babysitting thing. I'm not sure which turns me on more. You don't think of British Jews, if you happen to know any—and I didn't until Daniel Jacobs—as world-class lovers, but he must be an exception, or it could be the antidepressants he takes, which not only keep the blues at bay, but orgasms too. In Daniel's case, for, oh, forty-five minutes, give or take a few. My friend Henderson calls him the Bionic Man.

  That's how I'd have begun this story if I'd sat down to write it two months ago, instead of now. I'd have put it firmly in the present tense, the intense present, a time that felt electric to me and that I know I don't want to part with yet. Two months ago, the story would have been all about the sweet madness and the math. And why not? When the numbers are in this range, you feel some obligation to history to keep a record. Remember that old Irving Wallace novel The Seven Minutes, about what goes through this woman's mind in the seven minutes of intercourse? Not one reviewer griped, Seven? That's it? Not one of them said, Irving, you sure this isn't autobiography?

  Without my telling him, the doorman knows not to buzz me if packages, even groceries, arrive after he's seen dashing Daniel come upstairs. Phone messages on my machine pile up as thickly as pink While You Were Out slips impaled on an upright skewer. I always turn off the ringer on the phone and mute the voices on the machine, incoming and outgoing, so that we're not distracted. Or bombarded. My almost-ex sometimes calls, in tears, to say he wants me back, and my editor, practically in tears, to remind me that my novel based on the life of Lili Boulanger is budgeted for this year and I am eleven months late. And my other editor, a guy I call the Eighth Deadly Sin, who tries to tempt me to ghost another celebrity autobiography. He is a twenty-seven-year-old manic depressive with his own imprint who hired me to write the life story of a daytime TV personality, which I finished in three months and is about to be published without my name on it, thank God.

  As book-writing goes, other people's autobiographies are child's play. You're handed the central character, the dramatic highs and lows, the bittersweet, inspirational ending, a deadline that leaves no room for writer's block, and money, real money. Enough to leave my husband, Will O'Rourke, and dog Henry, move back to New York, and live for a while in this studio-with-alcove furnished sublet in Greenwich Village with two walk-in closets, galley kitchen, central air, and a look of Pier One exoticism on the cheap. An abundance of wicker, batik, cotton throw rugs, and bayberry-scented candles that I often light when Daniel leaves.

  The other people I don't want disturbing us are my mother, whose memory is on the fritz, and who sometimes calls to ask how old I was when my father left, and my best gay friend, Henderson, whose messages I love, except when they're broadcast into the boudoir, as this one was on an overcast afternoon: "Sophy, I trust you're not picking up the phone because you and Daniel are having one of those marathon sessions. Hi, lovebirds. Would you believe I lost the name of that guy who does interventions again? My birth father was absolutely blotto last night at Cost fan tutte, and my wicked stepmother and I have decided it's time to send in the Eighty-second Airborne. I hope this is a quickie, because I really need to talk to you before the sun goes down."

  Since I moved back to the city in March, my life often feels surreal and overloaded, like an electrical extension cord with too many attachments, on the verge of blowing a fuse. Henderson claims I'm suffering from what Jack Kerouac called "the great mad joy you feel on returning to New York City," though I think it's the generic great mad joy of jettisoning a tired old life for a shiny new one. Some days I'm Gene Kelly doing his waterlogged soft-shoe and singin' in the rain, happy again. On more difficult days, I'm Dorothy, wide-eyed at the phantasm of Oz but terrified I'll never find my way home, or never have another home to find my way to. Being able to focus completely on Daniel for several hours at a stretch keeps me from going off the deep end. Or maybe—maybe Daniel is the deep end, and we are a couple of ordinary junkies who don't even know we have a problem. You forget, being married, that sex can take up so many hours of the day.

  A quickie in Daniel's book is half an hour, and never mind foreplay, never mind the nerves on the back of my neck, the world of whispering and slowness. Daniel's cut-to-the-chase is an acquired taste, I know, but now that I've got it, I'm not sure I want to go back to the evolved, sensitive-guy approach. When I told my best woman friend, Annabelle, that on my birthday Daniel and I were at it for forty-three minutes— according to the digital clock on my microwave, which I can see in certain positions from the bed across the room—Annabelle said, "That's a very good birthday present, Sophy." Afterward he gave me another present, a framed gelatin print of a photo of my beautiful, sad-eyed Lili Boulanger he had an art dealer colleague in Paris track down, wrapped in wrinkled Pocahontas gift paper. Then we staggered to his house at the end of Waverly Street, stopping at Balducci's and Carvel to pick up dinner for his four Vietnamese orphans, Tran, Van, Vicki, and Cam, two boys and two girls.

  Of course they're not really orphans, because Daniel is their legal father, but so far they have lost two mothers apiece, the Vietnamese women who bore them and Daniel's wife, Blair, who is, as it says on all those old tombstones, Not Dead Only Sleeping, in a nursing home on the North Fork of Long Island, with a spot-on view of a meadow, a salt marsh, and the daily sunrise, none of which she is ever likely to lay eyes on again.

  Daniel explained all of this to me over coffee, days after I had moved back to the city and we met at the gay-lesbian-all-welcome AA meeting in the gay-lesbian-all-welcome neighborhood where we live. But by all welcome, they don't only mean boring straight people like Daniel and me; they mean cross-dressers, transsexuals, and a surprising number of people who haven't made up their minds. He and I ended up there separately and by accident, thinking it was nondenominational, but we stayed because, story for story, it's the best theater in New Y
ork, a darkly inspirational, Frank Capra-in-drag movie that could be called It's a Wonderful Life One Day at a Time. It's also a place where a man telling his life story can say, "During that period, which went on for five years, I was so busy drinking—I mean, honey, I was taking Ecstasy as a mood stabilizer—that I forgot to meet men and have sex, which brings us to Fire Island," and seventy-five people will howl with sympathetic laughter.

  Daniel and I innocently sat next to each other, and he invited me out after for coffee at Dean & DeLuca on Eleventh Street. I was still thinking about the speaker at the meeting whose name was Robert'S., and who wore a platinum pageboy wig and a chartreuse DKNY miniskirt and said to us, "Girls"—though I was the only one in the room—"I am waiting for God to work her magic," and I suppose I was waiting myself. That's what made me ask Daniel, at the start of our first date—as I began to take inventory of all the ways he appeared different from my gray-haired, salty-looking husband—where he stood on God.

  "Off to the side," he answered, "quite a way. But here I am, knee-deep in drunks who talk about the Almighty as if he lives next door. It's a lot for an Englishman to sign up for. We have a long tradition of drinking ourselves to death quietly and all alone. Then again, this wasn't my idea." Daniel had the look of a youthful Tom Wolfe, long-limbed, clean-shaven, wearing a suit I didn't know then was an Armani; and there was not a strand of gray in his fine brown hair. He might have been my age, mid-forties, or a few years younger.

  "Whose idea was it?"

  "My physician advised me three years ago that I'd die in short order if I didn't quit. And what about you? Where do you stand on God?"

  I said that for the first ten years I went to meetings, I had a difficult time overcoming my godless Unitarian upbringing, but in the last six months, I found myself leaning in another direction, dispensing with some of my skepticism. I wasn't a practicing Unitarian any longer, I told him; I considered myself lapsed. Trying that out for the first time, the "lapsed." Daniel laughed out loud. But I wanted to play it for laughs; I was flirting like crazy. I hadn't slept with anyone but my husband for the ten years of our marriage, plus the two years before, and I wasn't leaving anything to chance.

  "And what's at the core of a lapsed Unitarian's belief system?" he asked.

  "Nothing to speak of, so there's room for reconsideration, but not much motivation for it. What about you?"