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    The Dog of the Marriage: Stories
    The Dog of the Marriage: Stories
    The Dog of the Marriage: Stories
    Ebook121 pages1 hour

    The Dog of the Marriage: Stories

    By Amy Hempel

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    About this ebook

    Amy Hempel's compassion, intensity, and illuminating observations have made her one of the most distinctive and admired modern writers. In three stunning books of stories, she has established a voice as unique and recognizable as the photographs of Cindy Sherman or the brushstrokes of Robert Motherwell. The Dog of the Marriage, Hempel's fourth collection, is about sexual obsession, relationships gone awry, and the unsatisfied longings of everyday life.

    In "Offertory," a modern-day Scheherazade entertains and manipulates her lover with stories of her sexual encounters with a married couple as a very young woman. In "Reference # 388475848-5," a letter contesting a parking ticket becomes a beautiful and unnerving statement of faith. In "Jesus Is Waiting," a woman driving to New York sends a series of cryptically honest postcards to an old lover. And the title story is a heartbreaking tale about the objects and animals and unmired desires that are left behind after death or divorce.

    These nine stories teem with wisdom, emotion, and surprising wit. Hempel explores the intricate psychology of people falling in and out of love, trying to locate something or someone elusive or lost. Her sentences are as lean, original, and startling as any in contemporary fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJun 15, 2010
    ISBN9781451604009
    The Dog of the Marriage: Stories

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      Book preview

      The Dog of the Marriage - Amy Hempel

      ALSO BY AMY HEMPEL

      Tumble Home

      At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom

      Reasons to Live

      SCRIBNER

      1230 Avenue of the Americas

      New York, NY 10020

      www.SimonandSchuster.com

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      Copyright © 2005 by Amy Hempel

      All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

      SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc. used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

      For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

      DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

      Set in Garamond No. 3

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Hempel, Amy.

      The dog of the marriage : stories / Amy Hempel

      p. cm.

      Contents: Beach town—Jesus is waiting—The uninvited—Reference #388475848-5—What were the white things?—The dog of the marriage—The afterlife—Memoir—Offertory.

      1. United States—social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Married people—Fiction. I. Title.

      PS3558.E47916D64 2005

      813′.54—dc22

      2004057837

      ISBN 0-7432-6451-7

      eISBN: 978-1-451-60400-9

      Page 141 constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

      FOR GORDON

      But the greatest desire of all is to be

      In the dream of another,

      To feel a slight pull, like reins,

      To feel a heavy pull, like chains.

      —YEHUDA AMICHAI

      CONTENTS

      Beach Town

      Jesus Is Waiting

      The Uninvited

      Reference #388475848-5

      What Were the White Things?

      The Dog of the Marriage

      The Afterlife

      Memoir

      Offertory

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      THE DOG

      OF THE MARRIAGE

      BEACH TOWN

      The house next door was rented for the summer to a couple who swore at missed croquet shots. Their music at night was loud, and I liked it; it was not music I knew. Mornings, I picked up the empties they had lobbed across the hedge, Coronas with the limes wedged inside, and pitched them back over. We had not introduced ourselves these three months.

      Between our houses a tall privet hedge is backed by white pine for privacy in winter. The day I heard the voice of a woman not the wife, I went out back to a spot more heavily planted but with a break I could just see through. Now it was the man who was talking, or trying to—he started to say things he could not seem to finish. I watched the woman do something memorable to him with her mouth. Then the man pulled her up from where she had been kneeling. He said, Maybe you’re just hungry. Maybe we should get you something to eat.

      The woman had a nimble laugh.

      The man said, Paris is where you and I should go.

      The woman asked what was wrong with here. She said, I like a beach town.

      I wanted to phone the wife’s office in the city and hear what she would sound like if she answered. I had no fellow feeling; all she had ever said to me was couldn’t I mow my lawn later in the day. It was noon when she asked. I told her the village bylaws disallow mowing before seven-thirty, and that I had waited until nine. A gardener, hired by my neighbor, cared for their yard. But still I was sure they were neglecting my neighbor’s orchids. All summer long I had watched for the renters to leave the house together so that I could let myself in with the key from the shelf in the shed and test the soil and water the orchids.

      The woman who did not want to go to Paris said that she had to leave. But I don’t want you to leave, the man said, and she said, Think of the kiss at the door.

      Nobody thinks about the way sound carries across water. Even the water in a swimming pool. A week later, when her husband was away, the wife had friends to lunch by the pool. I didn’t have to hide to listen; I was in view if they had cared to look, pulling weeds in the raspberry canes.

      The women told the wife it was an opportunity for her. They said, Fair is fair, and to do those things she might not otherwise have done. No regrets, they said, if you are even the type of person who is given to regret, if you even have that type of wistful temperament to begin with.

      The women said, We are not unintelligent; we just let passion prevail. They said, Who would deny that we have all had these feelings?

      The women told the wife she would not feel this way forever. You will feel worse, however, before you feel better, and that is just the way it always is.

      The women advised long walks. They told the wife to watch the sun rise and set, to look for solace in the natural world, though they admitted there was no comfort to be found in the world and they would all be fools to expect it.

      The weekend the couple next door had moved in—their rental began on Memorial Day—I heard them place a bet on the moon. She said waxing, he said waning. Days later, the moon nearly full in the night sky, I listened for the woman to tell her husband she had won, knowing they had not named the terms of the bet, and that the woman next door would collect nothing.

      JESUS IS WAITING

      I didn’t want the sunroof or the luggage rack, but neither did I want to wait the three months not to have to have them. So I took the white one anyway and put fifty thousand miles on it in just about a year.

      Lincoln Tunnel to Baltimore, BWI: two and three-quarter hours; Holland Tunnel to D.C. (Connecticut Avenue exit): three and a quarter hours. In Virginia, anything over ninety is now reckless driving and reckless driving costs more than speeding does and they say no excuses, you have to show up in court, but don’t believe it; I phoned in sick the day I was slated to appear and a clerk told me where to send the check. One more reckless driving ticket in Virginia and I’ll have to find the place they have the safety class that, if you take it, knocks three points off your license. Or, I don’t know, your life?

      Maryland and New York are the states where I can push it.

      No blue highways, nothing scenic.

      In a tornado outside Baltimore, in a broken neighborhood off 1-95, I asked the attendant in a Mobil station, Where’s anywhere else?

      The man didn’t even point.

      I write in pencil because a pencil is what is tied with string to the suggestion box. We welcome your comments. I write, I went to the other place first, but got pissed off in line and came here and am glad I did.

      I had not fared so well at the one off Exit 7. The ice machine was broken. Yes, I got more Dr Pepper in the cup, but the Dr Pepper I got was warm.

      I never eat in the place I stop for gas. I like to keep the odometer turning. Sometimes I will drive only as far as a local exit with a road or avenue in the name. Not a connecting artery. I will pull off into a community, find a cul-de-sac, stop the car, keep an eye on the trees that line the street. Maybe fill out a postcard bought at a

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