Jenna Blum, Maggie O'Farrell, Molly Gloss, Nicole Mones, Elizabeth Benedict, Ann Patchett
The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction
© 2010
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.
ALMOST by Elizabeth Benedict
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.