A few days late, but I couldn't skip my short story reading this week. I'd not heard of Helen Nielsen prior to reading "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree". It seems she is one of those authors who has faded from memory. I don't see anything in print by her, but it looks as though some of her books are available in digital format. She wrote about a dozen novels from the late-1940s to the mid-1970s, TV scripts and quite a few short stories. This story was published in Manhunt in 1959, and as I was reading it I was thinking what a great movie it would make (and I know there are a few out there with a similar theme--so maybe it was made into a movie?). Considering she wrote for TV, perhaps that is not surprising really. I can picture it in B&W and Alfred Hitchcock would have been the perfect director.
Loren, the narrator, spins out her story at a nice pace--reeling you in, shocking you by her actions, and then a twist at the climactic moment of the story. I knew something was coming, I just wasn't quite sure what or what the outcome of it all would be. It's obvious from the first moment of the story that something is up. Nothing good can go on at 3:00 a.m. in the morning, right?
"Loren moved swiftly across the foyer, punctuating the silence with the sharp tattoo of her heels on the tile and the soft rustling of her black taffeta evening coat. Black for darkness; black for stealth. She stepped into the automatic elevator and pressed the button for the seventeenth floor. The door closed and the elevator began its silent climb. Only then did she breathe a bit easier, reassuring herself that she was almost safe."
She goes into her apartment, switches off the lamp, looks out of the window at a neighbor below and then turns off a taped recording of herself giving dictation to a secretary. Then the story flashes backwards in order to see just how we got there.
It's a cliché, but in this story it's necessary. Loren was a secretary until her married boss divorced his wife and married her. Then she became the vice president of the company, so efficient is she. On their honeymoon off the coast of Florida they have drinks in a shanty-type bar ("one of the high-bracket shanties"). Across the room she spots a man playing the piano, a little song that goes like this . . . "don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me . . . ". And the man playing it is someone she thought she would never see again. A man she thought was dead. Isn't that what happens to men in war who stop writing?
Back home Loren begins getting phone calls at home, late at night when her husband is away on business. She picks up the phone and hears music. It's the same song that was being played in the shanty on her honeymoon. She thinks of those foolish letters she wrote during the war. Now she's married and he's tormenting her. So she must do something to ensure her happiness.
Let me revise my initial 'visualization' of the story. It would make a great movie, but more an--Alfred Hitchcock meets M. Night Shyamalan (wouldn't that be fun?!). The story moves somewhat in reverse--the reader sees something of the outcome and then learns how Loren ended up there. You think you know how and why, but then again . . .
Another good story! Next up is one by Dorothy B. Hughes. I have a few of her books already, as yet unread. I wonder if when I read the story I will be prompted to go and dig them out of my mystery/crime pile. (Probably!).
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And the New Yorker story? "The Emerald Light in the Air" by Donald Antrim. I'll be honest with you. Since I have set myself the task to read all the stories published there this year, I am fully expecting them to be a mixed bag. Some I will love and would have read anyway. Others I wouldn't have but will be happy to discover. And then others that maybe are just not my preference, but that's okay as this is all meant to expand my horizons and learn/read something new.
As I was reading, this week's story (February 3 issue) was quickly falling into the latter category. The more I read, however, the more compelling it got. There was a certain symmetry in the telling--it's quite tightly written. A man sets out to throw some things in the dump. It's storming and he encounters a tree limb so must make a detour--in this case he crosses a creek bed and almost gets swept away. He's rescued by a young man who is looking for and expecting a doctor to come see to his ailing mother.
This is all a huge simplification--it's both the journey and the destination that are important. There is a lot of contemplation and it's very revealing--past relationships (successes and failures), the narrator's own patchy history and feelings of suicide, his artwork, and then he encounters this family and their mother who is intensely ill. I'm afraid I am not "selling" it to you very well, but it's another good find of a story for me. There is an interesting Q&A with the author you can read, and you are in luck as this particular story is also online. It will be the title story for a collection that comes out later this year.
Zadie Smith next. I've never read any of her fiction, can you believe it? Finally I get a little taste of her work. Maybe I should just save myself the trouble and go pull one of her books from my shelves now, too.