Hum: Stories

  HUM

  STORIES

  MICHELLE RICHMOND

  Copyright © 2014 by Michelle Richmond

  The University of Alabama Press

  Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  FC2 is an imprint of The University of Alabama Press

  Book Design: Illinois State University’s English Department’s Publications Unit; Codirectors: Steve Halle and Jane L. Carman; Assistant Director: Danielle Duvick; Production Assistant: Eric Austin Longfellow

  Cover Design: Lou Robinson

  Typeface: Garamond

  The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Richmond, Michelle, 1970-

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Hum : Stories / Michelle Richmond.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-57366-178-2 (paperback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-57366-845-3 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3618.I35A6 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2013039256

  FOR KEVIN

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD BY RIKKI DUCORNET

  HUM

  MEDICINE

  LAKE

  HERO

  SCALES

  HONEYMOON

  HOSPITALITY

  LOVE

  TRAVEL

  BOULEVARD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD

  BY RIKKI DUCORNET

  Told with intelligence and lucidity, “Hum” opens this collection; the story’s momentum, too, is impressive. Hum is disquieting and masterful, emblematic of a book given over to the study of couplings coming undone. Like the synthetic smells of gunpowder, sex and blood incessantly pumped into the movie theater across the street, the hum that overtakes and undermines a marriage indicates the dilemma that eats at the heart of lives unsettling, surprising and always arresting. Here the central theme is risk and the paramount inquiry is need—the need to be unshackled, tested and amazed; the imperious need for heat, for transformation (“Change is near!”), for anything perceptibly flammable, for “the desperate sweetness of hotel rooms.”

  In “Scales” an irresistible stranger covered with horny scales reaches into a paper bag and hands a boiled crayfish to the young woman he has just met and who will become his lover. Fascinated by his strangeness and longing “to embark on something terrible and fine” she breaks off the head and sucks the juices greedily. Clearly the affair is made in heaven (as they say); its hellish aspects are manageable, even thrilling (his scaled body is highly abrasive)—but it is his transformation into something like normalcy that proves unsupportable. (Most often the very things that bind these ill-fated couples are the very things that pull them apart.)

  At their best these stories are wonderfully strange, a strangeness both compelling and convincing. In an unexpectedly deft and moving moment, a clinically acceptable hand job undertaken with surgical gloves becomes the surprising and deeply moving portal to the memory of a vanished sister.

  The squelched and dissolving love affairs and marriages, not so much embattled as expended, unfold just a step away from a world that is dissolving, too. Yet the world is always tantalizing; after all, it is all there is. When the young wife in “Hum” says: “ . . . I felt a quiet, guilty thrill as if I had been invited to play some mysterious and possibly dangerous game, the stakes of which were unclear,” she is providing a key to the entire collection. Later she asks: “Does loneliness constitute an emergency?” These thoughtfully imagined stories convince us that it does.

  HUM

  We could hear it from any point in the house—upstairs, downstairs, even the garage. From the kitchen the sound was faint, like the upswing of a snore with no silent intervals in between, all intake of breath, no release. While we were eating at the small table by the window, forks and knives clicking against our plates, it was there in the background, a reminder. If we spoke loudly, the hum could be drowned out for a moment. In the beginning we tried, it was like a game, we attempted to keep a dialogue going during the entire dinner just to cover the hum with the sound of our voices. This went on for our first few weeks in the house, but there were only the two of us there, we knew each other well, and there was not much to be said. At one point, without ever voicing a mutual decision, we gave up. We fell into long silences, just the click of silverware on plates, the sound of wine being poured into a glass, the polite chewing—and beneath it all, or above it, the continual hum coming from the second bedroom, the source of our livelihood and of our growing discontent.

  With music we could disguise it, could forget it for three or four minutes at a time, but there was always the moment when one song ended, the tinny whir of the CD player while it moved on to the next, so that, eventually, even music lost its joy for me.

  At night, from our room across the hall, we could hear it. “It’s just white noise,” my husband said. “If you’d stop thinking about it, you wouldn’t notice it at all.” So I tried to stop thinking about it, but the more I tried, the louder it became. My unease was intensified by the fact that we were not allowed to go into the second bedroom; in fact, we had never even seen it.

  Twice a month someone would stop by to check the equipment. He or she would arrive unannounced and knock discreetly on the side door. Often, this person would bring a cake or a bottle of wine, so that it would look to our neighbors as though a friend had come calling. Once inside, he would avoid conversation and head straight for the second bedroom, toting a large duffle bag. Never once did any of the maintenance personnel—that’s how they always introduced themselves, not by name, but simply, “Hello, I’m the maintenance personnel”—agree to stay for coffee. Their abruptness heightened my sense that, even though we were merely caretakers of the equipment, not its subjects, we were under its scrutiny twenty-four hours a day.

  Because the equipment had to be supervised round the clock, my husband and I never went anywhere together. If we wanted to see a movie, we would toss a coin. The winner would walk down the street, past the rows of primly painted mansions, the neat driveways with expensive cars, across the city road, to the Cinaromaplex. The place was so named because of the machines that piped appropriate smells into the theater during movies—the smell of gunpowder during a gunfight scene, smoke and liquor during a bar scene. The Cinaromaplex was even equipped with the musty scent of sex for certain R-rated movies, and for the more gruesome films, there was the distinct, metallic odor of blood. The winner of the coin toss would come home straight after the movie, and the one who had been house-sitting would go to the next showing. Later we would discuss the movie as if we had seen it together, as if we were an ordinary couple who went on outings as a pair, rather than as two halves.

  It was the same way with restaurants, plays, and museums. When we first moved into the house, we made a pact that we would not sacrifice these small pleasures, the many cultural offerings of our beloved city. We decided to live as we always had, with minor adjustments. For a while we honored the pact, but about the same time we stopped insisting on dinner conversation we also ceased our elaborate efforts to see the same movies, eat at the same restaurants, view the same museum exhibits. The inevitable result was that, over time, we became more like roommates than a couple.

  That is not to say I was entirely without companionship.

  Some nights, unable to sleep, I would step into the backyard in my bathrobe. I would leave the porch light off, so as not to be seen, and would stand there in the dark, the wet grass slippery un
derfoot, and watch the Uradian Embassy. I would gaze up at the third floor corner window, where the light was always on, and I would watch the ambassador sitting at his desk, his tie pulled askew. I could never really make out his face, just the figure of him there. He sat as still as a man could possibly sit, and I wondered what he was doing awake, night after night, while everyone else in the building slept.

  I wanted to call up to him. I wanted to tell him about the second bedroom, and the machinery that hummed behind the closed door. I wanted to tell him about the dissolution of his country, a dissolution which, to him, might be only the vaguest fear, or perhaps even a nightmare he thought would likely come true—but no matter how vivid the nightmare, how disturbing his fears might have been, he could not have known for certain that his country was being slowly dissembled at that very moment, and that the machinery of its destruction hummed in the stately red brick house behind him. This is what the equipment did: it listened, it watched, it recorded everything.

  Those nights, standing in my borrowed yard and staring up at the ambassador’s window, I began to wonder if it is possible to love a man you have never met, if love can be born out of sympathy alone, and out of the knowledge that one’s own life’s work is intricately connected to the ruination of another. Could I love him simply for his insomnia, for the square of light cast by his window onto my sleeping lawn, for the knowledge that, without him, my own life would in some manner be rendered pointless?

  I decided that I could.

  I did not tell my husband about my late-night trips to the garden, although some nights he must have woken and found me gone. I did not tell him that I dreamed of this man’s country, of miles and miles of unused train tracks ending in abandoned towns, of once-prosperous markets that were now home to a lonely clerk guarding a few loaves of bread, a single poor cut of meat. I did not tell him that there were days when I sat for hours imagining myself in the ambassador’s country, starting a new life with him there.

  Isn’t it true that everyone, at some point, dreams of beginning anew—with new friends, new surroundings, a new lover? Doesn’t everyone, at least once, dream of abandoning her own life?

  ***

  My husband and I had become caretakers of the equipment by virtue of timing. The opportunity arose through a friend I had met years earlier while working as an administrative assistant in a government building. One afternoon in June, I ran into my old friend in a coffee shop. I mentioned that the landlord was raising our rent and we were going to have to move to a cheaper apartment across the river.

  “Perhaps we can help each other,” he said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

  Over a cup of coffee, my friend explained that a trustworthy couple of impeccable discretion was needed immediately to inhabit a very nice home in the Duncan Hill District. “Should you be approved and choose to take on the task, you would be rewarded with free rent and household expenses.”

  Duncan Hill was a dream, the kind of tastefully wealthy neighborhood I would never have imagined myself living in. The homes there had the best river views in the city, and the boutiques that lined the neighborhood’s main street sold one of-a-kind dresses and handbags that cost more than I made in a month.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “If you are selected, you’ll have to be very careful,” my friend said, biting into his almond biscotti. “You couldn’t have visitors, the department would retain the right to enter the house at their discretion, and the second bedroom would be strictly off-limits. Most important, under no circumstances would you be allowed to have contact with anyone from the Uradian Embassy. Think of it as a luxurious house arrest.”

  I talked it over with my husband, he agreed, and after a quick but extensive background check and a series of intense interviews, we were approved. We moved in quietly on a Saturday, and that night we celebrated with champagne on the balcony overlooking our small, well-maintained backyard. “What do you suppose is going on in there?” my husband whispered, tipping his glass toward the embassy.

  “That’s exactly the kind of question you’re not supposed to ask.”

  I glanced up at the embassy, and that was when I saw the ambassador for the first time, standing in a square of light in the third-floor corner window. He seemed to be staring out toward the river, but there was no moon that night, no way he could have seen the water in the darkness. Our own lights were off, so we must have been invisible to him. He reached up to loosen his tie, and I felt a quiet, guilty thrill, as if I had been invited to play some mysterious and possibly dangerous game, the stakes of which were unclear.

  ***

  The ambassador’s country, which was so small that the media rarely took notice of it, had managed several years before to get on the wrong side of my own government. Our government had attempted, first through economic and political pressures and later through a coup, to oust the prime minister, whose presence they considered to be a threat in the region. The coup had failed, in large part because it lacked the support of the citizenry, and ever since then a few dozen of our sharpest political and military minds had been working to slowly ruin Urada from the inside.

  Over time, their efforts were proving successful. Urada’s bank system was in a shambles, all four of its major industries had been brought to their knees, and violent splits had emerged within the major political parties. The most recent elections had erupted into riots so widespread that the elections had to be postponed indefinitely. The country appeared to be on the brink of civil war. A high-ranking official of our government took advantage of the riots to make a public statement that we were willing to “step in on behalf of the people” should the situation grow worse.

  In the aftermath of the riots, I had seen the ambassador on television, firmly holding his ground. “Our leaders are aware,” he said, “that ‘step in’ is merely a euphemism for foreign troops, martial law, and Urada’s loss of sovereignty.”

  I did not know whether it was a trick of television cameras, or instead a trick of the third-floor window, but the ambassador appeared much larger on television than he did from my backyard. He had dark hair giving way slightly to gray, blue eyes, a prominent forehead, and a faint scar traversing the bridge of his nose—all of which, taken together, made him attractive in an unsettling way. He always wore a light blue tie and dark suit, and on television he seemed to be in perpetual motion, his hands moving nervously as he spoke. If I could have talked to him in person, I would have told him that stillness suited him better, that those nights alone in his office he seemed possessed of a natural authority. But I could never speak to him. I could only admire him from afar.

  ***

  Originally, moving into the house seemed like a wise decision. A year before, my husband and I had both given up stable office jobs to pursue more fulfilling careers. I had gone into fashion design, a lifelong dream, and my husband had become a personal trainer. Both of us failed to make enough money to survive. After our meager savings ran out, I took a position managing an exclusive boutique, and my husband gave up the idea of a private practice and went to work for a gym. Since most of our earnings went to pay the rent, we had abandoned our dream of buying a home in the city. This new arrangement would help us save money for a down payment on a house of our own.

  I secretly relished the idea of working in tandem with my husband, with a shared goal and a shared secret; perhaps it would help to rekindle a lost camaraderie between us.

  As it turned out, however, we rarely saw each other except on weekends and a couple of hours between shifts. I would come home from a day spent catering to wealthy socialites, exchange a few polite words with my husband before he left for work, and take a long, hot shower. I would step out of the shower and into the humming house, put on a bathrobe, and pad barefoot downstairs. I would make myself a small dinner and sit alone at the kitchen table, waiting for darkness to fall. Then I would wander out to the backyard and look up at the corner window. More often than not, the ambassador would be there wit
hin the square of light, a dark shape at his desk, sometimes writing or talking on the phone, but usually just sitting completely still. It struck me that he was a supremely lonely man, that we would make the perfect couple.

  It was not our job to view the material being gathered in the second bedroom, or to relay information about the goings-on within the austere embassy building. We did have a key, but it was only to be used by direct order from the department or in case of extreme emergency.

  I put this question to you now: Does loneliness constitute an emergency? What about despair? Add to this an unsettling attraction, perhaps affection, that slowly builds to something that, by some definitions, might be called love. Is this, then, an emergency? What would you have done faced with the figure in the window, the ongoing ache of wanting to know him, and the distance imposed by two governments locked in a philosophical war? And in a kitchen drawer, hidden beneath the napkins and coffee filters, beneath the plaid contact paper, a key. You have tried to forget it is there, but it is impossible. Night after night, as the hum vibrates through the house, you run your fingers over the small, solid shape of the key.

  ***

  I began to do research. The ambassador was only 44 years old, younger than I had imagined. He grew up in a small industrial village in southern Urada, where he excelled in school. At the age of 16, he earned an art scholarship to the University of Urada, where he supplemented his studio courses in painting and drawing with difficult seminars in international law. Upon graduation he worked for several years as a law clerk before moving to England to take an advanced degree in business at Oxford. He did not complete his degree, but instead returned to Urada and ran for a minor office in the town where he grew up. From there, he worked his way up the political ladder.