Alone With You Read online

  Praise for Marisa Silver and

  Alone You

  “Marisa Silver is one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers . . . [whose] best stories are prickly and nimble, satisfyingly acute . . . [H]er talent for revealing the frayed bonds of relationships, for harnessing our sympathy toward characters who fall short . . . is so good it might give you vertigo.”

  —Taylor Antrim, The New York Times Book Review

  “Longing swells each of the eight stories in Alone With You, as Silver investigates ‘aloneness’ and the dear and inevitable distance between people in loving relationships. These stories stand out because of their high tolerance for complexity, never opting for a single note. The situations here don’t settle on the neat broad themes of loss or connection, but there are always surprises, nuances, changes of heart.”

  —Ron Carlson, Los Angeles Times

  “[In] Alone With You, Marisa Silver explores the impact of collateral damage, whether sustained in war or life. . . . Brisk and keenly observed . . . Silver’s characters manage somehow to emerge as credible realists, unafraid of the rigors of making do. Even in the darkest moments, their stories are illuminating as they find the courage to face who they are.” —Jane Ciabattari, O, The Oprah Magazine

  “The stories in Alone With You are portraits of everyday sorrows, but Silver keeps hope alive, even when it’s on life support. Her characters often feel powerless, then discover what they can do. . . . Silver makes clear with devastating simplicity, that tendency to change course works to our advantage . . . and passes it along to her characters with grace and insight as they grapple with change, revelation and the complexities of modern life. These are clear-eyed, unsentimental stories that resound with resilience.” —Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald

  “The wide range of settings and characters in these eight stories attests to Marisa Silver’s prodigious imagination. . . . Silver fixes on the inevitable compromises love demands. Her style is breezy, and its clever snap can be captivating . . . that style, and Silver’s observations, can be spot-on.” —The Atlantic

  “Marisa Silver tells eight quietly haunting tales.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “When it comes to the certainties and vagaries of domestic life, Marisa Silver’s . . . elegantly written stories quiver with the pain and pleasure of growing up, growing apart, growing old. Silver writes equally persuasively about adult-like children and childlike adults. . . . Silver’s prose [is] darkly luminous . . . That our lives unfold before us with a chilling ambiguity and no particular regard for our preferences is the truth that Silver reveals. She does so with a sympathy and affection so wide and deep that when we’ve finished the book, we want more. . . . Masterful.” —Alec Solomita, The Boston Globe

  “A polished, incisive collection. . . . Each of these eight stories drives unflinchingly toward a moment of unexpected and inevitable clarity about the precariousness of the world and the resilience it requires.”

  —More Magazine, Books: Ultimate Summer Reading Guide

  “Dark and resonant . . . Silver is an ambitious realist, able to breathe life into a wide range of characters . . . This is the kind of rare emotional truth that I read fiction hoping to find.”

  —Malena Watrous, San Francisco Chronicle

  “One of the most compelling and honest portrayals of human nature . . . that I have read in a long time. Emotions are treated like the multidimensional and exquisitely complex things they are rather than the boiled down version we are often treated to in contemporary literature. The intricacies of these short stories are so masterfully weaved together that they form a seamless tapestry reflecting raw slivers of contemporary Americana. The harshness of some of the stories is blunted by the skill with which Marisa Silver presents them to the reader.” —Sahar, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Silver . . . excels at Joycean epiphanies.”

  —Vikas Turakhia, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “[Alone With You] showcases [Silver’s] uncanny ability to tap into the unsettled nature of our times.” —The Daily Beast

  “These moments of bleak epiphany and emotional purgatory showcase [Silver’s] strengths as a writer.”

  —Jessica Ferri, TimeOut New York

  “Marisa Silver’s literary style is a dichotomous blend of brutality and beauty. . . . Her precise prose keeps one reading. The collection is a series of portraits of contemporary American life, but there is a universality to her writing that is interested in the collective suffering of humankind. . . . It is her unsentimental style, however, coupled with her fresh language, that makes the collection so profound.”

  —Summer Mauldin, The Charleston Post and Courier

  “Brutally honest, gripping and profound, Alone With You by Marisa Silver brings snapshots of damaged ordinary life to the reader with almost effortless grace. . . . Beautiful, sad, elegiac.”

  —Yunte Huang, Santa Barbara News-Press

  “Eight beautiful and brutal stories . . . finely wrought. . . . Silver infuses her characters with a fatalistic resilience that’s revealed through tiny, perfect details.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “[This] moving collection focuses on short periods of major

  impact. . . . . Stories to be savored, these are recommended for a wide range of readers.” —Debbie Bogenschutz, Library Journal

  “What New Yorker can’t relate to the title of Marisa Silver’s latest book of short stories? Savor the understated, brilliant, and darkly funny writing in snippets. Especially great: ‘Pond.’ ” —Daily Candy

  “Once again, Marisa Silver exceeds my already high expectations with her new short story collection, Alone With You. The eight stories in this slim volume brim with emotional intensity in their intimate portraits of love and family.”—Largeheartedboy.com

  “Alone With You offers eight extraordinary portraits of life’s tender humiliations as well as its sharp, rude jolts. Marisa Silver’s virtuosic range seems endless, and yet her ear and heart are in each case mining for a precise kind of undoing: when the fog suddenly lifts and people manage stark contact with themselves, if only for a fleeting moment. These moments are brought to bear with deftness, compassion, and an eerie, unflinching grace.”

  —Rachel Kushner, author of Telex From Cuba

  “Marisa Silver’s Alone With You is a triumph for the short story. Funny and surprising and unsentimental, the collection finds in dark situations a persuasive hope. Every story is striking both in its emotional complexity, and in the wry clarity with which it’s told.”

  —Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

  “What makes Marisa Silver’s portraits of contemporary American life so powerful is her unblinking gaze, her willingness to look imminent disaster straight in the eye. And what makes her characters unforgettable is the combination of bewilderment and resilience with which they navigate this precarious life. Alone With You is a beautiful collection: urgent, clear-sighted, wide-ranging, profound.”

  —Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles

  “Alone With You, a collection of wondrous stories by Marisa Silver, will endure. Each story shatters the commonplace with the telling detail that evokes crucial events in human lives. She is a real writer; the breath of life infuses her work.”

  —Paula Fox, Newbery Medal–winning novelist and

  author of Borrowed Finery: A Memoir

  ALSO BY MARISA SILVER

  The God of War

  No Direction Home

  Babe in Paradise

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, pl
aces, 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© 2010 by Marisa Silver

  “Temporary,” “The Visitor,” and “Night Train to Frankfurt” originally appeared

  in The New Yorker.

  “Leap” originally appeared in Ecotone.

  “Three Girls” originally appeared in Electric Literature.

  “Alone With You” originally appeared in Five Chapters.

  “Tonight I Can Write” by Pablo Neruda. USA: From Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, translated by W. S. Merwin, copyright © 1969

  by W. S. Merwin. Used with permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. UK/Canada and Audio: Translated by W. S. Merwin from Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Ltd.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof

  in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

  Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition April 2011

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  Designed by Akasha Archer

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Silver, Marisa.

  Alone with you : stories / Marisa Silver.

  p. cm.

  1. Families—Fiction. 2. Short stories, American—21st century. I. Title.

  PS3619.I55A78 2010

  813’.54—dc22 2009051114

  ISBN 978-1-4165-9030-9 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4165-9029-3

  ISBN 978-1-4165-9386-7 (ebook)

  For my mother and my sisters

  Contents

  Temporary

  Leap

  The Visitor

  Three Girls

  Pond

  Night Train to Frankfurt

  In the New World

  Alone With You

  Temporary

  VIVIAN AND SHELLY LIVED IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, IN AN industrial space that belonged, nominally, to a ribbon factory whose warehouse was attached. Shelly discovered it one night when the band she belonged to had played at an impromptu concert there. When the evening was over and everyone had cleared out, Shelly and a man she’d met that evening stayed on. The man left soon afterward, but Shelly did not. She worked out an arrangement with the owner of the ribbon factory: the rent would be paid in cash, and if Shelly was discovered by the housing authorities, the owner would claim that she was a squatter.

  Vivian met Shelly at the temp agency where they both applied for work. She had just finished two years of community college in Oklahoma and moved to L.A. Shelly offered her a small room in return for half the rent. She couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t be thrown out in a week or a month, but it was cheaper than the motel where Vivian had been staying, where she had to get out of bed two or three times a night to check the lock on the door whenever a drunken couple pinballing past caused it to rattle in a way that unnerved her. At Shelly’s place, the thumps and grinds of machinery could be heard through the walls, but only during the day. In addition to Vivian’s room, there was a doorless bathroom and a large open space. A rolling garage door served as the only window. You pulled on a chain and by some miracle of simple machinery the metal door ratcheted open with a satisfying flourish that appealed to Shelly’s sense of drama.

  Vivian had never met a girl like Shelly, who left her money lying around on tables and liked to throw blindfold dinner parties. Vivian had to learn not to compliment Shelly’s clothes or jewelry because Shelly had a habit of taking off whatever it was that Vivian liked and giving it to her. Vivian also learned to be blasé about coming out of her room in the morning to discover Shelly sleeping with a man they had met the evening before—or a woman. Vivian felt a little thrill at being able to carry off such sophisticated nonchalance, and she admired the way Shelly slithered through her days and nights, shedding the most outrageous experiences as if they were simply the air she passed through. Shelly had negligible professional skills and wavering incentive, and only Vivian managed to get a temp placement—doing clerical work at an adoption agency. Still, Shelly managed to come home with bags full of mangoes and coconuts, and sometimes they drank margaritas and grilled steak on the loading dock outside the garage door, using Vivian’s George Foreman. Shelly’s last name was vaguely familiar to Vivian, as if she had seen it on packages at the grocery store, or maybe on television ads for insurance. But she didn’t ask, because she didn’t want to appear ignorant, and because her parents had taught her that it was impolite to talk about money.

  At the adoption agency, Vivian was put to work at a computer in a small, windowless room where office supplies were kept; the walls were lined with bales of toilet paper and paper towels, industrial-sized bags of coffee and nondairy creamer. Vivian’s job was to transcribe the interviews recorded with prospective parents. These interviews were poorly taped, and Vivian spent her days winding the tape recorder back and forth in order to see if a husband had said that he loved children or loathed them, or if a wife had called herself infertile or infantile. Vivian herself was adopted—this was the single piece of information that had gotten her the job, as she typed only sixty words a minute and didn’t know how to make a spreadsheet. Her adoptive parents were nice people. Until the recent recession put him out of business, her father had run a small jewelry store in a mall that catered mostly to young couples buying engagement rings and girls celebrating their quinceañeras. Her mother had worked as a secretary in a doctor’s office. They were older than most parents and had required little of Vivian when she was growing up. They had always treated her with a kind of cautious respect that she didn’t see many other parents accord their children. By the time she was ten, her father was sixty. At back-to-school nights, her parents stood by themselves while the younger parents exerted a kind of hysterical energy toward one another. “Oh, you’re Alison’s mother!” they’d say, as though Alison, with her accomplishments, bestowed a reflected glory on the parents who’d made her. No one came up to Vivian’s parents to remark on Vivian, but this was understandable. Vivian was a “below-the-radar kind of girl,” as her adviser had written on one midterm evaluation. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, the adviser had added; not everyone could be a leader.

  When Vivian was fourteen, her mother became sick and was on the verge of death. In her mother’s hospital room, Vivian’s parents told her that she was adopted. As it turned out, her mother made a miraculous recovery, but the cat was already out of the bag. The information didn’t have much of an effect on Vivian. She lay in bed trying to feel different, now that she knew that her parents weren’t her real parents, but she didn’t feel different. The words father and mother were inextricably bound to the man and woman in the room down the hall, to her mother’s Je Reviens perfume and her father’s top dresser drawer filled with collar stays and golf tees. She was not imaginative enough to associate any other meaning with the words. She watched a television news show about a famous singer whose daughter had tracked her down after forty years. The famous singer seemed happy to have been found, and the two sat with their arms around each other and took long walks on the bluffs above the ocean, hand in hand. The women’s intimacy made Vivian uncomfortable. Her own mother’s kisses were dry, soft things, her hugs unassertive and prudent, as if she di
dn’t want to cause Vivian any harm. There was a moment during the show when the two women looked at each other as if to say, “Now what?” and Vivian had the sense that the mother had some misgivings about being found, that having given up a child had become part of her personal mythology, her idea of herself. Now, faced with the real person, she had lost some of the romance of her story. Driving across the desert on her way to Los Angeles, Vivian had seen a billboard announcing that this same singer, who had been very popular in the seventies, would be performing five nights at a casino on an Indian reservation. This strengthened Vivian’s decision not to explore her own adoption. You didn’t always want to know everything.

  Sometimes, when Vivian finished transcribing an interview at the adoption agency she would add a note to the bottom of the document offering her opinion of the interviewed couple. No one asked for her advice, but she felt compelled to give it since a life was at stake. Mostly she felt the couples should be allowed to adopt, because whatever flaws they had were no worse than the flaws of people who could have children effortlessly, even thoughtlessly, and she knew that children could survive almost anything. In one case, though, she felt strongly that the husband was unkind to the wife, and she noted this at the bottom of her transcript. She could not explain how she knew this, never having seen the couple. But the woman sounded frightened in a way that set her apart from the other women who were simply nervous during their interviews. She paused before each answer, as if waiting for the man’s permission to speak, and at the end of her answers she always added, “Right, Paul?” The woman who ran the agency reprimanded Vivian for this insight and reminded her that her job was a temporary one. But Vivian kept track and she knew that the couple had not yet been matched with a child.

  Shelly gave up looking for work. She said that she had too many projects of her own to concentrate on, and besides, she just wasn’t “the office type.” This statement seemed slightly insulting to Vivian, who clearly was the office type, but she could not discount Shelly’s generosity—the way she paid when they went out to dinner or brought home expensive wine for them to share—and Shelly’s rejection of such commonplace concerns as making a living seemed exotic to Vivian. Shelly spent most of her mornings wandering around their living space in a loosely tied mint-green kimono, her small, freckled breasts winking out from the material as she moved. For a time she took up painting and made large canvases on which she drew crude images of her face struck through with angry slashes of color. She organized a viewing of her work and a hundred strangers showed up at their home. Vivian wore one of Shelly’s beaded dresses and Shelly wore body paint. The guests ate the food that Vivian and Shelly had prepared and refrained from buying anything. Shelly didn’t seem to mind. After a few months the canvases disappeared, though it was unclear to Vivian whether someone had finally bought them or if Shelly had just thrown them into the Dumpster behind the ribbon warehouse to be carted away along with the giant spools of badly dyed grosgrain.