Fire Year Read online

  Fire Year

  © 2013 by Jason K. Friedman

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

  Managing Editor

  Sarabande Books, Inc.

  2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200

  Louisville, KY 40205

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Friedman, Jason.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Fire year : stories / Jason K. Friedman. — First edition.

  pages cm. — (The Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction)

  “Winner of the 2012 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, Selected by Salvatore Scibona”—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 978-1-936747-69-6

  I. Title.

  PS3606.R564F57 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2013005928

  Cover art: Beacon #4 (482) by David King. Provided courtesy of the artist (davidkingcollage.com).

  Cover and text design by Kirkby Gann Tittle.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

  “Blue” appeared in Moment magazine, November/December 2011.

  The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  For Jeffrey

  First reader, partner in everything

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Blue

  Reunion

  All the World’s a Field

  The Cantor’s Miracles

  The Golem

  There’s Hope for Us All

  Fire Year

  Acknowledgments

  The Author

  Foreword

  “[I]n my country,” says the homesick priest in A Farewell to Arms, “it is understood that a man may love God. It is not a dirty joke.”

  In one way or another, the question whether love—both the love of God and secular love—must always decay into a joke animates each of the stories in the terrific collection you hold in your hands. Fire Year is about the vulnerability of love to sneers, snorts, junior-high-cafeteria abuse, disproof, disdain, and even to our own later laments that our fondest imaginings have misled us.

  In the opening story, Aaron, “a puny and contemptible figure” at the narrator’s bar mitzvah party, warns him of the social consequences of reading from the Torah with such overt devotion:

  “You were swaying.”

  “You’re supposed to do that.”

  “Yeah, but you looked like you meant it.”

  In fact the narrator does mean it. “In those days,” he will recall, “it was religion alone that lifted me out of despair.” In the domain of current literary fashion, a narrator who cops to despair (forget about the hope of escaping it through anything so unironic as orthodox religion) is inviting zingers from the wisenheimer brigade. But among the many opportunities that this attitude (do we call it too cool for shul?) misses, and that Friedman does not, are the wicked humor that can arise only from a fair fight with a formidable antagonist. Like Saul Bellow, Friedman raises the stakes and thereby, paradoxically, makes the jokes funnier.

  Fire Year is crowded with true lovers—of God, of music, of art, of the body. Friedman doesn’t build a hedge around them. He subjects their love to the test of experience. In “There’s Hope for Us All,” the world’s only expert on an obscure Renaissance painter is so wedded to her view of the painter’s work, and is so humorless about it, that she denies she has made an interpretation at all. She pleads for lampooning, yet Friedman is too watchful to treat her merely as the object of derision; the vigor of her belief compels, if not his agreement, then at least his close attention. “Interpretation kills!” she insists, sort of ridiculously. But isn’t she sort of right?

  The book is full of wonderful moments of compressed and earnest hope, mixed with an affectionate humor that somehow works not by distancing you from the character—the better to sneer at him—but by bringing you closer to his plight. The critic James Wood calls this “the humor of forgiveness.” In “All the World’s a Field,” one man dreams of a new life for his family in America: “They would keep goats and chickens and meditate on Torah near the stillness of cows, and they would feel God’s presence wherever they went.” You do not laugh at this man, as though Friedman had made a fool of him; you laugh at yourself for having failed to see that such a modest goal could hold out such grand promise.

  Throughout these stories Friedman takes to heart the advice commonly attributed to Ford Madox Ford: if a character appears in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, the writer ought to make him real enough that we can smell his breath. Even the passersby bear the writer’s closest look. Memorable figures abound: a rich, married, Southern Protestant, bi-curious alpha male; Orthodox Jews living in Georgia plantation manses; a vain, middlebrow museum curator closeted to no one but himself; an otherwise kosher-keeping woman with a passion for hush puppies fried in the same oil as shrimp—each of these characters might have been played for caricature when you consider the unlikelihood of their cohabiting in the same stories. But there are no dramatic types here, only people. Even when they appear for just a flash, Friedman makes a whole character out of one brisk stroke. An old man with tufted dirty hair growing out of his ears inspires not disgust for his dishevelment, but tenderness. A security guard asks a gay associate curator about his home life: “Out of the two of y’all, who the one cooks?” A widow summarizes her husband with the bristling epitaph: “She knew only that he had not died one second before the last breath left his body—every second of his life he had lived!”

  By the resounding conclusion of the final story, you will be wide awake to the rigors and the dangers of belief; the vertigo of losing it; and the holy terror of laughing. Candid, cunning, brave, and wickedly funny—Fire Year will make you remember the first time you read Philip Roth. Here you’ll find love, lust, religious tradition, the new South, the transcendent promise of faith, the liberating hope of sexual awakening; Friedman twists them all into stories as true to our goofy joys as to our deepest intuitions.

  —Salvatore Scibona

  FIRE YEAR

  Blue

  The adults had been there for hours—the ones from out of town, for days—and they all seemed happy, huddled in little groups that opened up whenever I passed, to let me in. They were offering me a space to receive their congratulations and slurred life advice. I smiled gamely and kept walking through my grandparents’ house—through the sunroom, past the living room picture window, past the silver platters of food, the crystal decanters with little nametags chained around their necks. I had nowhere to go. I had changed out of my bar mitzvah suit into an aqua leisure suit with a polyester shirt depicting a crowded seafloor scene. I had blow-dried and sprayed my hair into a kind of helmet. I was ready for someone my age to show up. I was ready for a miracle to take place and a cool bar mitzvah party to assemble on the screened back porch. A bar mitzvah was, after all, a religious celebration, and in those days it was religion alone that lifted me out of despair, inspiring in me the fervid hope that everything would be all right.

  I happened to be in the foyer to witness the spectacle of Aaron Elkins making his entrance. It was July, it was Savannah, my grandparents’ air conditioner had broken, and so the attic fan was on. I stood in the insuck of hot air through the open front door and watched Aaron navigate his way up the crisscross redbrick walkway. Massive cockroaches illuminated in the front porch lights flew across his path, causing him to skip and dodge and do a minstrel-like little dance. At one p
oint his hands shot up and his palms pressed against the sides of his head. Aaron was a fellow regular at the first table by the steps in the lunchroom pit. He had been born a blue baby and struck me as a puny and contemptible figure, but I was glad he had come.

  “There’s about a million cockroaches out there.” Aaron had stopped on the front porch and was wiping his forehead with a shredded Kleenex. The corners of his purple mouth tilted down in a textbook frown, his shoulders were hunched, his entire physical presentation reflecting the effort it took him to get there. “Nine hundred ninety-nine thousand still alive. I stomped about a thousand of them. Oh, unless they’ve been doing it.” He leered at me as he stood there catching his breath. “Then there’d be more of them than when I got here. Have you ever seen two gigantic flying cockroaches doing it?”

  “Come in,” I said, taking a deep breath. This was only my first guest. I had an entire night to endure.

  “Are there any girls here yet?” he asked, stepping under the fanlight, his yellow eyes aglow from the blazing chandelier.

  “You’ve got pieces of Kleenex stuck to your forehead,” I said.

  He raked his skin with his long bluish nails, then did his version of a grin. “Which girls did you invite?”

  “All of them.”

  “Leslie Lee?” he asked.

  “I said all of them.”

  “Oo, Leslie Lee,” he said dreamily, his eyes closing. Then he opened them and grabbed ahold of an invisible pair of skinny hips, pulling them into his groin three times as he goatishly intoned each syllable of her last name: “Des-Bouil-lons.”

  “Come on,” I said, looking around, in case anyone had seen.

  I took him through the kitchen.

  “You look like you’re about to cry,” he said from behind.

  In the kitchen the two maids, my grandparents’ and ours, looked up from the trays of hors d’oeuvres they were arranging and smiled simultaneously. This struck me as a kind and classy gesture for which I felt absurdly grateful. My mother was giving them orders from against the kitchen sink and ignored me.

  My luck ran out in the dining room. Everyone was engaged talking with someone else except for Harry Sandman, my godfather, who was standing at the window looking out at the garden. The other men wore coats and ties but he had on a striped sports shirt and a pair of slacks, as if to call attention to his bachelorhood and confirm all the rumors. The reason he lived in a carriage house downtown, an aunt had once said, was to be closer to the “whores he ran with.” The carriage house was a block away from the auto-repair garage he owned, but this was apparently a secondary convenience. He turned just as I passed behind him, pinning Aaron and me to the dining room table.

  His hairline started very high on his head; below that, he had a deep reddish tan and spots like watermelon seeds here and there. “Ho, ho, the bar mitzvah boy! Look at that shirt, that’s a voyage to the bottom of the sea.” He put his arm around me, then stuck out the other one toward Aaron. “Harry Sandman, glad to meet you.”

  “— —”

  “Did you know I held this kid in my hands?”

  Aaron shook his head, and it was unclear whether he meant yes or no.

  “I had his legs spread as wide as I could, I was holding down his fat little calves—this kid was a kicker! One wrong move and he’d have been a little girl! Do you follow me?”

  Aaron laughed at this.

  “Who’s your daddy?” Harry asked.

  “Simon Elkins.”

  “Simon Elkins I’ve known since he was a boy. Tell him hello. Tell him to bring his car into the garage for a checkup. On the house, free of charge. What is it, a black Dodge Dart station wagon, ’69, ’70?”

  “Sixty-nine, heh-heh,” Aaron said, recognizing a kindred spirit.

  Harry looked at him for a second, then broke into a smile. “Your friend’s got a dirty mind,” he said into my face. “And one hell of a tan.”

  “Well, we better get to the porch,” I said.

  “I like that in a boy.” I was wondering if Harry meant the dirty mind or the tan when he kissed me on the lips. He tasted of pickles and booze. “I like you too. This is a hell of a party you’re throwing. I think there are more people here than came to the thing this morning. Hey, Aaron, did you hear how this kid reads Hebrew, like a professional?”

  “Yeah,” Aaron said sourly, “he read it for three hours straight.”

  Harry considered this. “He did read for three hours straight, didn’t he?”

  “It sure seemed like it if he didn’t.”

  “It was a double parsha,” I said in my defense.

  But I didn’t feel defensive. I had known what I was doing. The moon’s position in the sky accounted for why a double portion needed to be read from the Torah that day, but I alone was responsible for the hours of uninterrupted, practically tuneless Hebrew chanting coming off the altar. The cantor, my bar mitzvah coach, had suggested we do excerpts of the two long readings; a little here, a little there, then on to something else. I said we’d do it the way God wrote it, and it wasn’t a medley. The cantor, who’d escaped a Polish labor camp, run through a hundred nights, eaten the soles of his shoes, sighed. No one stands there for more than two hours straight reading from the Torah, he pointed out, especially at our middle-of-the-road synagogue, which prided itself on not being crazy liberal but not being crazy Orthodox either. In addition, he said, to paraphrase his elegant accented English, reading the two sections in their entirety and in Hebrew would bore the shit out of the congregation. I knew he was right but I would not be swayed. To keep us on some kind of schedule we had cut out my today-I-am-a-man speech, we had cut out the rabbi’s talk, we had cut out the part where the zaftig Elizabeth Taylor–esque Sisterhood president, Mrs. Glass, hands me a silver cup—we had cut out everything that could possibly be considered entertainment at a bar mitzvah.

  The day came and I stood there reading the ancient words, feeling God’s breath rise from my lungs and pass through my lips, and occasionally looking up and registering the emptying sanctuary. The endless lines of unpunctuated consonants, some of them crowned, rose and seemed to hover above the parchment, the letters black and watery but crisp-edged, and when I looked up I couldn’t make out faces, only the movement of bodies toward the door. At first they left one at a time, pretending to go to the bathroom or have a smoke. Then they left in pairs. And then, abandoning all shame, they left in groups of three and four and more. I looked up for the last time when I was nearing the end, the part where the Hebrews, camped on the far side of the Jordan, within sight of the Holy Land, listen to Moses relay God’s commandments on whom their daughters may marry. The front two rows were still filled with family, zombie-eyed and dutiful, but the rest of the sanctuary was empty save for an odd man here and there, like the audience at a midnight showing of a Czechoslovakian animated film. I didn’t know where the rest of the guests had gone, but they all reappeared in the social hall when it was time to eat.

  Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was playing on the stereo, white tapers columned in glass rose from every surface, bowls of hydrangeas lay among the platters of food. Then we crossed over onto the porch, where the kids’ party was still waiting to begin. The cement floor was painted red and it seemed to change color throughout the day; now, under the bare bulb, it looked like one great field of rust. It was a little sandy under our shoes. Lizards were mounted at various levels on the outside of the screen, and Aaron observed their undersides with uncharacteristic silence. Moths crashed wildly into the screen, and the only sound you heard was the crickets.

  I walked over to the stack of singles by the record player. “Moonlight Feels Right,” “Afternoon Delight,” “Dream Weaver”—I had bought them all last weekend at Kmart.

  Aaron turned away from the lizards. “Are you going to play a record?”

  “Okay.” I put on “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

  “Who do you think the first girl’s going to be?” he asked when the song was over.
/>   “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, guess. Leslie Lee?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What if no girls show up?”

  I figured somebody had to say it eventually.

  “Hello.” It was Mark Cohen, standing in the doorway between the sunroom and the porch. Instinctively I held my breath. He did not smell bad but sometimes I gagged when I saw him—an inconvenient reflex, because he was another of the guys who ate lunch at the first table in the pit. One morning at Jewish day camp Mark shat in his bathing suit. We were five years old. We were lined up for roll call and I was standing behind him. He was as disgusted as the rest of us—he slipped out of his yellow trunks and ran naked into the building. From then on even the name Mark Cohen carried with it the smell of shit.

  Aaron covered his nose and mouth with his palms and moved away from the doorway, saying the muffled word “gasmask” over and over, proving, as if there had been any doubt, that a comradeship of outcasts is no comradeship at all.

  “Happy bar mitzvah.” Mark handed me a long slim box. “I got you a belt. You can take it back if you don’t like it.”

  This was something about Mark—he was as sweet as the memory he conjured was foul.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You should get something to drink. There’s ginger ale and punch.”

  “I think I’ll get some punch. Do you want some?”

  Mark went out and Aaron took my elbow and said, “Come over here.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Come on.”

  When we got to the corner he said, “Do you know what you looked like up there?”

  “Up where?”

  “At the synagogue. Reading from the Torah.”

  I shook my head.

  “You were swaying.”

  “You’re supposed to do that.”

  “Yeah, but you looked like you meant it.”

  I shrugged.

  “You’re taking yourself off in a very extreme direction.”