Upon my arrival, the Hotel Bel-Air sends over a pot of tea and a lovely fruit plate. My friend Jeanette, who stayed here once fifteen years ago, told me they brought the guests cookies and a glass of milk every night at bedtime. The cookies were so beautiful she took their picture. But times change. There are no cookie-eaters left in the Bel-Air now.
On my first morning I hit the ground running, which is to say I roll over in bed and start right in on the pile of short stories. I eat the fruit for breakfast and drink the cold leftover tea and it’s fine. The silence in the room is so intoxicating that I can’t bear to leave it. At noon I take a swim in the pool, which is kept at a considerate eighty-two degrees. There is no one else in sight, and so, in accordance with the posted warning, I swim at my own risk.
After unpacking, I discover I have devoted much too much of my luggage space to short stories and not nearly enough to my wardrobe. When I turn up at the hotel’s restaurant for lunch, looking neat and presentable but not the least bit stylish, the hostess wants to know about my reservation, which I do not have. It is late. People coming for lunch later than this must be very hip indeed. The terrace has half a dozen empty tables, but she seats me indoors, where I have the entire place to myself. I could complain, but I figure if I’ve come to be alone then I might as well be alone. From my table inside I watch the glamorous women outside lunching on spa Cobb salads with neither blue cheese nor dressing. The man with the bread basket wanders from table to table, lonesome as a cloud. When he comes to me his basket is full and perfectly arranged. He gives me a smile of deep and sincere pleasure when I tell him I will take both a sourdough roll and a cheese stick.
It doesn’t take long to catch on to the fact that coming to this particular hotel for anonymity reflects a level of genius that I never knew I possessed. It is a hotel whose reputation was built on catering to people who are hiding, but those people hide in a much flashier manner than I do. They hide beneath hair extensions and giant Chanel sunglasses. The windows of their Jaguars are tinted. It is the kind of hiding that demands and receives a great deal of attention, in contrast to my kind of hiding, which basically constitutes staying in my room and frustrating the housekeeping staff. The hostess at the restaurant gives me the word that if I want to eat there again tomorrow I’m really going to need a reservation, and so I make one, but when tomorrow comes I find that I don’t have the energy for it. I stay at the pool and swim and read stories. The guy who brings the towels lets me eat all the fruit I want from the gorgeous basket beside the bottles of Evian. I’m still a little hungry but certainly not hungry enough to do anything about it. After a while a blonde who is somewhere in her late fifties takes up residence on the chaise longue next to mine. Even though there are probably forty empty chaises around the pool, these are the only two that bask in a slight shimmer of sunlight. The plant life at the Bel-Air is so teeming and lush, Tasmanian tree ferns and giant palms, towering camellias and gardenias, that the entire place is locked in shadow. The woman beside me is very beautiful, rather like an aging Elke Sommer or any of John Derek’s wives. She has pretty legs and a soft middle and wears a tiny pink bikini that is trimmed in what appear to be closely placed pink carnations. Every fifteen minutes or so we pick up our towels and move two lounge chairs down, following the sun as best we can. “It is cold,” she says to me in a Russian accent, and then returns to her sudoku puzzle. These are the only words any non-staff person has spoken to me. For a moment I imagine that she and I have come to the Bel-Air in hopes the air will strengthen our fragile nerves, or that we are guests at the tuberculosis sanatorium in The Magic Mountain, wrapped up in fur blankets and waiting to have our temperatures taken.
There are two sides to the Hotel Bel-Air. On one side is the busy restaurant, where well-groomed people have discussions, loudly and with great seriousness, about television shows. To make a sweeping generalization based on several days of captive observation, I would say that men have breakfast meetings and women have lunch meetings and everybody talks about the Golden Globes, Ray Romano, and episodes of Lost and CSI—or at least those are the words I hear repeated continually while I butter my toast (“toast” being another word that is bandied around a great deal, as in “No toast” and “Egg whites, no toast”). After several days of being forced into the role of passive audience for everyone else’s star turn, I decide I want a little attention of my own. If I were embracing my solitude as fully as I claimed to be, I would order the vegetable frittata, but I am so wild, such a spontaneous fool I am practically Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi fountain. I tell the waiter I’ll have the pancakes. This proves a mistake; they are bricklike and slightly sour. It is never wise to order the meal that no one else would touch. Still, there are plenty of wonderful things to eat at the Bel-Air. At dinner, the food is best when it is at its heaviest and most formal; the scallop fondue and the poached Maine lobster are as delicious as they are expensive. If you don’t feel up to a very fancy meal you can slip off to the bar, where the waiters are friendly, the pianist is charming, and the food is very bad. If you accidently slip up and order the chicken pot pie do not, under any circumstances, eat it.
On the other side of the Bel-Air—you will know it when you see the sign that reads “Guests Only Beyond This Point”—are the hotel’s guest rooms. Over there everything is perfectly quiet, so quiet that I sometimes wonder if I am the only person who is sleeping over. (I never see my friend in the pink bikini again.) One night, when I am returning to my room from dinner alone, a man in a suit hurriedly follows me towards this demarcation. “May I assist you with something?” he says pointedly. I feel a little bad about this, because I have gone out of my way to dress up for dinner and I believe I bear a remarkable resemblance to a guest, but I must be wrong. I explain that I am staying at the hotel, that I’ve been staying at the hotel for a while now, and while he doesn’t look completely convinced, he allows me to cross over. Here the scent of the purple saucer magnolias blends with the whiff of chlorine coming from the burbling fountains. It is a smell I have always associated with Southern California, and one that I dearly love.
What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again. I am deeply ready to be seen, thrilled at the thought of my own beloved civilization. I have done a month’s worth of work in five days. I have filled up to the gills on solitude. I am insanely grateful at the thought of going home.
(Gourmet, August 2006)
Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006
THE SHORT STORY is in need of a scandal.
The short story should proclaim itself to be based on actual events and then, after a series of fiery public denials, it should hold a press conference in Cannes and make a brave but faltering confession: None of it actually happened. It was fiction all along. Yes, despite what’s been rumored, it has always been fiction and it is proud to be fiction. The short story should consider staging its own kidnapping and then show up three weeks later in The New Yorker claiming that some things happened that cannot be discussed. Or perhaps the short story could seek out the celebrity endorsement of someone we never expected, maybe Tiger Woods, who could claim that he wouldn’t dream of going out to the ninth hole without a story in his back pocket. They are just the right length for reading between rounds. It doesn’t really matter what the short story chooses to do, but it needs to do s
omething. The story needs hype. It needs a publicist. Fast.
I can speak to the matter with great authority because I’ve been reading a lot of short stories lately, and the very large majority of them have been shockingly good. They are better than the novels I’ve been reading. They are more daring, more artful, and more original. Yet although I know plenty of people with whom I can discuss novels, there are only two people I know with whom I can swoon over short stories: Katrina Kenison Lewers (more on her later), and my friend Kevin Wilson, a young writer who reads literary magazines the way other people read pulpy spy novels, the kind of friend you can call in the middle of the night and ask, “Have you read the latest issue of Tin House?” As valuable as these friendships have been to me, I am sorry to say they are not enough. Since I have recently given my life over to short stories I need to find a larger audience than two. I have the zeal of a religious convert. I want to stand in the airport passing out copies of One Story and The Agni Review. I want to talk to total strangers about plot and character and language. I’m more than willing to take the message to the people, but the short story is going to have to work with me here. It has to be a little less demure.
The first thing the short story must consider is casting off the role of “The Novel’s Little Sidekick,” the practice run, the warm-up act. I was extolling the virtues of a particularly dazzling short story by Edith Pearlman to an editor friend at a major publishing house recently when she cut me off in mid-sentence, said she didn’t want to hear it. “I’ll only fall in love,” she said bitterly, “and then I won’t be able to buy the book, and if I do buy the book I won’t be able to sell it.” Short stories, it seems, are a dead-end romance in publishing. In the rare instance when a house finally does break down and buy a collection, the usual stipulation is that it must be followed by a novel, which is to say, something that might sell. But must you think so far down the road as to how things will end? Love the short story for what it is: a handful of glorious pages that take you someplace you never knew you wanted to go. The short story isn’t asking to be a collection, and it certainly isn’t trying to pass itself off as a potential novel. Who’s to say the short-story writer has a novel in him? Is a sprinter accepted to the team on the condition that he will also run a marathon? Certainly many writers do both, and some writers do both well, but it always seems clear to me when a novelist has turned out a short story or a short story has been stretched into a novel. There are a handful of people who to my mind are equal in their talents, John Updike leading the list, but then John Updike could probably win a hundred-meter sprint as handily as he could run cross-country.
It was a genuine challenge to select a mere twenty stories out of the more than 120 I received. So many of them were excellent, I would have been happier choosing thirty or even forty, and yet I know I couldn’t put my hands on the twenty Best American Novels for 2006. So what accounts for so many accomplished stories? (Remembering, of course, that this is not actually a volume of the best short stories in America. These are the stories that I like best, and I am full of prejudice and strong opinions. The genius of this series, and certainly the reason for its longevity, is that it relies on guest editors who arrive every year with all their own baggage about what constitutes a wonderful story, and as soon as they feel comfortable in their role as the arbiter of “Best,” they are replaced by another writer who is equally sure of his or her own taste. That’s one thing you can say for writers—we know what we like when it comes to writing.) It could be that stories are easier to write than novels, but having taken a crack at both myself I am doubtful about this. I think it is more the case that short stories are expendable. Because they are smaller, the writer is simply more willing to learn from her mistakes and throw the bad ones and the merely pretty good ones away. Knowing that something can be ditched encourages more risk-taking, which in turn usually leads to better writing. It’s a sad thing to toss out a bad short story, but in the end it always comes as a relief. On the other hand, it takes real nobility to dump a bad novel. A novel represents so much time and effort that the writer often struggles valiantly to get it published even when it would be in everyone’s best interest to chalk it up to education and walk away. I know a lot of people who published the first novel they ever wrote. I can think of no one who published his first short story.
So why, if what I’m telling you is true—and let’s assume for the sake of this introduction that it is—why aren’t more people running out to buy their copy of Harper’s and turning directly from the table of contents to the short story? Short stories are less expensive, often better written, and make fewer demands on our time. Why haven’t we made a deeper commitment to them? I am afraid it has something to do with the story’s inability to create a stir. As a novelist, I would say I read well over the average number (whatever that is) of novels per year. It doesn’t take much to get me to read something new. I’ll pick up a novel based on a compelling review, the recommendation of a friend, even a particularly eye-catching cover. I troll the summer-reading tables in bookstores to fill in the holes in my education. I am forever picking up something I’ve always meant to read (Zeno’s Conscience is waiting for me on the bedside table now, and there is still so much Dickens). But everything I mean to read, and nearly everything I have read, no matter how obscure, has first had some means of catching my attention. By contrast, the uncollected short story in its magazine or literary journal has nothing but its author’s name and possibly a catchy title to flag you down. Only in its largest venues does a short story manage to score an illustration. It does not go out and get you. It waits for you. It waits and waits and waits.
Unless, of course, you have the extraordinary good fortune to be chosen one year as the editor of Best American Short Stories. Because while a single short story may have a difficult time making enough noise to be heard over the din of civilization, short stories en masse can have the effect of swarming bees, blocking out sound and sun and becoming the only thing you can think about. So even though it goes against my nature to point out the ways in which I am luckier than you, I must say that in this case I am, unless you too have short stories mailed directly to your home. And even if you do have stories mailed to your home, you probably don’t get them from Katrina Kenison Lewers, and that’s where my real advantage comes in. These weren’t just any short stories I received, the normal cross section of good and bad. These stories had been intelligently and lovingly culled from the vast sea of those that were published since the last Best American Short Stories. Katrina handles the part of this project that is work, hacking her way through all that is boring and poorly written in order to find the gems and send them to me. She read everything so that I could read what is good, and I read everything good in order to put together everything that I think is best. Stories showed up on my doorstep in padded envelopes, a steady stream of fiction that I piled in strategic locations near bedsides and bathtubs and back doors. When you get enough short stories spread around the house, they gather momentum. The more stories I read, the more I wanted to read stories, the more I recommended stories, the more the stories created their own hype simply by being so numerous and varied and extraordinary. The stories offered me their companionship, each one a complete experience in a limited amount of space. No matter where I went I did not mind waiting because I was rich in stories. I went ahead and pulled into the endlessly long line at the touchless car wash on Sunday morning, took a story out of the glove compartment, and started reading. I was able to put other work aside in order to read, because for this period short stories were my job. I did not have the smallest twinge of guilt about lying on the sofa for days at a time, reading. Could there be anything better than that? I felt as if I had spent the year in one of those total-immersion language camps, and in the end I emerged fluent in the language of short fiction.
Of course I was no beginner. I can trace my relationship with the short story back to my earliest days as a reader, but my true connectio
n came when I was twelve years old, the year I read Eudora Welty’s “A Visit of Charity.” There had been other stories before that, stories I liked—“The Necklace” and “The Gift of the Magi,” the stock assignments that were the backbone of every junior high English class—but “A Visit of Charity,” even though it was a story about a girl, seemed infinitely more grown-up to me. It didn’t reward the reader with a plot twist at the end or present a clear moral imperative. Even more startling was the fact that this author, whose photograph and biographical paragraph preceded the text, had only one date listed after her name: 1909, and then a dash, and then nothing. Again and again I returned to that photograph to look at the long, gentle face of the author. She was both alive and in a textbook, a coupling I had never seen before. As sure as I was by the age of twelve that I wanted to be a writer, I was not at all certain that it was the sort of thing the living did. The short-fiction market was cornered by dead people, and this Eudora Welty was, as far as I could tell, the first one to have bucked the trend. I decided at the start of seventh grade to cast my lot with the living, and chose Eudora Welty as my favorite writer. Four years later, when I was sixteen, Miss Welty came to Vanderbilt to give a reading. I got there early and sat in the front row, holding my big, hardback Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty, which my mother had bought me for my birthday that year. It was the first reading I had ever been to, and when it was over I had her sign my book. I held it open to the wrong page, and she looked at me, and said, “No, no, dear. You always want to sign on the title page.” And she took the book from me and did it right. For the sheer force of its heart-stopping, life-changing wonder, I will put this experience up against anyone who ever saw the Beatles.
The impressions we pick up as children, when our minds are still open to influence and as soft as damp sponges, are likely to stay with us the longest. Ever since I saw that picture of Eudora Welty, alive and well in my seventh-grade reader, I’ve never been able to shake the notion that short-story writers are famous people and that short stories are life-altering things. I believe it is human nature to try to persuade others that our most passionately held beliefs are true, so that they too can know the joy of our deepest convictions. I was standing in my kitchen fixing breakfast the morning I heard on the radio that Miss Welty had died. It was July 2001, and I remember the room was full of light. I called my good friend Barry Moser, the illustrator who had worked with her on that most memorable edition of The Robber Bridegroom, and told him I was going to the funeral. He said he would meet me there.