Agnes Read online

  “She’s sick.”

  “American girls are always sick, but it’s never serious. They keep you in a state of permanent guilt about them. On the other hand, if they sleep with a guy, they talk about it afterward as though they’d done him a service. Like walking their dog or something. Because the dog needs walkies.”

  “Agnes isn’t like that.”

  “Sure,” said Louise. She linked arms with me, and introduced me to a few of her guests. She smiled and said a few words to each one, but as soon as we were alone again, she told me which of the men had come on to her, and who had deceived whom.

  “Why are you living with your parents, if their world is so repulsive to you?” I asked.

  “Oh, they’re fine, they’re not repulsive to me.”

  “But why don’t you get an apartment of your own, and have your own friends over?”

  “If it was up to me, I would have gone back to France long ago. But I’ve got a good job here. And I don’t really mind where I’m living.” Anyway, she said, her apartment had its own separate entrance, and she could come and go as she pleased.

  “Then why didn’t you ask any of your friends?”

  “Why should I? Haven’t I got you!”

  “Do you have any friends over here?”

  “I’ve always found men easier to get on with than women. And I didn’t want to ask more than one man at a time. After all, I’ve got a reputation to lose.”

  I drank quite a lot, and talked to Louise all night. Her mother winked at me a couple of times, and once her father came over and put his arm around me, and asked if I was having a good time. I thanked him for the invitation, and he said he was pleased I’d been able to come. He asked me what I’d managed to find out about the Pullman Strike. “I think the role of money in the whole dispute has been exaggerated,” I said. “It was about freedom. Pullman was a patriarch, and the strike was a protest more against him and his absolute power in their lives, and not just against their exploitation.”

  “Revolutions are always about power. And power is money.”

  “But even without the Depression, the workers were on a collision course with him. Even if wages hadn’t been lowered and prices raised.”

  “Believe me, young man, it was about money pure and simple,” said Louise’s father, taking his arm away. “You writers attach too much importance to ideas. I’m a businessman. I know what makes the world go round.”

  When I was alone with Louise again, she said: “You shouldn’t discuss politics with my father. What do you care about that Pullman business anyway? That’s all long buried and forgotten.”

  I said that what had happened then in that one model community was what was happening now all over the world, and that sooner or later there would be a similar reaction against it.

  Louise made a disparaging gesture. “Come on, let’s go up to my place,” she said. “There won’t be a revolution tonight. Everyone’s too drunk for a start.”

  She got a bottle of champagne from the fridge, and I followed her up the wide staircase into her little apartment. She locked the door behind us.

  34

  It was three or four o’clock, and I was one of the last to leave. Louise insisted on taking me back.

  “You’ll never get a taxi at this time,” she said.

  It wasn’t far to midtown. She pulled up on Beaubien Court, a little one-way street behind the Doral Plaza.

  “I don’t kiss my men on Michigan Avenue,” she said.

  “Agnes is back.”

  “You might have thought of that earlier.”

  “You don’t love me.”

  “And she’s stopped sleeping with you,” said Louise, and she leaned across the automatic gears, and kissed me on the lips.

  “She’s sick,” I said, “but she’ll get better. There was something real and important between us. And it’s not lost.”

  “You men are fools,” said Louise, “you can only love in the face of rejection. Words, these big words the whole time. There was something between us too, tonight, and that was beautiful. And tomorrow night we could have it again, and a few more times in the nights to come. And maybe, if you were open to it, something might develop from that. But you were never up for it, right from the start. You always had me in a separate category.”

  “You told me you didn’t love me. Back in the archive, remember?”

  “I may have said it then, but I didn’t say it tonight.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Why? I’m in no hurry.”

  “I’m not a good man, Louise.”

  “You’re just drunk.”

  “Yes. And now I’ve got to go. Thanks for the party. I’ll call you.”

  “Say Happy New Year to your Cinderella from me,” Louise said bitterly, and as I was walking up the back stairs to the building, she added: “Try bringing me one of her shoes sometime. You never know, it might fit me.”

  I couldn’t open the front door of the apartment. I could get the key in, but I couldn’t seem to turn it. I struggled with it for a few minutes. I didn’t feel drunk anymore, but it was as though my thoughts had left my head, and were floating around me. I tried all the keys I had, even the key to my place in Switzerland, even my trunk key, which I carry everywhere with me. I had to win time. Then I thought Agnes had changed the lock while I was gone, or some drunken asshole had stuck something in it. Or maybe Agnes had left the key in the lock, either on purpose or by accident. I rang the bell. I waited a couple of minutes, then I rang a second time, and then a third. Finally the door opened a crack, as much as the chain would allow. A Japanese man in a white robe was looking at me in alarm. I immediately realized what I’d done.

  “I think I must be on the wrong floor,” I said, “I’m really sorry.”

  The Japanese man merely nodded, and shut the door.

  I was on the floor below. I went up the stairs. The stairs had been built in case of an emergency, and they were always kept lit. I sat down on one of the steps. I could hear the elevator going by, and I wondered who was going up or down at this time, only a few yards away from me. In the whole year I’d been living in the Doral Plaza, I’d met none of my neighbors, only the guy who ran the shop at the bottom. And all I knew about him was that he always seemed to be in the shop, and that he was given to dirty jokes and innuendo. He always treated me as though we shared a secret, as though we’d been friends for years, and he winked at me and dropped hints I didn’t understand. But in fact he was as much of a stranger to me as the people I sometimes saw in the foyer, and of whom I didn’t even know whether they lived in the building or were just visiting someone. At last the commotion in the elevator shaft stopped, everything was quiet again, and I went on up the stairs.

  35

  The first thing I heard in the apartment was the hum from my computer. I walked into the study. The screen saver was on, with stars radiating out in all directions from some central point. If you kept your eye fixed on that point, you had the sensation of falling through space, as though you’d crashed through the glass and were being sucked into black infinitude. I’d often sat and stared at it for minutes on end, and Agnes had laughed at me and said it was just the illusion of space, in fact it was just a pattern of centrifugal lights expanding as they floated toward the edge of the screen, and not for nothing was it called “Starfield Simulation.”

  I pressed a key, and the end of my story appeared on screen. It was the new ending, the one I’d written secretly.

  For a long time, Agnes stared at the stars flying toward her on the screen. The mystery, she thought, is the void at the center. She felt herself being pulled ever deeper into it. It was as though she was diving into the screen, being converted into the words and sentences she had read there. The hand that switched off the computer wasn’t her own, nor was the body that put on its clothing. Agnes left the apartment, took the elevator down, walked in a kind of trance past the doorman who had fallen asleep over his newspaper.

  The journe
y to Willow Springs took the best part of an hour. By the time Agnes got out, it was well past midnight, but she could still hear the rockets going off, and sometimes the whole sky was bright with fireworks. Agnes was cold, in spite of her winter coat, but even being cold seemed to be at a remove from her, it was as though she knew she was cold, without feeling it. She walked down long streets, past rows of small wooden houses, some of them still echoing with music and the sound of people talking and laughing.

  Agnes got to the end of the street. In front of her lay the park in utter darkness. She blindly took a few steps into the darkness, and then she was able to see again. It was as though she had entered another world. The sky that, tainted by the streetlights, had been like an orange blanket over the suburb was of a transparent blackness here. She could see innumerable stars, and she could make out Orion and Gemini. The crescent moon was so new that she could barely pick out the snow-covered paths by its light.

  The wind was stormy. The gusting in Agnes’s ears was loud enough to drown every sound, every thought. She lost her way on the tangling paths, and it took her a long time to find the place in the forest again. The trees had lost their leaves, and the lake was frozen over. But Agnes recognized it. She pulled her gloves off, and ran her hands over the icy tree trunks. She didn’t feel their cold, but their roughness on her almost numbed fingertips. Then she knelt down, and lay facedown in the powdery snow. Slowly she regained her feeling, first in her feet, in her hands, and then in her arms and legs, and it spread through her shoulders and her belly to her heart, until it had gone through her whole body, and it felt to her as though she was glowing in the snow, and her heat would surely melt it.

  There was a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on it next to the computer. I went into the bedroom. Agnes wasn’t there. Her coat wasn’t hanging on its hook. Nothing else was missing.

  36

  Agnes didn’t return. I waited for her all night and all the following day. It stopped snowing at about noon, but it started again a few hours later. Once the telephone rang. I didn’t pick it up, and it stopped before the answering machine clicked on.

  I turned the light off, and put on the video that Agnes took of the time we hiked in the national park.

  Me driving, on the way home, filmed from the backseat. The windshield wipers. Occasionally a car in front of us. The back of my head, my hands on the wheel. Finally I seem to have noticed that Agnes was filming. I turn my head and smile, but before I can turn all the way, the film stops.

  PETER STAMM is the author of the novels All Days Are Night, Seven Years, On a Day Like This, and Unformed Landscape, and the short-story collections We’re Flying and In Strange Gardens and Other Stories. His prize-winning books have been translated into more than thirty languages. For his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction, he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. He lives in Switzerland.

  MICHAEL HOFMANN has translated the work of Gottfried Benn, Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and many others. In 2012, he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His Selected Poems was published in 2009, and Where Have You Been? Selected Essays in 2014. He lives in Florida and London.

  OTHER PRESS

  You might also enjoy these titles by Peter Stamm:

  WE’RE FLYING

  This short-story collection is a superb introduction to Peter Stamm’s work and its precise rendering of the contemporary human psyche.

  “These tautly constructed stories, with echoes of such disparate authors as Patricia Highsmith and Anton Chekhov, take root in the psyche and will not let you go.” —Library Journal

  UNFORMED LANDSCAPE

  A sensitive young woman is led to the richer life she was meant to have and is brave enough to claim. Her story speaks eloquently about solitude, the fragility of love, lost illusions, and self-discovery.

  “Like the landscapes of his novels, Stamm’s prose is spare and graceful.” —New Republic

  ALL DAYS ARE NIGHT

  In unadorned and haunting style, this novel forcefully tells the story of a woman who loses her life but must stay alive all the same.

  “A postmodern riff on The Magic Mountain … a page-turner.” —The Atlantic

  “Air[s] the psychological implications of our beauty obsession and the insidious ways in which it can obscure selfhood.” —New Republic

  “[An] engrossing story of recovery.” —The New Yorker

  SEVEN YEARS

  Torn between his highbrow marriage and his lowbrow affair, Alex is stuck within a spiraling threesome. Seven Years is a bold, sobering novel about the quest for love.

  “Seven Years is a novel to make you doubt your own dogma. What more can a novel do than that?” —Zadie Smith, Harper’s Magazine

  ON A DAY LIKE THIS

  On a day like any other, Andreas changes his life. Consumed with longing for his lost love and blinded by the uncertainty of his future, he is tormented by the question of what might have been.

  “What Peter Stamm has done with this novel is recreate life in all of its quiet banality — this is art — Stamm’s achievement isn’t the mere weaving of a story, it’s the report of a life in quiet crisis.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

  IN STRANGE GARDENS

  In this short-story collection, Stamm’s clean style expresses despair without flash, through softness and small gestures.

  “With artful understatement, Stamm conveys the mutability of experience, a phenomenon as inscrutable as variations in the weather.” —Bookforum

  And look for Peter Stamm’s new

  novel, To the Back of Beyond,

  to be published in late 2017.

  www.​otherpress.​com