Debbie and I had been fighting all week long. She dragged me everywhere. We ate rubber shrimp at an over-priced restaurant with stone-age decor. We visited an authentic Seminole village where they sold authentic stuffed baby alligators. We paid twenty-five dollars apiece to watch a blonde ride a killer whale. And on the night before our last full day, we drove down to North Miami to visit Debbie’s grandmother.

“Be careful what you say,” Debbie warned me as we drove down A1A. “There’s only one thing worse than my parents finding out, and that’s my grandmother finding out.”

“It can’t be much worse than if your parents find out.”

“Oh yeah? If my parents find out from my grandmother, she’ll make them feel guilty, especially my mother.”

“Never approved of her, eh?” I asked.

“Something likes that. If my grandmother lays it on my parents, can you imagine how my parents will lay it on me? Not one, but two layers of guilt.”

“You mean three instead of two,” I mumbled.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Never mind,” I said. “I just don’t see why you make such a big deal out of it. What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

“I just don’t like walking around knowing that I’m lying to them.”

That way she had of constantly accusing herself always annoyed me. Her parents were difficult enough without her helping them along. “If you don’t tell them anything, you don’t have to lie.”

“They ask questions. What’s the matter with you? Don’t WASPS make their kids feel guilty?”

“Of course they do,” I laughed.

“How come you don’t show it?” Debbie chuckled and added, “I’m sure you have plenty to feel guilty about.”

I most certainly did. Just several weeks earlier, I had taken Debbie down to New York to meet my parents. My father didn’t say very much, but I knew what he was thinking. It was just one of the thousand ways he was disapointed in me. I had gotten past caring about it enough to even have a fight.

“WASPS work silently,” I said. “They don’t say a word and just let the guilt build up silently. Psychological warfare. That way they can’t be blamed for anything. We always cover our asses.”

“Not a bad idea,” Debbie said thoughtfully. Then she turned abruptly and said, “And don’t smoke, whatever you do.”

“Of course.”

Mrs. Sussman lived in a senior citizen’s condominium, inland from the coast on Miami Gardens Drive. Debbie had a little trouble remembering which twenty-five story building in the complex her grandmother lived in and it took some time for her to remember some old landmarks. We drove slowly around the man-made lake, around which the towers were built. Finally, something caught her eye. “There it is,” she said, pointing to one of the floodlit concrete structures. “They planted some new palm trees since I was last here.” They all looked the same to me.

We found a parking slot marked VISITORS, locked up the car and walked slowly toward the entrance. Debbie put her arm around my waist, sliding her hand down into my back pocket and whispered, “Don’t worry. Relax. I love you, you know.” I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, trying not to worry. With Debbie, however, worrying was a way of life. As we entered the lobby, I began breathing deeply, filling my lungs with the cool, purified air.

On the elevator ride up to the fourteenth floor, I grabbed Debbie, embracing and pressing her back into the wall of the elevator car, kissing her mouth powerfully and deeply. It was something we had always done during our first year together in the high-rise dormitory at school. Making love on an elevator, if you could call it that, had always been one of my more bizarre fantasies. The scintillating sense of danger was heightened by the fact that we were in Debbie’s grandmother’s elevator.

Suddenly we felt the elevator slow down and as always, I jumped away from Debbie and we composed ourselves, preparing our faces to feign innocence. The elevator stopped on the seventh floor and an elderly couple stepped inside. The man wore white shoes, plaid slacks, a polo shirt, and a golf cap. His wife, although she was on the heavy side, was an attractive woman in her late sixties, wearing a print skirt and a lavender blouse.

The man pressed nineteen and turned to me. He grimaced and said, “Who are you?” The skin under his chin flapped when he spoke.

I stuttered for a moment and then Debbie said, “We’re visiting Golda Sussman on fourteen.”

“Oh, you must be Debbie,” said the woman, smiling. “Your grandmother told me all about you and your brother.”

Debbie smiled nicely at the woman and then glanced at me as a warning to be pleasant.

“And who is this handsome young man?” her husband asked, giving me a smile. A small one.

“He’s a friend of mine from college.”

“Rob Dickinson,” I said shaking his hand.

The elevator slowed down and stopped at the fourteenth floor. We said goodbye and as we stepped off the elevator, the woman said, “Tell your grandmother that Rose and Milton send their regards and that she has a beautiful granddaughter.”

The door of Mrs. Sussman’s apartment opened and Debbie fell away from me into her grandmother’s arms. There were tears in her grandmother’s eyes as she said softly, “five years, five years.” Then Mrs. Sussman stepped back, composing herself, looking Debbie up and down. “See how you’ve grown up. You’re a young woman now. A beautiful young woman.”

The dinner table was to the right, just off the kitchen as we entered the living room, exquisitely set with silver and crystal. The entire room was decorated in off-white. Across the room was a velour apholstered couch and love seat positioned around a glass-topped coffee table. Beyond that was a terrace that overlooked the moonlit lake. Mrs. Sussman closed the glass door and switched on the air conditioning. Debbie introduced me and I shook Mrs. Sussman’s hand.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said. “You don’t have to wear that tie just for me. Take it off, make yourself comfortable.”

“It’s all right, it doesn’t bother me at all,” I lied. Debbie and I sat down on the couch, making sure we were at least six inches apart, and Mrs. Sussman took the loveseat. I sat back momentarily and felt a small pillow at the small of my back, which I suddenly had noticed was damp, so I crossed my legs and leaned forward, clasping my hands around my knee, trying to look comfortable. I glanced to my right and saw that Debbie had adopted almost the same position.

“Can I give either of you a drink?” Mrs. Sussman asked. “I have plenty of liquor in the house. I don’t drink it myself, but I like to have some in the house just in case.”

“No, thank you,” Debbie said.

“And you, Rob?”

“Oh no thank you, Ma’am.”

“Are you sure?”

Debbie and I both shook our heads earnestly. If Debbie had said yes, I would have also had a drink. Normally, Debbie would never turn down a drink before dinner. When she said no it was for a very good reason. I guess it was bad enough for her, bringing her goyisherboyfriend to her grandmother’s for dinner, she didn’t want to worry about what her grandmother would think if she saw the two of them drinking together. I decided that it would be best if I played along with her.

“Maybe you would like some soda,” Mrs. Sussman offered. “I have Cocoa-Cola.”

“No, thank you,” I said. I hate Coke.

“Are you sure? I went out and bought five bottles when I heard you were coming?”

“I’ll have some, Nanny,” Debbie said.

“You two stay right here and relax from your drive,” Mrs. Sussman said, getting up. “Are you sure you don’t want anything Rob?”

Following Debbie’s lead, I finally gave in and said, “I guess I’ll have a Coke.”

“I won’t be a minute,” Mrs. Sussman said as she scurried into the kitchen.

Debbie and I sat quietly in the living room listening to bottles open and ice cube trays cracking and soda fizzing. Just before Mrs. Sussman returned, Debbie leaned to me and whispered, “Don’t worry, she likes you. She thinks you’re adorable. I can tell.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Because I think you’re adorable and she always spoiled me.” Mrs. Sussman returned carrying a metal tray with two glasses of Coke. “They certainly look good,” I said, trying a little too hard, as I reached for the nearest glass. I took a sip and felt the syrup coating my teeth.

Debbie and Mrs. Sussman got involved in a long conversation about the family back in Bayside. Her older brother was finishing law school and was now applying to every law firm in the country. He had offers from Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, and Washington D.C. He was most likely going to take an offer from Great Neck, Long Island. Debbie’s younger brother was now a senior in High School. Mrs. Sussman was rather upset that he was only going to a community college, but Debbie calmed the woman by emphasizing that he was going to transfer after two years. Then, Mrs. Sussman asked Debbie what her plans were.

“I’m going to move back home and get a job downtown,” Debbie said.

“What was your major again,” Mrs. Sussman asked. “Accounting?”

“Marketing,” Debbie answered.

“Oh yes, that’s right. Well, you’ll do fine. Everything is in New York. And what are your plans, Rob?”

“I’ll be going to graduate school in Boston,” I said. I didn’t want to say too much right away so that I could gauge her reaction.

Mrs. Sussman’s face lit up and she said, “Oh you’re getting and MBA. How marvelous.”

“It’s not an MBA, Nanny,” Debbie said.

“Oh.”

I’m getting a PhD in Classics,” I said, enjoying the disappointed look on her face.

“Rob has an assistantship, Nanny,” Debbie said. “They’re going to pay him to go to school.”

“What will you do after that?”

“Probably teach college,” I said. “My specialty is Latin poetry.”

“I see,” Mrs. Sussman said, looking down and straightening her skirt. For some reason, upsetting the women’s material sensibilities made me feel more in control, more independent. Being looked down upon has always given me a feeling of defiance. When people look down on you and think that their opinion means something to you when it really doesn’t, you can privately place yourself above them. The least it can do is save your self respect. In any event, Mrs. Sussman’s opinion of me was now permanently fixed.

For dinner, we ate pot roast (Debbie’s favorite meal as a child) with mashed potatoes, string beans, creamed corn, dinner rolls and rye bread. Mrs. Sussman also served an extremely sweet sparkling wine, which she called “champagne.” She kept filling my glass, telling me to tell her when I had enough because I still had to drive that night. I kept telling her I had enough, but she kept filling my glass anyway. Actually, I could drink that wine all night long and not get drunk. I might get cavities, but I wouldn’t get drunk.

Mrs. Sussman also forced on us second and third portions of everything else, which was actually very good. The pot roast was tender, the strung beans were not over cooked, and the rolls were freshly baked. After we finished, I tried to help Debbie and her grandmother clear the table, but I just seemed to get in the way. Afterwards, Mrs. Sussman brewed a pot of coffee and pulled a huge cherry cheesecake out of the refrigerator.

We sat back down at the table and Mrs. Sussman poured the coffee. I managed to convince her that I only want a very small piece of cake. “The coffee is very good,” I said.

“Thank you. You can have as much as you want. And as much cake too.”

We spoke for another half hour about college, the city of Albany and Debbie told Mrs. Sussman about her old friends from Bayside. Mrs. Sussman had a very good memory and could talk all about Debbie’s junior high school friends and their families. Finally, Debbie diplomatically said, “It’s getting late and Rob still has to drive us back to Pompano.” She looked at me and winked.

At the door, Debbie and her grandmother embraced and rocked back and forth. “Don’t wait so long next time. Any time you want to come down, just call me, I’ll send you a ticket.” Then it was my turn. “It was very nice meeting you, Rob. Good luck to you.” She hugged me and kissed my cheek while I obligingly kissed the air next to hers.

In the hallway, Debbie breathed a sigh of relief as we heard the door close behind us. In the elevator, I pressed Debbie into the back wall of the elevator, her thigh between mine, and kissed her mouth deeply. Then I held her tightly as I kissed the side her neck and my hand slid down her back and into her slacks.

Read the rest…

A Couple, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Barnes & Noble
• Sony
• Diesel Books
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image A Couple (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date January 29, 2011.

© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Reviews:

“These three separate stories about neighbors Johnny and Miriam growing up in the 1960s and 70s make for a moving and elegant novella. I very much enjoyed the directness and strength of the prose which has its own bleak beauty, and the push and pull of relationships and family was very well portrayed indeed. The ending is perfect too. Highly recommended.” *****

-Anne Brooke (Amazon)

“This collection has two lovely tales of growing up in Port Jefferson, New York, plus a remarkable story of complicated love — sexual and familial — amid scenes of poverty and emotional desolation. Bubbers has a fine, almost photographic sense of place and time, and a great talent at capturing the texture of life. The final story which gives its name to this collection, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” ranks with some of the best short fiction written today.” *****

Eugene Mirabelli (Smashwords)

Excerpt…

Brothers (Part 1)

When I was a boy, my father was a pressman who worked nights at a daily newspaper on Long Island. Although he worked those unconventional hours, both he and my mother did their best to keep us on a normal schedule. He left the house at 10:30 PM, after my brother and I had been put to bed, and returned home in the morning just in time to see us off to school. When my mother met us at the bus stop in the afternoon, she would always remind us that Daddy was sleeping so we should be quiet when we got home.

“Remember, Daddy is sleeping,” she would say again on the front porch, just before she opened the front door. We slipped off our shoes and stepped onto the hardwood floor in on the foyer of our house in our stocking feet. We looked up the steps and could see that the door to my parent’s bedroom was closed.

I could not contain all my energy after a day at school. Sometimes my feet would hit the steps too hard and fast and my older brother, who was behind me, would grab my belt to pull me back to slow me down. He’d solemnly put his finger across his lips.

Quietly, we slipped into our bedroom and changed into our play clothes. Our house was small and my brother and I had to share a small room next to my parents. He was two years older than me, so he got to sleep on the top bunk. After we had changed into our blue jeans, we went back down the hall stairs, sneakers in hand, and into the kitchen to see what snack my grandmother had prepared for us that that day.

She was a slight, stoop shouldered old woman who knitted and cooked and baked for us forever. My grandfather had died the same year my parents were married. My father was in the army at the time and there was no money and no time for my parents to find a place to live, so they had moved into my grandmother’s house in Queens. When my father shipped out to Korea, my mother kept my grandmother company and learned to cook all his favorite meals.

Now she lived with us in Port Jefferson, in a room on the first floor of our house. She shared the household chores with my mother, but specialized in baking wonderful breads and pastries. My favorites were the horn-shaped puffy shells filled with whipped cream.

Sometimes we would have small little cakes with nuts and raisins that my grandmother had made that day; she called them “Yeast Cakes.” Other times it might be vegetable soup or even her special pancakes, paper thin and made only with eggs, milk, and flour, and filled with apples or peaches. While we ate our snacks at the kitchen table, my mother would ask us how school was that day. Tommy, my brother, spoke first, telling her about his math quizzes and how many runs he scored at recess. Then she turned to me.

“And how was your day today, Johnny?”

Whenever Tommy had spoken first, I always struggled to make my story compete with his. Tommy had always been a straight ‘A’ student. He always got placed in classes with the smarter kids. I, however, struggled along in the middle rankings. I couldn’t read as well or add and subtract as well as Tommy had at my age.

After finishing our snacks, we put on our sneakers and left the house through the back door in the kitchen. Most often, we would ride our bikes and my mother would tell my brother to bring me along with him when he rode up the street to visit his friend Mark.

“Do I have to?”

“He’s your brother,” my mother would remind him.

“Oh all right,” he would say, hurting me with his reluctance. Then he would smile and say, “Ok squirt, I’ll race you to the corner,” and off we would go.

Mark and his family lived two blocks up the street. He had an older brother and sister, Ben and Sara, who were teenagers, and a younger sister, Miriam, who was my age. They lived in a much larger house than ours with a huge lawn in front that was perfect for playing touch football. When Ben and Sara and some of their friends were around, we played during good weather. Actually, the older kids played. Being too small to run and catch and throw with them, Miriam and I squared off at the line of scrimmage. We counted Mississippi’s until it was time for us to awkwardly wrestle each other, one of us trying to reach the quarterback, the other trying to block.

Mark’s family had a rec room in their basement. There was a ping-pong table, an old worn out couch from their grandmother’s old apartment in Brooklyn, and a portable stereo record player. It was a cabinet the size of a small suitcase and the turntable opened out and folded down from the cabinet-like a shelf. On rainy days, Mark, Tommy, Miriam and I would have ping-pong tournaments and put a stack of Ben and Sara’s Beatle records on the stereo. Miriam was a pretty good friend to me, almost as good as another boy, but whenever they played the song “She Loves You,” she would sing along and smile at me.

When Mark’s mother called them up to dinner, we knew that it was time for Tommy and me to climb aboard our bikes and head home.

Sometimes, as we road our bikes slowly home on the darkening street, Tommy would tease me about Miriam.

“Johnny’s got a girlfriend,” he would yell at the top of his lungs, for the entire world to hear.

“I do not!” I would shout back.

“Johnny and Miriam, sitting in a tree,” he would shout.

“Shut up!” I would scream and try to run my bike into his. Then he would rise up on his peddles and race up the street, singing “K-I S-S-I-N-G.” I would chase after him as fast as I could, but I was always smaller than him.

Once I caught up with him just as he was putting his bike in the shed in our back yard. I slammed into him as hard as I could. Tommy fell backwards onto the grass and I flew over my handlebars. I scrambled off of the tangled pile of bicycles and threw myself onto Tommy’s chest.

“Take it back,” I screamed, “Take it back!”

He laughed at me. I started flailing my arms, trying to punch him, but first he covered his face and then he grabbed my wrists.

“Take it back,” I screamed.

Just then, I felt my sweatshirt tighten and bunch up in back, as my father lifted me off Tommy.

“Stop it, both of you,” he yelled as he set me down on the ground next to Tommy. “What are you fighting about?” he asked.

I was too embarrassed to say what it was. “Nothing,” I said meekly.

“It didn’t sound like nothing,” he said sternly. “Both of you put your bicycles away and get cleaned up for dinner. And I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.”

Silently we both picked up our bicycles and wheeled them into the shed. We slowly walked across the yard to the house. It was dark and the light coming from the open kitchen window was bright, casting giant shadows behind us. The radio was on, reporting more dead in Vietnam. “I’m sorry, Johnny,” my brother whispered. “Friends?”

Through the kitchen window, I saw my mother and grandmother setting the table for dinner. My father sat at the table with his glasses on, reading the newspaper. My cheeks were burning from anger and the furious ride home. The knees of my jeans were damp with grass stains. “All right,” I muttered.

Seething, I pushed past Tommy through the door and into the light of my mother’s kitchen.

Read the rest of this novella:

Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Amazon Kindle Edition:

See larger image Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $1.99 USD Release date February 6, 2011.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Smashwords Edition.

Also available from:

• Sony
• Diesel eBooks
• Barnes & Noble
• Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

© 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

---

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Three stories about two neighbors who meet as young children and grow up together on Long Island during the late 60′s and early 70′s. The comforting and loving world they live in changes around them as their families fracture, society descends into chaos, and a war rages on. In the aftermath, they left on a wrecked, smoking landscape, searching for a new way to live when all of the sign have been burned down.

Reviews:

“These three separate stories about neighbors Johnny and Miriam growing up in the 1960s and 70s make for a moving and elegant novella. I very much enjoyed the directness and strength of the prose which has its own bleak beauty, and the push and pull of relationships and family was very well portrayed indeed. The ending is perfect too. Highly recommended.” *****

-Anne Brooke(Amazon)

“This collection has two lovely tales of growing up in Port Jefferson, New York, plus a remarkable story of complicated love — sexual and familial — amid scenes of poverty and emotional desolation. Bubbers has a fine, almost photographic sense of place and time, and a great talent at capturing the texture of life. The final story which gives its name to this collection, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” ranks with some of the best short fiction written today.” *****

Eugene Mirabelli(Amazon)

Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Smashwords Edition.

---

Natural Selection

A corporate manager is on the verge losing it all. Office politics, a growing drinking problem, estrangement from his family, and a looming layoff are pushing him to the edge of a personal abyss.

I wrote about how this story came to be in “Into The Abyss.”

Natural Selection, Smashwords Edition.

---

A Couple

Rob and Debbie are spending their last spring break in Florida. Graduation is looming and they face an uncertain future. Family expectations, peer pressure, and their own hearts are driving them apart. I wrote about this genre of story in my post Doomed Couples.

A Couple, Smashwords Edition.

Bonnifer

A short story about a married office worker struggling with temptation and desire while flirting with an older woman on a sultry summer evening in Greenwich Village.

Bonnifer, Smashwords Edition.

After the Fire: A Personal Essay

My memoir about a writing workshop and the teacher whose lessons on the art of fiction and the art of living continue to teach and inspire me, thirty years later. There’s some back-story about how this essay came to be written in my post eBook Week, Meta-Memoir.

After the Fire: A Personal Essay, Smashwords Edition.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Fiction

• “A Couple” – Cantaraville Two (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Absolutely Fourth Street” – The Square Table
• “Bonnifer” – Lily (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Calvin’s Monster”- Word Riot
• “Indian Summer” -  Cantaraville Four
• “Natural Selection” – Cantaraville Eight (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Truths” – Loch Raven Review
• Short Story Cycle – in progress
  • “Brothers” – The Square Table (available in the eBook Store)
  • “Come Together” – Cantaraville Six (available in the eBook Store)
  • “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” – The Big Stupid Review (available in the eBook Store)
  • “Fortunate Son” – in progress
• Poetry in Summer – novella in progress
• Winslow: A Novel – in progress

Memoir

• “After the Fire” – Oregon Literary Review (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Gifts”- Seeker Magazine
• “The Persistence of Gravy” – Static Movement

Poetry

• “On The Beach”- The Green Silk Journal
• “Compartments” – Mississippi Crow, Issue 7, available in print and download here.
• “The Clouds, A Highway…and Joni” – The Shine Journal
• “A Victorian in 1990″ – Loch Raven Review. Also anthologized in the annual edition:
  

  See larger image Loch Raven Review - Four (Paperback) By (author) Jim Doss, Christopher T. George List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $14.95 In Stock

© 2011 – 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

On an early summer afternoon in the tiny village of  North Dormer, Charity Royall sees from the distance a handsome young man, his manner and his clothing indicating that he is a wealthy city person.  Later, he stops in at the library that Charity unenthusiastically manages, in search of books about the local architecture and introduces himself as Lucius Harney.  Although his reason for visiting the library is entirely proper, and he has no motive for seducing or even flirty with the librarian, he is momentarily and involuntarily flustered by her beauty.  There is no flirtation at all in this meeting, but Charity notices Harney’s brief reaction and in the hours and days after that she repeatedly reflects on that moment even as her own obsession with Harney grows.

As the story unfolds we gradually learn more about Charity’s background.  She is the ward of Lawyer Royall, a prominent member of the community of North Dormer.  This is a somewhat dubious distinction considering how humble the village is; the only church in town lacks a fulltime minister and has services only every other Sunday. Its backwardness is revealed somewhat comically in Charity’s thoughts.

Charity was born into abject poverty in a place referred to as “The Mountain.”  Her destitute mother gave her up to Royall after her father had been convicted of manslaughter.  All that Charity can remember of her earlier life are fleeting images and she knows neither of her parents names.

As a work of naturalism, the behavior of all the characters in this story is driven by innate desires of which they are not entirely aware that conflict with the constraints and expectations of society.  Free will, if it exists at all, is exercised by negotiating in the path between conforming to the requirements of civilization (the nearby city of Nettleton) and giving in to primitive passion (“The Mountain”).  North Dormer, like Charity, exists somewhere between these two.  We see these internal conflicts play out not only in Charity but also in the two other main characters: Royall and Harney.

Wharton is one of the great literary stylists of naturalism (unlike, say, Theodore Dreiser), and of American Literature in general.  In Summer, her rendering of the landscape and season evokes the moods and desires of the characters.  The effect is poetic and, at times, intoxicating:

There had never been such a June in Eagle County.  Usually it was a month of moods, with abrupt alternations of belated frost and mid-summer heat; this year, day followed day in a sequence of temperate beauty.  Every morning a breeze blew steadily from the hills.  Toward noon it built up great canopies of white cloud the threw a cool shadow over fields and woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolved again, and the western light rained its unobstructed brightness on the valley.

On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge above a sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth and the warm currents of the grass running through her.  Directly in her line of vision a blackberry branch laid its frail white flowers and blue-green leaves against the sky.  Just beyond, a tuft of sweet-fern uncurled between the beaded shoots of grass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of sunshine.  This was all she saw, but she felt, above her and about her, the strong growth of the beeches clothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones on countless spruce-branches, the push of myriads of sweet-fern fronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood, and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags in the pasture beyond.  All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of fragrance.  Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalations to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal.  (Chapter V)

Wharton was born into incredible wealth and most of her work focused on the rites and rituals of New York Society.  She moved comfortably and at ease in those circles, yet her work reveals a discerning and critical eye for passions and desires that beneath polite and tasteful manners.  The two works that are set in humble rural settings, Summer and Ethan Frome, take place in western Massachusetts.  She lived there, in Lennox, for some years in a magnificent house that she had built, but by the time she wrote Summer, she had been living in France for some years .  The landscape and its less affluent people had made an impression on her.  There are elements of harshness in her portrayals of them, but never is there any condescension in tone and it is clear that she had great affection for the land and its inhabitants.

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

Books Referenced:

See larger image Summer (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $5.99 USD New From: $4.19 In Stock Used from: $48.80 In Stock

See larger image Ethan Frome (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $8.00 USD New From: $3.55 In Stock Used from: $2.44 In Stock Release date October 25, 2005.

See larger image The Age of Innocence (Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $8.98 USD New From: $7.00 In Stock Used from: $1.88 In Stock

See larger image The House of Mirth (Signet Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) By (author) Edith Wharton List Price: $4.95 USD New From: $2.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date May 3, 2005.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

In the years since then, two more of my stories were published there as well.  These were new stories and I think they were much better than the first one.  “Brothers” was the next one and it turned out to be the first of a cycle of stories that I’ve been working on over the past few years.  The third, “Truths,” was a short fictional vignette about  tryst that I composed from several fragments of stories that by themselves had fizzled out and were never completed.  I never throw anything out.  The writing challenge that I gave myself was to write an explicit bedroom scene to help tie the pieces together.  It’s the kind of writing that I’d always avoided doing in the past, even when a story obviously needed it.  A friend who read an early draft of “A Couple” remarked, “Fred, the best parts of this story happen in the white space between the scenes.”

It was true.  In my stories, three asterisks (“***”) could mean a movement in time, or a movement in space, or it could mean that somebody’s getting laid.  Given the nature of some of the stories I write – exploring intimate psychological and emotional relationships – the absence of these scenes is noticeable, kind of like Lucy and Ricky sleeping in twin beds.

Writing sex scenes in literary fiction is fraught with danger.  Somewhere between vulgar and clinical is a place where eroticism and sensuality and metaphor intertwine.  That place is very elusive.  Finding it is extremely difficult.  All that is certain is that when it’s bad, it’s really bad.  There’s even an annual award for bad literary sex that’s been won by some very respected writers and the offending passages cited are always cringe-worthy.

Novelist Elizabeth Benedict has written a book specifically about this challenge for writers called  The Joy of Writing Sex. It was this book and studying with Benedict at The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute that encouraged me to take this on.  To face the music.  To open the kimono. To put it out there.  After all, if John Updike could make a fool of himself and win several bad sex awards, what was I so afraid of?

I didn’t quite get there in actually depicting specific act or technique, but I did at least try to deal with the challenge of anatomy.  As these things go, it’s still fairly timid but I was nonetheless nervous when I sent the story out.

I had always been impressed by the high quality of writing in The Square Table, excluding my own contributions, so I assumed they wouldn’t accept anything that would end up being embarrassing to them or me.  Surprisingly, it was accepted and published.

Last year, after many years of publication, The Square Table shut down.  I’m not sure, but the editor and publisher, having completed law school, was now consumed by a career that leaves no time for labors of love.  Because my stories there were effectively “unpublished” I began looking for new homes for them, or at least two of them (“Absolutely Fourth Street” can safely fade away).   I sent “Truths” to the Loch Raven Review, an online journal that had previously published one of my rare poems.  I don’t write much poetry, I don’t think I’m particularly good at it, but occasionally something strikes me.  I’m never sure of the result, so submitting them to journals is always frightening for me.  This was definitely the case with the poem that they published, so when it came time to find a place to republish this story that made me nervous I thought of them.

I am pleased that they have confirmed what The Square Table had told me.  The story is valid.

“Truths” is appearing in the winter issue of Loch Raven Review.

In the meantime, here’s a link to the poem they published a few years ago: “A Victorian in 1990“

Elizabeth Benedict’s inimitable guide:

See larger image The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers (Paperback) By (author) Elizabeth Benedict List Price: $18.99 USD New From: $5.32 In Stock Used from: $5.33 In Stock

She practices what she preaches:

See larger image Almost (Paperback) By (author) Elizabeth Benedict List Price: $13.95 USD New From: $0.01 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Reviews:

“These three separate stories about neighbors Johnny and Miriam growing up in the 1960s and 70s make for a moving and elegant novella. I very much enjoyed the directness and strength of the prose which has its own bleak beauty, and the push and pull of relationships and family was very well portrayed indeed. The ending is perfect too. Highly recommended.” ***** Anne Brooke (Amazon)

“This collection has two lovely tales of growing up in Port Jefferson, New York, plus a remarkable story of complicated love — sexual and familial — amid scenes of poverty and emotional desolation. Bubbers has a fine, almost photographic sense of place and time, and a great talent at capturing the texture of life. The final story which gives its name to this collection, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” ranks with some of the best short fiction written today.” ***** Eugene Mirabelli (Smashwords)

Available now at Smashwords.com (use coupon code MJ87Z for 100% discount until June 6, 2011).

See larger image Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $1.99 USD Release date February 6, 2011.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

My short story “Natural Selection” has been released as an eBook at Amazon.com.  This story has previously been available at Smashwords.com and other retailers (see my eBook Store Page), but this is the first time it is available at Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer. Kindle books can obviously be read on their Kindle dedicated device, but Amazon has also provided reading software for PC’s,  Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Android smartphones.

As for the story itself, I must credit the magazine that originally published it, Cantaraville.  I’ve written several blog posts about the story already (Into The Abyss, Natural Selection), so I’ll refrain from writing anything more.  As a general rule, the number of words an author writes about a story should never exceed the number of words in the story.

In the near future, I’ll be offering additional titles at Amazon.

See larger image Natural Selection (Kindle Edition) By (author) Fred Bubbers List Price: $0.99 USD Release date January 25, 2011.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Thus begins Ivan Turgenev’s 1860 novella, First Love. At age sixteen while living in the country, Vladimir meets twenty-one-year-old Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, the daughter of a titled but very poor family living on the adjoining property.  Zinaida is a beautiful and spirited young women and Vladimir falls hopelessly in love with her.  Zinaida toys with him mercilessly, enticing him with hints of a deep and romantic affection and, alternatively, pushing him away and treating him with condescending, sisterly affection. (Perhaps the 19th century equivalent of “Let’s just be friends.”)  At one point, she even asks Vladimir to look after her twelve-year-old brother, emphasizing the their age difference and that Vladimir is still just a boy.

Adding to Vladimir’s frustration are the numerous suitors who come calling on Zinaida every evening.  They are all older than Vladimir and superior to him in either wealth or social class.  She plays them all off one another, but occasionally indicates that she favors Vladimir.  On these occasions the young man’s heart swells and there is no joy greater than the joy felt by a young man in love for the first time.  There is also no sadness greater than the sadness brought on by unrequited love.

Vladimir is a sensitive and observant young man and he is able to see through Zinaida’s extreme coquettishness and notices a gradual change in her manner.  Beneath her façade, he can see that she truly is in love, but not with him.  Nor is it one of the other suitors, although at first he suspects it is one of them.  The penultimate heartbreak for Vladimir is that Zinaida’s secret love turns out to be Vladimir’s own father.  In the final chapters, this heartbreak story, as all good heartbreak, turns tragic.

Turgenev is one of the early practitioners of literary realism.  First Love is told in first person and adheres strictly to the limitations of omniscience that that point of view requires.  Turgenev uses that to his advantage in several specific places, such as when Vladimir witnesses an altercation between his father and Zinaida.  He is unable to hear what they are discussing, but his visual observation provides enough for for us to understand the depth nature of their relationship.

The true artistry of this novella is revealed at the conclusion when the reader reconsiders the entire story once again, this time taking a far more sympathetic view of both Zinaida (and really, the first time through she’s very hard to like) and Vladimir’s father.  What is finally revealed is that this story is not only a tale about a youthful unrequited love but also about Zinaida’s place in society, society’s expectations of all of us, and ultimately about the nature of love itself.

Turgenev’s influence is even more apparent in the development of psychological fiction.   He has a gentle touch that captures complex and nuanced emotional states in his characters and can be seen as a precursor to Henry James and Joseph Conrad.  This same approach to fiction can still be seen in such contemporary works as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.

Turgenev lived during changing times in Europe.  Later events would sweep away the aristocracy in his native Russia, but during his lifetime the social order, and the aristocracy that it supported,  was already crumbling.  The characters in First Love reflect this along with the very nature of the story that the older Vladimir tells to his shallow and passionless companions.

For more articles in this series, see “The Art of the Novella.”

See larger image First Love (The Art of the Novella) (Paperback) By (author) Ivan Turgenev List Price: $10.00 USD New From: $6.08 In Stock Used from: $3.95 In Stock Release date September 1, 2004.

See larger image On Chesil Beach (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $14.00 USD New From: $3.17 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date June 10, 2008.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

At the very end of his life, Ernest Hemingway was convinced that the electroconvulsive therapy that had be used to treat his depression had destroyed his memory and, therefore, his ability to write.  Whether or not shock therapy can actually do that and whether or not it was true in Hemingway’s case has been argued ever since then, but Hemingway believed it and it was perhaps the final blow that pushed him into the despair from which he could find no escape.  About a year earlier, he had completed the manuscript for A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his early days in Paris when he was on the threshold of literary stardom.  While one might imagine that memories of true events are crucial ingredients for a memoir, they are not the only ingredients.  In the years since A Moveable Feast was first published it has been extensively fact-checked several times. Major parts of it cannot be verified, including an infamous anecdote involving F. Scott Fitzgerald, a ruler, and a men’s room, that I will forever refuse to believe ever happened. So really, what purpose did memory serve him in creating his memoir, especially since even though much of it may be fiction, it is still vivid and poignant, and a prime example of a literary genre?  For Hemingway, memory was everything and he couldn’t live without it.

So what is it about this fragile and mysterious thing called memory that sustains us, that inspires us, that tricks us, and sometimes horrifyingly eludes us, that makes it so essential to the creation of fiction?  And what is it about memory that is essential to the reading of fiction?

William Saleton’s recent profile of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus at Slate.com provides insight into the fragile nature of memory.  Loftus is a researcher who has studied, through experimentation on human subjects, the mechanisms of human memory.  In the course of her career, she has been a controversial figure.  She has shown how so-called eyewitness testimony in criminal cases can be unknowingly be shaped by police and prosecutors, helping defense lawyers obtain acquittals for their clients, and helping to overturn convictions based on eyewitness testimony.  Along the way she has stirred controversy in her own profession by  taking on proponents of recovered memory therapy in the early 1990’s, by arguing that the therapy itself created false memories of childhood abuse.  It’s still controversial today, but her efforts have resulted in tighter legal and professional guidelines.  Her shift in focus from proving eyewitness testimony to be flawed to proving recovered memories to be equally questionable had to have been motivated, at least in part, by her own experience.  Saleton writes:

Not even Loftus was immune to suggestion. In 1988, after 13 years of testifying about memory’s fallibility, she was told by her uncle that she was the one who had found her dead mother in the swimming pool. The sights and sounds of that awful morning came back to her—the corpse face down, the nightgown, the screaming, the stretcher, the police cars. But within three days, her uncle recanted the story, and other relatives confirmed that her aunt, not Loftus, had found the body. The memories of the memory expert were false.

Her false memory must have been so real and so vivid to her that when confronted with the truth she realized that memory was more fragile, and truth more elusive, then she had already established.

In 1990, Loftus testified in a murder trial for a murder that had happened twenty-one years earlier.  The defendant had been charged by his own daughter, who had suddenly recovered a repressed memory.  Loftus’ previous research had proved that eyewitness testimony could be altered, but she had not proved that entire memories could be made up.  The defendant was convicted.  And yet, from her own personal experience, she knew it was possible and set out to prove it.  Saleton writes:

Loftus began to read popular books that told women and therapists how to recover memories of sexual abuse. The books urged therapists to ask their clients about childhood incest. They listed symptoms that supposedly indicated abuse even if it wasn’t remembered. They invited women to search for memories by imagining the abuse. They encouraged group therapy in which women could hear one another’s stories of being victimized.

These ideas sounded fishy. Suggestion, indoctrination, authority, inference, imagination, and immersion were known to alter memories in police interrogations and experiments. But could they create a whole memory? Could the recent surge of incest recollections be the product of recovered-memory therapy?

Loftus conducted a number of experiments to see if it were possible, through careful manipulation, subjects could be induced into recalling vivid memories of things that never happened.  What she discovered is that it is possible to create a false memory in at least some of her subjects if certain conditions are met.  Interestingly, the conditions were met in her own very personal experience with false memories:

• The memory is suggested or verified by someone whom the subject trusts.  In her test subjects’ case, like her own experience, the facilitator is a relative.  In the books she read, the trusted facilitator was the therapist.
• The false memory contains true elements that trigger real sense or affective memories that become conflated with the false elements.

The rest is done by the subject’s own mind, unconsciously weaving true and the false together to form a convincing narrative that although false, might as well have happened because it is now part of the subjects self-identity. Loftus was able to create a recipe for a false memory.  It wasn’t always successful, but that it was successful at all shows how fragile our perceptions of reality can be.  Her most common recipe was the “lost in the mall experiment”:

Each subject was given summaries of four incidents from his childhood. Three stories were true; one was false. The false story followed a formula: You got lost in a mall or department store, you cried, you were found by an old person. The summaries were written with the help of older relatives who knew the true incidents and the family.

…

The subjects were told that their relatives had recalled all four incidents. They were asked to fill in the details of each incident or, if they couldn’t remember it, to write, “I do not remember this.” In follow-up interviews, they were asked to think more about each incident and to retrieve any additional details they could recall. Of the 24 people subjected to this procedure, six came to remember the fake story as true.

Because the stories were individualized by relatives who knew the subject, they contained enough specific details that evoke sense memories that were true and would validate the false part of the story:

You, your mom, Tien, and Tuan all went to the Bremerton K-Mart. You must have been 5 years old at the time. Your mom gave each of you some money to get a blueberry Icee. You ran ahead to get into the line first, and somehow lost your way in the store. Tien found you crying to an elderly Chinese woman. You three then went together to get an Icee.

There’s not a lot of vivid detail in this version of the story, but there’s just enough to bring the subject back to her child sensations and perceptions: going to a department store with her mother and her siblings as a very small child, a blueberry Icee, an elderly Chinese woman.  The subject who was told this story remembers going the Bremerton K-Mart with her family as a sensual experience: the immensity of the space, the aisles, the shelves of merchandize (brightly colored toys, gleaming appliances), the crowds of people all much taller than a five-year old, the sounds of people talking, the PA announcements (possibly for lost children), and finally, the taste of a blueberry Icee.

Loftus’ critics, and there are many of them, point out that a benign story with a happy ending is a far cry from a traumatic and scarring one of sexual abuse.  Additionally, as the Slate article describes, Loftus has used her research as a basis for therapists to implant false memories on purpose in order to alter their patients’ behavior in some desirable way.  To many of her peers, and to me, she has crossed over an ethical line in a very frightening way.  Her little recipe has become a cookbook for brainwashing.

Ethical concerns about what trusted professionals do with this knowledge aside, Loftus’s research into the delicate nature of memory has a lot to say about how we read and experience fiction and how we write it.  The conflation of sense memory and affective memory, which we bring as readers and writers, with fictional characters and experiences creates vivid false memories.

What ties us all together is the fundamental fact that all of us feel sensations and experience emotions in the same way.  One of the finest examples of a writer connecting with his reader through the five basic senses can be found in the opening paragraphs of Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point.”  This story is about a fourteen year-old boy desperately trying to escort a drunken middle aged women home from a party.  It’s not necessarily an experience that many of us have had, but D’Ambrosio makes it real for us from the very beginning by communicating with us through our senses:

I had been lying awake after my nightmare, a nightmare in which Father and I bought helium balloons at circus.  I tied mine around my finger and Father tied his around a stringbean and lost it.  After that, I lay in the dark, tossing and turning, sleepless from all the sand in my sheets and all the uproar in the living room.  Then the door opened, and for a moment the blade of bright light blinded me.  The party was still going full blast, and now with the door ajar and my eyes adjusting I glimpsed the silver smoke swirling in the light and all the people suspended in it, hovering around as if they were angels in Heaven—some kind of Heaven where the host serves highballs and the men smoke cigars and the women all smell like rotting fruit.  Everything was hysterical out there—the men laughing, the ice clinking, the women shrieking.  A woman crossed over and sat on the edge of my bed, bending over me.  It was Mother.  She was backlit, a vague looming silhouette, but I could smell lily of the valley and something else—lemon rind from the bitter twist she always chewed when she reached the watery bottom of her vodka-and-tonic.  When Father was alive, she rarely drank, but after he shot himself you could say she really let herself go.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then any one of the other senses – smell, touch, sound, taste — is worth a thousand pictures, and they transcend age, gender, and sometimes even culture.  From the sensation of the sand in the sheets, to sounds of the party in the next room, to the bitter twist and the watery vodka-and-tonic (combining both smell and taste), we are experiencing what young Kurt is experiencing and he is reaching us on a very visceral, non-verbal level.  He has no need to explain to us how he feels.  The sensations unconsciously evoke  our own sense memories and we simply feel what Kurt feels.  Having so firmly established this sensual connection with us, D’Ambrosio can now take us wherever he wants to go, just like Loftus’s test subject fondly remembering the taste of her  blueberry Icee.

This conflation of vivid sense memory and imagined narrative is how writers approach their craft and how, as readers, we experience books and stories rather than just merely read them.  We may have nothing at all in common with the author except for the simple fact that we inhabit human bodies and experience sensations and emotions in the same way.  In their simplest and most basic form, they pierce through everything that might separate us from one another: culture, time, place, language, and gender.

Sense memories, Rockaway Playland, 1969: the sting of sunburned cheeks, the roar of the rollercoaster overhead, the taste of hot dogs and cotton candy, the smell of the Atlantic Ocean and English Leather.

Books referenced:

See larger image Atonement: A Novel (Paperback) By (author) Ian McEwan List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $5.00 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock Release date February 25, 2003.

See larger image A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (Paperback) By (author) Ernest Hemingway List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $8.88 In Stock Used from: $9.14 In Stock Release date July 20, 2010.

See larger image The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (Paperback) By (author) Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, Katherine Ketcham List Price: $16.99 USD New From: $4.00 In Stock Used from: $1.49 In Stock

See larger image The Point: And Other Stories (Paperback) By (author) Charles D'Ambrosio List Price: $15.99 USD New From: $14.33 In Stock Used from: $0.01 In Stock

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.