"Under the Bed" by Jincy Willett

I've said this before, and I'll say it again without fearing redundancy: this woman is brilliant. I can do so because each time I say it, I've discovered it anew. In this, the eighth story of the collection, Willett tackles a subject both touchy and dangerously close to trite, with delicacy and shattering uniqueness. Now, before I explain this abrasive description (trite) of the story's topic of choice, rape, I highly suggest you read the story. If you do nothing else in this life, read this story. With statistics like "1 in 6 women - & 1 in 33 men - will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime," this story is relevant to the majority of people in the world. However, it does not presume to describe the experience for all women, in fact it recoils from the idea that this particular trauma (or any human experience, for that matter) is similar for every person who experiences it. The only real reaction we get from the narrator, in fact, is her strong and violent resistance to this idea and everyone who unwittingly expresses it.

The story begins by stating the facts, "On November 6 of last year, at around 8:15 P.M., I was beaten and raped by a man named Raymond C. Moreau, Jr., who had entered our first-floor apartment through a living room window while I was taking a shower." It is not the weight of this incident that makes this story powerful, however. The next sentence describes perfectly how Willett proceeds to tell this story: "This is neither the most significant event in my life nor the most interesting, nevertheless it is a fact, around which cluster many other facts, and the truth is always worth telling."

It took me days to read this story, having to pause after each section. I couldn't continue. The first section ends with her discussing how she told her husband what happened:

Well, then there was reconciliation, and explanation, and generally the sort of behavior you would expect from lovers to whom such a thing has happened. These events were not extraordinary, except to us, and I shall not record them, here or anywhere else. These are private matters. We are very private people.

In these last two sentences of the first section, Willett manages to say volumes more than if she had actually lain out the situation for us on the page. It is in these moments, these sentences that caught my breath, that I felt I was listening to a real woman talking.

One of the things Moreau says to the narrator, whose name we never receive, is, "You're all alike. All alike. All alike." It's disgusting to read, the repetition defining a certain cadence that implies what he is doing as he says it. Though I was repulsed as I read the details she gives about the "thing," as she and her husband refer to it, the moments of pure horror happen after the fact, transgressions inflicted by colleagues, close friends, a whiff of dust. During her friend Regina's outburst concerning the narrator's lack of reaction or grieving about the situation, she exclaims, "You were violated! Violence was done to you!...And not just to you. To me. To all women." The narrator's response that Regina is no different than Raymond Moreau, however uncouth, makes sense in the stupefying ending to this section: "I had meant only, she thought we were all alike, all alike. All alike."

Believe it or not, this is me refraining from recounting every bit of the story that I loved. These are just the parts that make it, hands down, my favorite story in the collection. I tried to describe it to a guest at the bar the other night, telling him the way that she says so many things by saying so little (articulate, I know). Close to tears, I had to stop. This story, this woman, has mastered subtlety. I can't say it any other way.

Okay, so I can't talk about this story without talking about the way that it ends. I don't want to ruin it, but I can't leave out this bit of perfection. Earlier in the story, the narrator talks about how she'd always been afraid, before her rape. She says that Moreau took that from her; she is no longer afraid. Before that, however, she would wake up in the middle of the night and stare at her husband, making sure he was still alive. Sometimes if she couldn't tell that he was breathing, she would move in a way to elicit a response from him, reassuring her that he was still alive. After "The Night of the Thing" (as she and her husband refer to it, "with some humor"), he has taken on this old habit of hers:

But lately, and too often, as we lie in the dark, I curled away from him, peaceful and fearless, he rises, stealthy, gentle, and leans over me, watching my face; I can feel his breath on my cheek; and I must give him a sign, a sigh, a dreamy moan to ease his mind. Just like a robot he must rise, prompted by my old, foolish impulse, unworthy of him, as though by watching he could keep me safe; as though the universe concerned itself with us.

There's the violation. There's the damage. There's the tragedy.

With this, I was left completely deflated. She murdered me with her precision. Throughout these twelve pages, you get to know these people. Their relationships are real; the heartbeat is loud, and when the story ends, you're just glad it's still beating.

What I Wish I'd Written: All of it. More specifically, this--
"He never looked me in the eye. But he did not, I think, purposely avoid my eyes. He was not nervous, or ashamed, or fearful. It just never occurred to him to look there."

"The Haunting of the Linguards"

One thing about me, whether annoying or endearing, is I am constantly being reminded of one thing by another. I enjoy linking books and stories I've read to one another, often confusing their meanings, exact phrasing or initial (and current) effect on me.

In this story, the second in the collection, I was reminded of the movie Revolutionary Road. If you haven't seen it, no matter--Willett does a more-than-sufficient job alluding to the complete breakdown of something unrealizedly precarious and delicate. Like a child architect, she builds up the relationship of the Linguards, Kenneth and Anita, only to tear it down with their own hands. But this story doesn't end in a colorful pile of Legos, rather with a heartbreakingly pessimistic promise that the buildup and breakdown is merely number one on a list of many. The art is in her ability to present situations that end up carrying all the weight in the world, conversations between people that decide outcomes of battles and wars they refuse to acknowledge that they are waging and fighting. This is where the ultimate sadness lies--not in the actual breakdown of something beautiful, but in the characters' willingness to push it--and with such force as to disallow any doubt of their intentions--over the edge. You watch them being shown the limits of their love and then watch, astounded (though without disbelief), while they push right on past those limits. It is this lack of disbelief that hurts the most. It is the essence of Willett's writing: revealing frustrating depth in absurdly superficial moments. You see these people and the exclamation in the forefront of your mind is not, "What are they thinking?" but "We all do it."

What I Wish I'd Written: "But she didn't stop laughing when everyone else did; she would stop, and glance at Kenneth, and then start afresh. She kept saying,'I'm sorry,' but she couldn't have been, because clearly all she had to do to stop was quit recharging herself, which she finally did. She stared down at her lap, biting her lower lip like a choirgirl with the giggles."

The Start of a Beautiful Friendship: Jincy Willett

"Julie in the Funhouse" from Jenny and the Jaws of Life


I received this collection of short stories along with the strong recommendation and endorsement of a good friend whilst still reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. One problem I run into as I flit from one book to another is an issue of loyalty. If I read a book or collection that I am particularly enamored of, the next book is often doomed to mediocrity. This happened with Albert Camus' The Stranger recently (I know, right? Who do I think I am?). The result of this is replacing the less-than-enjoyed book back on my list for a later date. This is disappointing because chances are I'll only live into my eighties or so, meaning the odds of my reading every book I ever want to are already pretty slim. Rereading seems like a self-inflicted glitch, however necessary. I say all this only so I can say that this did not happen with Jincy Willett's collection. She follows Milan Kundera well. And so, before I delve into my excited and overly-qualified evaluation of one of her stories, I want to quote what David Sedaris says of her in his foreword. This is what I hope someone says (or thinks) of my writing someday:

Like all the best storywriters, Jincy Willett excels in the moment, that split second when everything changes, and there's a discomfort to this. We like to think we'll recognize such moments in our own lives, but when the time comes we almost always get it wrong. Our eyes peeled for the Big Event, we point out the usual suspects--the death of a parent, the car spinning out of control--not realizing that the damage was done weeks or maybe years earlier, over dinner or while washing our hair, the moment cunning in its very resemblance to everyday life.

GUH. Okay, here we go:

As the opener of the collection, "Julie in the Funhouse" feels like it's told in one breath. As I finished reading, I felt as though I was taking my first breath since I'd begun. She manages, flawlessly and seemingly with ease, to tell a story about a brother and a sister that happens to have a brutal incident in it (rather than the cheap vice versa). And it is not just any sibling relationship--she flirts the line of love that siblings experience without belittling or romanticizing it. She follows well (and, thus, so do we) the change that takes place when people are alive and the sudden realization of that change when one of them dies and the other does not. Her writing is the kind that makes me want to copy down each word in hopes that her style and brilliance will infiltrate and transform (and improve) my own. Alas, post-it notes must do.


What I wish I'd written: "I laugh out loud and apologize at the same time, but Mr. Peterson is eighty-two years old now, and he smiles at me, acknowledging horror and despair with a sweet smile, the way some old people do, and some not so old people who have suffered early." (p. 11)