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Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Maile Meloy’s “The Proxy Marriage” was originally published in the May 21, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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It isn’t a secret to anyone who has followed this blog in the past that I’m a huge fan of Maile Meloy’s short fiction. I loved her excellent debut collection, Half in Love, and cannot praise enough her even better follow-up, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (my review of Half in Love here; of Both Ways here). I was thrilled, then, to see that she was back with this week’s New Yorker story. I was doubly thrilled to see that it begins in Montana, where my favorites of her stories take place.
“The Proxy Marriage” focuses on the love that William, an awkward and shy boy, has for Bridey Taylor, a confident singer who wants to become an actress. The story begins when each is in high school, looking forward to a life beyond the small town they are growing up in. Though William loves Bridey desperately, he is under no illusion that his future will include her in any greater role than she already plays. He hasn’t the courage to ask her out. In fact, after another boy has asked Bridey out, told her that he has already accomplished two of the three goals he has for high school, and that he thinks she can help him with the third, which is to have a serious girlfriend, Bridey laughs to William, “He was so earnest.” Then, “William made a mental note never to be earnest with Bridey.”
Bridey’s father is an attorney. As it turns out, Montana is one of the few states to allow proxy marriages and the only state to allow double proxy marriages, where neither person has to be present. Due to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is quite a demand for these types of marriages, and Bridey’s father asks William and Bridey to act as the proxies. Of course, the prospect of even a proxy marriage to Bridey makes William unable to speak straight. He accepts and shows up to the ceremony dressed in a suit. Bridey hasn’t taken it nearly as seriously.
“You look nice,” she said. There was annoyance in her voice.
“Thank you,” he said, mortified.
Bridey looked like an ordinary girl in a sullen mood, not like the love of anyone’s life, and he felt a flicker of hope — not that she would ever come to love him, but that someday he might not be in thrall to her, he might be free. She was chewing gum.
We feel for William for whom this love is a torture, especially as we see him recognize that peace might come if he could only stop loving her. Even when they both go to school in different states, and even when they are both finished with school and seeking stability. In expert fashion, Meloy quickens the narrative pace, while showing us that through the passage of the years William’s feelings do not change.
Bridey laughed, and then it turned into something like a sob. “Maybe my mother was right,” she said. “I’m just not pretty enough.”
“Bridey,” he said. “You’ve been there eight months.”
But they had the same conversation after two years, then three. [. . . .] Sometimes he went weeks without thinking of Bridey, and sometimes she haunted him. Then came a year when there were no calls, no e-mails, no word.
The years continue to pass, and William cannot remove himself from his feelings for Bridey; it doesn’t help that any time both are visiting home and are free they participate in proxy marriages. William spends much of him time resenting his feelings, even suspecting that Auden’s line — “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me” — is just an example that proves “[t]he role of the human brain was to rationalize suffering.”
This isn’t my favorite of Meloy’s stories, but I still loved being back in her world where the writing is succinct and direct. There’s no evasion here, as we learn the story of William’s love through the years. Highly recommended.
Not too long ago, you’ll remember, I was positively gushing about Maile Meloy’s most recent collection of short stories, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. As it so happens, my gushing was genuine. I wasted no time acquiring the rest of her backlist, which includes two novels and one other acclaimed collection of short stories, Half in Love (2002; PEN/Malamud winner). I was hoping to space out my reading of these short stories, but they are so short (most around ten pages), and so good, I couldn’t help reading one after another until they were all gone.
Because my recent praise of Meloy is so fresh, it’s tempting to just say, This is as good — maybe better. Read this too. But thankfully these stories are also the type one likes to talk about. So, right to them:
The opening story in this collection reminded me a bit of “”Travis, B.,” the opening story in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (which, if it comes up again, I’m shortening to Both Ways). This one is called “Tome.” At first, the story seemed fairly simple. A young female tort lawyer has a hopeless client. He was injured on the job, collected his workers’ compensation, and is now statutorily prohibited from pursuing a claim against his employer in court. No matter how many times she tells him this, he doesn’t quite believe her. The story has some action that lands the man in prison. I really don’t want to give any more away. Let me just say that this is one of the best stories about human intimacy I’ve ever read (the intimacy is what reminded me of “Travis, B.”). Seriously, somehow this plot line lends itself well to a story about human relationships, it does it in twelve pages, and it does it without any sentimentality — none.
There are fourteen stories in all in this short collection. A few of them take place out of the country, like “Aqua Boulevard,” which takes place in France, has a slow buildup to a wrenching ending that is as simple as an older man going to watch his children at a swimpark after he’s seen their pet dog killed. This story won the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Another story, “Red,” takes place in wartime London. It comes complete with a numb soldier about to ship out, but it somehow avoids being a war story.
Those stories aren’t my favorites, though. I prefer the ones where Meloy enlivens the still relatively unknown American West. One of these, “Ranch Girl,” is told in the second person — always a tricky thing to pull off. But this one is not only in the second person; ”Ranch Girl” is also subjunctive. There are a lot of if’s that then lead to the developing story where a young, intelligent girl tries to choose whether to stay on at a ranch, and be like so many of the other women she knows, or go away and become something different.
In grade school, it’s okay to do well. But by high school, being smart gives people ideas. Science teachers start bugging you in the halls. They say Eastern schools have Montana quotas, places for ranch girls who are good at math. You could get scholarships, they say. But you know, as soon as they suggest it, that if you went to one of those schools you’d still be ranch girl — not the Texas kind, who are debutantes and just happen to have a ranch in the family, and not the horse-farm kind, who ride English. Horse people are different, because horses are elegant and clean. Cows are mucusy, muddy, shitty, slobbery things, and it takes another kind of person to live with them. Even your long curled hair won’t help at a fancy college, because prep-school girls don’t curl their hair. The rodeo boys like it, but there aren’t any rodeo boys out East.
“Ranch Girl” shows a story with many paths: “‘You’re so lucky to have a degree and no kid,’ Carla says. ‘You can still leave.’” This is an interesting story about how some of the seemingly simple choices are difficult to make.
Another of my favorite stories was “Paint,” a simple story about a man who is basically estranged from the wife he lives with. We see their strained relationship from the beginning. He’s apologetic, and she deals with him with tense silence, which is both a way of avoiding reconciliation and a way to punish him:
Marie was washing breakfast dishes at the sink, light from the east window gilding her hair and shoulders.
“Leave those,” Jack said. He wanted the morning to last, wanted to linger over the coffee. He guarded his cup.
“It’s almost done.” She was dressed smartly for work, his tall and formidable wife, in pressed black trousers and a silver blouse. Her black hair, striped now with gray, was twisted up at the back. She studied an ice cream bowl Jack had left to dry the night before, then dropped it into the sudsy water.
“That was clean,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t.” Into the water when the drinking glass he’d washed, the spoon.
“Marie,” he said sharply. She looked at him in surprise.
“Just leave the damn dishes,” he said. “Please. I’ll do them right.”
She finished in silence and dried her hands on a towel.
Marie resents Jack for many reasons. For one, he never seems to pull through and has time and again disappointed her with empty promises he truly intends to fulfill. One of those promises was to stain their deck. Animated with the prospect of doing something right, Jack rushes out to buy supplies and begins the job.
One thing Meloy is good at is thwarting our expectations. Much like Flannery O’Connor, who will just slap you in the face with something, Meloy throws things at her characters that surprise us, make us rear back, as much as them. That happens in “Paint,” and we are left reading a story we just didn’t expect from its beginning, though, again like Ms. O’Connor, we look back and think it was perfect.
There are many who doubt the short story. Even since I wrote my review of Both Ways (hmmm, thought I’d get the chance to use that abbreviation more when I noted it), I have read again and again comments from people who say they just don’t like short stories. I hope that this blog has done a bit — with its weekly New Yorker forum, its (somewhat) bi-weekly The Clock at the Biltmore feature, and its frequent reviews of short story collections – to show that I think short stories are not only worthwhile but are incredibly addicting. I can’t help but think that these dissenters just don’t know many short stories. I think this because they tend to say things like this: “I like the depth of a novel” or “I like that in a novel you can really get to know the characters.” I understand this, but it is a misconception to think that a short story, even these very short stories, cannot be deep or that you cannot develop a very intimate relationship with the characters. Furthermore, these stories are still on my mind, I’ve continued reading them a second and third time, because there is so much in there to think about.
While it’s true that novels and short stories are different beasts, they are both beasts, and the art of the short story is going strong. For some, there’s a whole new world of literary possibilities. Of course, for me it is now time to open up Meloy’s novels.
I grew up in a very small town in Idaho. The nearest big city was Salt Lake City, 250 miles south — and even it’s not a big city. Now that I work in New York City, now that 25 miles is a big distance (it seems to take the same amount of time to go 25 miles here as it did 250 miles in Idaho), I find myself missing the open spaces and the mountains and plains landscape of the West. So one thing I loved about Maile Meloy’s recent collection of short stories, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (2009), was the immediate familiarity with that vastness. Meloy grew up north of me in Montana, where many of these stories take place.
I’ll state it up front: this is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. From beginning to end, always just when I thought Meloy couldn’t pull it off again, I was fully engaged and drawn into the lives of her torn characters. Some of my admiration certainly comes from my relationship to the landscape and to the characters here — she portrays them so well — but that’s not really it. Meloy’s writing is direct and incisive. Within these eleven stories Meloy’s characters breathe and their depths are shown in strong and unique plotting.
Often, the stories are fairly simple and straightforward. My favorite, one I almost wish I hadn’t read so that I could still read it for the first time, was the book’s first, “Travis, B.” Immediately we get to know the central character, Chet Moran, and the small town he grew up in:
Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.
There’s no evasiveness here. In prose so direct as to appear simple when linked together with “and” and “but,” Meloy sets up a sad but matter-of-fact tone. Loneliness is just below the surface as the characters go about their lives. Quickly, Chet is around twenty years old and still walks “as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.” The direct prose continues as Meloy sets up the foundation for a story that is both sad and innocent and terrifying.
He left home at twenty and moved up north to the highline. He got a job outside Havre feeding cows through the winter, while the rancher’s family lived in town and the kids were in school. Whenever the roads were clear, he rode to the nearest neighbor’s for a game of pinochle, but mostly he was snowed in and alone. He had plenty of food, and good TV reception. He had some girlie magazines that he got to know better than he’d ever known an actual person. He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel and his winter coat, warming up soup on the stove. He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.
In order to get out and meet people, Chet begins driving up and down the streets, looking for groups. One night he sees a bunch of people going into the school, so he parks the pickup and joins them in a classroom. These people, all teachers, have come together for the first of what will be a bi-weekly course on education law. The young, pretty, flustered instructor enters the room, and Chet decides to stay and enjoy the pleasant company, even if he doesn’t participate or even care about what everyone is talking about.
One night the instructor asks Chet where she can find some food quickly. It turns out that she is not from the area. In fact, she lives on the opposite side of the very long state of Montana. She signed up to teach the course because when she was finishing law school she was afraid of not having a job; she went for whatever she could find. Now she regrets it because she has a “real job” back where she’s from, and partly as a joke they have given her the license to complete her term in this miserable teaching job. I can’t imagine. In order to teach these Tuesday and Thursday night classes, she must drive for nine hours each way — thirty-six hours per week on the long winter roads. After a few weeks she is obviously exhausted.
On the other hand, Chet’s only solace in his lonely, empty week are those few hours with her. Waiting to see her on those nights is nearly more than Chet can stand. There are tender moments when Chet does his best to charm her and try to make her time there a bit more palatable. We know that Chet is incredibly lonely, has always been lonely, and we want him to find some happiness in this budding relationship. Still, he and the instructor are worlds apart, and we’re not sure, though he’s always been polite and good natured, what he might do to ensure those worlds come together. It’s a wonderfully crafted, lonely story, amplified by the vast, open distance in Montana.
Though this was my favorite story in the book, I was not disappointed by the rest. For the most part the premises continue to be fairly simple as we watch simple people struggling with their conflicting desires and sometimes getting into situations that make the reader’s throat go dry.
Two examples where I found myself physically affected by the story (short breath, dry throat, tensed muscles) are “Red from Green” and “The Girlfriend.” Both stories put older men in close proximity with younger girls. Though the initial motives are guilty but not sexual, the tension reminded me of the hotel scene in Roth’s American Pastoral (though what happens is very different).
In “Red from Green” a young girl accompanies her father on a boating trip. Their companions on the trip are her uncle, a private attorney, and the central plaintiff in a class action law suit her uncle is litigating. The trip is meant to smooze the plaintiff who is thinking of dropping the suit and moving away; if he leaves, the case dries up. Throughout the day the girl watches as her father (who is a district judge) allows the man to take advantage of his desirability. The plaintiff catches fish that are too small but keeps them anyway, something her father usually has no tolerance for. Later the plaintiff takes the girl out to practice shooting, using illegal hollow point bullets. Late in the evening, after the uncle has already retired to his tent, the father also gets up from the fire and goes to his tent. Before entering it he looks back at his daughter whom he has now left alone with this strange plaintiff, who has just asked if she could please kneel on his back to help him loosen up some tight muscles. It’s horrifying to read and wonder just what is going to happen. Worse, why? Did the father expect nothing to happen? Why would he leave it to chance? Did he actually expect something to happen? We have no reason to disrespect this judge. From all accounts, he’s a fine man who runs a disciplined life and courtroom. He’s a protector. But what is that moment of ambiguity about? It’s a great story.
“The Girlfriend” begins when Leo, a man in his fifties, shows up at a hotel room to meet a teenage girl. The air is tense. We soon find out that the girl is the girlfriend of the man who murdered Leo’s only daughter. The case has just ended with a guilty verdict, but this girlfriend lied on the stand to protect this boy who raped and killed another woman. It’s more than Leo can stomach, so he’s asked her to explain it. The tension in the prose makes it feel like we’re in the room with them, and it’s very uncomfortable to witness the discussion between these two broken and desperate people interact. Leo learns more about himself than he’d hoped.
There are other male-female struggles, like in “Lovely Rita” when a young man is killed in an accident at a construction site and his girlfriend comes to his best friend for help: she’d like him to set up a raffle at the construction site for a night with her. In “Two Step,” a wife who suspects her husband is unfaithful discusses the matter with the very woman he is being unfaithful with — and then he arrives, and we feel sorry for both women.
There is also the quirky “Liliana,” which begins with a sentence that echos Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
On a hazy summer afternoon in Los Angeles, while my wife was at work and our children were napping, I answered the ringing doorbell to find my grandmother, two months dead, standing on a stoop.
Liliana, the grandmother, was a very rich woman with a past in war-time Germany cinema. She and her grandson never saw eye-to-eye. She seemed to think him unworthy and never shared much, if anything, with him, forcing him to make his own modest way through the world. He despised her. He doesn’t want anything from her – has resigned himself to that fate, actually — but he certainly resents her. And here she seems to have returned from the dead.
While I stripped the master bed and carried the sheets to the wash, I thought about Jesus and Elvis. People had wanted them back, badly, and still did. But who would have willed Liliana back.
There’s some nice comedy when Mina, the wife, arrives home:
“Mina, dear,” Liliana said, standing to take my wife’s hand. “I haven’t seen you with this Sapphic haircut. Your children are lovely.” / Mina’s hair was cut short because she had no time to deal with it, and I thought of it as gamine-like and sexy. “Thank you,” Mina said. “You look great. Especially under the circumstances.”
As quirky as this story may seem, it actually — and it’s incredible how Meloy always succeeded in doing this — is a subtle look at this man, his insecurities and his strengths and his final devastating revelation.
I was so pleased with this collection I immediately marked Meloy as one of my favorite authors. She’s written one other collection of short stories, which one the PEN/Malamud, and two novels. I believe I have all three waiting for me in the mail today. And I can’t wait to see what she produces in the future.
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