Natural Shocks: A Novel

Natural Shocks: A Novel

by Richard Stern
Natural Shocks: A Novel

Natural Shocks: A Novel

by Richard Stern

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Overview

A high-flying journalist comes to ground in this brilliant and bittersweet novel about coming to terms with the traumas of life

Fred Wursup has an enviable existence. Paid to travel around the world “harvesting the annual crop of stars and villains,” he has a beautiful geophysicist girlfriend and a friendly relationship with his ex-wife, Susannah, whose living room he can see into from the roof of his Lexington Avenue apartment. His latest book, a collective portrait of brilliant but flawed leaders called Down the American Drain, had the good fortune to be published at the height of the Watergate scandal, sending it to the top of the bestseller lists.

A new assignment, however, threatens to bring an end to Wursup’s recent string of successes. Asked to write an article on dying—still “undiscovered country,” according to his editor—he becomes unsettled by the seemingly random course of his life, the nature of his work, and the mortality that surrounds him. A troubled playwright he once profiled commits suicide. His elderly father, a retired meter reader who writes poetry about the last years of famous old men, seems to be on the verge of something drastic. Cicia, a young woman dying of cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital, is gorgeous, vibrant, and doomed, and Wursup just might be falling in love with her.

A charming and richly intelligent story about the disasters, major and minor, that are bound to happen to us all, Natural Shocks showcases the fine craftsmanship and depth of feeling that have established Richard Stern as one of America’s most admired authors.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781497685321
Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 12/16/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 255
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Richard Stern (1928–2013) was the acclaimed author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Other Men’s DaughtersGolkStitch, and Natural Shocks. Born in New York City, he attended the University of North Carolina and received his master’s degree from Harvard University and his PhD from the University of Iowa. The recipient of many honors, including the Award of Merit for the Novel, given once every six years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Stern was a longtime professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he taught alongside Saul Bellow. He counted Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess, Lillian Hellman, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Philip Roth among his many other literary admirers.

Read an Excerpt

Natural Shocks

A Novel


By Richard Stern

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1978 Richard Stern
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8532-1


CHAPTER 1

Three years after Frederick Wursup moved across Lexington Avenue and turned his office into his home as well, he discovered that he could see the old apartment—where his ex-wife, Susannah, still lived with their two sons—from the roof. He'd never paid any attention to the cross-planked square on the ceiling of his back bathroom, but it was through this that Mr. Spunkel, the janitor, admitted the roofers one September afternoon. They climbed through and Wursup followed, hoisting himself up from the lidded toilet seat. While they checked for clogged spouts and worn asphalt, Wursup surveyed the avenue.

Sixteen floors up, only feet higher than his usual perch, but unceilinged and with full compass, the view was terrific: the southern flow of busses, cars, cabs; the miniaturized hominess of brownstones; the cramped silvery punctuation of the Episcopal-church steeple; the fraternity of nearby roofs with their odd brick structures—for elevator motors?—and gardens (potted boxwood, small pepper and locust trees in deep clay urns). Two roofs south, a gray-haired couple in sweat suits threw a deck-tennis tire back and forth over a net. What a sporty world it was up here. In the other direction, the Hotel Carlyle, noble, snowy, remote, alpine. Frightening. How could window washers endure the scare, the dazzle, racket and smell?

And then, surprise—what couldn't be guessed from his windows—there, eighty feet away, were the front windows of Susannah's apartment. He could see the green leather grandfather chair (where he'd spent how many thousand hours), the gold love seat and the mosaic table he'd carried home from Damascus twenty- odd years ago. If his eyes were better, he could see which books were on it.

"Oh me oh my."

"Yessiree, Mr. Double-U, you can really get you a breath of air up here," said old Spunkel.

For weeks, Wursup didn't go up again. (It wasn't all that easy pulling his hundred and eighty pounds through the hole.) But one October evening, feeling especially lonely, even abandoned—his girl, Sookie Gumpert, was giving a paper in San Diego—Wursup went up with field glasses to see if he could get a glimpse of Petey or Susannah. (Billy had gone back to Cornell.)

There she was, sitting in his chair, reading, smoking.

So strange to see the head that he'd known so well in this new way. For so many years, the sight of it had eased him; and then, for years, the same sight had gripped his stomach, infuriated him.

It was a head at peace with itself. Once, his description of Susannah's temperament was "armored stupor." "She has a fanatic's serenity," he'd said to Will Eddy, their oldest friend. "She lives by exclusion." (It was the time of their divorce.) "How lucky to have such psychic armor." Almost the worst part of the breakup was seeing how much ugliness the armor concealed. "There's such fury under that opacity," he told Will.

"She doesn't have your verbal spout to clear it off," said Will.

Three years later, Wursup and Susannah were more or less easy with each other; friendly, if not exactly friends. In fact, for a year or so, there was almost nothing he learned about her that did not touch and sometimes rend him. Three years away, the body that wrinkled and unwrinkled her clothes was stranger to him than any body in the world. Its look, feel, temperature and odor were erased; yet, unlike a newly strange body, he had no desire whatsoever for it. "Desire must be like alcohol," he told Will. "It's the first thing that evaporates from the pot." But he wished Susannah well; he cared for her wellbeing, and he guessed that meant he cared for her too.

These days, at the first whiff of any disagreement, each of them turned tail or tried to give in to the other. Both remembered—neither wanted even a souvenir of—the terrible, laconic battles of their last year together. Their relationship existed in a special part of the universe of feeling, a kind of miniature black space where the gravity of suppression was so powerful that no spark showed. Within its rigid unintimacy, they were friendly, almost affectionate; they reminisced, and could laugh at, as well as with, each other. Will said they looked closer than they'd been since he'd first known them, more than a quarter of a century ago, back in Chicago. "It's as if it took uncoupling to turn you into a couple again."

Wursup undeceived Eddy. "We treat each other the way you treat other people's pets."

Not quite.

Wursup almost never saw Susannah at home. He seldom went over, because all the boys had to do was turn around the corner to be at his place. When Susannah visited her mother in Chicago, though, he stayed there, because it was more comfortable for Petey to stay in his own room. And it was then he felt more deeply about her.

Susannah had never been a sterling member of the Consumer Society. She bought her clothes in department-store basements and resale shops. (Though he made five times the money he'd made when that was necessary.) Since she was slim and tasteful, she looked fine; and more, felt fine. Her taste was not limited by penny-pinching or penury; it was part of an aversion to self-display, a form of egoism as coercive as a stoic's self-assertion. When Susannah's old pal Adele Doyle gained forty pounds and sent her a trunkful of designer-label clothes, she gave them away to cleaning women and to a couple of the girls who worked with her down at Chouinard's News Letter. (Maybe it was because Wursup had thought she'd looked so terrific in them that she gave them away. As if to say, "Care for me underneath.") The sad foolishness of Puritanism. To work against sexual tedium even with verbal flourishes froze Susannah. Her sexual imagination was—as far as Wursup knew—as narrow as an animal's.

Of four years of high-school Spanish, Susannah remembered best the proverbs of abstinence and thrift: Quien mucho abarca, poco aprieta—"Who grabs too much, squeezes little." (That was her one bed joke with him.) Poco a poco se va lejos—"Little by little takes you far"—did for food, clothes, study. For life itself. No es oro todo lo que reluce—"all that glitters ..." and so on. The genius of Spain shrank into a vade mecum of caution.

Since the divorce, Susannah's life seemed constructed to arouse pity. She gave their bedroom to Petey and moved into the tiny back bedroom whose vista was the neighboring air shaft. The bed was assertively single, monkish. (Not that a larger bed would have fit.) The room's other works of carpentry were a bed table and a straight chair. There was no dressing table, no mirror; her clothes were in a closet, blouses and sweaters folded on shelves. The single ornament was a red silk panel on which stood an epicene Japanese saint holding a golden jug. Susannah and he had bought it at the ancient wood temple, Horyugi, when he was doing the Japanese articles which became his first book. Long, pleated, indented with the Beyond-You smile of Buddhist saints, the Kannon's head was overwhelmed with spadiciform flame (immodest equivalent of the western halo). There were a hundred reasons Susannah shouldn't have it in her room. She'd trimmed as many reminders of their life together as economy permitted. (No madeleine cakes to undo her emotional diet.) But there it was, this icon of renunciation.

Wursup himself was no great hauler of historic luggage, a rare attender of weddings, christenings, funerals, no singer of anthems or saluter of flags; but Susannah's uninvolvement, her carelessness about the signals and symbols life throws up, seemed to him quasipathological. A no-nonsense woman, fine, she'd had much praise for that (from him as well); but to believe that almost nothing on earth stood for more than its face, stomach, or flesh value removed too much from life. She used to overlook the boys' birthdays with a regularity that became a not always funny family joke. For Christmas, he'd lug home a Scotch pine—instead of, say, the broomstick fir she might allow herself to buy—and her green eyes glittered with an amused tolerance far more telling than voiced disapproval. "The toys of morons," was what he read in them. Susannah's face was noble, modest, oddly sensuous. Sculptors loved the fine bones of her temples and cheeks, the beautiful lips, the elegant chin. Her color was splendid—lime-green eyes, rose-and-peach flesh coloring. Yet it was mostly artists who saw her beauty. She did not consider herself beautiful and made none of the gestures which suggest beauty to the unobservant. Her modesty was a counterpart to what he'd first seen as her realism, her commonsensical practicality. (Later he regarded her abstemiousness as a form of torpor.) In the beginning, he'd been charmed—and relieved—when she said of course she didn't need, in fact wouldn't wear, a wedding ring; that she'd married—in the Seventh Arrondissement mairie—in a dress she could have worn any other day. But everydayness became her cult. No, not quite. For instance, her distaste for ceremony was so great she could take part in it without feeling hypocritical: it was beneath notice. So she decorated the Scotch pine, and, reminded, she gave the boys birthday parties. "It suits them; it's not worth an argument. The habit doesn't make the monk. A birthday cake won't ruin anybody." So the Japanese saint they'd bought together in the gift shop of the ancient temple hung over her bed, a mild defiance of nostalgia and—perhaps—of symbolism itself. Susannah would not debate the symbolism or the mode of defiance. You couldn't top Susannah, anymore than you could out-argue an analyst.

What upset Wursup most about her life now was her calendar. It was an ordinary handout from Somayo's Cleaners on which Susannah wrote the month's engagements. What in hell was the matter with their old friends? Didn't they realize what a terrific person she was? Underneath all that No-Nonsense frontage, there was a grand, true-blue human being. (At the worst, he'd never ignored that.) One night, maybe two, in a month, she'd be invited somewhere. (Of course, she wasn't all that hospitable herself.) What had happened? Their marriage had been festooned with hundreds of dinners and parties all over the world. She'd loved going to and giving them. The white blanks of Susannah's calendar had the resigned bareness of exile. Were their old friends turning her into a No-Person? People were swine.

Of course, Susannah did have friends at work—the Miyakos, the Bennetts, "Dame" Mae Twiddy—so she wasn't like one of those poor wrecks police find after Christmas, stiff in their armchairs in front of a burned-out television set. Still, night after night, the calendar—and then his field glasses—saw her at home.

She seemed married to the Times, to television and the books on Latin- American politics whose titles he now made out with the field glasses. Saturdays, though, she did go—Petey told him—to museums and galleries with Dame Mae or Libba Bennett. Susannah did love painting; she'd painted as a girl, going down to the Chicago Art Institute school every Saturday morning for lessons. Through their twenty years together, she painted, mostly landscapes copied from postcard reproductions of Corot or Pissaro: the paradise retreats of twentieth-century urban nostalgists.

According to Petey, she wasn't painting much now. "She says the price of paints is crazy since the oil embargo." Wursup had no love for the moguls of the world's second-commonest fluid, but this expression of Susannah's tightness was something he particularly hated. Spanish proverbs couldn't disguise such contortions of meanness. The first years, it hadn't bothered him, he'd hardly noticed it; economizing is one of the games of young middle-class couples, like the little languages of sex or playing cribbage. Yet when he began to make and then spend money, her distaste for it ceased being a game. When he bought an old Mercedes, the distaste was so skillful a torture of silent looks he took a bath on a trade-in for a Chevy. When, marriage coming apart, he bought a Porsche, she understood. (She was a fine interpreter of the symbols of revulsion.) Now she filled Petey's head with the prices of life. Vergil's most famous line was the "tears of things"; Susannah's was mean-spirited and unworthy of her: the cost of them.

"Tell her I'll buy her paint enough for The Last Judgment. If she can't find canvas, I'll buy her a chapel."

Petey relayed very little of such messages. Earlier ones had met with refusals that were as barren of gratitude as the Arctic of buttercups. Wasn't doing without life's essence? Petey didn't seem to mind it. He and Susannah economized in the old cribbage-game spirit. And he did love her so, it made everything else unimportant. The boy suffered when she didn't get a raise she was after (Wursup didn't think she should let him in on this); he bragged about articles she'd researched, about her good looks, her humor. He was a real companion; he understood Susannah's loneliness, encouraged her to go out, and when Wursup took them out for supper, Petey tried to draw Susannah into making good talk. He was so sweet and good-humored about all this, there was neither excess nor warp in it; he was just one terrific twelve-year-old.

Petey knew his mother would take nothing "extra" from his father. He'd heard her refuse offers to pay for cleaning women—"I don't need one, I don't like strangers around"—vacation trips to Europe—"Very nice of you, but I can go myself if I want. I've seen enough of it anyway." He admired his mother's independence, yet appreciated his father's generosity. Now and then though—Wursup noticed—Petey seemed fatigued by the insistence of abstinence and began regarding his mother's life as a special case. "It's the way Mom is. When she feels bad enough like painting, she'll break down and get some canvas. But thanks, Dad."

The first year of separation, Susannah didn't just bother to ignore his offers. If Petey carried over a rug Wursup had picked up in Kashmir for their apartment, she managed—when Wursup himself showed up—a kind of grunt which his knowledge of susannahese interpreted: "This would be a 'thank you' for anyone else, but please do not try to control me with gifts. All you can give me is your absence." In that first year, the proximity of his office-home was an oppression to her. Lexington Avenue was populous enough so that they didn't see each other in the street more than once or twice every month or two, but she had to see his building, she knew they could meet. When they actually did, panic stiffened her, the lime-green eyes shrank into a tunnel vision which excluded as much of him as possible. Thank God, he thought, she didn't know what Sookie looked like—did she?—or that he watched her from the roof as she read, smoked, stared.

With the field glasses, he observed smoke gushing through her nostrils, her fingers playing around in her hair—"a dump of brown gnarls" he'd described it in one of the unwritten novels of his insomniac divorce-time. It was still brown (still a dump). No gray at all to speak of in either of their middle-aged heads. Will Eddy had gone gray at thirty, was a Santa Claus today. What message was relayed to the surface by those molecular dictators? "You are still young; keep the doors unlocked"? "You've had it, get ready for the end"? Across the thirty yards, Susannah was blocked by the window into portraiture: The Reader; The Puffer; The Ex-Wife. (Not, though—for he didn't have the requisite psychic distance—As Seen by the Ex-Husband.)

"Ah, Susannah," thought Wursup, standing in the night air among the television antennae, "if only someone would see what a little champ you are."


It was a strangely quiet time in Wursup's life. He was not flying around the world, harvesting the annual crop of stars and villains, wasn't coming home to family dinners. "Lying on the bottom, he has stopped sending bubbles to the surface," he read in the Penguin Anthology of Latin Verse, his week's toilet reading. ("When you give away at one end, you bring in through another" was his explanation of this habit to Susannah, who found it disgusting.) He passed this bit from Persius the satirist to Will Eddy over a lobster lunch at King of the Sea.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Natural Shocks by Richard Stern. Copyright © 1978 Richard Stern. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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