The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

I had written to him after our meeting two years before. I had told him everything in that letter as though he had asked for me to. I had written him the whole time I was away, a woman he had met just once.

A reference to Tumble Home?

It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.

exigencies of the tiny life, a life that opened up inside me at night in a downtown loft on an ugly street in a city rebuilding itself.

I was never more myself than when I was lying in this man’s arms. But was I ever much of myself in them?

“You’ll have all your neighbors coming over to get warm,” he said to me, either believing the observation a comfort to me or a threat.

That is when the place became a sanctuary for me, and which of us does not need sanctuary all the time?

I am not allowed to bring him anything but myself.

“Show me what she did to make you come that night,” he said. In showing him, I took him to the other side of himself.

The transition was too quick, the way it is when you fly to a place that you need train time to adjust to.

There is an almost unbridgeable gulf between what an artist sees and what an artist paints.

He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.

I was aware of the point at which a compliment becomes a trap, because you are expected to keep doing the thing you are praised for; resentment will follow when you stop.

“You said in your letter that humiliation brings the softness of heart that allows you to listen to God.” “If you believe in God,” I said. “Or in humiliation,” he said.

This is a line from Tumble Home.

During that time I caught up on sleep and made the acquaintance of whatever turned up in the woods.

once when I thought we should drive to Maine. I wanted us to drift in a canoe across a calm, cold lake, and listen to loons.

He said he wanted to see everything, but did he, really? Does a person want to know the thing he is asking you to tell him?

his insatiable urging, wanting the savor of the way women are with each other, what they say to each other, him begging for female truth.

What would have made me seem compliant when we started was assault by the time I told him. I told him in just one word.

You want the truth and you want the truth and when you get it you can’t take it and have to turn away. So is telling a person the truth a good or malignant act?