Twice Upon a Time by Daniel Stern

Author:Daniel Stern [Stern, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4424-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-08-16T01:56:00+00:00

The Man with the Blue Guitar

by Wallace Stevens

(a Story by Daniel Stern)

THEIR SUDDEN SEXUAL SUCCESS surprised them both.

Burnt children of midlife and midtown, they’d tried not to expect too much—sort of a charm against failure. If you don’t want what you want too much, maybe they’ll give it to you—that sort of thing. When they got it, a fine, tender, savage loveplay triggered by poetry, they were amused, astonished, and grateful, not necessarily in that order.

They’d each been around the track a few times, but no marriages and no kids. Sam was an insurance expediter specializing in disasters: the human and financial aftermath of hurricanes, earthquakes, fires—he’d even covered a tidal wave, once. He lived with one woman for six years, a trial lawyer, and counted that as a disaster. Djinna had a nine years’ success with an abstract painter to her credit, even though the man was essentially a son of a bitch.

“Why a success?” Sam asked her.

“Because it had all the ups and downs—all the sideways troubles and getting over things they say you get in a marriage. The sex turned bad for a while, then it got all right again.”

“Just all right?”

“It never got back to what it was. He was an angry man. But we weren’t kids and we got along. You stop expecting shooting stars after a while. It was a success as those things go.”

“But you hung in for almost a decade. And then it didn’t last.”

“Okay, finally I felt like I’d been in a bad accident, because it ended. Don’t complain,” she said. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Am I here?” he asked. He kissed her, kiddingly, a swipe.

“Sort of…. I’ve been cautious for a while now—afraid of another disaster.”

“Disaster’s my middle name.”

She was too tense to smile. “What worries me,” she said, “is I’m just all out of caution,” she said. “I’ve used it up.”

She must have meant that she hadn’t had an affair in two years or so.

“I’m tapped out,” she said.

Sam liked the way she mixed poker lingo with her uptown art gallery style. He kidded her about her talk of being played out, but he was no further along towards taking chances than she was. They were both still in their cautious phase, teasing each other with long sensual bouts, touching everywhere, still clothed, acting the adolescent even though they were both thirty-eight.

“Go home,” she would whisper after hours of exhausting play. “I’ll be late for my job.”

“You hate your job.”

It was not true, just deliberate provocation. She managed an art gallery with a specialty in Indian objects—she felt ghettoized but she had a degree in Indian art as well as the regulation red dot on her sweeping brown forehead. She liked the job but often hated dealing with her customers. She took particular pleasure in showing ignorant, patronizing American collectors that she knew which end was up about early Matisse as much as late Kashmir pottery.

Years later, it would be impossible for them to explain how poetry had made their

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