Fight No More by Lydia Millet

Author:Lydia Millet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

I KNEW YOU IN THIS DARK

After the service, for the first time since high school, she’d learned part of a poem by heart. It was a World War I poem, written for the dead. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. / Age shall not weary them. She wasn’t sure how the minister had chosen it. Lynn wasn’t English or a soldier.

But like a soldier he’d died young.

She dropped the words she didn’t like from the poem and kept the rest. Ran over it in her head when she felt the fast clutch of grief. To the innermost heart . . . they are known / As stars are known to the night.

She often listened to the music he’d played for her after dinner, drink in hand. She’d doled out most of his collection to the guys in the band, including his hundreds of carefully kept records. It hadn’t been easy to split them up, but the others treasured them: she could tell by the way they handled the grainy cardboard of the covers. For herself she’d reserved only the music he’d played for her when they were together, on his MP3 player and a small shelf of CDs. She kept these beneath a picture of him she’d taken with her phone and printed out at the office, and a votive candle she lit at night.

Bereavement had made her into an audience at work. The clients talked to her more than they had before, not casual conversations but confessions. Some new receptiveness must be coming off her, a helpless openness she didn’t want.

She’d had some doozies lately, client-wise. A magnet for eccentrics. There was a man who told her all about his shameless infidelity as though the telling would absolve him. A buyer from Redondo Beach showed her graphic pictures on his phone of a recent liposuction procedure; someone from out of state, calling to list her boyfriend’s condo, told all about his criminal conviction. There was a seller in Los Feliz who confided that her house was infested with handyman midgets. She was a successful executive at a production company—mostly local and regional commercials—and appeared to lead an otherwise normal life. But she’d had to leave her house, she told Nina, when the midgets grew into regular-sized men overnight. “Seven of them,” she told Nina, indignant. “There wasn’t room for all of us.”

This house—an overpriced wreck near the Hollywood sign—was owned by a woman who claimed to be a vampire and said she could only draw strength from drinking blood.

“I used to be a med sang,” she said, “you know, a medical sanguinarian? But then I got into the lifestyle.” She’d had a boyfriend who let her feed on him, but after that ended—for unrelated reasons, she clarified—she’d gotten used to buying blood online. She kept it lined up in small jars, vacuum-sealed and neatly labeled with the dates of purchase, in her refrigerator, where dark liver and fillets of deep-pink salmon also glistened under Saran Wrap.

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