The Assignation

Contents

One Flesh
Slow
The Boy
Sharpshooting
Tick
Photographer's Model
Accident
Mule
A Touch of the Flu
Holiday
Eleutheria
The Abduction
In Traction
Romance
Only Son
Bad Habits
Anecdote
The Quarrel
Pinch
Secret
Ace
Heartland
Maximum Security
The Assignation
Fin De Seicle
The Bystander
Shelter
Party
Stroke
Adultress
Superstitious
A Sentimental Encounter
Senorita
Face
August Evening
Picnic
Visitation Rights
Two Doors
Desire
Train
The Others
Blue-Bearded Lover
Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl
The Stadium

Other Editions

Epigraph

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Excerpt

SLOW

The wrong time for him to be returning home so she stands at an upstairs window watching as he drives up the driveway but continues a little beyond the area where they usually park in front of the garage and stops the car back by the scrubby evergreen hedge and then there's another wrong thing, it's that she doesn't hear the car door slam, she listens but she doesn't hear, so she turns slow and wondering from the window goes downstairs and at the door where there's still time for her to be hearing his footsteps she doesn't hear them so like a sleepwalker she continues outside moving slowly as if pushing through an element dense and resistant but transparent like water and at the end of the walk she sees that he is still in the car still behind the wheel though the motor has been turned off and the next wrong thing of course is that he's leaning forward with his arms around the wheel and his head on his arms, his shoulders are shaking and she sees that he is crying . . . he is in fact sobbing . . . and in that instant she knows that their life will be split in two though she doesn't, as she makes her slow way to him, know how, or why.

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1988, p926
• Publisher's Weekly, July 22, 1988, p43
• Booklist, September 1, 1988, p39
• Library Journal, September 1, 1988, p184
• New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1988, p11
• Georgia Review, Winter 1988, p840
• Bloomsbury Review, January 1990, p12
  

Awards

• New York Times Notable Books of the Year
• The Pushcart Prize, XIV: "Party"