The Book of Regrets
by Norman Waksler
ISBN 1-930907-89-3
Short Fiction, 195 pages, $10Mr. Waksler was a runner up in the 2004 MSR Short Fiction Contest. His story, "The Pain," will also appear in the 2005 MSR Short Fiction Anthology.
Author bio Introduction Sample
Charley Regrets
(A sampling)
The way Charley Cohen saw it, his long friendship with Dan Giles was creaking slowly to an end, like a tired old dog taking its last steps before lying down and giving a final arthritic wag. They’d met as college sophomores thirty-five years ago, discovered a mutual interest in the English novel, ‘creative’ writing and low key irony, gone to separate, distant grad schools and met up again in the Boston area, where Charley became an urban librarian, Dan an ex-urban high school teacher. Charley figured they had probably seen each other every two weeks the next few years, an average only slightly affected when Dan married Marlene. They’d continued to get together regularly; often Marlene made dinner for Charley, or for him and his inamorata of the minute; sometimes the pair came to his apartment in Carbury, although after their first child it became more convenient and habitual for him to drive out to Westford.
They went to movies at times, plays occasionally, but the staple of their friendship was talk, mostly about books, mostly about fiction. Over the years Charley and Dan had read similarly, including vast quantities of Anthony Trollope, while Marlene, a Comp Lit major who’d learned accounting so she could work part time while raising children, was a devotee of Dickens, Proust and Thomas Mann. Their evenings together were generally spent on fat chairs, a cup of something hot nearby in cool months, a glass of cool in hot, as they analyzed, opined, recommended and argued, sometimes with Charley’s dog of the decade a permitted guest at his feet. It all fit closely and comfortably with the notion Charley had come across in Sallust, that to like and dislike the same things was what constituted true friendship.
But recently, perhaps the last three years, a hitch had developed in the easy stride of their rapport, which developed into an irregular stumble, and finally became this almost moribund stagger. Looking back, Charley could never locate a particular incident that might have set off the decline. Sure there had been strains in the friendship; all friendships have strains that need to be accommodated. In their triad, Dan was always a bit testy, Marlene had a tendency toward snideness and inflexibility, he himself could be self-absorbed and arrogant; they all liked their own way. Perhaps he’d changed unawares, or had unconsciously expressed contempt for their quiet ex-urban life (though every few years they went to Europe while he stayed stuck in Carbury), or they’d changed in ways he couldn’t see, or they’d come to disapprove of his bachelor life. Certainly, the three of them couldn’t have tripped over that old literary chestnut, inherent antagonism between city and town. In any case, there had never been an egregious collapse of the means by which they reconciled their differences and failings of temperament.
However, he could remember an incident which time-stamped the change. Dan and Marlene had stopped smoking years before. “So our kids’ll get jobs after college and develop their characters instead of living off our life insurance,” said Dan.
Charley had continued to smoke the stumpy Dutch cigars he’d been enjoying since just after college, in the same moderate quantity, four or five a day. The time he was thinking of, Marlene had confronted him before he’d had a chance to light up after dinner, when Dan was off in the bathroom. “You know, Charley,” she said. “We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t smoke in the house any more. The smell hangs in the curtains for a week, and it gets into the rugs. You should probably quit, anyway. What with your weight, they’re probably heading you straight toward a heart attack.”
Charley hadn’t minded her request: she was house proud and not the first to ask; and he’d been only mildly affronted by the reference to his weight; but there had been an impatience in her asking, as if she resented having to bring it up and he should have thought of it himself, and a hardness more suitable for repulsing inappropriate strangers.
It had seemed a momentary break in the long line of their cordiality, but after that came a series of stings and nips from both of them: failure to recognize a witticism, offhand dismissal of ideas, a snide remark about a previous woman friend, ridicule for a literary misjudgment, refusal of an invitation to his apartment, turned condo, for dinner, more frequent comments about his weight and physical condition. Then comments he made which might once have been viewed as humorous and innocent were taken wrong and found offensive. Instead of acquiescing in his latest romantic illusion, they tried to represent it to him realistically, showing how it had all the characteristics of earlier brief and failed affairs, not to mention wasn’t he a bit old and wasn’t it a bit ridiculous for a man his age to be seeking and thinking he’d found romance? Dan and Marlene canceled engagements more frequently, more time passed between get-togethers in general. And where once if he disagreed with them, about a book or a writer or a literary movement, the argument would have been unemphatic, self-deprecating, temperate, yielding, now all three of them insisted, stressed certain important and irrefutable words and phrases, were formal and rigid, exited each argument without shaking hands.
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Introduction
What is it you most regret? The love lost when courage failed you? The friendship that eroded as you watched, helpless to shore it up? The words that might have brought comfort to someone now dead? Norman Waksler knows these things.
But The Book of Regrets is no mere catalogue of disappointments, no nihilistic checklist of roads not taken, no Aesopean romp through the standard virtues and vices. Nor will you find capital-R redemption accompanied by an overwrought violin score at the close of each story. Waksler has done what’s harder – to mirror our actual experience of regret: the consolation that seems small but, on second thought, will do to salvage pride and self-worth; the temporary epiphany that serves to carry us at least to the next moment; or, once every great while, the savage pinch of self-knowledge we can no longer ignore. Grudgingly or gratefully, Waksler’s characters take whatever satisfaction offers itself up: a stumpy Dutch cigar, an eye-opening moment in a museum, a strangely apposite encounter in a park, the limited catharsis of apology and of confession: “You tell me your unmentionable pain… and I’ll tell you mine.”
To inhabit these stories is to understand that even though what you hold dearest is inevitably tinged, tainted, muffled and mitigated over time, its value – its necessity – need not decrease. How can there be regret without love, or love without regret? Think of the thing that sets you apart, that defines you or stirs you. A photograph. A young sweetheart trembling with hunger. A dog – say, a too-intelligent terrier mix, huffing from the back seat. A quiet sense of order, the ability to keep chaos at bay. A book, a writer. Waksler knows how crucial these things are, how impure, and how devastating when lost.
Then there’s Waksler’s humor, the best kind, the kind with a knife in it. He evokes the deep humiliation that is, even as it occurs, also outrageously comical; all your friends’ foibles you must treat as jokes or be doomed to a lifetime of fury; the earnest childhood mistake you might recount only much later, deep in the night, to a lover. Waksler’s characters’ aches tend to congregate around things unsaid, untreated sores that fester precisely because they are unacknowledged. Yet he makes us aware that full exposure would be both excruciating and absurd. He presents ailments so ripe for metaphor you cannot help laughing through the pain. Waksler knows there’s nothing facile in what’s funny, nor in what’s curative. All depends on balance, good judgment, and timing.
But for me, the true test of a prose stylist is the detail work. Waksler is a master of conveying small facts, idiosyncrasies and telling details without seeming effort: the child’s keen vision of “thirty-two horizontal stripes” in the framed snapshot of his dead brother, or the “slight and tubular” body of his best friend. An incongruous black eye with its “ever evolving purples and greens lurid as a biker’s tattoo,” and the almost equally painful sympathy it engenders, “like being a small child and having your cheek pinched by a snaking conga line of a thousand inescapable, solicitous aunts.” And the food! Not every book can stir up a days-long craving for mediocre Chinese takeout – the crunch, the salt, every tactile moment of the meal, from the garlic-scented steam filling your car through the last drops of soy sauce licked from your fingers – or make an ecstatic experience of spreading an English muffin with apple jelly.
At the heart of Waksler’s collection is the pure pleasure of story: the self-defense of a boy suffering the daily assaults of a schoolyard tough; the failed bravado of a teenager trying to impress his date; a boss’s determination to be fair to his free-spirited employee; the vengeful fixation of a mild-mannered administrator-turned-vigilante. For all its disappointments, love is seen to conquer hunger, reluctance, assorted injuries, and even to take a stab at self-loathing. Perhaps most compellingly, Waksler gives us key moments in the life of Charley, a recurring character. Charley is hapless, generous, skilled at taking the precisely wrong measure of every situation. We see him trying always to “muzzle his pride, kennel his envy,” and do what’s right; blundering into trouble, into grace, by wholly reasonable means:
He understood the variability of friendships. How some are born in propinquity and die with distance, while others are always renewed despite separation and infrequency. How some just run out of feeling, others explode apart, and still others accrete goodwill year by year, meeting by meeting.
Charley believes his vast tolerance, his humane understanding of friendship as “balanced reciprocity within broad limits,” his deep affections and excellent intentions will carry the day, as they should. Instead, he shows us how it’s possible to fail to be forgiven, and to survive the failure.
What kind of stories are these? They are literate, intelligent and earthy, lofty and quotidian, earnest and ironic. They are the kind of stories into which you relax deeply, then stop short to take note of a particular word as if for the first time, or to say, “Hey, listen to this sentence,” to whomever else is in the room.
You might read The Book of Regrets to enjoy the mix of voices, to dip into empathy as into a cool (yet somehow caustic) bath, or to enjoy the occasional dollop of Trollope. Read it to see how what is said is always balanced by, in tension with, or canceled out by what is unsaid: “He couldn’t say that having finally spoken made him feel different, though he was glad to have done it.” Read it for its elegantly understated final line. Read for the wisdom of a writer who knows regret, love, and humor, and a great deal besides.– Laura Cherry
Winner of the 2002 Philbrick Poetry Award
Norman Waksler, raised in Providence, RI, moved to Boston for college, and remained in the area. He has worked at the various writerly jobs—taxi driver, warehouseman, bookseller, janitor, school teacher, magazine distributor, camp director, salesclerk, and most recently, and for many years, librarian. His short fiction has appeared in in such places as Ascent, Kansas Quarterly, Greensboro Review, Hanging Loose, StoryQuarterly, Madison Review, Chaffin Journal, and Bibiophilos, as well as in Best American Short Stories. He was the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Ficton for 1998. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his sociologist wife Frances Chaput Waksler, and a small menagerie of not very exotic animals.