I Want To Show You More - Hardcover

Quatro, Jamie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080212075X ISBN 13: 9780802120755

Publisher: Grove Press, 2013

Synopsis

A brilliant new voice in American fiction has arrived. Bright, sharp, startling, utterly distinctive, passionate, and secretive, Quatro’s stories are missives from deep within the landscape of American womanhood. . . . She has earned a place alongside Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, and Alice Munro.” David Means

Fasten your seat belt: Jamie Quatro is a writer of great talent who knows how to take a dark turn without ever tapping the brakes and then bring you back into daylight with breathtaking precision. These amazing stories explore the human boundaries between the physical world and the spiritual lust, betrayal, and loss in perfect balance with love, redemption, and grace.” Jill McCorkle

Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humor, Jamie Quatro’s debut collection is a beautiful and disquieting portrait of infidelity, faith, and family.

The hypnotically intimate, urgent stories in I Want to Show You More are about lives stretched between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South. In narrative modes ranging from the traditional to the fabulist, these stories are interconnected explorations of God, illicit sex, raising children and running. Jamie Quatro’s stories confront us with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations: a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover’s corpse in their bed; a teenager attends a Bible Camp where he seduces a young cancer survivor with hopes of curing his own rare condition; marathon runners on a Civil War battlefield must carry phallic statues and are punished if they choose to unload their burdens; a girl’s embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the pitying gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.

I Want to Show You More unleashes Quatro’s exhilarating talent for exposing the quiet terrors of modern life with stunning and subversive energy.

About this title

About the Author

Jamie Quatro’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the winner of the 2011 American Short Fiction Story Contest, she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Quatro holds graduate degrees from the College of William and Mary and Bennington College.

www.jamiequatro.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Caught Up

The vision started coming when I was nine. It was always the same: I was alone, standing on the brick patio in front of our house, watching thick clouds above the mountains turn shades of red and purple, then draw themselves together and spiral. Whirlpool, hurricane, galaxy. The wind picked up, my hair whipped my face, and I felt knew that the world was on the cusp of a cataclysm. Then came a tugging in my middle, as if I were a kite about to be yanked up by a string attached just below my navel. Takeoff was imminent; all I had to do was surrender close my eyes, relax my limbs and I would be catapulted, belly-first, into the vortex.

The vision ended there. I never left the patio.

When I told my mother, she said, God speaks to his children in dreams. She said we should always be ready for the Lord’s return: lead a clean life and stay busy with our work, keeping an eye skyward. I pictured my mother up on our roof, sitting in a folding chair, snapping beans.

I don’t remember when the vision stopped coming. Somewhere along the way I forgot about it. I grew up and married a good man who cries at baptisms and makes our children carry spiders outside instead of smashing them; who never goes to sleep without kissing some part of my body. He says he wants to know, on his deathbed, that his lips have touched every square inch. In grad school, when I told him I was attracted to one of his friends who’d made a pass at me, he said, Show me what you would do with him, if you could.”

Three years ago seventeen years into this marriage I fell in love with a man who lives nine hundred miles away. Ten months of talking daily with this man, until finally he bought train tickets and arranged a meeting date. We’ll just pick a car, he said on the phone. Any car, so long as it’s empty.

The day he suggested this, I called my mother and told her about the affair. I told her I wanted the infidelity to stop, but planned to keep the man as a friend. I said I loved my husband and wanted to protect my marriage. What I didn’t say was that I only knew I was supposed to want to protect it; thought that if I did the right thing, eventually my heart would follow.

My mother was quiet.

Please tell me you won’t keep him, she said. In any way.

Are the children all right? she said. Can you put one of them on?

After we hung up, I went for a long run, then walked the last block up our street’s steep incline. A cloud covered the sun so the entire length of pavement was in shade, and then the cloud pulled back, all at once; the light sped down the street toward me, and in those few seconds it looked like the road itself was moving, a conveyor belt that would scoop me up from underneath. The old vision returned. The upward tug in my belly. I recognized the feeling what I felt every time the other man, the far away man, told me what he would do if he had me in person, my wrists pinned over my head.

It would be devotional, he’d said. I would lay myself on your tongue like a communion wafer.

This time, in the vision, the other man was with me. I would like to say he was standing beside me that we were equals but he was the size of a toddler. I was holding him. He was limp and barely breathing, his skin gray, the color of my two-year-old son’s face the night we rushed him to the ER for croup, and I knew the reason I was about to be caught up was because I was supposed to carry the man to God and lay him in His lap so that God could . . . what? I didn’t know.
Bullshit, the man said when I told him about the vision. I’m already there.
My turn, he said. You, me, walking in the woods. It’s winter. We’ve just had two feet of snow. We’re playing together like kids. I’m chasing you, and when I catch you, I push you into a drift and lie on top of you. Above us the sky rips open and God is there, smiling down, and what he is saying, over and over, is Yes.

I wish I knew God your way, I said.

You will, he said. All you have to do is show up. Grand Central, February thirteenth, nine a.m.

Tell me you’ll be there, he said.

Two years later, when I called my mother to tell her how much I missed the man, how on the one hand I wished I had gone through with our planned meeting yet at the same time regretted even the phone sex, because if we hadn’t done that we might have been able to save the friendship; when I told her that something inside me was weeping all the time, and that I hoped there would be a literal Second Coming and Consummated Kingdom because then the man and I could spend eternity just talking, she said, Wait phone sex? And I said, I thought I told you, and she said, You told me you had an affair, and I said, No I didn’t, we didn’t, not in that way, and she said, I must have assumed, and I said, I can’t believe all this time you’ve been thinking I went through with it.

You might as well have, she said. It’s all the same in God’s eyes.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 080212075X
• ISBN 13: 9780802120755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224