My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead Read Free

the story now, older (and more innocent), I couldn’t help finding in Chekhov’s last line a glimmer of optimism. The story seemed to me, this time through, to be about that miracle you come across every once in a long while: two unexceptional people, for no demonstrable reasons, being exceptionally in love.
Christianity, which in its beginning retained much of the earthiness of Judaism, a sense of the body and its sexual appetites as inherently good, was slowly influenced by Neoplatonism, which held for a strict duality between the body and the spirit. Asceticism, abstinence, monasticism—you can blame it all on the Greeks. Nevertheless, if the stories in this collection provide any evidence, it’s the renunciation of the body that distinguishes true love from any simulacrum. When the body is no longer desired, when beauty has faded, when possessiveness has been relinquished, real love shows its face. This seems to happen most often in old age, or as the result of a winnowing of ego. Born with desire, these stories say, we grow into love, and then only sometimes, and only if we’re lucky.
In Alice Munro’s magnificent “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the husband of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, after regret-fully relinquishing her to a nursing home, finds, on his subsequent visits, that she is slowly forgetting him and becoming involved with an elderly male patient. The husband responds to this death-in-life with an act of love that goes beyond the bounds of matrimony, approaching the selflessly divine. Deborah Eisenberg’s shatteringly beautiful and unerring “Some Other, Better Otto” suggests that, in moments of existential crisis, the only lifeline remains the quotidian, humdrum, durable presence of that imperfect thing: one’s life partner. Each of these two stories is nearly impossibly good. The complexity of the characterization alone is a marvel—Munro’s model husband was, it turns out, a serial philanderer some years back, and the irascible Otto of Eisenberg’s tale becomes, despite his scorched-earth policy relating to other human beings, a person of uncommon tenderness and philosophical insight, in the way depleted soil is enriched by burning. These two stories are the bleakest in the collection, too; they tiptoe right up to the abyss, Munro by unsentimentally describing the inevitable decay of the mind and body, Eisenberg by insisting on the absurd and pitiful insubstantiality, the puniness, of the self. And yet these are the stories in which love, to use an old-fashioned word, triumphs. To borrow from Raymond Carver, whose work is also included here: this is what we talk about when we talk about love. Not eros, maybe, when all is said and done. Closer to agape.
Had Catullus written only those two opening poems about Lesbia’s sparrow, he might not be remembered today. Although they prefigured his own fraught relationship with his married woman, and although I find in them the poles around which all love stories revolve, there is a whole world of detail, particularity, and specificity in between. Read these stories, then, not to confirm the brutal realities of love, but to experience its many variegated, compensatory pleasures. From the bracing acerbities of Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be an Other Woman” to the stark assessments of Richard Ford’s “Fireworks” to Bernard Malamud’s comic presentation of one very picky rabbi, the stories that made their way to me, by sometimes circuitous paths, never failed to be just the thing, after a long, unromantic day at my desk, that I most wanted to read.
It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.
There’s this thought, too.