Paradise, or, Eat Your Face: A Trio of Novellas

By Alan Cheuse

From acclaimed author Alan Cheuse -- National Public Radio's longtime "Voice of Books" -- comes a trio of provocative novellas. In the title piece, "Paradise, or, Eat Your Face," we meet travel writer Susan Wheelis and follow her exotic journey to Bali, and into her own frustrated soul. “Care" centers on Rafe Santera, a recent stroke victim who was once a vibrant, intellectual romantic. Attended by one of his many female admirers, we find ourselves in the midst of an unusual and politically incorrect love story. Cheuse takes us into Santera's erotic past, set against the daily struggles of a harrowing decline. The third novella, "When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears and Watered Heaven with Their Tears," follows author Paul Brunce as he grapples with art, life, and family. Publisher's Weekly has praised Cheuse's "impressive command of many voices" and, in this collection, he is once again in top form and in possession of a powerful range of literary gifts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780981966175

Alan Cheuse

Novelist, essayist, and story writer Alan Cheuse (Washington, D.C.) has been described as "The Voice of Books on NPR." The author of A Trance after Breakfast, he has also written three novels and a pair of novellas. He is the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great Early American Short Stories and co-editor of Writers' Workshop in a Book. He teaches writing at George Mason University.

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright ©2012 by Alan Cheuse

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express permission of the publisher or author.

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ISBN: 978-0-9819661-6-8

Table of Contents

Introduction by Howard Norman

Paradise, or Eat Your Face

Care

When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears

and Watered Heaven with Their Tears

For Kris

Introduction

By Howard Norman

I read these novellas the way one might the most highly esteemed Edo-period Japan triptych: in its entirety the screen orchestrates a wonderful story, but each panel has an autonomously provocative immediacy, and is itself deeply gratifying. And allow me to suggest that the most stalwart unifying element between these novellas is the act of writing itself—to say the least, Cheuse is preoccupied by the severe paradoxes and intimate consequences of a writing life.

In the title piece, Paradise, or Eat Your Face—and believe me, the word paradise is used in a way so as to subvert every convenient notion of it—Alan Cheuse achieves the very incarnation of Chekhov’s concept of a novella: that it should contain the force and ambitions of a novel, replete with full portraitures, but has to compress—and deftly camouflage the actual passing of—time itself. After all, one is allowed fewer pages! In part sponsored by Cheuse’s signature gift for constructing a story-as-biography, in Paradise, or Eat Your Face, we follow the life of Susan Wheelis, a travel writer so available to erotic recklessness (existentially she is in dire straits ), that despite the fact that travel writing is about place, Wheelis seems almost chronically dislocated. It might be said that her very soul is without portfolio. In presenting Susan Wheelis to us, Cheuse is arguably as empathic a writer as he has ever been. When an assignment takes Wheelis to Bali, she becomes vulnerable to, amongst other things, rather exotic predations, right up until readers are spun hard back to words in the title (eat your face), as the story ends on a note of arresting strangeness.

The Mexican-born quarter-Jew Rafe Santera (Rafe might be construed to mean raffish) is at the heart of the second novella, Care. Cheuse portrays him as a timeless sort of romantic figure, though with a tinge of philosophical misanthropy (as in his platitude of seduction, If you want a woman’s body you have to court her soul.). This novella tours us through Santera’s life from his utmost intellectual and physical charisma (he is a marvelous problem of puer aeternus) to—the most harrowing of declines—his being a stroke victim (though miraculously his libido recovers at full-tilt) attended to by one of his many great women adorers. Set primarily in Berkeley and the Central American rain forest, at its center Care is a highly unusual and, in indispensable ways, a politically incorrect love story.

In the third novella, When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears and Watered Heaven with Their Tears, we are with the writer Paul Brunce who had never been one for cannibalizing his life to use in his work. However, readers will be grateful that Alan Cheuse has chosen not to keep to Brunce’s principles on his behalf, and tells us everything about Brunce’s family life writ large (the drug-toting philandering prick of a father of ours). Every page of this novella is full of life; and yet the whole is struck through with a kind of elegiac anticipation. This is a great story, a fearless story about art and life, and the need to keep thinking about both without cease. And a singularly impressive thing about it is the way Cheuse seamlessly folds in the deeply affecting life of Brunce’s sister, Mira, who after much suffering, ends up in a sanitarium. In words, Cheuse is a marvelous watercolorist—in turn pointillist and impressionist—of physical and cultural landscape, and always has been, in stories, novels, memoirs, and travel writing. In this third novella, for example, the coast of California around Santa Cruz is definitely a place where Cheuse’s narrative imagination intensely comes alive. It is a beautiful experience how exactingly he renders the place.

Erudite, emotionally honest, and without a hint of sentimentalism, these novellas often suggest in various tonalities of comprehension that the very act of being alive is essentially tenuous. At times Cheuse seems to be convinced, too, that character is indeed fate, and that all we can really do is try and live as fully as possible every minute of every day, a quite practical philosophy, to my mind. But what I want most to say is that Alan Cheuse—by intuition and naturally from years of coming to knowledge of himself as a writer—has chosen the perfect form in which to convey the stories he wants to tell: The novella. And while Cheuse writes about the here and now, the living present, the recognizable world, still what is sometimes sent down a reader’s spine is a frisson far colder than one finds in any orthodox or even unorthodox ghost story. This is to say that the powerfully written lives of Alan Cheuse’s characters in equal measure haunt themselves and us.

Originally published in The Idaho Review

A Paradise Like No Other

By Susan Wheelis

The dark-haired smooth-faced young brown-skinned woman dressed in a yellow and orange sarong walked quietly along the brick pathway toward the porch of my hotel room carrying a tray of what appeared to be baskets each about the size of her hand. Birdsong filled the lavender sky, high-pitched exotic warblings I couldn’t identify, while close by roosters crowed a more familiar chorus. The sun had just come up on on my first morning in Bali….

And that was as far as she got in her notes that morning in Denpasar. She feared that her head might explode. She would have felt an awful lot better if she hadn’t fooled around with the bartender from the Singapore airport the night before. For that, maybe she could blame her editor, who had suggested stopping off either in Hong Kong or Singapore to break up the long trip from San Francisco.

That’s what she told the cute brown-cheeked bartender when he served up her first beer and inquired about her presence there.

(and why wouldn’t he? Five foot eleven, beautiful reddish-blonde hair—a weird weave that her hairdresser in the city had given her—good tits, great legs, lovely tan. Her nose was slightly irregular—she didn’t like to remember why. Except for the nose and the color of her hair she looked an awful lot like her mother. But this morning, waking up in the cool shadows of the beach hotel she saw a puffy face, with patches of discoloration, so that one cheek looked darker than the other, and her neck seemed to have added a crease along the line of her collar bone. (And her slightly overlarge nose, yes, all right, her father’s nose)).

She never remembered her mother looking so unprepared for the world, but then, two things, one, her mother, a beautiful Mexican woman, never showed her face without having first put on her makeup, and, two, her mother died of uterine cancer when Susie was only six. She remembered little of her, except for bedtimes, when her mother told her stories about Mexico and how before modern times the gods told people how to live and what to do. Chac-Mool brought rain. Or was it Tlaloc? Or was it Huitzilopochtli? She couldn’t remember much about this, in fact, amazed herself that she recalled these names so all chockablock in her memory.

The heart is very precious to a Mexican woman, her mother said at bedtime one night—or so she recalled or (perhaps even mis-)remembered it—because in the ancient days the priests cut out the hearts of the sacrificed and offered them to heaven.

Even the thought of it right now made Susie shudder. Cutting out the heart!

One more memory (much more gentle (and more mysterious)) of her mother remained—she told Susie how as a child she had while living for a while in the United States with her aunt learned English by listening to radio broadcasts of a childrens’ show in which there was a story about a kingdom beneath the sea called the Land of the Lost, the place where all the things you lost turned up.

(And the memory of a taste—what was it?)

So at thirty-five she had no idea how she was doing in relation to her mother. Her father, a wealthy vagabond, born Wilensky who later changed his name to Wheelis, had lived only into Susie’s twenties. But some of his words stayed with her. Put a good face on things and they’ll work out. Too bad he had helped to make her face so distinctive. (But she didn’t want to think about that.)

She couldn’t remember on which occasion he had first said it. Maybe after her school advisor—this was at a private girls school in Troy, New York—suggested that she see a therapist. Which she did, in Albany—Mrs. Oakton, a slightly overweight woman who put her on several different kinds of medication. Or maybe it was after the disaster of her graduation. Sunny day, not bad for Troy in June, a light breeze, all these girls in their white dresses, looking so virginal. (Well, she might look that way. But during rehearsals for Revels in this her senior year scaly-skinned Mr. Trumble, the young school carpenter who smelled of paint and turpentine and helped with the sets, met her in the parking lot and invited her into his truck where they made out wildly, with fingers and mouths on fire. And that spring there was a drug-dealer in Troy, a stinky, because unwashed, long-haired freckle-faced Irish guy, a high school drop-out who talked about philosophy and punched her on the arm so hard in play that she had a bruise for a week. He was the first and made her feel as though he punctured her, though she had no bruises from it.)

But she and two friends, Pip Masterson, an anorexic blonde girl from New Haven and a foreign student named Antonia Gulbarra, were barred from the ceremony because a week before they had signed themselves out for an off-campus trip without permission, something they had done a zillion times that year without getting caught. Christ, what if they had gotten caught with a joint! Or the beer she’d learned to love when her mother died—that was the taste she recollected but could not at first name— and she tried to as a way, quite a successful way, actually, to anesthetize herself against sorrow. And what would the administration have done if they had found out about her taking acid in the middle of a Yankee game where her class went for its senior trip? Would they have had her arrested? Crucified? (Her father told her how he had been caught drinking and thrown out of his school when he was twelve.) Not much consolation as Susie watched her classmates walk to the stage and receive their diplomas while she and her two accomplices had to remain seated on the sidelines.

Susan Wheelis! she shouted at the end of the ceremony from where she milled about with the guests and public. (Her father had chosen to be in Patagonia on a ski trip!) A few people looked around. There was her therapist, a surprise guest, staring over at her from the other side of the crowd.

That’s me! she announced. I don’t have to have somebody say my name. Susie! The only one from her class admitted to Berkeley!

Mrs.Quentin, her favorite teacher—English—a bird-like woman with dyed black hair, who always praised Susie’s writing, waded through the crowd and took her by the hand.

I’m sorry, she said.

Susie felt so relieved when she didn’t say anything more.

I love you, Susie said, and kissed her on both cheeks.

Mrs. Quentin, who always seemed to enjoy Susie’s antics, was surprised. She started back and let go of Susie’s hand.

Susie, she said, I wish you well.

Upon his return from the world below, Susie’s father sent some money to the school—a late gift to this year’s development fund. A month later she received her diploma in the mail.

By that time Susie was living in her own apartment on the Lower East Side and working in a battered women’s shelter where she spent the rest of the summer learning about the dark side of marriage—she and one of the other volunteers who worked there had a joke: forty thousand battered women in America each day, and you know why? You said this and raised a fist and put a menacing (male) look on your face. They just won’t fucking listen!

By the end of the summer she moved to Berkeley.

Her father had an old friend, someone he attended Columbia with (when he had still been Wilensky), a writer who lived in San Francisco.

You want to write? he said. You look up Hal. He’s a real writer. He can set you straight.

She didn’t want to be set straight. She didn’t want to be set crooked. But after a few weeks out of curiosity—and out of boredom with her classes—she called the man her father had recommended. She knew he would be old but that didn’t bother her. Young boys bored her. She wasn’t sure why, except that they were boring.

It was her father, she supposed. He set a high standard for being interesting, no matter what you thought of him.

She and his old school friend Hal met at a North Beach coffee house. The writer had a snow-white beard and his breath smelled different from the breath of boys she knew—it smelled—mature, marinated, ready to cook, she couldn’t find the words to describe it. And then it came to her: it smelled like her father’s breath.

And then what did he bring up? Almost as if he were reading her mind!

You look a little like your father, the man said. That’s good. I remember him as a handsome man.

If you’re a girl, you don’t want to look handsome, Susie said.

Hal ignored her attempt at agitation.

Does your father still fancy himself an adventurer?

He’ s stopped mountain climbing, she said. He had to admit he was getting too old for that. The fact was, she hadn’t spoken to him for a while and was making this up. But it sounded right. He must have been doing something like that in Patagonia.

It’s a brave man who admits he’s getting too old for certain things, the writer said.

But he’s still water-skiing, and he wrecked a speedboat a couple of years ago down in Florida.

Good for him.

And he took up sky-diving. This was true.

I think he wrote me about that, the writer said. He paused and stared at her.

And still plenty of girlfriends?

Susie didn’t say anything.

I suppose I shouldn’t ask a man’s daughter that question.

Susie shrugged, pushing a finger to one side of her nose.

I put him in a novel of mine once, Hal, the writer, said.

Which is that? Have I read it?

Have you read any of my work?

I will now, Susie said.

Hal wanted to sleep with her—a girl knew something—but she kept him at arms’ length—or hands length, anyway. She had an argument against it. It would be close to incest, wouldn’t it? But she was lonely and horny, and so now and then they’d go up to his place in the Mission, a wonderful top-floor apartment with a roof-garden filled with all sorts of plants and flop down on his bed and cuddle, and he would give her plenty to drink—though, as she remembered it, he never drank anything himself—and she’d take out his penis, and pull him off and he’d then fall asleep, snoring in a fatherly way.

So weird!

He gave her a copy of the novel with the character who was supposed to be her father, but for somebody who wanted to be a writer she just couldn’t get deeply involved in a work of fiction. She wanted to read about real things. Her life on its own was fiction enough for her. If only Hal had written about her father in a magazine article. She wanted answers, not stuff someone made up. That, she decided, was the kind of thing she wanted to write. Magazine articles. They read like little stories, and they were all true, and you learned from them. Sad—nothing at Berkeley helped her learn how to write one. She felt as though she were wasting her time, spinning around and around, never moving forward.

That winter quarter she matriculated at UC Santa Cruz. Everybody at Berkeley thought she was crazy. All the students they knew wanted to go in the opposite direction, Santa Cruz to UCB. So what? She was who she was. It was a perfect fit. She loved her classes under the redwoods and she loved the town even more. Either she spent time in the woods or at the beach or the aromatic dark interior of the Jahva, her favorite coffee house downtown, or at the beery flavored Catalyst, the best rock and