Covet the Oven: 20 Short Stories of the Head, the Heart, and Writing

By Jerome Mandel

This book of new stories by novelist and short story writer Jerome Mandel tells tales of the head, the heart, and writing – some gritty, some witty, some smooth.

With intelligence, sympathy, and a wry, often comic irony, they address loss and love, puzzlement and growing old, choices. In these stories cars break down, people make surprising announcements or do unexpected things. They die or don’t or can’t or sell metaphors.

Some people fall in love, misplace love, lose love. Some survive and thrive; others don’t. We learn more about them than they do.

"Jerome Mandel is an excellent writer. He brings to his stories deep compassion, emotional understanding, blended with scholarship and refinement." -Leslie Blanchard, Writer's Choice-

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Apr 26, 2024

Book preview

Covet the Oven

COVET THE OVEN

20 Short Stories of the Head, the Heart, and Writing

JEROME MANDEL

Copyright (C) 2024 Jerome Mandel

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2024 by Next Chapter

Published 2024 by Next Chapter

Cover art by Jaylord Bonnit

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

This one is for Jacqueline with love.

There was an afternoon in northern Georgia when the wind drove yellow leaves down through sunlight in a slanting, golden shower. My happy heart rose in gladness. That love.

Contents

Kidney Stew

Nice Man, Sexually Impotent

The Square in the Square

The Statue

Lorelei Adams

Home-Going

The Way It Has To Be

Robbers

The Rescue

The Light Man

Survivors

Sunshine Pharmacy

The Rules We Live By

The Inter-Galactic Call

Trouble with the Note

Why I Drink

Poison

Uncle Amos

Character Fault

The Problem with Croutons

Dandelions

When yellow leaves, or none, or few

About the Author

Kidney Stew

No more for me

the bland buttock and flank,

it's guts I cook:

liver, heart, and kidney.

Blood's dead as soon as

it spills. Give me

the whiff of urine

and the tough of systole,

they live beyond the beast.

My meat's drying,

dying on the bone,

but behind the bone

the juice still stinks

and trickles. I covet

the oven, that's why

I cook and cook and cook—

Clarinda Harriss Lott

Nice Man, Sexually Impotent

In the second week of their living together, Andrew Palmer announced to the group.

I’m writing a short story about a man who places an ad in the Personals Column of the local newspaper. It goes like this: Nice Man, Sexually Impotent, seeks woman with whom to be intimate. Size and age not as important as openness to new experience. Let’s meet and talk."

They were drinking pre-dinner wine on the screened porch, looking out over the shadows stippling the long lawn and the late afternoon sun bright on the mountain tops across the road.

What happens in the story? asked Heather.

I’m not quite sure yet.

Not very promising, said the novelist.

Why do I get the feeling, said Fred, that something else is going on here?

Well, said Andrew, I don’t know how much you know about the disease, but one of the results of long-term diabetes is impotence. No matter what I do, folks, I can’t get it up. Not a moral failing but a physical one.

Was that the cause of the divorce? Barbara asked.

One of the straws. Judy is thirty-nine, still a young woman. She’s not ready to abandon her body, nor should she. Ours had become a sexless marriage. We thought it better to divorce before it became a loveless marriage.

A writer’s distinction, said Barbara. Much too intellectual.

We’re still good friends, but we’re not sexual partners any more. Haven’t been for a while. And that’s the source of the problem. If I’m going to write this story—turn loss into art—I need to resurrect the details of intimacy. Of course I can imagine them all from memory, but I want to experience once again what it’s like to touch a woman’s body. So I thought I would make the same offer to this group that my character makes in the story.

I knew it! said Fred. A stud service!

Without the stud!

Let me get this straight, said Deborah in the general laughter. You want to grope some woman.

My word is ‘caress,’ actually, said Andrew. Look, Deb, you test the quality of the clay you work with. I want to recapture the details of a woman’s body, the language of it.

Andrew Palmer leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his arms open to the community.

I like women, he said. In many ways, I prefer women. I like the touch and texture of them, the skin, the hair, and the bone beneath. I’m looking for intimacy, not fornication.

Sex for the sake of art, said Fred.

For the sake of Andy, rather. Why didn’t I think of this? said Jack.

And it doesn’t make any difference to you who it is? Any woman will do?

That’s right, Deb. This is not personal, don’t you see? I don’t want a passionate love affair. I’m not capable of it. But I am interested in caressing a woman’s body. Intimacy as an aesthetic, not sexual, experience. I’m physically impotent, not intellectually.

I don’t get writers, said Barbara. Why would any woman want to do this?

I don’t know, said Andrew. I hope she’ll tell me.

Give a better answer, said Heather.

Okay, said Andrew, setting his blood-dark wine on the table beside him. I believe we all like to feel good about ourselves. That’s why we read reviews of our work. We want people to think well of us and what we do and who we are. We like to be stroked. So I think that a woman might welcome the opportunity to be intimate without being involved, to have someone touch her body with tenderness and appreciation without commitment, without the emotional turbulence of a love affair.

This whole thing strikes me as an arid experience, said Barbara.

Not at all, said Andrew. We’re all artists here. We look for new experience; we all live lives in the imagination—you with paint, Deb with clay, Heather in words. And that’s why I don’t expect this to be barren, for me or for the woman. Her imagination will be as active and alive in this as mine is, and as enriched. Anyway, that’s the basis of my offer.

With clothes or without? said Fred.

That’s up to her, isn’t it?

Sort of sex without sex, said Jack.

Is it possible? said Heather.

Wait a minute, said Jack. If there’s no attempt to arouse or gratify, is it sex at all?

God bless Bill Clinton! said Fred amid laughter.

So what’s the process here? sneered Jack.

Everybody knows where everyone’s cabin is. My door is always open.

Do the girls have to make an appointment? Pay attention, Heather, this may be important for you.

Perhaps it would be better to talk to me about it first, if for no other reason than to avoid embarrassment.

And long lines, said Fred.

I could kick myself, said Jack.

A good idea in general, said Heather, but why now?

Why didn’t I think of this first? This is great.

The cook appeared in the doorway and said, Dinner is ready.

Let the feast begin!

Yes, said Andrew, getting up.

Sorry I’m late, said Deborah, the feldspar glaze wouldn’t fuse with the stoneware I’m working on. Couldn’t get the temperature hot enough. It’s an old kiln.

Me, too, I said.

Ha-ha, that’s good. Are you hot enough or do you need stoking?

I’m about as stoked as I get these days.

Okay, then, here’s the deal. My hands extend my mind. They do to clay just about everything I can imagine. After a day in the pottery shed, my hands are tired, my arms ache, and my mind is numb. I’ve tried shiatsu, yoga, everything. I want to see what an impotent writer can do.

She held out her hands to me, clay beneath the nails.

It never comes out, she said, unless I clean my nails to the wrist.

I held her fierce hands in mine.

I’ll take my shirt off, if you think it will be inspirational. Or intimate.

First I did her back, working the muscles around the wings of the shoulder blades and up and down the bony spinal column. Then I did her arms, knotty as twisted cord. Then, her hands, rolling the muscles and the pads at the base of the fingers and working the long lump where the thumb comes to the palm, loosening the sinews between the round bones where the fingers start, working the fingers and the joints and the nails.

You’re good, she said, buttoning her shirt. You got strong hands. Relaxed my body and cleared my head. I like that. A good experience. I got strong hands, too. Listen, I think I could pull a hard-on if you’d like, sort of pay you back in kind for the job you just did on me. It’s not too different from milking a cow.

The tactile art of the potter is not the tactile art of the writer.

The painter came when it was dark. She walked around the cabin turning off lights and then sat in my reading chair in the dark corner between windows. The moonlight lay in tatters on the floor around her.

I live in light, said Barbara. It’s what I paint and how I paint. There is no life without it. I can’t escape.

And this darkness?

Is this darkness? she said. I could tell in her voice that she was smiling. All my nights are bright. Even here, now, my mind is alive with the color and composition of this room. I can’t stop shaping it.

It’s what we do, isn’t it? We shape the world we live in and the worlds we create.

"It’s not something I choose to do. I have to create space in light."

We’re all victims—I mean, we’re all victims of the imagination, I said. We’re helpless.

Isn’t that what ‘impotent’ means—helpless?

Yes, of course. But it also means without power or potency, unable to create.

Barbara sat still for a moment, silent in the dark chair in the dark corner.

Have you tried Viagra?

I’ve always thought Viagra was sort of masturbatory: it privileges erection and penetration. These are male concerns and focus on male pleasure. Viagra doesn’t have anything to do with intimacy. And nothing at all to do with women. I suppose if a woman were interested, she could replace a man taking Viagra with a warm vibrator and be a lot happier.

I’ll never understand writers, said Barbara.

After a while, she asked me to move the mattress from the bed to the floor by the window. She left her clothes on the chair and lay down in moonlight. She turned toward me, her ear moon-white beneath the camber of her hair.

Was it difficult for you to say what you said that night?

No. I’m dysfunctional. To pretend otherwise misrepresents who I am. I’m interested in the truth of detail and the validity of experience, both mine and, if you will tell me, yours.

I could paint it easier than I could tell it.

What would you paint?

Touch me, and then I’ll know, she said, turning her face to the window and the sky alive with light beyond the