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Praise for Subtraction
“There isn’t a writer working today who sees the world, or hears it, or inhabits it more fearlessly than Mary Robison. Reading Subtraction is falling in love with her—her voice, her verbs, the peculiar squinted view she has. This is the book we all wanted to write. It’s as smart as snakes. It’s a work of generosity and genius, of perfect timing and pitch, of immense sadness, and singular, driving hope. I can scarcely imagine anyone writing a novel half as stunning anytime soon.”
—FREDERICK BARTHELME,
author of There Must Be Some Mistake
“Robison raises sitcom wit to the level of real emotional situations, real comedy and real art with much the same perspicacity as Henry James did a century ago in ‘The Reverberator,’ his romantic satire on American media madness and the first novel to isolate the wisecrack or one-liner as the basic unit of American courtship conversation. But where James’ use of the wisecrack satirized his innocents abroad in the 1880s, Robison makes the one-liner emblematic of her characters’ ’90s hipness at home against a background of baffled emotional and intellectual drift.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Subtraction stands out as a high-wire act of the novel form—taut in expression yet rich with humanity, expertly crafted and unfairly neglected . . . In Subtraction Mary Robison creates a poignant, forceful tale of lovers in limbo. Her writing is rich with detail, lean with implication. When the tedium, the drudgery, the ephemera are sifted out, we’re left with the intense. Each word pulls its weight. Nothing is wasted.”
—The Millions
ALSO BY MARY ROBISON
An Amateur’s Guide to the Night
Believe Them
Days
One D.O.A., One on the Way
Oh!
Tell Me
Why Did I Ever
SUBTRACTION
Copyright © 1991 by Mary Robison
First published by Alfred A Knopf, Inc. in 1991
First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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 is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robison, Mary, author.
Title: Subtraction : a novel / Mary Robison.
Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010548 | ISBN 9781640090859 | eISBN 9781640090866
Classification: LCC PS3568.O317 S8 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010548
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
Book design by Jordan Koluch
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Bobbie Bristol
and, with love,
for Rachel and Jen
Coco Plumoso
OH SURE, THEY, OVER there in the city, had rain to behold. From out my third-story window I could see to Boston and over to the Fenway. There the sky was so low and black; if I had been there the rain would have torn at my hair, and ruffled my clothes, soaked me in cool lashings of rain. But over where I was, not so far west—a six-minute trolley ride!—nothing but fringe winds and hot breezes that dog-bone July day, although the four floor fans I had running were mixing up a nice brisk area on my damp back, which was wet from the ice-water shower I’d just suffered. I made myself do that every hour to cool off: five minutes of a paralyzing cold shower, but then fifty-five minutes of relief; of shivering even at first.
A telephone bill that arrived early in July showed Raf’s tracks. It showed all the long-distance calls he had charged to our Brookline number. He’d been to D.C.; gone on to Charlottesville; then Birmingham; Oxford, Mississippi; Thibodaux, Louisiana. New Orleans was last listed, and from there Raf made three Houston calls.
Now I had a chair in the only corner of the room not scorching with light, and I sat, wearing a towel sarong, hair streaming from my hourly shower, and dialed, and watched starlings out the window, and waited for someone in Houston to answer his phone.
The man who said hello was named Raymond Hollander.
He said, “Raf’s here in town, I believe, but not here here. Not with me, or with us, anymore. And where he’ll be tomorrow I wouldn’t know. Or, hell, where he’ll be tonight. I could make some guesses about him but nothing you’d wanna put a peso down on.”
I called Herb, a former student of mine.
“I’ll go ‘on line,’ ” Herb said. And, “Hold.”
His voice returned. “Window seat; flight’s this evening; they can do vegetarian; a motel suite; a week’s worth of rental car, but car isn’t accurate. I splurged on that part.”
“You should market these skills, Herb,” I said. “You go public, you could buy food.”
“They’re not skills, they’re crimes. And not winky-dink ones either. They’re felonies. So think prison, hard time, the gulag . . .”
Herb went on like that. I hung up and dialed again for Raymond Hollander.
Raymond said we could meet tomorrow, after he got off work, at something he called an ice house.
