Homewreckers

- Matt Ramoney on the rocks with a side of funny. - Quiet, but got sick. - You're yelling like a price-fight manager. - In rage to that, she had recourse to her eyes as weapons. And looks steadily at him for a while

with the expression of one who is viewing a small and horrible animal. Such as a horn toad. - Coming up on selected shorts, humorous stories about marriages not made in heaven as a long married couple fall out over Donald Duck

and a spouse's bone-jarring snores.

“I'm Meg Wallitzer and you have to hear this.”

And a talk with one of the authors, the sublime Louise Erdrick. You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

Marriage has taken on many forms in recent years, but whatever the shape or context,

it remains one of the most important forms

of bonding we have. It makes two people into a family and often one that includes a circle of friends and the proceeding and perhaps succeeding generation. More is at stake than just the two people

who've linked together. So what happens when that bond is tested? On this show, we share two stories in which marriages are in jeopardy and they defy our expectations.

We often think of divorce as being either cataclysmic, the discovery of an affair, or the slow acid of disenchantment, but these stories tip the balance in favor of the little things. In one, a long established couple disagree, loudly,

in the other two different wives, shape the life of one man. Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote this line. Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.

And that's pretty much the truth, right?

But you never know the specifics of someone else's marriage.

You think you know, but the minute the door closes and the couple is alone, things get said that you will never find out. Another writer, I'm not sure who,

“said that what people remember from novels”

isn't plot but character. And maybe a variation of that is true about marriage. What you may remember most about your marriage for better or worse isn't what you did together. That trip to Sacramento, the time,

the dishwasher fell onto the kitchen floor, but what it was like to be talking to that other person, whether in Sacramento or standing in front of a dishwasher on the floor. And so the long conversation gets had.

First, a favorite from our archives,

James Thurbers, the Breaking Up of the Winships. We've also severed Thurbers' fairy tales and sassy recollections of his Ohio childhood in works such as my world and welcome to it. This hilarious story of a minor disagreement

turning into a marital deal breaker was first published in the New Yorker in 1936

“and has a whiff of old New York about it.”

The couple are affluent upper crust types in the era of men's clubs and women's bridge parties. The unnamed narrator is a character familiar from Hollywood comedies, the hapless friend trapped between two people.

The breaking up of the Winships is read by Broadway star Christine Nielsen, whose credits include Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike and present laughter. On television, she's appeared on the gilded age

among other shows. And here she is to make us laugh with James Thurbers the Breaking Up of the Winships. (audience applauding) The breaking up of the Winships.

The trouble that broke up the Gordon Winships seemed to me at first as minor a problem as frost on a window pane. Another day, a touch of sun, and it would be gone. I was inclined to laugh it off and indeed,

as a friend of both Gordon and Masha, I spent a great deal of time with each of them separately, trying to get them to laugh it off too. With him, it is club where he's sat drinking scotch and smoking too much and with her in their apartment

it seemed so large and lonely without Gordon and his restless moving around and his quick laughter. But it was no good. They were both adamant. Their separation has lasted now more than six months.

I doubt very much that they will ever go back together again.

after dinner, over there been a Dictim. It started innocently enough, namely even, with laughter from both of them,

laughter that froze finally has the clock ran on

and their words came out sharp and flat and stinging. They had been to see Camille. Gordon hadn't liked it very much. Masha had been crazy about it because she's crazy about Greta Garbo.

She belongs to that considerable army of Garbo admirers whose inchantment borders almost on fanaticism. And sometimes it even touches the edges of frenzy.

“I think that before everything happened, Gordon”

admired Garbo too, but the depths of his wife's conviction that here was the greatest figure ever seen in our generation on sea or land, on screen or stage. But it exasperated him that night. Gordon hates or used to exaggeration.

And he respects it or once did detachment. It was his feeling that detachment is a necessary thread in the fabric of a woman's charm. He didn't like to see his wife get herself into a sweat over anything.

And that night, at Leonardo's, he unfortunately used that expression and made that accusation. Masha responded, as I get it, by saying a little loudly, they'd gone on to scotch and soda, that a man who had no abandon a feeling

“and no passion for anything was not altogether a man.”

And that his so-called love of detachment

simply covered up a lack of critical appreciation

and understanding of the arts in general. Her sentences were becoming long and wavy and her words formal. Gordon suddenly began to poo-pooer. He kept saying poo.

And annoying mannerism of his Ivo is thought. He wouldn't answer her arguments or even listen to them. That, of course, it infuriated her. Oh, poo-do-you, too! She finally more or less shouted and he snapped at her quiet,

but got sick, yelling like a price-fight manager. Enraged at that. She had recourse to her eyes as weapons and looked steadily at him for a while

“with the expression of one who was viewing a small”

and horrible animal, such as a horn-toed. They sat in moody and brooding silence for a long time without moving a muscle at the end of which getting a hold on herself. Marcia asked him quietly enough.

Just exactly what actor of the screen or on the stage living or dead, he'd considered greater than guapo. Gordon thought a moment. And then he said as quietly, as she had put the question,

Donald Duck. I don't believe he meant that at the time or even thought that he meant it. However, that may have been she looked at him scornfully and said, well, that speech just about perfectly represented

the shallowness of his intellect and the small range of his imagination. Gordon asked her not to make a spectacle of herself. She'd raised her voice lightly and went on to say that her failure

to see the genius of Donald Duck proved conclusively to him that she's a woman without humor.

That he said, he'd always suspected.

Now he said, he knew it. She had a great desire to hit him. But instead, she sat back and looked at him with her special Mona Lisa smile. A smile rather more of contempt

than as in the original of mystery. Gordon hated that smile. So he said that Donald Duck happened to be exactly 10 times as great as Garbo, whatever he'd be and that anybody with a brain in his head

but admitted instantly. Thus, the wind ships went on and on and the resentment swelling, their sense of values blurring until it ended up with her taking a taxi home alone,

and with him making the rounds of the late places

and rolling up to his club around Dom. There, as he got out, he asked his taxi driver, which he liked better. Greta Garbo or Donald Duck. And the driver said, well, Greta Garbo best.

“Gordon said to him, bitterly, oh, who do you, too, my good friend?”

And he went to bed. The next day, as is usual with married couples, they were both contrite. But behind their contrition, they sleeping, the ugly words, each had used in the cold glances

and the bitter gestures. Well, she phoned him because she was worried. She didn't want to be, but she was.

When he hadn't come home, she was convinced

he had gone to his club, but visions of him lying in a gutter or under a table somehow horribly mangled haunted her. And so it ate a clock, she called him up. Her heart lightened when he said, oh, oh, roughly. He was alive, thank God.

His heart may have lightened a little, too, but not very much, because he felt terrible. He felt terrible, and he felt that it was her fault that he felt terrible. She said that she was so sorry,

and that they'd felt very silly, and he'd growled something about, well, he's glad she realized she'd been silly, anyhow. That attitude brought a slight edge to the rest of her words.

She asked him, shortly, if, if he was coming home, he said, sure, sure he's coming home. It was his home, wasn't it? She told him to go back to bed and not be such an old bear and hung up the next incident occurred

at the Clarks party a few days later. The winch-ships arrived in fairly good spirits to find themselves in a buzzing group of cocktail drinkers that more or less revolved around the tall, and Langwood figure of the guest of honor

in imminent Lady novelist. Gordon laid in the evening one her attention and drew her a part for one drink together, feeling a little high and happy at the time. This is the way with husbands.

Mention lightly enough, he wanted to get it out of his subconscious. The argument that he had had with his wife about the relative merits of Garbo and Duck. The tall lady, lowering her cigarette holder,

said in the spirit of his own gayety, but he could count her in on his side. Unfortunately, Marsha Winship standing some 10 feet away, talking to a man with a beard. Caught not the spirit, but only a few of the words

of the conversation and jumped to the conclusion that her husband was deliberately reopening the old wound for the purpose of humiliating her in public.

“I think that in another moment Gordon might have brought her”

over and put his arm around her and admitted his defeat. But he was feeling pretty fine. So he caught her eye, she gazed through him, freezingly, and his heart went down, and then his anger rose. Their fight naturally enough blazed out again

and the taxi they took to go home from the party. Marsha Winship attacked the woman novelist. Marsha had had quite a few cocktails. Defended Garbo, excoriated Gordon, and laid into Donald Duck.

Gordon tried for a while to explain exactly what had happened and then he met her resentment with a resentment that mounted even higher that resentment of the misunderstanding husband. In the midst of it all, she slapped him.

He looked at her for a second

under lowered eyelids and then said coldly, if a bit fuzzily. - This is the end. But I want you to go to your grave knowing that Donald Duck is 20 times the artist Garbo will ever be

the longest day you or she ever lived if you do.

“And I can't understand with so little lift for why you should.”

(audience laughing) Then he asked the driver to stop the car and he got out in wavering dignity. Character job, cartoon! She screamed after him, "You and Donald Duck!"

Both you and the driver drove on. (audience laughing) The last time I saw Gordon, he moved his things to the club the next day for getting his trousers

He had convinced himself that the point at issue

“between him and Marsha was one of extreme importance”

involving both his honor and his integrity.

He said that now it could never be wiped out

and forgotten now. He said that he sincerely believed, "Donald Duck!" (audience laughing) was a great creation as any animal in all the works of Louis Carroll.

(audience laughing) Probably even greater, perhaps much greater. He was drinking, there was a wild light in his eye. I reminded him of his old love of detachment and he said, "Oh, I owe him detachment."

I laughed at him that he wouldn't laugh if he said grimly. Marsha persists in her silly belief that that "sweed" is great

and that "Donald Duck" is merely a caricature.

I cannot conscientiously live with her again. I believe that he is great that the man who created him is a genius, probably our only genius. (audience laughing)

I believe for that that Greta Garbo

“just another actress, this God is my judge, I believe that.”

What does she expect me to do? Go whiny back to him pretend that I think Garbo is wonderful and that Donald Duck is simply a cartoon. (audience laughing) Never!

(audience laughing) He galloped down some scotch straight. (audience laughing) Never! (audience laughing)

I could not ridicule him out of his obsession. I left him and I went over to see Marsha. I found Marsha pale, but calm and his firm in her stand as Gordon wasn't his. She insisted that he had deliberately tried to humiliate her

before that goki, so-called novelist,

“whose clothes they were the doubtest that she'd ever seen”

and whose affectations obviously covered up a complete lack of individuality and intelligence. I tried to convince her that she was wrong about Gordon's attitude at the Clarks party, but she said she knew him like a book.

Let him get a divorce, marry that creature, if you wanted to. They can sit around all day, she said, "And all night too, for all I can." And talk about their precious Donald Duck and damn common strip.

And I told Marsha that she shouldn't allow herself to get so worked up about a trivial and non-sensical matter. She said it's not silly and non-sensical to her. It might have been once, yes, but it was it now. It made her see Gordon clearly for what he was,

a cheap, egotistical, resentful cat who would descend to ridiculing his wife in front of a scrawny, horrible stranger

who could not write and who would never be able to write.

Furthermore, her belief in Garbo's greatness was a thing she could not deny. And would not deny simply for the sake of living under the same roof with Gordon's region. The whole thing was part and parcel of her integrity

as a woman and as a woman. And she could go to work again. He would find out there is nothing more that I could say or do. I went home and at night, however,

I found that I had not really dismissed the whole ridiculous affairs I hoped I had for I dreamed about it. I tried to ignore the thing, but it had tunneled deeply into my subconscious. I dreamed that I was out hunting with the windships and that as we crossed a snowy field,

marshes spotted a rabbit and taking quick aim, fired and brought it down. Oh, y'all ran across the snow toward the rabbit, but I reached at first. It was quite dead.

But that was not what struck horror into me as I picked it up. What struck horror into me was that it was a white rabbit. It was wearing a vest. It was carrying a watch. I woke up and start.

I don't know whether that remains that I'm on Gordon's side

I don't want to analyze it.

“I'm trying to forget the whole miserable business.”

[LAUGHTER] That was Christine Nielsen performing James Thurbers, the breaking up of the windships. I'm Meg Wallitzer. Thurber was a master of comic escalation

and Nielsen did him proud. The quarrel seems to linger in the air like the aftermath of a storm. For all we know, the windships are still out there filming. When I saw that we were doing James Thurber,

I thought, well, that's a blast from a long lost past. Thurber was a legendary humorist and cartoonist, a member of the Algonquin roundtable, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and he was pithy and mordant and extremely popular.

Every year, the James Thurber Prize is awarded to a book deem to be the funniest. And one year, I got to be a judge, which was a thrill.

“I'm so glad you got to hear one of his stories.”

There's a lot more where that came from. When we return, Louise Erdrick explores two marriages. I'm Meg Wallitzer. You're listening to selected shorts, recorded live-in performance at Symphony Space in New York City,

and at other venues nationwide. (upbeat music) - Welcome back. This is selected shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction,

one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wallitzer. On today's show, we're hearing stories about matrimonial challenges,

but we hope that you'll always be willing to say I do

to our offer of great tales that cover the gamut of human emotion. Just go to selectedshorts.org or search for us wherever you get podcasts.

“And while you're there, subscribe to the show”

so you'll never miss another episode. Our second work, The Big Cat, is by the contemporary master, Louise Erdrick, whose many published works include the novels Love Medicine, The Night Watchman, and The Roundhouse.

We've featured her nuanced and perceptive short stories many times over the years, so we were not surprised to find that she's put her in delible stamp on this portrait of two marriages and one bemused husband.

You'll hear how Louise Erdrick takes her time here, letting the story of a marriage spool and unspool. You probably won't know where the story is going, and listening to it, I could feel the freedom and sense of surprise

at Erdrick herself might have experienced when she was writing it. After the story, you can hear some part of my talk with Erdrick about it. Our reader is Keir Dulei.

He's best known as Dave and 2001, a space Odyssey, but enjoys a busy regional theater career and shows such as Katana Haktin Roof and On Golden Pond, both with his wife Maya Dillon, who's also a regular selected shorts reader.

He's Keir Dulei with the Big Cat. (audience applauding) The Big Cat. The women in my wife's family all snored, and when we visited the holidays every winter,

I got no sleep. A lightest three sisters and their bomb proof husbands love to gather at her parents' house in Golden Valley in the inner ring suburb of Minneapolis. The house was less than 20 years old,

but the slide tricks of the contractor were evident in every sagging sill, skewed, jam, crack plaster wall, tilted handrail, and most significantly in the general lack of insulation that caused the outer walls to high-sup

and the inner walls to resound. Every night, the sounds were different. Helplessly cognizant, I formed mental scenarios while drifting in and out of sleep. One memorable night, I tossed and turned

in a metal-working shop. From the fire end of the second floor hallway

came the powerful rip of my mother-in-law's rough cut saw.

From below on the living rooms, cold-out couches, the intermittent thrum of welders' torches, a wild hissing as the sisters' noses sparked and soldered invisible objects. Beside me, Alaita finishing touch,

the high-pitched burr of a polisher, perfecting a metal surface. Alaita was slight, and she was dressed in precise quiet colors.

wore clear nail polish and almost undetectable makeup.

You would never have imagined

that such a stark little person could produce such sounds. Ambien, earplugs, two pillows over my head, nothing could shut the noise out. Alaita, awake, stewing, even though I knew I should feel sorry for them. The sisters and their mother had visited sleep clinics,

endured surgery, blown their seat-hats off their faces, tried every no-strip and homeopathic remedy that existed. It wasn't that they liked the snor, but that they were incurable.

“I think they took comfort in solidarity,”

though Alaita admitted that she loved sleeping in that noisy house, and sometimes they snored in unison, which was terrifying. One sub-zero vacation morning, my daughter Valerie ran her fingers across the iceberg, downstairs living room wall and asked, "What is this, Daddy?"

"Snors," I said, blue with tiredness. All the snors from last night have stuck to the walls. Later, after her mother and I had divorced, Valerie wistfully recalled that moment as the first time she realized how alive the sound was, and all the noise emanated from the women in the family.

Later still, she asked her mother if what age she'd begun to snore, and asked me if that was the reason we'd split up. Valerie was worried for her own future. I assured her that the snoring had nothing to do with the divorce, which was amicable, but also unavoidably painful.

I laughed and hugged Valerie.

“I even told her that I had daughter mother snores.”

I had never adored them. But I had adored almost to the point of madness, Elhida, from the first time we met.

We found each other in Hollywood, as Minnesota expatriates always do,

common sense driving them together. Though to leave the land of 10,000 lakes for a thirsty city built on the desert, may speak of some interior flaw. For Elhida, it was a compulsive lure of film editing. In my case, the shame of acting.

Although I auditioned endlessly and always had work, my parts generally lasted between six and 12 seconds. I really had a line. But I had Elhida. Her intense green stare, her Nordic paler, even after years of sunlight,

her slender gliding walk, and the dark square of her severe hair cut. She was mine.

“When Valerie turned 12, I was cast in a supporting role in a movie”

that got a lot of attention. It could be my fabled break. But Elhida suddenly panicked over how unhappy Valerie was in high school and decided that the schools in Minneapolis were more nurturing. We moved back.

I had to accept the fact that my film career was over. I had worked steadily and spoken a line or two, given many a meaningful glance, tipped villains, soccer punched heroes, spilled coffee on or danced around movie stars in revolving doors. I'd appeared in dozens of films, TV episodes, commercials,

but Elhida hadn't been doing well. And both of us got better, more reliable jobs back home. Elhida loved the miniscule. The hundreds of tiny decisions that together produce a great flow of scenes. She applied this love of detail to her new vocation,

planning corporate events. I also loved the small when it consisted of learning to say lines and dozens of different ways with different total qualities, inflection, and gestures. In my new job as fundraiser for a vibrant local theater company,

I've perfected the gestures and tones that I hope would coax donations to my organization. For my birthday that year, perhaps to console me for the life I'd given up, Elhida somehow managed to clip and spice together a half-hour movie of my bit-parts,

which she set to eerily repetitive music. Shortly after she gave me that gift, which she titled "Man of a Thousand Glimpses," we parted. I moved out of our downtown condominium near nurturing,

to sell high school. For the first couple of months after leaving Elhida,

I bolted out of work exactly at 4 p.m. I drove to my tiny apartment impatiently, hung really, addicted not to do relationship, but to sleep itself. Deep rest was a drug.

Why shoot up, I wondered, when just by depriving the body

of uninterrupted sleep for 20 years,

“you can have ecstasy with no side effects.”

Except I might say, for Lorraine, it took no time at all before I was sleeping the entire night, beside a woman who, I feared, I had married too quickly, because she slept like a drunk kitten. From the beginning, I had to consciously keep myself

from referring to Lorraine in casual conversations as my current wife. Though it was taken as a joke, I knew better. It was a slip. Lorraine shots with the daughter of the owner of an immensely successful Midwestern sporting goods chain, without lets, in the excess of the exorbs throughout the tri-state area.

She was also a love-roof theater arts. At the annual Gala dinner from my theater company, which Alayda organized pro bono the year we parted, Lorraine spoke between the solid and the on-tray. Her flattering words thanks to our supporters,

which screened a plea for still greater,

“lodgesce impressed me with their genuine awkward grace.”

Lorraine reveled in that sort of Gala when people bid on donated items, the use of time shares and warm countries, fur coats, ski packages, signed books, hand-painted scarves, scarves draped our chairs, and we took superb vacations. Lorraine was blonde, social, generous, and love to barbecue.

Alayda was dark, wear-width, introverted, frugal, and usually a vegetarian. Lorraine could drink a whole bottle of cold pino-gree between five and six p.m., Alayda might sip one murderous, snore-inducing glass of coat-to-one between 11 and midnight.

After the divorce Alayda and I met once a month to discuss Valerie, we had agreed to do this early on, even when it hurt to see each other. Every time after we had winsingly established where Valerie's college tuition would come from, or whether she needed a new therapist,

after Alayda had confided the latest news of Valerie's

“boyfriend who we both hoped would turn out to be simply”

experience. We would conclude the hour with a cheerful goodbye. Perhaps say, oh, that wasn't bad, or even good to see you. We laughed and relieved, we hugged, pattyed each other on the back, sometimes drank a cup of tea before the drive-home.

We never kissed, not even on the cheek.

Our divorce had been agreeable and final. Our post divorce meetings were lingering, tedious, and self-congratulatory. Once Lorraine and I were married, however, the meetings with Alayda became more difficult.

The boyfriend had turned out to be a problem. We suspected addiction. We also began without warning to fight. It would start with some obscure thing and progress to even more obscure things.

By the end of our meetings, Alayda and I were worn out. Then after one particularly difficult session, still upset as we were saying goodbye, Alayda instead of hugging me, stuck out her hand. I took her hand and held onto it until she met my eyes.

Her glare pulled me to her and I shocked us both by kissing her studious pale lips. We jumped apart as those scorched and turned away. We didn't speak of it. Our next meeting was set up by email and I found myself

walking eagerly toward NYX, a restaurant off-loring park, which was quiet and decorous by day with leather booths and rosy curtains that led in glowing white rafts of winter light. Alayda was sitting at the third booth in and raised a hand as I entered. Then put a tissue to her eyes.

She'd been crying, a rare event. It usually meant frighteningly that she had some

breakthrough realization about me that she'd repressed for years.

Whereily, I asked her what was wrong. She told me that Valerie had started snoring. Her boyfriend had left her, thank God. But now, Valerie was refusing to believe that her mother's snoring hadn't precipitated our divorce.

Of course it didn't. Maybe not, but we had other issues. Who doesn't? Twenty good years, one bad year. A thousand little issues come home to roost.

I thought, you know, because of those good years, we might still get back together. Alayda said, until Lorraine, she doesn't snore, does she?

Ah, Alayda turned to look out the window

“and her dark linting hair swung softly along her cheek.”

Hmm.

The first time we spent the night together.

It's in George Street. I warned you I snored. I'd already been to a specialist and had surgery, which only made it worse. It's almost a relief to sleep alone now. At least I'm not blasting a man out of bed.

I never minded. I thought of the couch in Los Filis that had wrecked my back. The walk-in closet with a floor pallet, and our mini-appalist condominium. I'd adjourn to those lonely, sleeping venues on most nights. I did mind.

But her fixed gaze shook my heart. Last month, you kissed me. I did. We grew up aplexed, eight in silence, each secretly imagining the other's face from time to time.

I was very conscious of the drama of the situation.

Any actor would have been. He lied to shut that out. You're trying on expressions. She said laughing. It was true.

Various expressions crossed my face. But none felt right. The elements wouldn't melt.

“My eyes would express affection while my mouth was tense.”

Surprise would lift an eyebrow while my upper lip worked cynically. Embarrassment smoked me. At least that was real. I put my face in my hands and I tried to breathe, but my hands covering my mouth. Made me hyperventilate.

When I looked up, Elida was signing the credit card slip. She folded her napkin. Don't get up. She said, "From now on, let's do a phone call or email." I really hate email.

I said, "For personal stuff, please sit down. We can solve this." She sat down. Erasically elated. I ordered a bottle of wine.

This is a bad idea, Elida said. Why? We can talk how the rips all on the welders.

“Elida knew my nicknames for her mother and sisters.”

She clinked my glass. What was I again? The polisher. I don't really mind that. She said, "It's in my line of work, really.

I miss you.

Maybe we should have an affair where we see each other only by day and never sleep together."

You know? She was speaking whimsyly, but we proceeded to do exactly that. We were extremely happy for ten months. To be sure, I felt bad about lying to Lorraine, but she noticed nothing. She made a few demands, seemed happy enough with my company and continued to barbecue even

in December. Meanwhile, Valerie had left college and Elida and I were meeting in our old condominium overlooking the poison-brown waters of the Mississippi. Then, one afternoon, we were dressed, sipping tea, looking out at the river when Valerie dropped her suitcase inside the door.

She was astonished to see a sitting there. She gaped silently for a moment and then clunked down the hall in her big stooshoose. Elida gave me an oddly insolent look. You can live with a person, have an affair with a person, and still suddenly see an unfamiliar flash, like the belly of a fish in the shallows, there and gone.

She had known exactly when our daughter would arrive home. Valerie screamed when she saw the untucked covers in our bed, the scattered pillows. She clunked back into the living room. "Come on, is this been going on?" We told her.

She began to sob. "Almost time! Oh, selfish! I could have had you both together! Instead I've been trying to get used to you apart!

I was facing the fax and then!" She pressed her mittened hands to her temples as if to keep her head from flying apart. We all started crying, and for a while felt miserable. Then Elida snorted, and we burst into hysterical laughter. It was decided that I would come clean and leave Lorraine Shotes.

Elida and I would remarry, although it was strange the idea gave me an enormous sense of rightness. Things were falling into balance. My relation continued all the way back to Lorraine's, and my house on interlock and boulevard in Hopkins facing the golf course.

A beautiful stone house with creamy painted walls, a wet bar and the basement, and a vast screening room for movie viewing parties. Sitting in my car and looking up the flagstone walk, I thought of the pallet on the floor of the condominiums walk in. I would regret leaving this lavish comfortable house, but with Lorraine Shotes money.

Lorraine pitched a maholyca vase, then a framed photograph of us in Peru.

“She threw the other break of logic at the wall, and at last hefted a crystal unicorn”

that she had had from the age of ten. "You are great, throwing that," I said, "Please don't. I am so sorry, Dad was right, tears rolled on her face into her collar, wetting her throat. I was stricken.

I couldn't stop apologizing.

Never before her head seen her so truly upset or sad.

Dad was right." She said again. He said you were after the money. He didn't trust you, a former bit part actor. He begged me to make you sign a pre-nup, but I said, "No, you're so wrong.

He's the one!"

“Because I had little money, and because money hadn't figured into my first marriage,”

except for the problem I'm not having it. I wasn't till that moment unaware that this had even been discussed. I put it out of my mind, I didn't think about it until a month later. I had moved out of Lorraine's house into a studio apartment. I continued to see Alida only during the day.

I wasn't quite ready for the walk-in closet. "Are you crazy?" Alida said, putting down her teacup one afternoon after I had told her of the proposed terms of my divorce.

"That family is worth more than a hundred million!

You could get a settlement! Didn't even miss it!" I waved her off, but every time I thought about how handy, how fantastic it would be to

“have money, I waved her with my non-profit salary, I could barely afford to sound”

proof, Valre's old bedroom. I told myself that I'd keep my pride and sleep on the closet floor. I'd walk away without a scent, but I didn't, of course. We bought the condominium next door and removed two walls. This gave us an easy path into a large room where I set up a huge screen.

Before it we arranged several couches of immense size and comfort. I slept there in grateful quiet.

I didn't take Lorraine for that much, comparatively speaking, and shots finally was relieved.

Still they hated me enough to threaten for a while to get me fired. One night Alida surprised me by playing the montage of clips she had made from my birthday years earlier. It was worth somehow seeing it on that giant screen, bought with Lorraine's money. But there I was, my trivial works captured for all the ages.

I hadn't noticed when I first viewed the movie that Alida had made of those fleeting camuos and set pieces a sort of narrative. Man of a thousand glimpses started out with crowd scenes, me here, me there, the nice looking unuptrusive bystander, reading a newspaper, glancing up at the sound of a gunshot, a man crossing the street, exiting a bakery, jumping into his car, uncoiling a hose to water down his lawn,

next to better man appeared, somewhat older, more heroic. I ran toward a river with a child in my arms. I was a soldier dragging his buddy to safety. I lowered a dog and a basket from a burning building, addressed people through a bullhorn, rushed into waves, and dived toward despairing arms.

After that, I became a good father, inflated bicycle tires, opened with refrigerator doors, laid back smiling in my late night shoppers easy chair, had my waist measured, drove several carloads of screaming kids to sports events. Small wonder, I then got a pounding headache, clutched my jaw, my leg, my heart, wencing in agony.

Next, there came a turning point, which had been much applauded at the first viewing. I smoked a cigarette and cheap motel of beautiful women silhouetted in the shower behind me. Afterwards, ruined, I poured myself drink after drink, ordered a third martini, fell off a bar stool, crawled under a table and licked a woman's ankle.

I sank even lower, stuck a gun and a teller's face took cash from the drawer of a fast food register, a pondern apple from a pile, stole a moped, a diamond bracelet, a newspaper. These crimes kept me tossing in bed. I stared at ceilings, my eyes luminous, hollowed with glare, haunted by ghosts, by women, by hallucinations.

Sleepless, I got clumsy. I was hit by a car, crushed by a falling girder, devoured by a live volcano, axed molled, infected with dobantic plague. I was identified several times in liverish green morgolite by stricken dignified women. It was shocking, the way I just kept dying, physically,

the tracks and drank deeply from a flask, I smiled at the swiftly approaching lights and

laughed soundlessly. The end.

“I lied a lift, I played the movie over and over. How dark was my narrative? Why hit a light”

a killed me off instead of letting me rest you dogs at the end? This downward trajectory gave me a moral chill. I decided that I had not only wasted my life, but I acted ignorably in taking money from Lorraine. Although Elida and I made Valerie happy and I thought I was contended with Elida, I knew now, as I'd known before, the nature of true feelings for me. I destroyed the movie. It would be years before anyone noticed that

my long ago birthday gift had disappeared and I was once again dispersed to the confetti of B-movie's failed TV sitcoms and clumsy commercials. No one would ever have the cruel patience to assemble my life, glimpsed by glimpsed again.

“When the holidays came around, I insisted that we stay at the house in Golden Valley. Why not?”

I'd already counted a million holes in a million ceiling tiles. The first night at Elida's

parent's house, we all had a earth full-loving dinner and did the dishes together. Elida's relatives had easily absorbed me back into the family where my role, though peripheral, was also vital because I was Valerie's father. After he turned in and Elida fell asleep beside me, I lay on my back waiting. Usually took her about an hour or so to really get going, but her sisters and her mother had already begun. Valerie at a girl cousin had sneaked a bottle

of wine into their sleeping bags and were now drifting off next door. The real snoring hit with a abrupt ferocity. The orderly mechanical regularity of the metalworking shop had been abandoned.

“Now it was more like a pack of wolves snarling over a kill. I closed my eyes.”

I'm a mental screen. I saw lions driving the wolves or hyenas maybe into the veld. On a hill overlooking the bloody feast, a baboon whooped. How many hours I elaborated on the vivid images that accompanied the soundtrack? A lioness worrying the leg off a carcass. Two others feeding off a male, raking his ribs with teeth and claws while their cubs mock fought nearby. At last, I dropped off. In the deepest part of the night I woke. Although Elida's

snarles had come to the loud, gurgling purr of a big cat digesting its pre-meal, I came to in a sick, sweat, shaky. Perhaps my magic scenario had triggered some terror from my evolutionary past. I had dreamed that I was the hunted animal thrown to earth being eaten alive. The tearing of my flesh, the snap of jaws wrestling at my bones, the blissful lapping as my throat opened. All this seemed absolutely real to me. It took some time for me to understand

that Elida's body had not been satiated on mine, that she wasn't purring because she'd swallowed my heart. Thank you. Here do they, performed Louise Erdrich's The Big Cat. I'm Meg Wallitzer. This story reminds us that happiness is complex, and that what constitutes happiness in a marriage is especially complex. Like some of Elisman Rose work, Big Cat takes place over years, and it's leisureliness

and sense of time passing, make it imaginable as a novel. I would read a whole book about these people, and if I did, I would definitely want to hear more about the various snoring cures tried by the different women in this family. And indirectly, the story partners well sonically with the windships. The personification of the first wife is almost enveloping her husband, might also bring to mind James Thurber's playful drawings of large menacing spouses.

I've long been a Louise Erdrich fan, and it was great to catch up with her and ask about this story and her writing life in general. We've listened to one of your stories The Big Cat, which is fantastic,

so I always try to track for myself even as a reader and a writer where a story comes from.

of it. I like your take on stories because I feel the same way. I'm not sure where they come from.

“Sometimes I can trace back details. It's said in Minneapolis, some of the settings are”

real, the restaurant where they reconnect to the condominiums, which I've seen from the outside, and I just imagined. And then this relationship, you can call their everything that happens the other all relationships. For me, I don't know if you feel this way as a fiction writer, you can pull things from life and things that are not from life. Feel like it's our superpower. To have a restaurant that you say is real, but a meet-up, metallurgic symphony of snoring.

I like to think that you were just really excited when you came up with that. I was excited by the end, which is violent in a lot of ways, but what's most violent is based on

“a man's dream state in which he's surrounded by the noise of women. I feel like the”

snoring stands in for the noise we make as women in so many ways that appalls men, appalls partners, you know, appalls people in the wider sense. That is a great way of thinking of it. And I'm already thinking of a million things. Like women screaming and happiness at a restaurant,

right, at a group of women at a time. It's always this gesture come on. You get down and

saws and metal instruments with their teeth. It's so evocative. I was a pleasure to write those scenes. I really, it's fun. It's really funny too. Oh good. What was it like to hear the story read by someone who is not you? It's strange, I suppose, but it's also very satisfying. People emphasize work in places that you wouldn't expect and the cadence of words is different. It's satisfying. I know. I feel absolutely the same way. So, yeah, you've always written about families.

And the opening chapter of Love Medicine, I guess it started off as a short story and it was about family members gathering on a reservation for the funeral of an Ojibwe woman. Do you feel like more of a short story writer or a novelist or do you not think that way? I know you're also a poet. Well, short stories came to me in the beginning and it's harder to write them sometimes now. They come as more of a wave of emotion, the way poems do. But now I've started writing into a

longer form and I really love doing that. The same time when I have a story in an ending, I'm so excited about it. It just feels so gratifying to be able to bring a reader into a world

immerse the reader and then say, "Now you can leave." Do you always know which it is? What

feels like the beginning of a novel versus a story? You somehow sort of know? Have you ever had the experience of writing one and it turned out to be the other? So many of the novels that I was writing in the beginning had stories embedded within them. So somebody would tell a story or there would be a series of narrators or somehow you would feel that the story was coming from a source within the novel but it sometimes didn't have a lot of bearing on the novel. And then I started making the

stories have more bearing or not using multiple narrators. And it last started writing from one

point of view, which was a huge breakthrough for me. I didn't think I would sustain a point of view

over a novel. And when I did, I loved it. I have to have a very powerful relationship with that character. So you've brought Native American life into the center of American literature. Do you feel a responsibility as a writer or do you write what you want to explore or love or are they sort of interchangeable? It's not me. It's my parents, it's my tribe, my nation, the people around me.

“I mean, it's everybody else who has been essential to me who has done this. Well it's just a”

such a wonderful body of work and a continuing wonderful body of work. Thank you so much for talking to me really. We're so happy to have your story on the show. I'm happy too. I'm very happy. It's this story. I was delighted when I was a really good story. And I'm glad you liked it. I loved it. That was author Louise Erdrich, a longer bonus version of this interview is available on our podcast

quite another. The reason everyone gets teary-eyed at a wedding is that there's something moving

“about the idea of a couple who are deeply in love beginning their formerly united life together.”

Yet when we get all teary, that's not all we're thinking about, not entirely. Maybe unconsciously we fast forward. And sometimes we picture the whole thing. This perfect love

holding fast over time, even as the two gorgeous young people, all young people are gorgeous,

grow slightly worn under the weight of their mortgage and inadequate child care,

“yet still hold strong as a couple, like they promised each other they would. But here's the”

thing. We can't ever know if they're going to hold strong. Statistically it's not at all unlikely

that something tempting or terrible or ludicrous will do some sundering. You never know if a

lifetime of amiable coexistence is going to be shattered by a whim, or if there's possibly more than one the one for a member of a couple. There's something perversely enjoyable in looking at

“photos of famous married couples who didn't last. You stare at these old photos and say to the”

people in them, you're going to hate her soon, or he's going to steal all your money. Get out while you can. I'm the happily married megwalser. Thanks for joining me for selected shorts. Selected shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimkin, Vivienne Woodward, and Magdalene Replesky. The readings are recorded by Miles Beesmith. Our programs presented at the Getty Center in Los Angeles are recorded

by Phil Richards. Our mix engineer for this episode was Jennifer Nelson. Our theme music is David Peter since that's the deal performed by the Deer Dorf Peterson group. Selected shorts is supported by the Dungeon and Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hockel and the New York State Legislature. Selected shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space.

Hey, if you've ever wanted to do selected shorts in your own home, I have a suggestion. I have a novel coming out for kids and since kids do like to be read to, maybe you could read aloud to them from this book. I co-wrote it with my son Charlie Panic and it's one of those scavenger hunt books with a lot of really cool clues in it. Great for ages 7 to 11. That's found sound, read it aloud, let your kid read it, let your grand kid read it, let adults read it,

whatever.