FICTION

INTIMATES by David Huddle (David R. Godine: $20.95; 238 pp.) A recurring image in these 13 stories is of the world seen through a huge plate-glass window. Sometimes it’s the half-understood world of adulthood, as in the opening two stories, told from the viewpoint of a young girl with an alcoholic father. In the first, she nurses and placates him like a veteran wife, and reflects: “I’ve been the best girl anybody could be.” In the second, she and her mother escape to Scotland, where her seatmate on a tour bus, a male model, introduces her to love’s power to warp and illuminate the landscape.

Often, though, what’s outside the window is simply the world. What’s inside is a faculty office or a hotel room where poet Frank Riggins (who, like author David Huddle, teaches English at the University of Vermont) is anticipating, remembering or engaging in yet another affair.

Huddle (“Stopping by Home,” “The High Spirits”) does his best to disarm our prejudice against academic philanderers and our suspicion that some of these stories may inhabit the wrong side of the glass. He is a lucid and tactful writer; he makes Riggins morally alert as well as sexually restless, and he has a delicate touch with epiphanies--the moments upon which the meaning of a story turns.

In Arizona with his family for a poetry reading, Riggins finds himself outside a groupie’s cabin, suddenly aware that “his wife and daughters, asleep some 40 yards away, would not recognize the creature” he has become. A reunion with an old flame, now mentally ill, reminds him of parachute training in the army--of the moment when the chute slipped out of its pack, signaling that “I was not going to plummet to my death.” Now he feels a similar relief: “Something departed from me that I knew I had to leave behind.”

Still, we like Riggins best when something bursts through the window at him--the Montreal gangster who calls the hotel where he is bedding the gangster’s wife; the story told by an acquaintance who took her lover--another professor--into the Idaho mountains, where he fell to his death. Nobody connected her with the accident, but her guilty secret, years later, haunts Riggins and gives him the sense--which this whole collection tries to give us--of love as an incurable, sometimes fatal, mystery.