Short Stories, Long on Desire, From a Master of the Language

Longing can be so distasteful. Pining is palatable; neediness, repulsive; desire, a little sticky, but still it is one of the fundamental elements of life. “Desire is a figment swiftly fleeting,” writes Rikki Ducornet in the title story of “The Word ‘Desire,’ ” an ephemeral enactment upon the finite stage of the world, where flesh is a flame and a seeming. Is it true then, she thinks, all is fire? We can pretend this is a book about desire, but it is really a book of stories only punctuated by desire. Most of the characters, as in real life, suffer from longing.

The promise of desire being fulfilled, expressed, pulls the reader through these stories, even as the longing and desperation Ducornet evokes make one want to put the book down (if only to fulfill some petty urge, like eating or spending money, a reminder that some needs can still be met).

And then back to Ducornet’s splendid language, which is truly exotic here as in her novels and another story collection. Ducornet’s word choice creates longing, opening out like long tunnels as a reader searches memory, maps and the dictionary for meanings and connotations.

Here are some examples, powerful even out of context: vertiginous, lucent, ravening, sinuous, avowal, verbena, isthmus, simoon, amber, quince, oscillating, celerity, perdition. In her use of language, Ducornet is an arsonist, and she admits it: “I believe it is so that one’s sexuality is fixed at an early age. . . . I mean one can see something so puissant it sets the mind on fire, an inextinguishable fire that--if it cools to embers with the passage of hours and days--can be rekindled by a random word.”

In “The Many Tenses of Wanting,” the narrator admits to being “consummately Babylonian. . . . I sounded like a Finn speaking about Babylonian legal codes in Turkish.” This can happen in Ducornet’s writing, which is why I like her short stories so much: They are contained, meaning that inspiration, conflagration and immolation take place if not in a discrete location or period in history, then at least in a finite number of pages.

Beyond language and the kindling of desire, there is another reason to read Ducornet: wisdom. In “The Chess Set of Ivory,” a young girl and her father visit an ivory carver’s shop as he makes them a chess set in which the gods of the Egyptians and Romans battle. The two wander the streets of Egypt while the girl’s mother philanders with Egyptian officers. “Mother’s orbit was like that of a comet. . . . When she approached us,” thinks the girl, “[she] was always on a collision course.” “Evil is a lack,” her father tells her, “a void in which darkness rushes in, a void caused by . . . thoughtlessness, by narcissism, by insatiable desire. Yes, desire breeds disaster.”

There are many voices in this collection, most of them belonging to young girls, but there are also a young priest, a patient in therapy, an observant villager, a scholar and even a lap dog. “The Neurosis of Containment” is about a young botanist who visits her friend and patron, Mrs. Liveday, at her homes on Block Island and in Barrytown-on-Hudson. Set in 1930, the story tells how Mrs. Liveday, a wealthy, vigorous old lady who’s reading Freud, wages a campaign to force her house guest to give up her obsessive, orderly ways and let her imagination and sexuality emerge.

The sad result is a persistent buzzing in the botanist’s ears, a few memories of her wayward flapper sister and a simply gorgeous night vision that will haunt the scientist all of her livelong days: She sees, on Mrs. Liveday’s “moon-soaked lawn: two tall, beautiful young men, redheaded and pale, moving with a meticulousness so that I was held in thrall. And they had wings-enormous, velvety wings of tawny brown and deepest black with spots of blue and green. . . .” They tell this woman that she has summoned them by dreaming of the “cipher of sexual longing. With his fingers he traced the contours of my aging face lovingly, a tenderness that flooded me with sweetness. . . . Then, as I stood there in the curious orbit of their wings, they began to touch me with their fingers, to insinuate their warm fingers into my hair. It fell to my shoulders like water.”

In fact, throughout these stories many of the fairies are men; nurturing, life-giving, mysterious and magical. They visit, they reawaken; it is only in the last story, when a woman watches as her new lover stares at another woman, that we are reminded of their ordinary, pain-inducing abilities. And then, of course, longing seems much safer.