The marriage of a particular audience member implodes during the performance of a same-sex version of Fool for Love, the Sam Shepard play that gives Helen Schulman’s short-story collection Fools for Love its name. Contained within the book’s covers is ample evidence, if such evidence were needed, that fools give their hearts much too soon.
The shattered spectator in question, one Anna Herrera—the narrator of the collection’s title story—will set the scene of woe for you. “Many moons ago, my beloved husband, Miguel Herrera—have you heard of him?—gave an earthshaking performance in an event space in the East Village…. The room was full…. In that moment maybe for the first and last time in my life, I knew I was exactly where I should be: on the top floor of a tenement near Avenue A, in this magical little bird’s nest of creativity, married to a brilliant, handsome man who was crazy about me.
“I still believe all this to be true.”
Of course she does. Like pretty much all the other characters who populate Fools for Love, Anna is a dab hand at denial. In the tragicomic “The Revisionist” (which became the basis of Schulman’s 1998 novel of the same name), David Hershleder, a proudly assimilated Jewish neurologist who marvels at his blessings—“the shiksa wife, the children raised on Christmas, bacon in their breakfast, mayonnaise spread across their Wonder bread”—can’t seem to grasp the quite basic fact that when something is over, it’s over.
In “P.S.,” which formed the basis for Schulman’s 2001 novel of the same name, and “In a Better Place,” people return from the dead, a situation that is treated with utter (self-serving) credulity by the stories’ protagonists.
Many of Schulman’s characters have a perfectly good life, sometimes a life that’s a good bit beyond perfectly good. But you know what? They want more—love from people who either can’t or won’t give it, more attention, more sex, better sex.
This insatiable hunger certainly doesn’t make them admirable, and considering how far some of them push things, it doesn’t always make them relatable. However, it does make them fun to read about. Consider Mirra, a divorce lawyer and the narrator of “Parents’ Night,” who is gobsmacked to see her shiftless, improvident former husband, Mike, at a cocktail party for incoming parents at her daughter’s fancy Upper East Side school “amid a sea of ophthalmologic surgeons and hedge fund guys. He was wearing black jeans, a Brioni sports jacket, leather moccasins, and get this: shades, inside.”
He was still attractive, Mirra notes, “but thicker. Like someone had put his handsome face on the copier and pressed Enlarge.” Despite that extra weight, despite the presence of Mirra’s arbitrageur husband, Armand, “whose name sounds like what he is, jewelry you can wear,” despite the presence of Mike’s Chanel-clad wife, when Mike suggests the two of them have a cigarette on the rooftop playground, Mirra is all in.
“I was a secret smoker too,” she thinks. “Me and my secrets. Like the cocaine in my lipstick case…. Like the fact that a tour guide had told us the play-terrace door automatically locked at night. I’d already known that once we were alone and outside the party we couldn’t be able to get back inside that building.
“‘Let’s go,’ I said.
“‘You’re on,’ he said.
“There was no turning back, after that.”
While the pieces in Fools for Love are connected primarily by the collection’s theme, a few characters get encores. Anna Herrera and Mirra are the focus of two stories. Some, like Dr. Hershleder, star in their own tales but are alluded to in others. The ineffable Mirra comes in for a mention in “I Am Seventy-Five,” an account of her mother Lily’s early days as a widow. Let’s just say the apple doesn’t fall far.
Two stories about diabolical toddlers are one too many, and the farcical “My Best Friend” is less funny than effortful. But the title story wonderfully captures a time and place—downtown Manhattan in the 80s. The standout of the collection, the piercingly lovely “The Shabbos Goy,” an account of a married Orthodox rabbi and a Gentile divorcée who meet on the streets of Paris and form a deep—brief—bond that includes reading and quoting Russian poetry to each other, feels fully developed and fully inhabited.
Even in the stories that don’t quite hit the mark, a sly wit is at work. Schulman writes of a woman’s recollection of her newlywed apartment, in a sketchy part of the Upper West Side, “amid the drug dealers and the prostitutes, the opera singers and the social workers.” In another instance, “Lily had thanked God for it; or better yet, God’s secular equivalent (luck).” She observes elsewhere that “theater people love to speak simply; it’s an inverse pretension” and that “envy is the fentanyl of the human heart.”
Schulman may not spare her characters what they have coming, but she feels for them. That counts for a lot.
Joanne Kaufman is a New York–based journalist and critic
