Praise for small acts of sex and electricity
“Haines skillfully creates a tenuous idyll that’s reminiscent of sections of Ann Patchett’s ‘Bel Canto’ or even Rebecca West’s ‘The Return of the Soldier’—here we have the same blissful menage, based on impossible circumstances that carry the seeds of their own destruction.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle
“The closed doors, crackling tension and heady atmospherics imbue small acts of sex and electricity with a welcome subtlety that is often missing in novels about female friendships. And Haines, rather than succumb to the pitfalls of the token happy ending, has followed the wise advice of Chekov: ‘When you want to touch a reader’s heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief, as it were, a background against which it stands out in greater relief.’”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“A lyrical, earnest second novel . . . touching . . . [a] sexy summer read.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Haines skillfully uses flashbacks and rapid-fire dialogue to make and keep things credible as Mattie takes over Jane’s life in this oddly compelling tale of loss . . . and losing detachment.”
—Booklist
“Whether Lise Haines’s characters are doing needlepoint, or playing miniature golf, or exchanging lives, they are fiercely intelligent, provocatively funny, and profoundly aware of the complexities of love and friendship. As small acts of sex and electricity joyfully reminds us, here is an author who writes like no one else. Our world is the richer for her glittering work.”
—Margot Livesey
“[S]wells with the sounds of the Pacific Ocean and imagery so vivid and unique that the reader will be as entranced with the sights and sounds as with the introspective and complex issues of relationships the novel addresses. A normal day at the beach with ‘pelicans diving into the ocean’ is in vivid contrast to ‘all the rooms of Jane’s psychic house . . . though I thought I knew where the worms were buried . . . I ripped up her lawn and laid the pink bodies of childhood end to end.’ The controversial and moral issues are ripe for mature book club discussion and self-discovery.”
—The Book Report.com
“A strange, sexual and dark look at personal bonds and friendship. . . . It’s a destructively interesting plot, as motherhood, sexuality, aging and honor all come into play. Haines . . . stylistically separates herself from book-of-the-month clubs with her avoidance of quotation marks and her deliberate stutter-start prose, matter-of-fact in its form and ideas. small acts of sex and electricity . . . breezes by in moments and finds in its characters the unrecognizable places that do, in fact, exist.”
—NewCity Chicago
“Lise Haines’s wonderful new novel, small acts of sex and electricity, holds the reader enthralled from beginning to end as it explores the boundaries of sex, love and friendship. Very few writers could have pulled off the twists and turns within these relationships with such grace and strength.”
—Jill McCorkle
“It’s a situation fraught with all the best kinds of literary tension: sexual infidelity, children’s resentment, and the inevitable showdown between pals-turned-competitors. The relationship between Mattie and Jane is complex and believable. . . . Haines’s cryptic style has its appeal, and she aims an observant eye at life’s oddities.”
—Library Journal
small acts of sex and electricity
small acts of sex and electricity
lise haines
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Denver, Colorado
Copyright © 2006 Lise Haines
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haines, Lise.
Small acts of sex and electricity / Lise Haines.
p. cm.
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-932961-27-0
Hardcover ISBN-10: 1-932961-27-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-932961-43-0
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Women—Family
relationships—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.A545S63 2006
813’.6–dc22 2006015449
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book Design by SH•CV
Originally published as an Unbridled Books hardcover.
First paperback edition, 2007.
to Sienna, Charis and Ben
one
I found Mike passed out on the master bed, curled on his side, the covers down around the floor. Maybe he had kicked them off. Sometimes he and Jane slept that way. There was a tiny pool of moisture where the tip of his penis touched the bedding, a dimple at the base of his spine. He had a very long back. Spider veins just below his ankles. Mike was losing hair in a circle at the back of his head, in the same spot where a man of God shaves his skull.
To get to him, I had inched down the hall, past the clock room where their daughters, Livvy and Mona, slept. Locking the door behind me in case they got up, I stood by the blue dust ruffle. I was supposed to wake Mike and tell him that Jane, his wife, my oldest friend, had just left him. She had driven off in Franny’s Jaguar.
I wondered how Mike would talk with Livvy and Mona. I wasn’t sure what I’d say. Livvy, the older girl, was the one who worried me. No one would be awake for hours.
Mike’s voice bubbled up but made no sense. Refined alcohol came with each of his exhalations, the occasional choked snore. His face animated and relaxed. I wanted to be with Mike in that raw, unkempt state. But I knew how many cables there are in the elevator shafts of the Empire State Building and how long it takes for a body to hit the sidewalk if you jump from the roof. And I was aware, as I stood by the side of the bed, that I could screw up in so many ways, up or down. It was hard to know where Mike would land if he jumped.
To get my head on the pillow, I nudged him a little. He knew how to breathe from his diaphragm even in his sleep. I touched the spot over his missing appendix, surprised that he didn’t wake, and curled into his back. Then froze. I heard a boat move through the water, close to the house.
I made a ring out of my left thumb and forefinger and fitted it around his penis. He stiffened and angled and his hips moved in what appeared to be deep REM sleep. His back twitched a little. I waited, as if a horn or bell would go off, signaling the start of my trade with Jane.
I slipped my hand away and put it under my ribs to feel my irregular heartbeat. I thought about basic survival, considered social membranes, tried to review one of those rules that keep people in check. The house sounded like an engine cooling. If I just shut my eyes