The title story in Fools for Love, Helen Schulman’s urgent, funny, and wistful new collection, features a young heroine married to a sexually omnivorous actor, Miguel Herrera. In one scene, the wife, as part of the audience, realizes that the ardor she witnesses on stage as he spars with his male lover and scene partner, Angel, is all too real. She vicariously feels its magic and she’s willing to champion it, even when its heat shines on others. Schulman’s description of the young wife’s reaction, looking back at the magnetism between her soulmate and someone else, equally in thrall, is wrenching:
… at this point in my life I don’t know if I’d wish it on anyone, but back then there was no denying the jealousy and exhilaration we in the audience felt while witnessing their A‑train-coming-at-you brand of forbidden love. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that sexy, hot, rapturous action if they could have it, even momentarily, no matter what the cost? They were so goddamned alive in each other’s arms!
The narrator recounts this moment from the vantage point of decades passed and the security of a newer, safer, Waspier and straighter partner. Her sizzling Miguel has long since died of AIDS, and she is stranded in lukewarm middle age. But her soul, expressed in this passage, announces a theme for the rest of the stories: Love is alive even when it is part of the vanishing past, a defiant, inextinguishable spark among the ash-piles of convention and compromise.
Most of the stories in Schulman’s volume share this thrilling, rebellious tone. In “I Am Seventy-Five,” a woman is slowly invigorated by her late husband’s secret sex diaries. Though he seemed somewhat tame, his raunchy and varied past comes to blazing life and rouses the widow, first to revenge, and then to her own rollicking sexual coloratura. It is never too late, as she herself discovers. Societal norms have no dominion over primal desire, nor does death. In “P.S.,” a tragically deceased teen lover returns to life decades later, embodied in another form, familiar, strange, and now partial to women twice his age; “In a Better Place” revives the horny nature of the narrator’s own late father, posthumously gobbling a tower of “treyf in Normandy with a lithe African ‘lady friend.’” Even toddlers, those embodiments of fascistic, irrational will, refuse to be suppressed in the Schulman canon: “The Memoirs of Lucien” hilariously gives life to the inner monologue of an id-ruled mini-tyrant.
With both visions and revisions and a constant battle between restlessness and resignation, Helen Schulman’s new collection makes willing fools for love of us all. Her wild inner heart reaches out to our own, and as she says, “who wouldn’t want a piece of that?”
