Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Stories by François Camoin
Series: The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
Copyright Date: 1984
Published by: University of Georgia Press
Pages: 164
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46nf27
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Book Info
Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Book Description:

The tie that binds men and women, that makes men do absurd things that they will very likely be sorry for later, is at the center of this prize-winning collection of stories. There is, for example, Jack Segal, who is thirty-six and who owns a record store on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica and who has fallen in love-badly and madly in love-with the fourteen-yearold daughter of his friend Katzman. Segal can't think. He eats, but it doesn't taste like anything. He drives the freeways, floats above the city lights, and finds himself almost wishing that the Great Quake would come and solve everything for him. Some of Camoin's characters are running: Diehl, from the necessity of finishing his second novel, of deciding once and for all the fate of its central character, who may be Diehl himself; the jogger-narrator of the story "Peacock Blue," from the pain of his life ("What lucky fools marathon runners are. They run for joy."); Loveman, to El Paso and a hustler's dream of paradise that turns into something else.

eISBN: 978-0-8203-4589-5
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. [i]-[viii])
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. [ix]-[x])
  3. Miami
    Miami (pp. 1-13)

    My wife Marge is lying on the bed with her sweater pulled up around her neck and her pants rolled down to her ankles. Her belly rises, tight as a beach ball.

    “Touch it,” she says.

    What was God thinking about when he made us like this? She’s a good person, but all this love, all this touching we seem to need. I’ve got on my new white suit I bought yesterday, and I feel like a fool. I’m not rational this morning, and it’s getting worse by the minute. I don’t know how to tell her.

    “You don’t believe...

  4. It Could Happen
    It Could Happen (pp. 14-39)

    Segal slumps at the table, eyes more than half closed, thinking he’d rather be home. His head feels like the inside of a soggy sandwich. Across from him Korda holds the deck almost hidden in one big hand, knuckles folded over the cards. Next to him Katzman waits for the deal. Katzman’s eyes are a little crazy; he loves poker, loves to win big. The new player looks at the deuce of clubs lying on the table in front of him and frowns. Segal can’t quite remember his name—it’s a color, he thinks. White? Green? Whatever his name is,...

  5. Peacock Blue
    Peacock Blue (pp. 40-50)

    When I was twelve years old and a good deal more certain about the world than I am now, my father bought me a used three-speed Raleigh bicycle; I took it down to the basement we shared with the Schades and painted it peacock blue.

    Schade and his wife were very old now but they had managed to have two children late in life, in a final spurt of fertility before the good times passed forever. Georgia Schade, who later became my wife, was eleven; her brother Joseph, the last of the last, was nine. There had been another child,...

  6. Diehl: The Wandering Years
    Diehl: The Wandering Years (pp. 51-66)

    In the end Diehl went back to Santa Barbara. He drove the Datsun up the coast highway from Oceanside, through Los Angeles, Ventura, and Oxnard; he listened to the radio and watched the surfers in their black suits, bobbing in the water, waiting for the wave. It was late February and Diehl planned to be gone from California before the calendar rolled into March. He visualized it like an old movie cut: the little square pages of days fluttering and tearing themselves away, blown out of the picture. Out beyond the surfers he could see the drilling platforms standing in...

  7. A Special Case
    A Special Case (pp. 67-78)

    Harry Caudill studied his naked self in the mirror. He had imperceptibly turned into a fat man. A fat man in a strange place, he thought; he felt Ohio all about him, surrounding the cottage he rented from Marvella, pressing on the walls. A wooden clacking from the weather vane on the roof signaled a shift in the Ohio wind. Being away from home made him feel out of sorts; even after nearly six months at Goshen College as poet-in-residence he was still having trouble reconciling himself to this place. It was the winding roads, the trees and grass everywhere,...

  8. Home Is the Blue Moon Cafe
    Home Is the Blue Moon Cafe (pp. 79-91)

    Used to be I liked the Texas heat, but I don’t anymore, so I stepped inside quick. The swamp cooler was making its same stupid whang-whang-whang noise it had been making two years ago, the day I left. Everything else hadn’t changed either. The booths with the high backs, the bar, the flypaper, the yellow walls were the same. The way the electric light fell across the stools and lay across the floor in patches and streaks was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen.

    Estrellita came out of the ladies’ room; I laid down my duffel bag and waited for...

  9. The Amelia Barons
    The Amelia Barons (pp. 92-104)

    In the picture I keep in my head my father wears his old blue windbreaker unzipped to the waist. On the back, between his shoulders, is printed a knight’s helmet with a drooping plume; under the helmet, in Gothic capitals, is the name of the team my dad coached, the Amelia Barons. He is bald on top already; he’s shorter than most of the high school boys who stand around him waiting to get into the game. He paces the sidelines and hunches forward to guide a falling football which I remember is going to be tipped high in the...

  10. A Hunk of Burning Love
    A Hunk of Burning Love (pp. 105-114)

    Gene is already there when I come through the door of the New Deal Cafe and Bar. There’s a sausage speared on the end of his fork and he’s waving it in Rita’s face. Gene’s a fat man but a long way from jolly; he can in fact be mean as a snake if you give him half a chance. His hat is on the stool beside him, upside down with his work gloves folded in it. This morning we’ll be digging postholes for a new fence in old man Hazzard’s pasture.

    “This sausage looks more like a dog turd,”...

  11. La Vida
    La Vida (pp. 115-128)

    Lunchtime. Loveman comes down off his roof. He looks back up, sees the peak of the house he built, and past that the Oregon sky: woolly clouds that remind him of the state university sheep that graze endlessly in the field down the road. Dumb beasts with stenciled numbers on their backs. Loveman hates sheep, for that matter hates this country Rachel insisted on discovering. He wishes he was back in New York.

    He takes two steps and trips on a rock no bigger than a gooseturd. Hammer and hatchet hung from his belt punch him in the kidneys and...

  12. Cheerful Wisdom
    Cheerful Wisdom (pp. 129-137)

    “Listen now, honey. I am about to tell you the God’s simple truth about all this, from the start to the finish. No lies.”

    My wife watches me across the kitchen table with sleepy eyes. She has hair rich as cream. Skin like a baby’s behind, for all that she’s my age. A miracle, I mean. Titties I’d die for. But right this second I tell myself: don’t touch. It’s about six in the morning, I suppose; I left my watch someplace. The kitchen looks about the same as it did three days ago, only worse: dishes smeared with fossil...

  13. Sometimes the Wrong Thing Is the Right Thing
    Sometimes the Wrong Thing Is the Right Thing (pp. 138-150)

    The other six nights at the Joker belong to the semiprofessional eighteen-year-olds with too much breast, too little hip, and all the assurance in the world, flashy girls with hard little asses no bigger than volleyballs, who strut their stuff, roll their eyes at the men, and end up being about as sexy as Shirley Temple. But on Saturday, starting at seven and going on as long as the supply of volunteers holds out, it’s these other women. They are generally older, in their late twenties or even thirties, and they have real bodies. Bodies that have seen more of...

  14. Back Matter
    Back Matter (pp. 151-152)
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