Published by

AST, Moscow

Oceanida, Greece

Bellona, Poland

and in Bulgaria, Norway, Serbia, Albania, Lithuania

Rights aquired by

Eurasian Press, Taiwan

Jieli Publishing House, Beijing

The critics were impressed most of all with how successfully Toss has woven together elements from the genres of melodrama and thriller into an intelligent and exciting psychological novel with a very surprising ending. They were also pleased with how Toss managed to pull off the delicate, but definitely titillating erotic scenes that play such a large roll in the fantasies of this middle-aged woman without ever slipping into sticky sweetness or making them vulgar.

***

After having spent two years in a psychiatric clinic, Jackie had retreated to Maine to the little house on the sea, near the Canadian border, where she and her beloved Steve had often spent the weekends. But Steve is dead, as are two other men she had loved. Even here, in seclusion, she can’t escape the nightmare of thinking that she is to blame for the death of her lovers.

Except for the neighbor, farmer John, delivering groceries twice a week, not much happens in her life. Jackie can spend the whole day walking in the woods, or wrapped up in a blanket, sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, reading. And, of course, she has her memories of the ones with whom she had been so happy.

She had met Steve while she was still studying art. Perhaps he was not the best professor in the Linguistics Department, but his real talent was love. It soon became clear to them that they were made for each other. Jackie was the woman that Steve had always been waiting for, and he patiently formed her, both as a personality and as a woman. After a few years, however, he had to admit that Jackie had outgrown him, and that their love had become a straightjacket for someone like her who longed for new impressions and experiences. Once she had almost gotten involved with one of his colleagues. All their future held was the routine that would destroy their relationship. Then Jackie was offered a grant to study architecture in Florence. Steve encouraged her to grab hold of this opportunity, making her promise to write him regularly from Italy, but not to call, because the telephone would be only a temptation to insincerity and superficiality.

Jackie had already read all the books she could find in the house by the sea, but then, in the basement, she came across a manuscript, some short texts and novellas that were written on the topics of transitoriness and love. Perhaps they were an inheritance from the writer who had lived in the house before her. She started to read them.

Jackie has been living in Florence for some time now. She still writes Steve almost every day, and paints him a detailed picture of what happens to her and what moves her. She doesn’t even conceal her encounter with Dino, a stage actor, and the revelation she experiences during physical love making with him. Dino, with his elegant features, is very much different from her first lover. He is romantic and sensual and sensitive. She is afraid for him almost as if he were a child, and she is ready to make sacrifices for him. She even goes so far as to sleep with an older director, so that Dino can get the leading role in his new movie. But maybe she is deceiving herself. Maybe this older man can give her what she cannot get from Dino. Jackie gets a new offer, namely to be the lead architect for a grandiose project in Paris. She cannot imagine being separated from Dino, but he implores her to go to Paris. They agree that Jackie will only stay there for a year, and that, in the meantime, they will meet frequently and write.

Fall has begun in Maine, and Jackie has read her way deep into the mysterious manuscript. In some special way she feels moved by the novellas. One is the story of a world-famous doctor who is conducting a perverse experiment with talented scientists, artists and writers. He gives them a (false) diagnosis of cancer, and calculates exactly how many months they still have to live. Most of them subsequently start to arrange their affairs, but two of them, in the time supposedly left to them, achieve something greater than anything they have done before in their lives.

Another novella is set in a town where time does not exist. A third novella is about a man and a woman, who throughout the course of their lives keep meeting one another. During the times in between meetings they lose touch with one another and become strangers. A number of years later, when they both take a newly developed drug that can make the most important memory of your life come to life again, they come to the realization that both of them have essentially constantly been searching for each other.

The last novella is about a brilliant artist who lives in abject poverty. The gallery owner who handles his work prophesizes that he will become world-famous, but only after his death. The artist decides to take leave of life, and reaches an agreement with the gallery owner that half the sales price of all posthumous sales will go to a certain bank account. Decades go by. The artist’s pictures have been selling for enormous prices for a long time. One day, the gallery owner is approached by an old gentleman in a café. It appears to be the supposedly deceased artist, who has become terribly rich. In all the years, he has only managed to complete one painting, which has the title of “Emptiness.”

The year of separation is over. Jackie and Dino get together a few more times, but Jackie is absorbed by her job, and Dino cannot give up his theatre, and suddenly it is seven months later, during which time they have not seen each other. That sees the entrance of a new man into Jackie’s life. He is René, a race-car driver. His face is unusual, as if the individual pieces did not fit together, even though the combination of the disproportions seems to create a particular kind of harmony. For the first time she holds back in her letters to Steve with whom she still corresponds, omitting the risqué sexual details of this affair. Despite her fascination, she feels repelled by his brutality and malicious nature, even though he treats her very much differently. There is something in him that she has no control over. She cannot stand René’s friends or his job that constantly puts him in mortal danger, and she is afraid that she will begin to hate him at some point.

One day a letter comes from Dino: He is moving to Rome shortly and will let her know where to write once he’s settled in there. Then, when Jackie does not hear from him anymore, she is seized by a dreadful jealousy. She sits at home and hardly eats. Even the letters from Steve remain unopened. Weeks later she gets hold of Dino’s telephone number in Rome. She calls. A young woman answers. She enthusiastically tells Jackie that she and Dino are going to be married in a month. Jackie wants to go to Rome immediately, but René offers to drive down there himself and size up the situation. He finally calls her from Rome and reports that Dino and his new love are happy. Jackie is desperate, and René offers to see to it that Dino will not make her unhappy anymore. Her reply is silence. After the call, however, she feels uneasy and decides to fly to Rome. When she gets there, she learns that Dino has been run over by a car. Fear drives her away from René, and she flies to Boston, back to Steve. When she gets there, she learns that his yacht has been found in the ocean, drifting keel-up. In his good-bye letter, he had written her that his life had become senseless when she stopped writing to him. Jackie takes an overdose of sleeping pills, but survives the suicide attempt. Back in Paris, she is told that René was fatally injured in an auto accident on his way back from Rome.

The seclusion of the house by the sea did Jackie good. One morning she finds a package in front of her door. The package is not addressed to her, but to “J.B.” There are two books inside. They are both dedicated to “J.B.” The first book tells the story of her love for Dino. The second tells of her love for the race-car driver René. Who had written these books? The unknown author knew about Dino and René and maybe even about Steve. He also knew where Jackie was. She thinks that it is a psychopath who has been stalking her for years. Maybe it is the writer who lived here before her. Were the deaths of her three lovers so close together a coincidence? Is she next? Or does the psychopath intend to drive her insane? When she is surprised to find John standing on her doorstep the next morning, she panics and almost kills him with an ax. Jackie cannot stand the isolation anymore and flees to Boston to track down the murderer.

She begins looking for him by going to the two publishing houses that brought out his books, but nobody knows the real name of the author behind the pseudonym. Neither do they know if there is a third novel that might tell the story of Steve. She goes to the city library to search for dedications to “J.B.” among the new books of the past year, and she actually finds something.

She begins reading … it is her story and that of the three men in her life. It is the book that the reader has started reading: Fantasies of a Middle-aged Woman. In the second part of the novel, the author—none other than Steve—addresses her directly in the way that he had always done, as “Jackie Boy” (“J.B.”.) She learns that, as a young man, he had written a best-selling Western, and that it was soon clear that he could never repeat this success. He changed his name and took a teaching position in a small college. That is where he met Jackie. When she left him, he began to write again, and it was Jackie’s life that he wrote about. First he mapped out her meeting with Dino, and then (after a number of plastic surgeries and a crash course in Italian) he won her himself in the person of the actor.

When Jackie wrote Steve about her feelings for the older director, Steve understood that even Dino could not hold her. That led him to create a new hero, the manly race-car driver René (even though the facial surgery was not entirely successful). This was the first time that Jackie had withheld the intimate details of her life with her new lover from Steve, and Steve/René thought that he had mastered fate and that Jackie would be his forever. But when it seemed that he was losing her again, he decided to get out of her life and take all his avatars with him. All he needed for this was a bit of imagination, a girl to play Dino’s supposed bride on the phone, two bodies from the morgue that could not be identified after the accidents, and a drowning at sea, where the body would never be found.

This skillfully built novel begins with love and ends with three murders, yet the author defeats—just like the heroine with her fantasies—the reader’s expectations. And he conquers time. Just like the novellas that are introduced in the novel, this is a tale about time and an attempt to escape its grasp. Is it possible to begin a new life, and to live a number of lives within one life span? All the novellas among the manuscripts that Steve left in the house by the sea for Jackie to find, were intended to make her recognize his plan and to look at her own life with different eyes so that she would realize that it was not as real as it seemed. Jackie had led the life that he had written for her, but in the end, he leaves her to the future.