'Wife Shopping' by Steven Wingate

Stories

Steven Wingate

Mariner Books: 192 pp., $13.95 paper

ONE OF the cruelest ironies of modern letters is that so many books are written about male insecurity -- consider the oeuvres of Bellow and Updike, and work down from there -- and yet so few readers of serious fiction seem to be men.

This irony is especially piquant in the case of Steven Wingate's new story collection, "Wifeshopping." Trust me, fellas, even if you think you've been a bad boyfriend, the protagonists assembled here could teach you a thing or two about despicable conduct.

Nearly all are in the thrall of misguided wooing. They want sex (naturally) and companionship (to some vague extent), but mostly they want to bask in the glamorous notion that they are the marrying kind. It's almost sweet, really -- until it turns toxic.

Consider the restless composer in "Knuckles." He initiates a passionate affair with one of his neighbors, a woman mourning the loss of her child and husband. As he makes inroads into her fragile psyche, he wears his patience and loyalty like a snazzy new suit. But when the widow undertakes a gesture of grieving too public for his liking, he snaps.

"There was something intractable about her then," he tells us, "something implacable that I would never be able to understand or accept, and the love affair I thought we could have began to look weird. Began to look one-sided, with me constantly sacrificing my needs to accommodate her dead husband and son." His solution is to humiliate her, which drives her deeper into her grief.

Wingate specializes in such bruising moments. His characters are forever chasing their romantic delusions into narcissistic ruin. It never takes much for their rescuing desires to pivot into sadism.

The narrator of "Inside the Hole" has a pregnant fiancée with preeclampsia, a condition that makes carrying a baby to term difficult and dangerous. He wants to be the sort of guy who's going to stand by her.

But he's also repulsed by her anxiety. "Screw being afraid of her fear," he declares at one point. "I couldn't live like Nikki wanted me to, couldn't spend the rest of my life walking on eggshells to hide how I felt. Lying to myself and burning up inside, feeling bad just so my wife and kid wouldn't have to. I'd never make it, never be the kind of guy who stayed. It was in my genes like failure, like rot."