NINE WOMEN

A writer recalls encounters that he has had with various women in Tedeschi’s short story collection.

In early 1970s New York City, writer Michael Rhodes sits in a cafe observing women at another table, “writing vigorously” in his notebook. He tees up the rest of this story collection by wondering, “Is even the encounter with the woman at the coffee bar in Soho real or imagined, as the central character in a story I said I might one day write?” In the stories that follow, Rhodes recounts his interactions with various women, including a rich college classmate’s striving lower-class girlfriend, Siobhan Leary, whom he sleeps with once then meets again decades later; his troubled first wife, Aldina Connor, a woman he met and briefly married while serving as a United States Air Force officer during the Vietnam War; and Laura Brennan, a policeman’s wife with whom he had an affair in suburbia after his divorce. He describes other connections he made, sexual and otherwise, while on assignment as a writer in Haiti and Costa Rica and as a cruise ship dance instructor. Tereza Grymes, a woman in the British Virgin Islands, reads Rhodes’ palm in a way that presages the final story in the collection, about Rhodes and his childhood best friend, in which they react to a schoolmate’s tragedy and experience later-in-life reunion. Tedeschi’s collection calls to mind the Fellini film 8 ½with its spotlight on women influencing a creative artist’s life. Some of Rhodes’ musings are more tantalizing than revelatory, leaving the reader wishing for more information about his “other semi-successful marriage.” Yet even the more fleeting encounters included here are memorable, including one with Gabby, a misunderstood young woman Rhodes met in Haiti who “managed to expose me as the lead character in my own story and definitely not a sympathetic one.”

Imaginative, introspective explorations of the impact of women on one writer’s journey.