This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Debra Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Tessa Hadley read her story The Maths Shooter from the July 24th, 2023 issue of The magazine.

Hadley has published 12 books of fiction, including The Novel's Free Love in the Past, and the story collections, Bad Dreams, and After The Funeral, which came out this month.

She's a winner of the 2016 Wyndham Campbell Literature Prize. Now here's Tessa Hadley.

The Maths Shooter

In her 30s, Lorraine was unfaithful once or twice. She didn't tell her husband. Quentin owed her, she reckoned, in that long accounting of pluses and minuses which is marriage.

owed her, not only because he was unfaithful too, although he certainly had been, she didn't doubt it and more than once or twice, but also because he was impossible.

He was one of those impossible men, attractive, but also sleazy, in a way that was more popular than in the 80s and 90s than it is now.

He was long-limbed and super skinny, fizzing and jigging and restless with energy, his ugly sharp face a light with cleverness and mockery of everything.

Nowadays, he wouldn't get away with it.

Quentin didn't once, not ever, attend any of the parents evenings at their children's schools, or cook a meal for the family, or use the vacuum cleaner.

If he took the children out, it was on some crazy, risky adventure, not to buy shoes. Usually, anyway, he was high on some illegal substance or another.

When Lorraine thought of him, that was how she pictured him, deep in concentration, his long hair falling forward around his face dipped to the toque, his hand cupped around the lighter flame, his greasel long fingers stained with nicotine.

Sometimes, he fried up steaks with herbs and wine when they had friends round to eat and everyone was amazed by his culinary skills, it was also delicious.

He paid a fortune once. At a time when there was so short of money, for a good suit lined in purple silk sewn by a tailor who made suits for the rolling stones,

Why shouldn't Lorraine have her bit of pleasure?

Her affairs buoyed her up when the reality of her days was mostly the slog of childcare, worrying about the children's happiness and rushing around, picking up plates and toys and dirty clothes from the floor before she went off to work.

Quentin was a musician. He knew a lot of people and got to play keyboards with some of the old 60s bands still on the scene and some of the punk bands.

But it was Lorraine's steady modest income as an administrator in the admissions office at a polytechnic that kept the wolf from the door.

But the wolf wasn't at the door she thought then with that sort of grimly satisfied righteous outrage, it was too easy to get addicted to.

The wolf was inside the house. She put the wolf's clothes in the washing machine and nursed him when he was sick.

The wolf slept beside her in the marital bed, so she helped herself to her affairs in a spirit of compensation.

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