Cava Vena
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Excerpt
Cava from the Latin cave, pit, hole, hollow. Vena from the Latin vein, root, via (road), venenum (venom). Cava vena. Vena cava. A hollow road into the first chamber of the heart, carrying old blood, used blood, maroon in color, tinted purple. Venom.
She hasn’t heard from him in weeks. He hasn’t heard from her in weeks. They’ve entered a cold war of sorts. Pride? Obstinance? The runway ending, as it was supposed to, but still, but why. He could be dead, for all she knows. She hopes not, but say he choked on his own cigarette, or were struck by lightning, or drowned—she, the much better swimmer, he, with the compromised lung capacity—would she go to the funeral, shake his wife’s hand, say, you don’t know me, wife, but I knew your husband, and we swam together, poorly? The last time they saw each other was at a small resort by the ocean, a few months ago, at the end of summer. Somehow, they’d found a thirty-six-hour window. Their respective spouses, children, taken care of for thirty-six hours. The NYTimes headline in her mind: 36 hours on a Fling: Dos and Don’ts. Do fabricate a work trip. Do rent separate cars. Do use a secret credit card or straight up cash. Do not be seen.
Weike Wang
Weike Wang is the author of Chemistry (Knopf 2017), Joan is Okay (Random House 2022) and Rental House (Riverhead 2024). She is the recipient of a PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Best American Short Stories and has won an O. Henry Prize. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Barnard College.
Patrick Ryan on “Cava Vena”
There are many different kinds of affairs. There are affairs of the heart, affairs of the mind, affairs of the body—and affairs that threaten to devour your life. The unnamed main character of our new issue is involved in an affair of the latter sort—one she’s maintained for the past two years, with a colleague at medical conferences. Both work in the field of “medical liaison,” informing doctors of new heart medicines. Twice a year, they leave their families to attend a conference, meet up in secret, and hide away while they enjoy each other’s company. Sometimes in hats and sunglasses, in case they’re spotted by someone they know.
I imagine such an affair to be like an hourglass: you can turn it over when it’s about to run out, but before long it’ll be about to run out again. How many times can you turn the glass?
The sands are running out for Wang’s character, and she knows she has a decision to make: turn the hourglass over or let the last grain fall. We invite you to step into Weike Wang’s “Cava Vena,” an inventive and entertaining story that reads in part like a medical pamphlet, and in part like a meditation on love—not for another person, but, ultimately, for the self.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for this story?
- WW: I was rereading Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. After that, I read, for the first time, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Talk about affairs being bad ideas. I was also going through a period of losing some significant friends. Losing any relationship is a heartbreak. As an only child who moved around a lot and doesn’t have close family ties, I invest so much of myself into a new friend that to lose them even partially, let alone entirely, hurts me more than that person will ever know.
- PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- WW: One month. I had been thinking about the story for a few months prior though.
- PR: Can you say a little about your decision to weave into the narrative short passages of medical information about the heart? Did you experiment with different ways to incorporate it? And was that part of your original vision for the story?
- WW: Yes. At first, the characters were economists, and then I realized (a very helpful reader helped me realize) that the science sections didn’t really make sense. How would macroeconomists know anything about the heart? So, it was natural to make the characters part of the medical field in some capacity. I didn’t want to make them cardiologists—too on the nose—so medical communication seemed the most apt.
- PR: At one point, midway into the story, the narrator says, “[…] there was the fantasy, and the fantasy was cancer.” I find that metaphor fascinating. Can you say a little about how it functions?
- WW: I have always found that the stories I can’t get away from, that I can’t not write (because writing is the disease), start with a sentence that anchors in my mind. In some ways, this sentence is the cancer. Because it leads to another, then another, and then, ultimately, the vast fictional world of what if. When I can’t get rid of the idea, the growth, the only fix is to write the story down/cut it out. I imagine if I were in an affair (I am not), I would get very caught up in what could be and let this fantasy overtake me.
- PR: Are you hopeful for your protagonist’s prospects at the end of the story?
- WW: The protagonist will move on. But the affair is over. She won’t forget the man, but they are through.
- PR: What are you currently working on?
- WW: Nothing! I finished Rental House, and since then, I have mostly been puttering around with paragraphs. I was able to turn one paragraph into a flash fiction though recently. Coming out with The New Yorker hopefully in August. It is about a mother-minotaur, a mother-taur in a maze.
- PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- WW: “Write to your smartest friend.” – Sigrid Nunez, my friend and teacher extraordinaire. And READ, that is my advice to all my students. Please, please, read broadly and wildly. Find out what you like and dislike. You can’t find your own voice without reading others. You can’t reject the canon without seeing it.
