Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

There’s a tradition of books that have managed to survive their working titles: Something That Happened became Of Mice and Men , The Inside of His Head became Death of a Salesman, Trinalchio in West Egg became The Great Gatsby. My book was in that company, thanks only to its inept working title, Farewell to Welfare . I had intended to dedicate it to Felice and Starla, but after Starla’s death, the book was published without a dedication. It was my first and, I now thought, possibly my only book, one from which I felt increasingly dissociated. Back when I’d started on it, I had felt there was so much that needed to be recorded in the plain language that people spoke on the street, a language real and by nature subversive, in opposition to the sanitized bureaucratic jargon of the case reports I had to file. But since Starla’s death, I hadn’t written a word.

At each university that spring, once free of obligation, I’d wait for Lise to arrive. The anticipation was a kind of foreplay. She’d fly in and we’d spend my honorarium on a weekend in a hotel as if we’d won at the track and the college towns were our Bouzy. In North Carolina it was the Grove Park Inn in the mountains near Asheville, where Scott Fitzgerald stayed when he’d visit Zelda. In D.C. we slept on a rickety antique bed at a place that referred to itself as an inn where, Lise agreed, the operative word was indeed quaint . At Berkeley we drove down the coast to the Vision Perch, a bed-and-breakfast in Big Sur.

The school that invited me to Miami had a deal with the Fontainebleau for housing guests. Late in the evening after my reading, I called Lise from the hotel. When she asked about the room, I told her I was stretched out on a bed surrounded by floor-to-ceiling marbled mirrors, and was at risk of being inhabited by a spirit who called himself the Angel Frankie.

“Well, then, should you come down with another attack of prosopagnosia before I get there tomorrow, I’ll expect a spirited rendition of ‘Strangers in the Night,’” she said. “Maybe I’ll show up with something to share in return.”

“I’m not kidding about the bed being surrounded by mirrors.”

“I’m not kidding, either, Jack,” she said.

While I waited for her, I had a Friday to swim in the ocean. The weather when I’d left Michigan was spring in name only. In Miami, the summery light seemed tangible enough to blow about like the rattling palm fronds. I woke too early for breakfast. The surf was audible from the boardwalk and the all-but-deserted beach was open despite the wind. I ignored the single red flag that warned of rip currents, since I planned to swim parallel to the shore once I was beyond the breakers.

I wasn’t prepared for how quickly it swept me out. I remembered reading that even strong swimmers, exhausted by fighting a rip, drowned, but that if you resisted the panicky urge to swim against the pull, sooner or later the current released you. This one showed no intention of letting me go. I rode it, testing constantly whether I could swim back toward shore, and feeling flooded by mortality, as if the real danger of drowning were from the undertow within. I had no proverbial flashbacks of scenes from my life, only an eerily calm recognition of the obliteration that lurked at the center of each moment—moments I’d taken for granted. That awareness—however fleeting—was a reminder of the privilege of each breath. Lise would be arriving later that day and I desperately wanted to live, if only to learn what would become of us.

I waded ashore shaky from exertion and far down the beach from where I’d spread my towel. I lay on the warm sand, catching my breath beneath gulls yipping as they Holy Ghosted against the wind. I was ravenously hungry but couldn’t move. A squadron of pelicans crash-landed where fish must have been schooling beyond the breakers. On Central time, Lise would be up early, grading papers, still hours from leaving for O’Hare. I couldn’t imagine Felice, not without wondering if she was still alive. Those trips to County Hospital with her to visit Starla seemed farther and farther away, a distance Felice could never allow herself to accept. She had written the previous November that she could no longer bear seeing me because I’d once made it seem as if the impossible were possible for her, and she hoped for my sake that, should there be a next time, I’d be better at recognizing the difference between the two, as it was cruel and dangerous not to. She had tucked the letter in a perfumed black nylon stocking and folded it into a paperback copy of The Great Gatsby— one of the many books I’d given her. That was her last letter to me.

Lise arrived that evening with her satchel of freshman themes and new strappy green heels. We went to Little Havana for dinner and drank too many mojitos as if, beyond our usual shared celebration, we each had some private cause for getting drunk. It seemed hilarious when I forgot where I’d parked the nondescript rental car; neither of us was sober enough to drive anyway. We caught a cab to the hotel and walked out along the beach to clear our heads. A massive cruise ship sketched in electricity passed slowly beneath a low-slung moon. Lise, her dress hiked for wading in the surf, lost a shoe. I was sure the rip had carried it off and tried drunkenly to describe how, when I’d been swept out that morning, I had wanted to live to see her again. She pressed a finger to my lips. “Baby,” she said, “you had a revelation. I had one, too.” She told me she’d been waiting for the right time to tell me that a week earlier, while Rey was on a buying trip, they’d decided during a long-distance call to end it.

“Stunned silence?” she asked.

“You caught me by surprise. I hope I didn’t pressure you.”

“Not to be forward, but that’s not quite the desired response.”

I woke to dazzling brightness. Lise had drawn the drapes on the morning. She was naked, her small, up-tilted breasts momentarily striped with the shadows of the slats of the blinds she was hoisting. The mirrored walls threw back a likeness of sea and sky, and the room filled with the expanse of the horizon. Our reflections appeared superimposed on light and water.

“Look at them, still young,” Lise said. “Don’t forget their faces.”

* * *

By early summer I had lucked into the place up north on a spring-fed lake small enough to swim across, and clean enough for loons. The cottage connected to a dock perched at water’s edge in a sunlit clearing at the end of a two-track gravel road that crossed a culvert for a trout stream before emerging from the ferny woods.

The sink pumped silver-tasting well water. The shower was a head outside; there was no stall. And no Internet—there wasn’t even a phone; cell reception was spotty. A chipped white enamel table; wooden folding chairs with green canvas seats; a blue corduroy couch; a bed whose wire headboard twined like the morning-glory vines that laced the porch screens; a pine writing desk supporting an Underwood typewriter, which seemed as archaic as the kerosene lamp that drew luna moths to the porch. Some nights we’d unroll sleeping bags there on the porch and fall asleep to the lap of water.

The college that hired me expected publication. I had applied for a few positions abroad in case my appointment wasn’t renewed, including a Fulbright to Trinidad, but that was before meeting Lise. In graduate school, I’d published some freelance features, the best of them about a Michigan vintner determined to make champagne. The winter day I visited his winery, our interview was punctuated by the sound of bottles dangerously exploding in the cellar—as they continued to explode for months to come. I thought now of trying a feature again that I might sell to a magazine like Michigan Out-of-Doors , anything just to reconnect with language and get myself writing. I needed a subject that wasn’t a city. Weren’t there subjects enough for books on one small Michigan lake?—fish, frogs, ferns, wildflowers, mushrooms, the sandhill cranes that announced themselves on arriving punctually each noon, the resident loons? How many lakes were named for loons? I thought of writing about how lakes came to be named. There had to be stories behind the names. The article could open with a list that read like a line in a poem: Loon, Crystal, Mud, Bullfrog, Rainy, Devils, Little Panache, Souvenir, Gogebic (an Indian name meaning “where rising trout make small rings”). Or I could write about what had become of the Native Americans who had lived here when Hemingway was a boy, or about the environmental changes to the rivers since he had fished them. He’d fished the nearby Black River, but his famous story “Big Two-Hearted River” is set in the Upper Peninsula, and actually it was the Fox, not the Two-Hearted, that he’d fished there. The story wouldn’t have been the same had he called it “Fox River.”