Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

He called on my birthday—our birthdays were days apart—to invite me up to Deep Lake to fish one last time. His grandfather had died years earlier and the family had decided to sell the cabin. When I asked how things were going, Cole paused, then said, I’m living my life like an opera. I knew he was speaking in code, something so uncharacteristic of him that it caught me by surprise. I waited for him to elaborate. Before the silence got embarrassing, he changed the subject.

We’d always fished after Labor Day when the summer people were gone. By then evenings were cool enough for a jacket. The woods ringing the lake were already rusting, the other cottages shuttered, the silence audible. Outboard engines were prohibited on Deep Lake, although the small trolling motor on the minister’s old wooden rowboat was legal. Cole fished walleye as his grandfather had taught: at night—some nights under a spangle of Milky Way, on others in the path of the moon, but also on nights so dark that out on the middle of the lake you could lose your sense of direction.

The night was dark like that. There was no dock light to guide us back, but the tubed stereo that had belonged to his grandfather glowed on the screened porch. Cole’s grandfather had had theories about fishing and music: one was that walleyes rose to saxophones. His jazz collection was still there, some of the same albums I’d sold in the record shop when I was eighteen. We chose Ballads by Ben Webster. The notes slurred across the water as I rowed out to the deep spot in the middle. Cole lowered the anchor, though it couldn’t touch bottom. I cracked the seal on a fifth of Jameson and passed it to Cole; tradition demanded that I arrive with a bottle. We’d had a lot of conversations over the years, waiting for the fish to bite.

I been staying at the cabin since we last talked, Cole said.

What’s going on? I asked.

Remember I told you I was living life like an opera? You didn’t say boo, but I figured you got my meaning, seeing you’d used the phrase yourself. Never know who’s listening in. Cole laughed as if kidding, but, given the surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr., he worried about wiretaps.

Cole, I said, I never used that phrase.

Where do you think I got it? he asked.

Not from me.

Maybe you forgot saying it, he said, maybe you finally forgot who you said it about. Anyway, whoever said it, I’m at a fund-raiser in Ann Arbor, everyone dressed so they can wear running shoes except for a woman I can’t help noticing. You know me, it’s not like I’m looking—just the opposite—there’s always someone on the make if you’re looking. She’s out of Vogue. I hate misogynist rap, man, but plead guilty to thinking: rich bitch—which I regret when she comes up with my book and a serious camera that can’t hide something vulnerable about her. Photojournalist , her card reads, and could she take one of me signing my book, and I say, sure, if she promises not to steal my soul, and she smiles and asks if she can make a donation to the school, and how could she get involved beyond just giving money, and where’s my next talk, and do I have time for a drink? Two weeks later at a conference in D.C. she’s there with Wizards tickets. And this time I go—we go to the game. In Boston it’s the symphony, in Philly I show her places I lived in college and take her to the Clef, where ’Trane played, and in New York we go to the Met. I’d never been to an opera; we go three nights in a row. Was I happy—happiness isn’t even the question. Remember running a race—thirteen-point-seven-nine seconds you’ve lived for, and when the gun finally fires and you’re running, you disappear—like playing music those few times when you’re more the music than you? She could make that happen again. One night, I’m home working late, Mina’s already asleep, and the phone in my office rings. I’d never given her that unlisted home number. You need to help me, she says, and the line goes dead. Phone rings again. Where are you? I ask. Trapped in a car at the edge, she says. Her calls keep getting dropped, her voice is slurred: Come get me before I’m washed away. I keep asking her, Where are you? Finally she says: Jupiter Beach—I drove to see the hurricane. I say, You’re a thousand miles away. The phone goes dead, rings, and Mina asks, Who keeps calling this time of night? She’s in her nightgown, leaning in the doorway for I don’t know how long. Too long for lies. I answer the phone, but no one’s there.

She have a husband? Mina asks. You got to call him now.

The business card from Ann Arbor has private numbers she listed on the back, one with a Florida area code. A man answers, gives his name. I say, You don’t know me, but I’m calling about an emergency, your wife’s in the storm in a car somewhere on Jupiter Beach.

I know you, he says. I know you only too well. Don’t worry, she doesn’t tell me names, I don’t ask, but I know you.

Mina presses speakerphone.

You teach tango or Mandarin or yoga or murderers to write poetry, film the accounts of torture victims, rescue greyhounds. I know the things you do, the righteous things you say, and I know you couldn’t take your eyes off her the first time you saw her, and how that made you realize you’d been living a life in which you’d learned to look away. And like a miracle she’s looking back, and you wonder what’s the scent of a woman like that, and not long after—everything’s happening so fast—you ask, What do you want? and she says, To leave the world behind together, and you think beauty like hers must come with the magic to allow what you couldn’t ordinarily do, places you couldn’t go, a life you’d dreamed when you were young. But now, just as suddenly, she can destroy you by falling from the ledge she’s calling from, or falling asleep forever in the hotel room where she’s lost count of the pills. She’s talking crazy since she’s stopped taking the meds you never noticed, and when she said she loved you, that was craziness, too—you’re a symptom of her illness. So you called me, not to save her, but yourself, and it’s me who knows where she goes when she gets like this, and I’ll go, as I do every time, to save her, calm and comfort her, bring her home, because I love her, I was born to, I’ll always love her, and you’re only a shadow. I’ve learned to ignore shadows. She made you feel alive; now you’re a ghost. Go. Don’t call again.

I told you on the phone, Cole said, that I was living my life like an opera, but he’s the one who sang the aria.

* * *

FIRE!

A borrowed flat above a plumbing store whose back windows look out on a yard of stockpiled toilets filled with unflushed rain. Four a.m., still a little drunk from a wake at an Irish bar, they smell bread baking. Someone’s in the room, she whispers. It’s only the mirror, he tells her. She strips off her slip, tosses it over the shadowy reflection, and then follows the scent to the open front windows. A ghost, she says as if sighing. Below a vaporous streetlamp, in the doorway of a darkened bakery, a baker in white, hair and skin dusted with flour, leans smoking.

FIRE!

A bedroom lit by fireflies, one phosphorescent above the bed, another blinking in the mirror as if captured in a jar. The window open on the scent of rain-bearded lilacs. When the shards of a wind chime suspended in a corner tingle, it means a bat swoops through the dark. Flick on the bed lamp and the bat will vanish.

FIRE! DAMN YOU! FIRE!

Whom to identify with at this moment—who is more real—Caruso, whose unmistakable, ghostly, 78-rpm voice carries over the ramparts where sparrows twitter, or Mario Cavaradossi?

Or perhaps with an extra in the firing squad, who—once Tosca flings herself from the parapet—will be free to march off for a beer at the bar around the corner, and why not, he was only following the orders barked out by the captain of the guard, who was just doing what the director demanded, who was in turn under the command of Giacomo Puccini.