Writers & Lovers(43)

‘What are they fighting over?’

‘Maybe they’re arguing about when to take off for winter,’ he says.

‘I don’t want them to go.’ It strikes me as a terribly sad thing.

‘They’ll come back.’ He nudges me with his arm and leaves it there.

We watch them for a while. Out of the corner of my eye I watch Silas, too, his long body curved over the stone wall. I can feel the heat of him through his sweater, the smell of him coming out at the neck.

He straightens up and pushes off the wall then bends back down and kisses me, as if on a dare. Neither of us pull away. I press against him and he slides his hands around to my back and his fingers trace the knobs on my spine all the way up. I feel him, every bit of him, and it’s not nearly enough. We take a few steps and kiss again, harder, longer, against the parapet.

‘God, I have been waiting to do this a long time,’ he says into my ear. Our bodies are moving against each other at just the right angles, and I can’t reply in words.

We hold hands on the way back, but it feels like we’re still kissing. My whole body responds to his hand in mine.

He puts my bike in the back of his car and drives me across the river. He says he has to chaperone a ninth-grade field trip to Gettysburg next week, and he’ll call me when he gets back.

He parks on my street and we make out some more. No talking. No pecks. The kisses are long and intimate, like we’re telling each other everything that needs to be said this way.

When I get out of the car I’m so horny I can barely walk up the driveway.





Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision. The emotions get heightened. I give the reader more pleasure. In the margins Muriel has written, ‘Linger here’ or ‘Let us feel this,’ and I try to stay and feel the moment and my understanding of it expands. Small unexpected things begin to thrum across the whole book. I feel like a conductor, finally able to hear all the instruments at once. I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that’s still inside me.

I save the rape scene for last. It was supposed to happen on a beach but I change it to a storage room at the bank where she works, and after that it comes out of me in one sitting. I see it, hear it, taste it. It pulses out like a song that’s been stuck in the back of my mind. When it’s done I’m haunted by what I wrote for a few days, skittish on my bike going home at night.

I stand in line at the post office, two stacks of six boxes at my feet. Inside each box is a copy of the book and a cover letter to an agent. Muriel told me the names of a few of them, and the rest I found in a reference book on contemporary authors at the library. I discreetly kiss my fingers and touch each box. When the line moves I push the boxes forward with my foot. I take a breath, and it becomes so deep I realize I haven’t taken one for a while.

The guy behind me is reading the addresses on the top boxes. He’s wearing a camel hair overcoat and looks like a Salinger character, the boy who meets Franny at the train station in New Haven. He sees ‘Literary Agency’ and ‘New York, NY.’

‘That the Great Amer—’

‘Yup. That’s exactly what it is,’ I say.

Behind the counter a stout woman is working around her breasts, which rest on the counter, in the way of everything she does. She puts my boxes one at a time on the scale. She’ll be the last person to touch them before they go out, and I need her to wish them well.

‘I’ve been working on this book for six years,’ I say quietly.

‘Huh,’ she says, punching in numbers.

Her indifference feels like a terrible omen. I don’t know how to get her on my side. ‘It takes place in Cuba.’

‘Huh.’

She drops them in three unceremonious batches into what looks like a big laundry bin behind her.

I pay in cash, mostly ones: $96.44. ‘Thank you very much.’

She hands me the long receipt her machine has spat out. ‘Let’s hope your next six years are a little more exciting, sweetie pie.’





I cross the dining room to bring water to a couple at table 6. It’s like a dream, the way they transform from sloped strangers, a man with a crackled bald spot and a woman in a gold jacket, into my father and stepmother.

‘Look at you,’ my father says. He places his napkin back on the table and rises. The old coach, brittle now, the same grimace, as if I’ve just overshot a hole. We hug loosely.

‘Don’t get him all wet,’ Ann says, because I’ve got the water jug in my hand.

‘I won’t.’

He seems smaller, his hug without much muscle.

I bend down to kiss her. She always smells the same, metallic. ‘What are you doing here?’

They never leave the Cape in the summer.

‘We talked to Caleb last night and he filled us in on you and we thought we’d drive up and say hello,’ Ann says.

‘I’m working till three, but maybe I can get out early.’

They look at each other. ‘We have to get ahead of the traffic,’ my father says. ‘We’re just here for lunch.’

‘We wanted to get a glimpse of you. It’s been a while.’ She pauses. ‘And a lot has happened.’ It’s a risk, alluding to my mother in front of my father.