Paper Lantern: Love Stories (8 page)

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.”

I’d packed a beer box of books for the cottage, including Dawn Powell’s collected stories and her novel
A Time to Be Born
. After supper, Lise would read aloud from Powell’s diaries. They were set in the New York City of the 1930s, but even to the trill of night noise from the woods around us, the words sounded as if composed fresh that morning. I’d packed Hemingway’s collected stories, too, which I hadn’t read since school, in case I needed to refer to them for a feature. The rest were books on ferns, mushrooms, wildflowers, birds, Native American tribes. A subject search revealed a surplus of magazine articles on Hemingway in Michigan, so I went with loons. Their presence on a lake is an indicator of its health. I could taste the clarity of our lake water in the pike I hooked at dusk, fishing from my kayak at the edge of an acre of lily pads, and in the hand-sized bluegills I caught at the end of the dock when they fed at sunrise. I’d fry them with bacon for a breakfast of eggs, potatoes, and ice-cold Heineken that Lise and I would have at the picnic table beside the scorched, lopsided fieldstone grill after our swim across the lake.

We swam early each morning in the company of loons, through smoldering mist that hid the shore. Invisible in mist, the loons glided near, their manic bolts of laughter reverberating through a veiled forest. By the time we were swimming back to our dock, the mist had burned off. The only other cottage on the shore was shuttered, and Lise swam naked. She taught summer school during midweek and would drive up from Hyde Park for long weekends. I’d already be missing her when I watched the dust hanging behind her retreating blue Honda. On the day she was due back, I’d work at the picnic table, listening through birdsong and the thrum of insects and frogs for tires on gravel.

When she didn’t arrive at the start of the Labor Day weekend, I figured she was held up in holiday traffic. We had gone without seeing each other for two weeks while she finished grading at the end of the summer semester. That morning, I’d caught three brook trout in the stream that ran through the culvert, I’d bought homegrown tomatoes, sweet corn, and giant sunflowers from a roadside stand, and I’d started a low fire on the grill so the coals would be ready when she arrived. By the time the third round of coals had burned to ash I was afraid she’d had car trouble on the road or worse. Twice I drove the nine miles to a gas station where there was a pay phone, but got only her voice message. By midnight, I couldn’t stand the wait and decided to drive the three and a half hours back to my place to retrieve any message she might have left. I worried we’d pass each other in the dark, that she’d get to an empty cottage. I’d left a note and the key beneath the step where she’d know to look, and watched the headlights coming toward me, wondering if they were hers.

There was no message waiting. I almost set out for her apartment in Hyde Park to make sure she was all right. What stopped me was an inescapable flashback to another panicky drive to Chicago when, shortly after moving to Michigan, I had found a letter from Felice forwarded to my campus mail—a suicide note postmarked from Chicago a week earlier. I had been kayaking on a river that morning, and without stopping to cancel classes or to remove the kayak from the rack on my car, I found myself speeding down I-94 as if, despite the postmark, I could get there in time to stop her. I drove through sun showers; an incongruous rainbow, washed out beside the glistening, flame-wicked September trees, spanned the interstate. I went instinctively to Felice’s old Bronzeville neighborhood and parked by Banks, a soul-food place we’d frequented, across from the DuSable Hotel, now boarded up for demolition. I checked the restaurant’s huge windows as if she might be gazing out drinking a beer, and then walked for blocks, stopping to knock frantically on the doors of welfare recipients whose caseworker I’d once been, reappearing now as a crazed white guy with no business except to ask if they knew where Felice might be. No one did. When I returned to my car, I found all seventeen feet of my white fiberglass kayak spray-painted with initialed hearts, obscenities, and gang graffiti. I drove to the cocktail lounge where Felice had worked as a waitress in net stockings before they’d fired her and she’d had to go back on welfare. Finally, I contacted a friend at the police department. We checked the morgue and hospitals without finding a match. The next day, when I returned to Michigan, another letter was waiting that said she was sorry she’d sent me the suicide note but she couldn’t think of anyone else to tell, and she was also sorry she hadn’t been able to go through with it.

Lise finally called around nine in the morning. I’d barely slept. I’d played our last conversations over in my mind for some hint of what might have happened. I kept returning to her mention—only a vague one, but it made her voice change—of how, after seven years, breaking up with Rey on the telephone didn’t seem right; she needed to see him again, she said, to tie up loose ends and finish things properly. I didn’t know what “loose ends” she was referring to and I didn’t ask because by then I knew her well enough to expect her to be evasive. Despite her initial frankness, once we started going together she’d begun to censor her history with Rey. There’d been in her voice the same uncharacteristically deferential tone I had noticed when she’d told me that it was hard for other men to turn her head.

She’d been away, she told me, and had only just received my messages. There’d been a last-minute change in her plans. She wasn’t thinking clearly, she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to make me worry.

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“What do you think is going on? You never ask directly, Jack,” she said.

“I’m asking now.”

“I was pregnant.”

“You
were
pregnant? What does that mean? Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“Maybe it caught me by surprise. Maybe I hoped not to pressure you. You can understand not wanting to pressure someone, can’t you?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t understand. Are you all right? Let’s start with that.”

“Why not with surprise? Why aren’t you surprised? When Rey and I began sleeping together I was on the pill, but I went through a time when I had to get off, and he didn’t like using protection, so we went without it for years, and since he has a son by another woman I assumed it was me who couldn’t conceive. Obviously I was wrong.”

“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m down to the simple, basic questions.”

“You mean, like, Will you stay in Michigan or keep running if you get the chance to hide out on an island somewhere, an ocean away?”

“You know that’s not fair. How about more like, Does he think the child was his? Or was it his?”

She said nothing.

“Look,” I said, “I’m going to hang up now and drive to your place so we can talk.”

“Don’t, please, Jack, I won’t be here later.”

“Where will you be?”

“Basic questions don’t necessarily make things simple,” she said, ignoring my question. “What if I said I didn’t tell you because one morning I watched you from the dock fishing for dinner and suddenly wondered who is that out there on this little hidden lake in his kayak tagged like a viaduct wall in the inner city? What is he doing here, so out of place, trying so hard to fit into a new life he’s making up as he goes? And I went inside and opened your book and sat reading it as if for the first time on the bed—all mussed from our lovemaking—and the words were so sad and angry, more than I’d realized, more than the writer realized, and I wept, not just for the words themselves. I was thinking that ever since that first trip together in New York, I’ve been trying to fit in, too.”