“Poe was a pussy. I’m just kidding. Poe is awesome. I love Poe. I love him so much that I’d fuck him if he were alive. I’d fuck his hairy black tits off.”

  “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “I wish I had a pen. Pretty sure you’ve just crafted a sentence that’s never been uttered before.”

  “What sentence?”

  “You’d fuck Edgar Allan Poe’s hairy black tits off, whatever the hell that means. Pretty sure those words have never been said before, in that order, by anyone, ever.”

  “In English?”

  “In English or otherwise.”

  “Arrgh! I’d fuck Edgar Allan Poe’s hairy black tits off!”

  “Blackbeard meets Edgar Allan Poe,” I said.

  “Aha! Hello, short story. Blackbeard meets Edgar Allan Poe. Were they contemporaries? Probably not. Doesn’t matter. Ghost of Blackbeard meets Edgar Allan Poe. Grandson of Blackbeard, still a pirate, meets Edgar Allan Poe.”

  J. P. got out his moleskin notebook and made a few notes. I sensed the literary discussion coming to a close and felt a wave of unspecified relief pass through me.

  “Where’s your dog this weekend?”

  “Soubrette’s watching him for me,” I said. “She’s got a great backyard and Buller gets along with her dogs really well.”

  “She’s probably going to call and tell you that he caught and killed a deer in her yard. You know that’s going to happen. Because he could do it.”

  From inside someone called out that Story and her friends had left late but that they were on their way. An agonizing hour later, the eager night full of promise, a car came slowly up the street. It pulled into the driveway in front of the house and the girls, all in shorts and sandals, ponytails bouncing and bobbing, bounded out into the street, but Story was not among them. Three hundred lagging seconds passed and then another car made the bend and rolled into the space behind the first. I heard the car shift into park and saw the lights turn off. A second later the parking brake was engaged even though the ground was flat as a lake. Then an interior light went on, but try as I might I couldn’t see into the car, and this agony lingered for some time until at last the light clicked off. I heard insects; waves; voices, faint and near; cars down the lane; the clickety song of a nonexotic bird, perhaps a naturalized European starling; a child being chased by another child, the second one heavier than the first; the pshht of a newly opened bottle of beer; the glassy thunk of an old one being discarded; tires on gravel; a sticky painted-shut window being forced open from the inside; the barking of a dog, possibly a neutered or aging Borzoi; and finally, dear god finally, the plastic-on-metal plunk of a driver’s side door being unlocked in anticipation of a vehicular exit. I hadn’t breathed, neither inhale nor ex-, for probably five minutes. At last, Story’s blond head appeared from behind the car, her hair wild and windblown, and I was stricken. Hard to say I would have been more impressed if the clouds had parted and the lord god himself, the King, Elvis Aaron Presley, had appeared in her place. I stood there barely able to speak.

  Story joined the other girls and they caromed about like cheerleaders and hugged in that cute way that girls do, and luggage was hauled out of trunks. Soon they paraded up onto the porch all in a line to the greetings and friendly catcalls of my friends. I was on the broad steps leading to the driveway as wooden as a canoe, holding a beer in one hand, the other hand rather foolishly stuck into my pocket. Story dropped her suitcase on the porch and slowly made her approach to where I was standing.

  “I made it. How are you?” Demure as a flower. Sweetly unsure of herself, but sure enough. “Sorry it took us so long to get down here. Are you guys having fun? It looks like it.” Unable to conjure a single syllable out of the space between us, I turned and walked into the house without saying a word.

  Later that night we all decided to caravan over the bridge to Charleston for dinner even though not one among us should have been driving. In a mad scramble, we piled into three different cars, people sitting on top of other people, hot skin next to hot skin, heads pushed into car ceilings and necks bent uncomfortably this way and that. Off we went up the road with the windows down. Story went in one car; I went in another.

  We ate at Magnolia’s on East Bay. Our waiter knew we were drinking when we came in and was happy to accommodate our eagerness for more drinks, and that wound up being the bulk of our tab at the end of the night. Mercifully, Story sat at the next table over with her back to me. J. P. sat between us, my view of her obscured by his head and helicoptering arms. Picking up our previous conversation, he said, “The most important thing that agents and publishers look for these days,” he said, “is a strong narrative voice.” I watched her laugh with the others at her table. I couldn’t hear her through the noise, but she seemed to be having a good time.

  “And word count is obviously important. For a work of literary fiction,” he said, “you need at least, I’d say, eighty thousand words. Really, it probably needs to be somewhere between ninety and a hundred thousand. One hundred ten thousand is too many, but if the book is really good, you might get away with it.”

  “I can think of a hundred exceptions,” I said. “What the hell does word count have to do with quality? Shouldn’t the story dictate the word count?”

  “I’m just telling you,” he said. “You don’t want to give an agent one more reason to throw your piece-of-shit manuscript in the trash.”

  Just to be contrary, I said, “If I were ever to write a book, it would have exactly one hundred ten thousand seven hundred eighty-three words in it—no more, no less.”

  Story ordered a round of drinks for her table. When our harried waiter came by, J. P. asked for shots. “What do you want for yours?” he asked me.

  “Vodka,” I said.

  “Fancy,” he said. “Not what I had in mind, but that will work. Two vodka shots. Good form, brother. Solidarity.”

  The waiter asked if we preferred one vodka over another. “House is fine if we’re going to shoot it,” I said. “Wyborowa if we’re going to sip it.” I knew nothing about vodka other than that for years I had poured my father drinks out of a bottle with this name on the label.

  “Let’s shoot it,” said J. P.

  “Then we don’t care,” I told the waiter. “House is fine.”

  “Right,” said J. P. “No point in spending ten extra dollars on something that’s only going to be in our mouths for less than a second. It won’t even be in our mouths. We’ll just be throwing it down our throats, like a pelican eating a fish.”

  “Like a cat eating a grindstone,” I said.

  “Like a cat eating a what?”

  “Like a cat eating a grindstone. It has zero bearing, but all your fucking similes reminded me of it. It was something my grandmother always said. Something to do with determination in the face of long odds. She had a simile for everything.”

  “She could have had a one-a-day simile calendar,” said J. P. “That would have been revolutionary.”

  We took our shots and J. P. ordered another one, this time for the entire table.

  “I’m getting shitty,” he said. “The last time I had vodka I got shitty and pissed in my mother’s underwear drawer by mistake. I was at home visiting the folks.”

  “You can’t get too shitty,” I said. “I need you to keep me from doing anything objectively foolish or reckless or historically regrettable.”

  “Too fucking late.” J. P. turned around to steal a look at Story. She caught him and smiled and he smiled a little guiltily. Turning back to face me, he said, “Yep. You’re fucked. You are fucked seventeen different ways from Sunday. Damn, she looks good. Does she have hairy black tits? Tell me as soon as you find out. I’m going to want to see pictures. Drink. Salud.” And it was down the hatch with another one.

  My table’s check at dinner ended up close to nine hundred dollars. None of us were employed and we had all borrowed money with which to attend school, so this came as quite a shock. We negotiated with the restaurant management over our bill without success and then headed out into a steam bath of humidity. A troupe of bagpipers in kilts walked by and J. P. fell in line behind them, marching in step, and we followed. They moved south on East Bay for a ways and then went right through the front door of Southend Brewery and formed a wide circle near the entrance. On a four count, the bagpiping commenced. J. P. was soon in the midst of the tumult doing a credible Russian folk dance. A tall girl from the bar joined him and mimicked his dance and everyone clapped in unison. After ten minutes of dancing, they broke out of the ring to a round of applause and came over to the bar dripping with sweat. J. P. offered to buy the girl a drink, but she turned him down. He was momentarily crestfallen but then ordered the two of us sake from the bar and was right back in the game. I asked him if he was drunk yet and he said, “No—but I’m prancing up on it.”

  I sat next to Story for the car ride back to the beach. Her body felt good next to mine. BethAnn was the only one of us with the courage or, alternatively, the bad judgment, to drive back (the others wisely took cabs), so she was at the wheel. Tyler sat in front navigating and manning the radio. He got lucky and found one good song after another. The music was perfect and in the dark of the backseat I could see Story smiling and I have never been so alive.

  Back at the beach house, someone proposed in honor of the luminous night and clear sky that we all walk out to look at the stars. The doors on the back of the house facing the ocean were open, and the rush and hum of the mighty rolling waves called in through the doors and pulled us out to the sea.

  There is something extraordinary about standing on the shore at night under such circumstances. It is the closest one can come to feeling immortal—or to recognizing the euphoria of insignificance at the edge of an immortal sea. On clear nights the effect is more pronounced, for the stars burn numberless in the sky and remind us that time is beyond our understanding and that the universe is indeed indifferent to us—yet hardly benign.

  We stood for several minutes in a broken line facing the ocean, all of us mute in deep contemplation of dark and impenetrable things.

  It is customary and expected that someone will inevitably, on such a starry night, wonder aloud about the location of the Big Dipper and begin to wander around gazing upward looking for this most famous ursine constellation. It is also customary for someone to locate the Pleiades—Blanche DuBois was not the first—and declare with certainty that it is either the Big Dipper or the Little Dipper, which of course it is neither. Similarly, it is not uncommon for folks to see Canis Major just below Orion and assume it’s a planet—usually Venus—due to its remarkable brightness. Conversely, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Saturn, despite roaming confusingly across the sky in and out of other constellations, are almost never observed as planets by anyone other than astronomers.

  All of this transpired amidst much uninformed and intoxicated speculation about said heavenly bodies, and going back to my childhood I set about to bring order to the wonders of the universe displayed magnificently before us. The Big Dipper is here, in the north. These two stars in the cup of the Big Dipper point toward Arcturus, in the Boötes. From there, we proceed on to Spica, a brilliant star perhaps fifteen degrees above the horizon on this night. This star here—yes, it is faint, but gladly it is always in the same location—it is the North Star, Polaris. See how the tail stars in the Big Dipper point to it. And see that star there—yes, the immense white one, hovering just above the ocean horizon—that is not a star, my friends, but rather that is the great Jupiter, god of the night sky. I tell them that on a clear night, with no light pollution, people with perfect eyesight can see its moons, just as Galileo did with his rudimentary telescope so many years before. My friends express incredulity. How do I know this object is a planet? I make predictions about its future location with respect to the background of stars and this seems to satisfy even the most skeptical among them.

  When the stargazing subsides, J. P. recites part of Byron’s “Darkness,” a spooky tale of a world bereft of the light of the sun, and then everyone takes a turn. Nichole hilariously summons forth a ditty from Schoolhouse Rock—“ ‘Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here…’ ” Tyler impresses the group with a scholarly oration of the Gettysburg Address. All eyes then go to BethAnn, her little bare feet dancing in place, and she outright levels me with “The Fiddler of Dooney,” a poem by William Butler Yeats.

  “You’re up,” says J. P. He’s talking to me.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I say, deflecting the attention. “Someone else take a turn.”

  The imagined spotlight trails away. “The Fiddler of Dooney”—that was one of his favorite poems. Wonderful timing on that. In my weakened state of nostalgic drunkenness, I can’t help but imagine him there with us holding court and I feel gut-sick and benumbed. My mind pushes back against an upwelling of long-forgotten memory and verse. In a moment’s time I hear it all, as if ten million words from as many books fell at once onto my ears in a drowning yet intelligible cataract. I hear my father’s voice and his incantations. A flood of prose, remembered, unremembered, leftover like hellish debris from a writer’s son’s childhood. Every word he’d ever said to me. Every poem. Every paragraph he’d written and said aloud. Put that away, I tell myself. Put that away. The revulsion leaves me at last and I watch removed as the silver star-spotted waves clamor at the beach and roar at my unfeeling heart.

  J. P. resumes with Housman’s “With Rue My Heart Is Laden,” and this brings a pall of melancholy to our group. We all toast grimly to “rose-lipt maidens,” and it looks like J. P. may now be weeping. We stand in a circle in the dark, faces in shadowed contemplation. Story is standing opposite me. Her hair is down; her arms are crossed in front of her as if she is cold. She is looking at me.

  The morning came early for everyone, and squinting into the horizontal light of day, we all made for a beachside tiki bar just north of our house for hangover drinks and food. The girls all had on bikini tops and shorts over bikini bottoms. The guys, evincing no present intent to wind up in the water or do anything much beyond sitting at the tiki bar drinking beer and watching sports on the television suspended from the ceiling, donned shorts and polos. A whitewashed picket fence crossed the dunes between us and the water. The day was blindingly bright and hot. Before long, most of our crowd was at the bar talking and laughing with that animation often seen among those imbibing significant quantities of alcohol early in the day. J. P. made it to the bar late and sat down on the empty stool next to me.

  “Did I eat a pack of cigarettes last night, or just smoke them?”

  “You smoked them,” I said.

  “Why do I smoke when I drink? I don’t even know where I got the damn things.”

  “You bought six of them from that guy on the street. I think he might have been homeless—”

  “Oh, yeah yeah yeah,” said J. P. “Fucking hell.”

  “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.”

  “Deep,” said J. P. “Yet shocking in its simplistic accuracy.”

  “You look like shit,” I said. He still had a diagonal pillow line across the side of his face.

  “Do I?”

  “Tyler, how does J. P. look?”

  Tyler leaned over and appraised J. P. “He looks like shit.”

  “Damn this democracy,” said J. P. “But indeed I feel like a big crusty festering piece of shitty hell. Did someone put me in the dryer last night? My equilibrium is off.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Thank god. Because I was going to quit drinking. What happened after I went to bed? Anything?”

  “Nothing that I know of. Everyone just turned in. Want a beer?”

  “What the fuck. Hair of the dog, right? Anything with Story?”

  I handed him the beer I’d just ordered and ordered another one. “I admire your courage,” I said. “No, nothing happened.”

  “There’s a continuum that runs between courage and idiocy,” he said. “I usually fall somewhere closer to idiocy.”

  Tyler leaned over and said, “J. P., I think it’s time to admit you’ve got a drinking problem.”

  “Someone just handed me a free beer,” said J. P. “That’s not a drinking problem. That’s a drinking solution.”

  By early afternoon Story still hadn’t made it out to the bar. After a while I summoned the courage to ask as to her whereabouts and was told she had decided to spend some time on the beach rather than come to the bar. I looked around at our friends and by deduction attempted to discern who might be out there with her. It seemed everyone was at the bar except Story. Perhaps she was alone. I wanted to go to her and talk when it could just be the two of us, but it felt awkward to abandon my friends for this clandestine purpose.

  I finished my Corona and ordered two more. “I’m going to the beach,” I said. “Probably read a little.” I held up the book I was carrying as evidence. I took the book and my two beers and headed down the wooden causeway to the beach. After walking for two hundred yards or so, I saw a figure lying in the sun. It was Story, alone, facing the ocean. I felt on fire. I walked to her across the scorching white sand and asked for permission to sit down, which she granted with a nod. She took one of the beers and said thank you as if she had been expecting me.

  We sat for a long time just looking at the water without either of us speaking. I didn’t want to disturb her reverie; I gathered she was in contemplation of some troubling question. We finished our beers simultaneously and, pinging her lime about in the bottom of her bottle, Story said, “Are there any more of these?”

  “Yes, at the bar,” I said. “I’ll go get a few more.”

  “Wait—you’ll get stuck talking to people and I’ll be out here getting scurvy. Let me run up to the house to get them.”

  She stepped into her shorts and walked the brief distance up to the house. Moments later she returned with a plastic bag that had ice and four beers in it and several lime wedges wrapped in aluminum foil. When I gave the foil a dubious look, she shrugged and said, “I couldn’t find any Saran wrap. Oh—and here’s a bottle opener.” She had it tucked into her pocket.

 

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