Once I reached the beach, I stripped to my underwear and swam in the sea. I never wore a bathing suit; my bikini, the first few days, had kept falling off my narrow chest in the waves. There was no lifeguard this late in the season, but the water was warm and a sparkly deep blue, a color utterly unlike the Atlantic of my childhood, more like a lake than the sea. Even on its crashiest, biggest days it seemed to me benevolent, and so I swam alone, at dusk, with no one on shore to watch me.
Into this weightless immortality, this lulling embrace of risk, came Ian. I had known him for weeks, of course; he was one of the two artists practicing beneath the sweeping rafters, a painter who stood on his artwork as he made it. I knew because I watched him from the high observatory window built into the edge of the second floor. I watched his broad, thick arms, covered with blond hairs, as he flicked house paint around, and I watched his funny yellow shoes, pointed like elves’ slippers, which allowed him to walk lightly across his Plexiglas canvas.
We roomed across from each other in the narrow white hall built above the kitchen, and though for the first few days we kept our doors resolutely shut, I soon started leaving mine ajar when I was out—it seemed fussy and distrusting to always keep it closed. Then he started doing the same. After a week or so I stopped making my bed the instant I awoke, preferring to loll about with my coffee for an hour or so; this meant that when I left my room he could see my unmade bed. He soon followed suit, and so I could glimpse beyond the partially shut door the flung-back sheet and the round dent where he had put his head. It was a lovely, finely calibrated game of loosening standards, and it thrilled me to lead it. Meanwhile, we continued to speak politely, if indifferently, to each other.
Then I opened an email, and everything changed. The University of Nebraska had awarded me the Dwight O. McKneight Fellowship; for a single semester’s work I would receive $25,000, and all I had to do was teach one fiction-writing class, two hours on Tuesday afternoons.
Wobbly, I walked in a circle around my small wooden room. I sat and read the email a third time, then made another circle. The tidiness of the news left me stunned. I had applied, figuring hundreds, if not thousands, were in the pool; I had dawdled through these weeks, figuring that soon enough I’d be back to early-morning commutes and thirty minutes of scribbling before bed. But no. Summarily, I had been yanked from my life.
I closed my computer, went downstairs, and filled a pot with water. Turned on the electric stove and let the coils darkly glow. While there were still only tiny bubbles on the bottom of the pot my eye sockets began to ache. My nose burned, my temple pulsed, and then there they were: two hot tears trailing down my cheeks, leaving in their wake two lines of cooled air. Then more.
As I was crying and salting the water and shaking the pasta box, Ian walked in—he had swapped his yellow elf shoes for boots, I remember that—and asked me what was the matter.
The story came tumbling out, in between gasps of “I don’t know why I’m crying” and “I’m so happy, but it’s just so strange” and “I feel crazy—”
“Do you want a hug?” he interrupted. I nodded and folded myself against his belly, the warm, safe swell of it, and his strong painter hands. Beneath them, I steadied.
We stayed up that night talking. After I had said all I could say about the University of Nebraska, after we had googled Lincoln together and laughed and shrieked at the boxy, bland downtown, we turned to other things: his upcoming show, my faltering novel draft, ambition, fate, the literary world, the art world, differences and similarities, rivals and jealousies. Later he put on a Britten opera, and we simply sat in the warm half-light of a single lamp, sipping red wine as the contralto unleashed her rich throttle.
We finished the opera, and then the wine. In the flickering yellow light we sat, saying we would like to take an astronomy class one day; jokingly, we made plans to do it together. There came a whisper of wings, a beating, and a bat—a tiny black ball of fury—flapped into the living room. Shakily it circled, nearly like a baby bird, and then flapped over the stables.
We raised eyebrows at each other. “That,” he said, “means time for bed. Let the bats take over.” I sent him a long despairing glance, all panic and pleading. For me the air held not bats but the golden thread of what might happen next. Yet seeing the embarrassed half-smile on his face, I understood that my expectations were both obvious and unwelcome.
“Yeah, time for bed,” I said briskly, and we parted abruptly, in the hallway, without even saying good night.
* * *
—
After that night, we tumbled into an easy intimacy built from the cloudless September days, the butcher block in the center of the kitchen, and the bottles of wine we biked up the hill from the liquor store. By unspoken agreement every evening at the golden hour we would make our way to the beach. Now when I swam he sat on the shore and watched me. I would bob in the water, and sometimes, if the ocean was calm, I would turn my back on the waves, and he would point at the wonders happening in the west—great purple pillars of clouds, yellow rays, darkening pink toward the horizon—and I would wave and nod, as if he could see my tiny head in the dark sea nodding. But I didn’t care about the sunsets. I liked to see him, his long thick legs sprawled before him, resting back on his hands, watching me, making sure the sea did not swallow me. I imagined what he saw: my white limbs, my blond hair made dark by seawater, the ocean lifting and dropping me like a paper doll.
We took turns showering in the outdoor shower, and gathered in the kitchen after dark, where we cooked in the messy, careless way I loved, chopping vegetables, scalding them with oil, putting everything we had—pasta sauce, eggs, broccoli florets—in a single bowl, all the while talking.
He told me he had slept with a man. He told me that his ex-girlfriend had screamed like she had been stabbed when he told her, and ran to the shower and turned on the hot water as high as it would go, and shrieked while it scalded her. Wet from the sea and my own shower, I imagined this woman, naked, screaming, slapping her own face. Her pink skin darkening to red.
We talked about monogamy. We talked about desire. We talked the way men and women talk when they’ve decided that they won’t fuck: we talked how men and women talk when they’re using each other for research. Slowly there built a kind of tension, but not the usual kind. As the night got later and the kitchen smaller and brighter, the long summer twilight finally blackening, night pushing against the glass, we talked on and on. But never again did we wait for the bats.
Sidewalk glittering with glass. Ocean glittering with sun. It hurt my eyes to be in Red Hook. I walked the cobblestoned streets. The sky was bright, and it was hot, too hot for October. Past the projects I went, past the bars and lobster shacks. In a park I hung my arms over the railing and looked out at the pale green doll on oily waves. Then, feeling stupid, I biked home.
* * *