Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  On the night of the seiche, the campus was deserted; but then, it was deserted most nights. I climbed to the flat roof of the shed, looked out over the oily oscillation of moonlight, and waited, senses cocked, listening for the least change to the rhythmic sloshing from the pebble beach below. It was the beach I had imagined the priest had swum from each morning.

  All I knew about a seiche was what I’d read in the paper. It could swell without warning as if the basin of the lake had suddenly tilted, causing water to rush over the shore in biblical proportions. I estimated the shed roof was well above ten feet, but still wondered if I was doing something really stupid. The roof gave me a clear view of Madonna della Strada, whose doorstep began at the lake. Before I learned it meant Our Lady of the Way, I had thought its name translated to Our Lady of the Streets, which sounded to me like a Virgin to whom whores might pray. I’d certainly have been safer watching from the steeple. From my perch on the roof, I could look into the side doorway of the church where, in late March of my senior year, Nisa and I had huddled out of the wind, locally called the Hawk, slashing off the lake. She’d wrapped her long crimson scarf around us. Her dark hair kept blowing into our mouths until I gathered it in an ungloved hand and gripped it as if to steady us as we kissed. We held each kiss and without stopping kissed again. I could feel the warmth of her mouth traveling the length of my body. I slid my hand between the buttons of her coat and brushed her breast and she moaned into my mouth and, with one hand holding her hair and the other cupping her breast, I backed her against the marble portal and pressed against her and she opened her coat so our bodies could touch and pressed back while wind swirled her scarf and our tongues stabbed together. We thought we were alone, hidden in the doorway, but when finally I released her hair and we pulled apart, we were greeted by an enormous cheer. The church doorway faced the dormitory at Mundelein, a Catholic women’s college, and the Mundelbundles, as we called the students there, lined their dorm windows cheering and applauding.

  I waited for the seiche until three a.m., my body at the ready as if listening for a starter’s gun whose report I supposed would sound at first like a reverberation of thunder. I kept my eyes trained as far as I could see into the formless dark where I imagined that a great moon-glazed wave would rise. Even after I finally gave up and climbed down, I kept looking behind to make sure it wasn’t gaining on me as I walked away.

  Blowing Shades

  Like a boy with a kite.

  One he’s labored over all afternoon, fashioned from sticks, newspaper, tape, and bakery string. A tail of rags.

  Running bareheaded down an empty beach, trailing a tail of footprints through wet sand, shorebirds scattering before him.

  How effortlessly the birds mount air, soaring off sideways on gusts of sea breeze, crying out from on high, while the kite stubbornly refuses to rise.

  Wind whooshes over foaming water. Despite the drag of the kite he runs harder, faster. If he were a kite, he’d be up there, though it’s no longer a day for launching a kite—even a store-bought kite from Japan made of silk the shade of women’s underclothes, let alone a kite of sticks and newspaper. Maybe that’s why the kite won’t rise; it knows flying could tear it to shreds.

  Only when the boy acknowledges defeat, slows to a halfhearted jog, and turns at a cross angle to the wind does the kite sail off sideways on a gust, twisting crazily, barely holding together, but climbing, tugging at the ball of string the boy can’t unravel fast enough.

  He pays it out over the ocean. Stands at the shoreline, squinting up as if it has just occurred to him to read the print on the newspaper the kite is made of, but the words are too far away.

  Too late for words. The kite is barely recognizable, a speck above the horizon; and is it merely to see what will happen next, or to set it free, that without warning he lets go?

  Or a bird, wingbeats flailing for a hold on air.

  Futility strips it of grace. When it falls clumsily to earth, the boy gently gathers it up again.

  “Try, please,” he whispers, and tosses it back into the air.

  Again the bird flaps and falls, weaker for its failed attempt, and the boy gathers it up, gently folds in its wings, and more violently this time tosses it up.

  The bird crashes helplessly as if it has forgotten that it ever defied gravity.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you,” the boy insists.

  How beautiful the bird appears, iridescent like a woman’s slip in the gleam of an afternoon in which sun beats drawn shades to bronze.

  He traces the curve of its nape. He’s never seen a bird like this before, never before been allowed to stroke his fingertips along such smoothness, to touch a life so different from his own, to hold an inhabitant of air, that mysterious sphere about which the boy can only dream. He feels its rapid heartbeat. Its body heat intensifies in his hands, and suddenly he’s afraid the heat is blood. But his hands are dry. He doesn’t know exactly where he’s inflicted the wound.

  He’s never shot anything with the pellet gun but empty cans and factory windows. True, he’s shot at birds—sparrows on wires, starlings in the trees, pigeons on the girders under railroad bridges—but never hit them. He’s either a naturally poor shot or his nerve fails at the last instant so that the pellet whizzes harmlessly into the sky or ricochets with a ringing spark off the girders while a flock of pigeons beat from an underpass and swoop away.

  He’s always missed before, perhaps, because that’s what his heart demands. Now he could argue that, though he pulled the trigger, hitting this bird was the merest chance—an accident.

  He could argue that, but to whom? Who’s here besides the two of them?

  Look what he’s done.

  What difference does the truth make now?

  * * *

  “Like a boy,” she said, as if more to herself.

  Then she leaned from the bed and released the shade.

  Perhaps the pull cord accidentally slipped from her fingers. The shade, gleaming like a sheet of bronze, shot up, and blinding daylight blazed across the bare mattress, slicing the bed in two.

  Heat streamed into the room; pigeons launched from the ledge as if a shot had been fired.

  She was on her feet, knocking over the chair, kicking through the clothes strewn beside the bed, and pulling on her slip.

  A slip she sometimes didn’t remove. But today, before they’d exchanged a word, she’d stripped off her clothes, no longer shy about the sag of her breasts. Maybe it was simply too close—still air before a summer storm—to lie beside him in the slip. Nonetheless she’d worn it beneath her sundress. She knew he liked her in it from how he drove her into the mattress kissing her throat like he was crazy for her, her shoulder straps slipping down, a breast popped over the lacy bodice, while the silk rode up her jittering legs so that the V of her dark bush showed like a flash of panties.

  “Haven’t I been good to you?” she asked, softly. “Haven’t we been happy up here in our own little world? You’re not being honest with me. I made good on everything I said I was going to do. Something else has come up for you. Who is it?—a girl, no doubt more your age. Or have you found another lonely woman?”

  He shook his head: It’s not like that, he wanted to tell her, to say, as he’d rehearsed it, I’m getting in over my head with you.

  That would sound stupid now. Looking at her standing against the shade-drawn window at the foot of the bed, her eyes too full of hurt for his to meet, he choked up. The choice was between total silence or rising to hold her. He sat naked on the mattress, paralyzed; she released another shade with a violent yank, clearly on purpose this time, so that it clattered up, and light obliterated the foot of the bed.

  “So,” she said in that soft voice, unsettling after the racket of the shade, “you thought maybe we’d fuck goodbye.”

  She let another shade fly as if releasing a kite.

  Sparrows on the wire, starlings in the basswood trees that lined the curb and threw the network of
their branches across the shades—city-wise birds—beat their wings and flew away. It might have been someone shooting.

  “You’re not being honest with me. You’re dumping me, and I was already so looking forward to seeing you Wednesday,” she pleaded gently—too gently—the way he’d answered her once when she asked him why he’d whisper, No no no, while she came down on him. Too sweet, he’d tried to explain to her then, so gentle it aches.

  I never wanted it to go this far, he wanted to say, never wanted to hurt you.

  “What happened? I showed a little feeling and scared you away,” she said, answering her own question as she paced, bare feet slapping the floorboards, moving from window to window, tripping the drawn shades the way an executioner might trip the lever on a gallows. “You said I was amazing, that I raised the bar for you. I’m a fool. You really were too young for me.”

  With the shades up and the fierce light that obliterated the mattress bleaching her skin from bronze to white, it seemed as if she were fading. Before his eyes, their room, secret in the sun-beaten shadows of drawn shades, was revealed for what it was: an unrented apartment with a few sticks of shoddy furniture.

  And when she’d reduced it to that, she stood dressing before him one last time, against an open window that looked out on a blur.

  “You opened me up, and then just let go. Like a boy—confused, callow, and cruel.”

  Blocks away the spooked birds resettled on other sills and wires, and on the crabapple trees in a little park.

  “My pretty boy,” she said, and stepped out, quietly shutting the door.

  After a while he rose, pulled the shades on the windows down, lay back on the bed, closed his eyes, spit into his hand. But it was impossible to touch himself with her sweetness.

  * * *

  The braided hoops at the ends of pull cords begin to sway like miniature nooses. A tingle of grit on the panes against which the shades nervously rustle. A whoosh of coolness. The shades lift slightly and float back. Hypnotically. Billowy, translucent, like garments through which summer light outlines the shadow of a woman’s body. Until, seized by a sudden gust, they crash like paper cymbals and tread air on the edge of tearing apart. Like trapped birds, they want to fly in this room that once seemed perfectly ordered in its bareness—bed, mirror, chair. Chair on which to drape discarded clothes; mirror in which to watch his hands cupping her breasts.

  While on the other side of the door, the girl, who’s changed her name from Mary Jane to Marigold, and who has spied all summer, drawn by the forbidden sounds of her mother’s lovemaking, strains to listen. Now that she no longer has to despise and envy her mother, she’s free. Free to pity her now for the boyfriends she’ll go back to, the guys she brings home rather than hides away with in the unrented flat upstairs, the dorky graybeard, bald under a hat he never removes, six foot two of baby fat singing country western, or Mr. O’Pinions, who thinks he’s cool, calls himself Red Crow, commandeers the TV, and leaves the couch smelling musty. Free to concentrate on her own crush on the guy from Frost’s Service Station. That’s what’s stenciled on the back of his paint-spattered coveralls, the white pair he wears partially unbuttoned over a smooth, bare chest. Rafael stitched in green over the pocket. “Baby” was what her mother called him, behind the closed door, sometimes sighing it over and over. She’s never heard her mother say the real name of the nameless young man with the dark, dreamy eyes, angel eyes, eyes she’s seen on holy cards. Saint Francis eyes, or Saint Sebastian nailed down by arrows but gazing up at heaven. Her saint’s alone in there. Why won’t he come out? she wonders. This time she won’t run and hide. Is he weeping, perhaps, like her clueless mother, her mom who still wants to be a girl, or has he merely fallen asleep?

  She holds her breath to listen harder, but all she can hear is the thrash of shades blowing in an echoey room.

  Waiting

  There is really only one city for everyone just as there is one major love.

  —The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931–1965

  I read an essay once—I don’t recall who wrote it—about waiting in Hemingway. There’s that couple at the station in “Hills Like White Elephants” waiting for the express from Barcelona, and the little boy with a fever who is waiting to die in “A Day’s Wait.” That situation, waiting to die, is one Hemingway returned to often, as in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” when the man with a gangrened leg is recalling his youth in Paris; nor is he waiting alone—the hyenas and vultures are waiting, too. In other stories, the men are alone. Nick Adams waits out the night in “A Way You’ll Never Be.” In “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” Mr. Frazer listens to a hospital radio that plays only at night—a clever touch—as he waits out the pain of his fractured leg. All these characters have, in one way or another, been wounded.

  * * *

  When the phenomenon known as the Men’s Movement was in fashion, I was invited to give a poetry reading at a “gathering.” Chad, the therapist who organized the event, believed that poetry had therapeutic power. We’d met at a literary festival in Washington, and it was obvious that Chad, who was shopping a book of his poems, also believed in the power of networking. He referred to poetry as the “Po-Biz.” The term reminds me that, like any troubadour, Orpheus was part hustler, although he couldn’t out-hustle Death. I would have passed on the gathering if Chad hadn’t also invited a friend whom I didn’t get to see often enough, a Vietnamese poet whose family were boat people. After the fact, I learned that my friend accepted the invitation because Chad told him I’d agreed to come.

  On the Friday the conference was scheduled to open, with a sweat lodge, I couldn’t get myself to go. I slept restlessly and woke early, feeling guilty enough about reneging to make myself get in my car and start driving. The conference was four hours north of where I was living in Michigan. The Vietnamese poet had flown from Philadelphia to Chicago and then on to a commuter airport in Traverse City the day before. It’s beautiful country up there. Sand dunes sculpt the edge of the planet’s greatest freshwater sea. I had sometimes rented a cottage there on a lake whose name I kept to myself. I’ve read that Michigan has more coastline than any state but Alaska. I don’t know if that calculation includes the coasts of all the weedy lakes and trout streams you can smell hidden in the woods while speeding north on a highway in summer.

  By eleven I’d reached the turnoff on Chad’s map and continued down a dirt road. It opened from a papery birch forest into a clearing where a rustic compound stood on the shore of a lake glistening with the rings of feeding fish. I parked and walked by deserted cabins to a log lodge beside the dock. The screen door was ajar, and I went in, past a table stacked with books: Iron John, Fire in the Belly, The Myth of Male Power, Fatherless America. Copies of my book, Welfare, were for sale along with the others and with the three slim volumes by my friend the Vietnamese poet, who was reading to a circle of maybe seventy men. A couple of the men were perched on wheelchairs; the rest sat Indian-style on the plank floor. Each had a drum the size of a toy beside him. My friend was the only one in the circle wearing a shirt.

  No one turned when I slipped in; they were absorbed by the poem. My friend had always been a gently charismatic reader, but he was reciting now with an intensity that reflected that of his audience. After each poem there was a collective exhalation, a moment of respectful silence, and then Chad would invite the men to share personal responses. Several of the poems were elegiac portraits of a once-powerful father who had been reduced by immigrant status and the prejudice of his adopted country to an aged, exhausted man on the periphery of all but his family. The men on the floor shared their stories about fathers and Chad would ask my friend to read another poem.

  I stood outside the circle, feeling like an unbeliever at a prayer service. I was scheduled to read after lunch and wondered how I would come up with something appropriate. The few vignettes I’d written about my father, also an immigrant, were at best what Chad might term “conflicted.”

  My friend read the t
itle poem of his first book, Friendly Fire, an indictment of a criminal American foreign policy simply conveyed in thirty lines about the ghost of his godfather, who had been killed by American fire during the war. When he finished, an older man with a bit of a gut, hirsute, with a silver cast to his ponytail and mustache and a faded SEMPER FI tattoo on his chest, raised his hand and asked, “Chad, would this be the right time to share my ghost dance?”

  “Could we put that on hold for just a moment, Pete Red Crow?” Chad said. He passed out a shopping bag stuffed with so-called scarlet ribbons that looked like tie-dyed rags. “I want each of you to take as many ribbons as you need and tie them around the places on your body or spirit that have been wounded.” To demonstrate, Chad wrapped a ribbon around what I presumed was a tennis elbow. Men in the circle were winding them around their heads like headbands, around their necks like bandannas, around their chests, their drooping bellies, their legs, ankles, and feet. Later, when I described the scene to a woman I was seeing, she asked, “Did anyone tie one to his wiener?”

  “Maybe symbolically,” I said.

  “Where did you tie yours?”

  “I didn’t take one.”

  “Where would you have tied it if you had?”

  “That information is to be shared only with the brotherhood.”

  The man who wanted to share his ghost dance banded a ribbon around his forehead and knotted one at each wrist, where they hung like streamers. “Is it a good time yet, Chad?” he asked.

  “Thank you for waiting, Pete,” Chad said.

  Pete rose, bowed to the circle, raised his scarlet-trailing arms in salute to Chad, to the poet, to the sky above the rafters, and, chanting in a tongue that sounded like Hollywood Indian, he began to gyrate and stamp, twisting while his arms milled and waved and the ribbons swirled as if slashed wrists were spouting loops of arterial light. He stopped abruptly, and without a bow folded back into his seated position, buried his face in his hands, and wept.