Paper Lantern

by Stuart Dybek

  From that first night, I always preferred that room in the dark. The windows above Dorchester, steamy with radiator heat, appeared tinted by the northern lights—an aura reflected from the blinking neon hangers in the dry cleaner’s shop window below. The storm faded to a tape hiss in the background of her breathing as we kissed and she lay back with her mouth open, waiting for another kiss.

  “I think we can dispense with the pretense of you sleeping in your clothes,” she said.

  “In my wildest imaginings I couldn’t have anticipated this. Not to be forward, but besides no jammies, I don’t have protection.”

  “Me neither,” she said. “Just so you know, I’ve never done a one-nighter.”

  “I’ve been tested since the last time I was with someone.”

  “You’re safe with me,” she said, and though I hadn’t the slightest idea on what that assurance rested, I couldn’t at that moment summon the nerve to ask.

  The following evening, when I phoned from Michigan, more than a hundred miles away, I said, “That thing about you never having done a one-nighter, how about keeping your record intact?”

  “You’d do that for the sake of my record? I’m glad to hear it because I spent the day thinking about you. Not to be forward, but when are you back in town?”

  “How’s this weekend?”

  “Not good, I’m sorry,” she said, without explanation. “The weekend after?”

  “I’m in New York then, doing a program at the Donnell Library.”

  “I love New York. I could meet you there.”

  All it took were those intervening two weeks of waiting for our initial effortlessness to turn into anxiety about seeing her again. I didn’t know what I might be getting into, but I knew already that despite the lightness of that first night together, her effect on me was powerful.

  I arrived in New York on a Thursday and stayed at a friend’s unoccupied pied-à-terre, a fifth-floor walkup on Waverly Place, around the corner from the Village Vanguard, where Sonny Rollins was playing. On Friday night, after a dinner with my library hosts during which I tried to conceal my distraction, I went alone to the late set at a jammed Vanguard and stood by the bar letting the waves of tenor sax wash over me. It was a practice run of sorts: I imagined Lise beside me.

  “Still remember me?” she had asked when I’d phoned her on landing at LaGuardia.

  “Everything about you but your face,” I’d said. “Still coming?”

  “I can hardly wait. Maybe you’re suffering from prosopagnosia?”

  “Is there an over-the-counter remedy?”

  “For lack of facial recognition? Not to be forward, but a direct application of moist heat is rumored to be efficacious. And, Jack, don’t be duped by an imposter.”

  I could recall her green eyes beneath the brooding brow of a Russian hat, her amber tendrils of hair, the shape and shade of her lips, but not her face, as if that single snowy night we’d spent together had left me dazed.

  In the crowd at the Vanguard, I felt as if I were waiting for a stranger, a stranger scheduled to arrive the next morning in a cab from LaGuardia and ring the buzzer. Having already undone the intricate battery of locks peculiar to New York, I’d race down the five flights to where she’d be waiting in the cold with her overnight bag. We’d kiss hello, and then climb back upstairs together. Just like that she entered my life.

  * * *

  That winter and spring, I gave readings at a literary festival in D.C. and at universities in Chapel Hill, Berkeley, and Miami, from the book of prose poems and vignettes I’d written while working for the Cook County Department of Public Aid. The book began three years earlier as a record of the stories I’d hear from welfare recipients, as they were officially called, which I’d write down at the end of the workday as I rode the L from Bronzeville back to my apartment on the North Side. Working on it had seemed effortless. I’d be lost in a trance of writing on the train, and sometimes my stop would go by before I noticed. It was shortly after meeting Felice that I realized I had the rough draft of a book I had never planned to write. If I cut back expenses, I had enough money saved to get by for five months or so, and I quit my casework job to finish a book that still seemed more like an accident than a gift.

  There’s a tradition of books that have managed to survive their working titles: Something That Happened became Of Mice and Men, The Inside of His Head became Death of a Salesman, Trinalchio in West Egg became The Great Gatsby. My book was in that company, thanks only to its inept working title, Farewell to Welfare. I had intended to dedicate it to Felice and Starla, but after Starla’s death, the book was published without a dedication. It was my first and, I now thought, possibly my only book, one from which I felt increasingly dissociated. Back when I’d started on it, I had felt there was so much that needed to be recorded in the plain language that people spoke on the street, a language real and by nature subversive, in opposition to the sanitized bureaucratic jargon of the case reports I had to file. But since Starla’s death, I hadn’t written a word.

  At each university that spring, once free of obligation, I’d wait for Lise to arrive. The anticipation was a kind of foreplay. She’d fly in and we’d spend my honorarium on a weekend in a hotel as if we’d won at the track and the college towns were our Bouzy. In North Carolina it was the Grove Park Inn in the mountains near Asheville, where Scott Fitzgerald stayed when he’d visit Zelda. In D.C. we slept on a rickety antique bed at a place that referred to itself as an inn where, Lise agreed, the operative word was indeed quaint. At Berkeley we drove down the coast to the Vision Perch, a bed-and-breakfast in Big Sur.

  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 a
live. 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.