Early Work

by Andrew Martin

  “Wake up, little Susie,” Colin said.

  “How was your run?” I said.

  “Real nice,” he said. “We almost tired your dog out.”

  “Where’s Julia?”

  “Went in to get some water. We were gonna swim to that island. You down?”

  “I … swim,” I said with some hesitation.

  “Know you do, son. Put on some trunks.”

  I sat up, turned around, and shaded my hand over my eyes to look up at Colin.

  “What’s Julia got to say?”

  “I heard panting, mostly,” Colin said. “Something about how she hopes we’ll procure some seafood for tonight. Something about how she doesn’t want some bullshit to ruin a week by the sea. Real WASP stuff. I guess neither of you got killed last night.”

  “Our lives aren’t worth dying over,” I said.

  “You stoned? What time is it?”

  “You guys go off for your sexy exercise, leave me here all contemplative and shit. Man’s got to contemplate using the tools at his disposal.”

  “Let’s go swimming. Unless you’re going to drown.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice? Then you two can go running together to your heart’s content. Once you get that fascist chick off your back.”

  “Seriously, go put on a bathing suit,” Colin said. “And get Julia.”

  I hoisted myself to my feet, blinking away the dark spots in my eyes from the sunlight. Colin was a saver. He was born to save.

  I didn’t know where my bag was. Probably in the main house, since I didn’t remember bringing it to the cabin. But maybe I hadn’t taken it out of the car? Julia was probably in the cabin because that was where her stuff was, and I wanted to talk to her. But I wanted to get changed first. I didn’t like the way my heart was beating, all fast and persistent, demanding an answer. But what was the question?

  Julia wasn’t in the main house, and neither was my bag. I did find a clementine, though. I stripped it shoddily and chewed its juices. My phone was dead. I went upstairs and plugged it into Colin’s phone charger, which was plugged into the wall by the bed where I’d expected it to be. His phone was sitting there, too, and I tried to check what he’d been texting, but it was password protected. I typed in his birth date, then some random numbers, but to no avail. I went through his bag and found a swimsuit. He was significantly skinner than I was, so my belly hung over the cheap orange nylon, but I didn’t care. I liked wearing Colin’s stuff. It wasn’t funny, exactly, just potentially aggravating in a low-key way. I picked out an Oxford University T-shirt from his bag and put that on, too. When I got back to the dock, Julia was out there with Kiki and Colin was already in the water.

  “Hey, good-lookin’,” I said.

  Kiki ran up and greeted me with her paws in the air, like I’d been gone for months, not minutes, then proceeded to painfully drag her claws down my back. Julia ignored me and stared out toward the water.

  “Dude, it’s really cold,” she called to Colin.

  “But then you go numb!” he called back.

  I took off my shirt and ran past Julia into the ocean. The cold was painful, debilitating. It made me want to sink to the bottom. But I surfaced and swam over to Colin.

  “Oh, my glasses!” I yelled.

  “What about them?”

  “I think I was wearing them when I jumped in. Oh fuck.”

  I dove deep near the dock, sweeping my hands through gunk and seaweed. I’d lost three pairs of glasses in bodies of water, but none since I turned fifteen. It felt inevitable, now, because I deserved everything coming to me. I came up for air in a panic.

  “Peter, your glasses are right here,” Julia said from the dock. “They’re on top of your shirt.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s good.”

  “Calm down,” she said. “Stop doing drugs.”

  “Get in here!” Colin yelled to Julia.

  She yelled, “Fuck it!” and jumped in, then surfaced screaming. Kiki stood on the very edge of the dock howling in confusion and anxiety. Losing me to the water was one thing, but both of us gone to the depths? Unbearable.

  “Okay, this is actually the worst,” Julia said, though she was smiling. She looked beautiful. Thanks to endorphins, I guess, and maybe Colin, she was happy. She started swimming toward the island, kicking hard and powering onward with sharp, chopping arms. Colin glided after her, and I followed, splashing for a while in incompetent imitation of them before resorting to my usual dog paddle. Kiki’s howls grew more plangent the farther we swam, and I swam on my back for a bit, watching Kiki race from one end of the dock to the other. The sound disturbed me, made my heart hurt again. I worried that she was going to fall in the water and drown trying to get back onto the dock, or trying to swim after us, and who could live with that on their conscience forever? The more I listened to her cries, the more I wanted to go back and placate her. Let Julia entertain whatever crypto-romantic fantasy she was conjuring about life on an eight-hundred-square-foot island with Colin. It would be something out of a contemporary magic realist story: A man sits with his dog and watches as his partner and his best friend take up a new life together on a desolate island a few hundred yards from shore. Years pass, and the narrator watches them build a house, catch fish, raise their children, all on this tiny uninhabited island, while he and the dog waste away in longing, back on the mainland. It had that perfect combination of not making any sense and being full to the brim with banal sentiment. I tried to ignore Kiki and kept swimming for the island. Dogs probably had something in their brains that kept them from killing themselves in most instances.

  The island was just far enough away that I got tired and worried for all of thirty seconds that I wasn’t going to be able to make it. But then, up ahead of me, I saw Julia and Colin already walking on the sandbar leading up to the island proper, and realized I could have swum twice as far. Ten times as far, if I had to! My knees hit rocks and shells and I bird-stepped gingerly to the sand. I looked back toward the dock and the house but without my glasses it was just an incomprehensible blur. I didn’t hear barking and I didn’t see movement, so I became immediately convinced that Kiki had fallen in the water and drowned and that it was my fault for overriding my valid concerns and continuing on the path of hedonistic excess instead of exercising my responsibility to the creature I’d raised from puppyhood to depend on me.

  “Can anyone see?” I yelled to Colin and Julia, who had their backs to me.

  “What is it?” Julia said brusquely.

  “Can you see if Kiki’s all right?” I said. “Is she in the water?”

  “What?” Julia said. A hint of worry entered her voice. She turned around and shielded her eyes from the sun. “She’s lying on the dock. Looking very sad. But she’s fine.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “Look where I’m pointing,” she said, kinder. “No, there. See? That dog-shaped brown and black thing?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, that’s where she is,” Julia said, walking back toward Colin. “She’s fine.”

  I squinted hard. I hadn’t been able to see that far since I was about nine years old. I had to take it on faith. Julia might not have liked me much anymore, but I knew she still loved Kiki.

  I followed Colin and Julia toward the far end of the island. We passed through some scrubby grass and a couple of piney trees and then the land abruptly turned to rock, smooth at first and more jagged toward the water. We all sat on a big outcropping on the farthest, I don’t know, western corner of the island. Some corner. Everyone was being quiet and wistful so I started talking.

  “I’m thinking about how writers are, like, predestined to write whatever they’re going to write?” I said. “It’s stupid how people are always lamenting that Fitzgerald wasted so much of his talent on these hacky short stories or on trying to be a Hollywood screenwriter or whatever. Or people will wish that Updike had taken his time and written, like, six good novels instead of thirty okay ones. But i
sn’t what they did do basically whatever they were capable of doing? I mean, being who he was, how could Fitzgerald have done anything else, right? That’s the thing about alternate histories.”

  “First of all,” Colin said. “That’s not the thing about alternate histories. And second, all you’re saying is a slightly more complicated variation on ‘It is what it is,’ which you say all the time.”

  Julia said nothing. Maybe she was looking at the blurry white thing moving swiftly across the water. A boat, probably. I wasn’t the kind of person who considered boats particularly interesting or impressive, though I had a rule about always accepting invitations to board them when offered. Julia and I had watched some of the America’s Cup races one summer, the year that everyone cared about it for some reason, and it was always impossible to tell what the hell was going on, even with my glasses on and the commentators explaining everything.

  “I never understood why you were so into free will,” I said. “It seems tacky.”

  “It’s his secret Christian stuff,” Julia said. “You were in that Milton seminar. Gotta have free will to commit original sin. God knows what’s going to happen, but you have to be able to choose to do wrong. Or so say secret Christians.”

  “But what about talent?” I said.

  “To be cultivated, my boy,” Colin said. “Your buddy Scott really fucked the dog on that one. Most of your dead artist heroes: worse than they should have been.”

  “Are you being really hostile or am I more stoned than I thought I was?”

  “He’s hungry,” Julia said. “You know how he gets.”

  “Let’s go back,” I said. “Let’s save Kiki a year of therapy.”

  “We need to enjoy the island more,” Julia said.

  “It’s right here,” I said.

  “Shhh,” she said. “Enjoy it.”

  I got up and wandered around, mostly blind. Even without eyesight, I could enjoy being warm; I could enjoy the light breeze. Mostly I could worry about Leslie, and transmute that into anxiety about the dog and Colin’s bitchiness and what we would have for dinner. Leslie. In these twelve hours that I’d been cut off from her, during which I’d been enjoying, or enduring, the rank specificity of this place and the longest-tenured people in my life, she’d become an idea. She was an abstract thing I wanted, a thing that I already had, really, if I could keep it.

  * * *

  The day unfolded in a simulation of languor. Swimming and sun and sandwiches and beer. We were working actively to soften our edges, to radiate outward rather than burrowing deeper into individual resentments. We played Erykah Badu on a laptop on the porch. We caught up on the LRB.

  “I’m going to my room for a bit,” Julia announced in the late afternoon, pausing an extra moment to make sure that I’d taken this in. She sauntered down the steps of the porch and across the lawn in a gray wrap with skulls on it. I stared at what I was reading for a few more minutes—the fourth piece that month rotely summarizing a University Press biography of an overrated midcentury poet—then stood up myself.

  “I’ll put on some real pants,” I said to Colin. “Then we can go to the store.”

  “Whatever, dude,” Colin said, not looking up from his book. He was desultorily reading Margaret Atwood because she was the preferred author of the women on his online dating site.

  Julia was in the shower when I went into the cabin. Kiki clawed at the door but I didn’t let her in. I sat on the bed, thinking about things that would make me want to have sex with Julia. In my mental riffling, Leslie reemerged, fully formed, from the fog of abstraction in which she’d been lurking. Tangle haired, faintly sour smelling, long fingered. Real. I felt, for the first time, the sharp pang of betrayal. And I felt like I was betraying Leslie.

  Julia emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a fluffy blue towel, her cheeks bright red, her shoulders and chest splotchy from the steam.

  “Who gave you my room number?” she said. It was an imperious non-question. “I specifically told them not to admit guests.”

  “I’m no guest,” I said, but in my normal voice. “This is my place.”

  Julia eyed me curiously. Our usual signals were scrambled, staticky.

  “Then I suppose you’ll be expecting the rent,” she said. She put her chapped hands on her hips. It made me want to put my hands there instead, feel her sharp hip bones through the damp cotton.

  “Come here,” I said.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed next to me, creasing herself in the middle.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Where’s your head at?” I said.

  “My head? I didn’t think that was what you were after.”

  “Where’s your ass at, then? Where’s your pussy been?”

  I reached under the towel. She pressed my hand against her thigh.

  “If you give me syphilis I’m going to fucking kill you.”

  * * *

  That night, Colin and I collaborated on a seafood stew made from materials we’d purchased at an overpriced “shack” adjacent to the gigantic commercial supermarket. Julia had spent the day in one of her poetry fugues, keeping a self-enclosed vigil on the porch overlooking the ocean until I called her in for dinner, at which point she was typing in the dark, her face glowing from the light of her laptop.

  “That was fast,” she said absently.

  “We’ve been cooking for like five hours,” I said.

  “Do we have any wine?” She stood up and stretched, rising to the tips of her toes.

  “Wine, beer. Col and I have been drinking gin and tonics.”

  “Do I want that?” she said, somewhere between a rhetorical question and a genuine one.

  “I’ll make you one,” I said. “Then you’ll know.”

  We’d been into the gin fairly seriously since we got back from the store, and maybe it was partly the sun, but I felt floaty, medium-bodiless. It felt good. It was, I thought, a state well short of checked out. It was a mere gentling of what I would be anyway.

  I’d received a long email from Leslie in the afternoon, which I read in discrete bursts over the course of the day and evening. She’d had lunch at Kenny’s and they’d hit it off fabulously. He’d cooked her fish tacos and given her a slightly more coherent tour of the property. And she loved Scruggs, his little dog. Not as much as Kiki, of course. But Scruggs was a bit friendlier. She didn’t feel that she was being judged quite as much by him. Anyway, they’d had some beers and made plans to hang out during the week whenever they were both free, which was most of the time. They’d talked about me, of course. She hadn’t told Kenny explicitly what was going on between us, but he inferred it, and it seemed like he approved. He told her that he was “morality neutral” when it came to sex, so long as “nobody acted like an asshole,” which seemed to be a contradiction. Then she talked about Underworld for a while, which I hadn’t read, so didn’t find particularly interesting, and then she signed off.

  I knew, or thought I knew, that she wouldn’t have sex with Kenny, but their reported intimacy made me unhappy anyway. My conception of her was that of someone who did not enter into relationships lightly, this despite the fact that our own partnership could not have been more blithely ratified. There was a school of thought that suggested it might be clarifying if Leslie turned out to be just as into Ken as she was into me; it would be a simple lesson learned about the wiles of freethinking women. They weren’t to be trusted! But you could still trust the feelings of someone who slept around. I still deserved trust, some kind of trust, right? I was almost enlightened enough to see Leslie as I saw myself, as a soul not entirely governed by the actions of the body she happened to inhabit.

  Our fish stew turned out to be pretty good, though I couldn’t have re-created it if given a million opportunities. We toasted Maine; we toasted ourselves. I felt that we, as a table, had figured something out, some way of being that might somehow be sustainable if we kept our minds open, our brains flexible. We played the first-sentence game, making up po
ssible opening lines to the middlebrow novels of later-life coastal love that Julia’s parents kept in the house. By the third round, our entries had descended fully into the realm of the bizarre: Julia’s tended to contain mathematical symbols, mine were in pidgin Italian. You had to be there.

  Later, we lay on the dock, looking at the sky. There seemed to be far more shooting stars than usual that night, but maybe it had just been a long time since we’d been somewhere we could see the sky clearly. Spotting stars became competitive. I was pretty sure Colin was pretending half the time, but I knew Julia was being honest, and she was still seeing a lot more than I was. By two a.m., even those two dedicated joggers were bumming smokes from my emergency pack. I’d miss both of them, I thought.

  Julia and I went back to the cabin at the end of the night.

  “We can work this out, right?” she said. “You wouldn’t choose some girl you just met over me. You’re not that kind of person.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m going to fix it.”

  I’d decided to end things with Julia in a week, when we got back to Charlottesville.

  Part VI

  Julia and I broke up for the first time a year after we graduated from college. We were living in New York, separately, me in a fifth-floor walk-up in Clinton Hill, her in a two-bedroom occupied by four people on 128th Street in Manhattan. The commute was so ridiculous that we tried to coordinate which apartment we would stay at for two or three days at a time, but inevitably something vital was left in one place or the other, requiring round-trip A train rides so long that one could read an entire late-period Roth novel.