Little Reef and Other Stories Read online

  “Right?” said Taylor, gasping and waiting for Diane to finish her idea. “Oh, and? And?”

  Taylor was often on the verge of overdoing it in the felicity department.

  “It was a long time ago when Gary and I met,” Diane said, “and I don’t know if anybody needs to hear that old shpiel,” and started to laugh. “I mean, who needs to hear that old shpiel?”

  “Oh but they might!” said Taylor, turning her face full-on expectantly to Diane, who had a weirdly special thing for Taylor. Diane rooted for Taylor—though she still could not say why.

  Taylor was more talented than Gary. You even got the sense that Taylor knew it already, but Taylor had come to North Carolina to study with Gary. Her father revered him. There were those families, Diane knew, where everybody loved books, and they talked about them nonstop, but Diane hadn’t come from one of those. “It’s all right,” Diane wanted to say to the girl, reach across, and touch her. Taylor’s fiction was full of agony—whether lived or not it was hard to tell, since it was vivid but took place in settings where Taylor had probably never been, in trailers and boardinghouses (and how did Taylor know about boardinghouses? but she obviously read a great deal). What an imagination. Taylor was affectionate. Now as Diane had taco night, going to the trouble to serve beef and tofu fillings separately, Taylor wanted to sit on the couch for hours, and drink wine and talk. “We should go to the movies,” the girl had once proposed, “or shopping.”

  Taylor wouldn’t expect any special favors with her grades—she didn’t need help with her grades. But a few years ago, one of the girls in Gary’s fiction workshop was obsessed and would ring the front door while he and Diane were in bed. She left things she’d baked at the front door and rang and got in her car and drove off, Gary swearing that he’d received no love notes. Diane believed him since young people always needed extra attention. They’d lavish it on you to get a tiny part of it back. Joni always found a way to show this without saying it. Gary disliked Joni Mitchell, though he’d never said it outright. First Diane had stopped playing her whenever he was around—then she’d stopped playing her altogether. Joni, admittedly, was a depressive influence, but in her prime Joni’s finest thoughts had rhymed with Diane’s most painful views of humanity.

  I met a redneck on a Grecian isle … He cooked good omelets and stews.

  But Gary didn’t cook. Gary acted as though he were incapable of anything but thoughts.

  Every year brought a Taylor (or a Josh, a young man she’d felt great kinship with), but at the end of the second year, she knew, the bond was broken. Josh had been a beautiful boy. Josh was a name you heard a lot now, so that not every Josh was special, but Diane had felt something for the one from Atlanta. The warm, intelligent ones never stayed. It was too small a town, and there were no local opportunities for a graduate from this program. Yet with a recommendation from Gary, they could go anywhere in the world. They got teaching fellowships in California or New England. They were invited to colonies in Italy. They found agents and editors; they ended up publishing their books and became professors themselves. The ones who stayed didn’t have a big future, anyway, not right away. They stuck around and taught lower-level courses. They got married and stayed and asked for full-time positions teaching those lower-level courses then never had their books published. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, but they lost their ambitions. The creative sparkle went out of them as they settled into parenthood, some of them changing careers and going into carpentry or landscaping. They managed video stores, until the video stores went out of business. They helped open restaurants. Gary didn’t seem to judge them harshly. He was happy teaching and encouraging them. Not everyone was going to be successful and it was cruel to ask them to try to be—as cruel as it would be to ask Gary to write a bestseller.

  Diane switched gears on the couch with Taylor and tried not to get too maternal a look in her eyes and said, “You’re almost done here, and so what are your plans? You’ve obviously been thinking about them. Have you been applying to all that good stuff, filling out applications?”

  Taylor smoked, something Diane wished she wouldn’t do. It was a mild evening. Diane had opened all the windows and lit some candles. Out on the screened-in porch Gary was doing doubles in Ping-Pong with a couple of boys and another girl. Only half of Gary’s workshop had showed up. It was that time of year, when the numbers began dropping off. Diane imagined this happened for good reasons and some terrible ones, too, like envy in the ranks. Some people had been handed goodies already, and the others were waiting and wondering and starting to worry.

  “I’m going back to Maine for a summer,” Taylor said, “probably work for my neighbor’s lobster-pot type deal—it’s a shack right on the Union River Bay where they ready-make the rolls and dinners, and you can go out on the water, on the dock I mean, and sit at a picnic table and eat your dinner. They don’t sell beer or anything, but you can bring your own. It’s so, so pretty.”

  “I bet, but are you going back and doing that because you feel like you have to, Taylor?”

  “No, no, Diane, Steve, my neighbor, and his wife Jane—they could sort of use my help.”

  It came back to Diane, that she’d read a story by Taylor about this. The man got cancer and for a summer was unable to work at the shack when summer was their big season, and they couldn’t afford to close. It must have given Taylor a sense of accomplishment. If Diane could go back and do something like that for someone who really needed it, she would. What a stupid thought, though. Diane was already on her third glass of malbec. She’d be on the purple pill for her reflux again by morning. Gary didn’t take any medications, but Diane was on three different prescriptions. Gary ran in the morning, played tennis with the department chair (whom he didn’t especially like), and watched what he ate. Two beers and he was ready for a good night’s sleep, and woke up ready to do it all over again, never complaining. He left his students’ stories on the breakfast bar when he was done making his comments, as though Diane should have a skim, too.

  “I remember that one,” Diane said, knowing that Taylor understood that she was referring to the lobster-shack story. “I hope you don’t mind, but I was curious.” She stopped, wishing that for this one idea she wanted to express she had a cigarette to handle for help. “I’m curious about all of Gary’s students,” she went on, arching her eyebrows vaguely. “And I’m often amazed.”

  “Thanks, Diane.”

  “By quite a lot of you,” said Diane, then winking at the girl, added, “or some of you.”

  “You caught me,” said Taylor. “He doesn’t say it but I think Gary thinks I’m just a bit too confident and cocky. That’s why I want to go back to Maine and just be quiet a while, regroup.”

  It hit her again there was a chance that Taylor and Gary were having an affair, or fucking on the side, meaninglessly. Whenever this possibility hit her, it seemed too absurd. Confronting this distant possibility with Taylor always comforted Diane; Gary should have fun with someone. But he wasn’t, of course. Gary was too fucking disorganized to bring something like that off.

  “And after—do you know what you’ll do after?” said Diane, watching Taylor steadily as Taylor imbibed, more than sipped, her smelly, fragrant cigarette—courting death, as we all did.

  “I might go to a family friend’s fish camp in the Keys and work— maybe get on a boat or do some housekeeping or cooking or waiting on tables. I’m not scared of hard work. And in the end, I suppose I think I need something like that. I’m really not afraid of menial tasks.”

  Diane gazed at her and they both laughed, at what Diane couldn’t be sure. Pretty Taylor!

  “You’re so humble,” said Diane. She would have liked to be this humble at that age: the things she might have seen, and not just from the closed window of an air-conditioned car or the purview of a farmhouse in a part of a Europe hours from where menacing stuff happened. Even going to Columbia had been a safe move and made her parents proud. Anyway, the city had los
t its edge by then, people said. Not even telling them she planned to marry a writer had fazed her folks. Before Josh, Gary was the only man she’d ever slept with. Josh was a man. She’d let him fuck her because she’d thought of him as a boy, and he’d been tender. But he was nearly twenty-five when he’d said goodbye and he never wrote, not even when it was so easy now with email. Nor was he going to at this point. He had his own website and had published a novel and a book of stories already, and a deal for his next book, a sailing travelogue, had just been announced and God only knew but he’d sail into Taylor’s port one morning and bed her. Then Taylor would find out about Diane, which didn’t matter either. Diane had sex with Josh maybe a dozen times in his apartment, which was underfurnished but not dirty. When he pushed into her his back undulated, and she held his buttocks and her palms rode in along on them toward her. When his motions got faster she squeezed, pulling; when Josh came, she smoothed them. She smoothed the soft brown hairs. He dropped his head next to hers and drove the side of his face into the pillow looking the other way. Her hand motions got wider and she felt his thighs relaxing and when he rose up she kissed his chest, too desperately, she thought. You didn’t do anything too desperate, so then she cooled off, tried to make a joke, yet keeping her hands near him. She liked the way his nipples felt between her lips, which she tried not to tense too hard. She liked his smell. It didn’t matter if it was sweet or something more mixed but was lovely. And he was lovely but not a boy. And she’d never been a girl. Everything had happened too late, and she wanted to mention this with Taylor. She had a feeling if things weren’t about to wind down, and she knew they soon would be, she’d ease into it and confess that all with Taylor—for no reason except that it would be nice to confess something for once in her life. And to have a friend from one of these groups. She’d gotten this idea from the way Taylor could sit still, without saying anything, just waiting for a topic to suggest itself, the two of them listening to each other’s silences, watching each other’s features, and apparently both enjoying sitting here. She thought Taylor could have been her friend. But in a few weeks the girl would be gone, and Diane would be alone again, so nope—no confessions.

  From out on the porch came a ruckus, all of the Ping-Pong players crying “Oh!” together.

  There was a striking-down of paddles onto the table, but Diane could hear the ball still in metrically clacking motion. One of the boys was tapping it back up and up with his paddle.

  “No no no,” Gary was saying, shouting actually, “don’t let me stop the big tournament!”

  That was Gary’s signal, though, that it should stop. Evenings always ended far too early.

  Taylor turned to Diane, waited, and said, “Hey, girl. Let me help you clean up?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Please! But Diane, please. You never let me and yet I always want to.”

  Taylor was nice but her language could edge toward the pretentious, so middle-class. At times, Diane had actually heard Taylor make the construction “between you and I.” So realtor.

  “We have a rule about that,” said Diane, “and that rule is absolutely not. There’s nothing to clean up. All I have to do is turn on the dishwasher. It’s all set to go, I’ll just flick the switch.”

  “But help pick up glasses and take them in?”

  “Don’t bother. Machine’s nearly full and they won’t fit. You’ve helped enough already.”

  “Okay.” Taylor reached across squeezing Diane’s hand. “All right crazy, sweet you.”

  She hadn’t fought too hard, but then all of Gary’s students had a sense of entitlement. It was cool, forbidding Gary. But it was also Diane. She’d just dump the remaining opened wine.

  Gary was seeing them to the door when she went around blowing out candles, getting the lights, pressing the dishwasher button. She was careful not to rattle the recyclables around in the container on the side porch. It was too friendly a neighborhood for something as impersonal as a note about her rattling things around outside when it was late. People came over and started with an opening line about the weather: but make no mistake, nothing out of line went unnoticed.

  Upstairs, Gary ducked into the bathroom in his T-shirt and shorts, saying, “I missed you.”

  They were calling back and forth as she pulled back the covers on the carefully made bed.

  “Me, too,” she said. “I was with Taylor the whole time. Those boys adore you.”

  “They’re friendly guys, those nutty, rascally boys. And Jill-Ann. I’ll miss her, too.”

  She was in one of her short nighties, but she was starting to wonder if she should still be showing her knees so frankly, the last thing or almost the last thing he’d see before he closed his eyes. Dirt from the garden smeared on them below the frayed bottoms of her cut-offs, fine. She couldn’t see herself in pajama pants and a tee, the way the catalogs were suggesting she do.

  “But honey, just curious,” she called kindly, “where do you think Taylor will end up?”

  “Are you suddenly worried about Taylor? Vous? ” he said, appearing in the doorway with his toothbrush pasted. He put the other hand on his hip, a bit effeminately yet appealingly so.

  “Watch it now, darling,” she said. “Just asking, do you think Taylor has any direction?”

  Gary mugged, and before he began brushing his teeth said, “Does any of us?”

  Now in all of history, young peoples’ lives seemed most delicate. The wars in the Middle East, the banks, the jobs situation. It was a terrible time. Like before, in a way, but much worse.

  “Your students are grateful,” said Diane, “and the French act like you invented the baguette.”

  Gary went up and down on his toes as he brushed, flexing and scrubbing machinelike.

  “You always had direction,” she said as he was ducking out. She heard him spit, rinse.

  Gary had never solicited her critical thoughts of him, so self-confident was he always.

  “Taylor’s a free soul,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I don’t force them, no one forced me. I’m always glad to write recommendations. Some say I’m indiscriminate with them. There’s no deadline with me. If Taylor wants one later, I’ll certainly write it, but why take on extra work?”

  These application processes were ruthlessly officious and both of them knew it, and here Gary was choosing to be coy and obscure. What it boiled down to was Gary hating paperwork.

  Diane narrowed her eyes at him and said, “Really, Taylor’s not applying for anything?”

  “Or she is and she doesn’t want my recommendation. She went to a good undergrad.”

  “You’re amazing,” Diane said, shaking her head and sliding under the covers.

  “I’m Ludner the Amaze-O,” he said with the grin of some character out of his beloved childhood comic books, his first collectible passion—as though his words were suspended in a speech balloon hooked to the side of his mouth with its cheerful check-mark shape. He turned out the lights and got into bed with the same punctilious cheer, sighing for effect in the dark. (⋆SIGH!⋆)

  He turned on his side away from her, curled his legs, and pushed his butt against her, and she lay on her back and her hand gravitated there. She reached under the waistband. I’m an ass woman, she thought, and always was. She thought of Taylor’s absurdly pleasant face. The baby softness of Gary’s skin against her dry palm and roughly worked fingers soothed her. Of course, she’d forgotten to lotion her hands again. But she wasn’t getting up now. Then sometime in the middle of the night she thought the phone was ringing—her mother again, from assisted living.

  “Di honey, is it you? I’ve misplaced your father again. My hearing’s terribly degraded.”

  Before she’d died, Diane had given her mother a cell and the woman, whose real problem was losing her sense of time, would use it to call her in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep and was thinking about the past and wanted to go over it again. More than once her mother would say, “Was I any good to you
? I was good to your father, which wasn’t easy. But to you?”

  This time a SWAT team rappelled from the ceiling’s attic door shouting that it was time to go, there was no time to get dressed: they were coming to escort her to see her mother in assisted living down in Florida—it came to her in the confusion. “But I’m on the line with her now,” she wanted to say. “Ask her yourself. I’m not due to see her for weeks!” In her throat was caught a makeup-removing sponge soaked in a pH-balanced clarifying lotion made with pricey botanicals, but already the ninja-attired men had disappeared. There was no one to talk to if only she could. She tasted the preciously derived essence of a rare African fruit gagging her, and she whimpered, and then she was alone and already starting to feel foolish, but she wasn’t sure, wasn’t at all sure.

  A Black Hawk with its rotors churning was waiting out on the lawn, shining its lights. It was the neighbor’s kid pulling into the drive next door, thunderous rock just dying as the boy got out of the car and slammed its door. Once her mother sat up bolt-erect in their settee across from the bed, and yet Gary’s light wheezing snores didn’t interrupt their oddly calm conversation.

  “You were wonderful,” her mother had said. “Did you pray for me, like I taught you?”

  Usually she knew it was a dream and would sleep right through it. For a year before she died, her mother was racking up incredibly high charges on the cell, calling numbers in states the woman had never visited—and it was Diane’s idea to pay them, billing herself for her own guilt. Gary had been nice about it, nodding forbearingly since nothing flustered the Amaze-O. Nothing could block Gary’s sleep. He awoke refreshed and tied on his running shoes, stealthily exiting.

  She was making the plans for Provence. She’d gotten proficient on the computer. Gary liked to pretend he was hopeless about paying online. Instructions and prompts made him visibly tetchy. His antsiness allowed him to stay in character, encouraging in him a trait her friend Holly called learned helplessness. Holly was recently divorced for the third time and would occasionally call to say she’d done two hours of cardio at the gym—an hour on the elliptical and another hour on the StairMaster, which she set for what she called Zermatt Bergsteiger Intensity. She’d achieved a tight, feral midlife angularity and a hungry cougar regard and said that when she looked in the mirror she asked herself why she had ever needed a man to tell her what was glaringly obvious to someone as discerning as herself. During Holly’s Zumba class, aping the snaky festive moves of the fetchingly mic’d gay Brazilian, Holly experienced the first intimations of cascading orgasms.