enduring. I breathe like it does, my blood takes on its rhythms,
my heart listens to the sound of the ocean enduring and mimics
it.
After five days, my lost boy comes to visit. We swim. In the
shower we make love. We sleep on the beach, in the fog, in the
mist. Inside the huge slick bugs line the tops of the windows,
poised there to drop off or fly, but never moving, primal, they
could be gargoyles, guardians in stone but as old as the sea. I
watch them. I stare. I am terrified by them but too tired to
scream or run or move: I am restless: they sit: I am afraid: they
sit: they are long, slick brown things, repulsive, slow: I must
be here, near the ocean, or perhaps I will die: maybe they wait
for that: grotesque guardians of my lonely, tired death. I am
restless. I go inside, I go outside. I listen to music: Bach,
Chopin, Mahler, Mozart. They and the ocean are renewal, the
will to live. So is the boy, my love, sleeping on the beach. I
have left him, fragile, exposed, as I always do, to sleep alone.
128
He sleeps, I am restless, I go in and out. He leaves the next
day. I have two more days here. The ocean has turned me
nearly human: closer to life than death. Someday I want the
ocean forever, a whole life, day in and day out, a proper marriage: I want to be its human witness: near its magnificence, near the beat of its splendid, terrifying heart. Oh, yes, I am
tired: but I have seen the ocean come from the end of the
world to touch the sand at my feet.
*
He calls me, the publisher with the dripping upper lip, the hair
on it encrusted slightly yellow, slightly green. His voice is
melodious, undulating like the ocean, a soft washing up of
words on this desolate human shore: a whisper, a wind rushing
through the trees bringing a sharp, wet chill. He wants me,
wants my book: he is soft, melodious, undulating, tones like
music washing up in waves on the shore.
He calls, whispering. You are so wonderful to want me, I say.
*
He calls, whispering, a musical voice, soft, soft, like the ocean
undulating or the wind rushing through the trees at dusk, the
chill of night in the wind.
I am a writer, I have an agent, she stands between me and
every disaster, one human heart with knowledge and skill,
some common sense, and I say to her, I cannot stand to talk to
him. I don’t know what to say to him, I don’t know how to
say anything to him because anything I say has to mean: take
me: have me: I love you: I want you, wonderful you. I knew
how, certainly, once. He must be loved, admired, adored, to
publish me, whom he now adores. She tells me what to say. I
write it down, word for word, on a four-by-six plain index
card. I cross out the adjectives. I say what she tells me. I read
