Free Paper Lantern: Love Stories by Stuart Dybek

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 alive. 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