Free Paper Lantern: Love Stories by Stuart Dybek Page A

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