Free A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown

Amy had said, but he held up his hand.
    “Listen,” he said—like his father, or like some reverse image of his father, who had of course known everything he was supposed to know and a million other things as well: how to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew, how to count cards in blackjack, how to make a Sazerac and an Old Fashioned.
    He hadn’t read Henry Miller, he told Amy, much less Henry Fielding or Henry James. “You’d think, you know, given my name, that I’d have read at least some Henrys.”
    “O. Henry?” Amy asked.
    Henry shook his head. And he hadn’t, he said, read Jane Austen or Tolstoy or much of Hemingway besides The Old Man and the Sea. In a seminar in college he’d been forced to make his way through Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, about which he now remembered exactly nothing, and Moby-Dick, much of which he couldn’t remember even as he’d read it. Mainly, he told Amy, he had tried to figure out which of the two books was a more useful prop to spark conversation with the beautiful, sullen young graduate students who, with their spiked bangs skimming their lashes, studied at the café tables in the student union.
    “Which one was better?” Amy had asked.
    “Neither one. Nothing,” Henry had said. “I tried everything. Kerouac and Ginsberg and Bukowski and Borges. I even sank as low as Kahlil Gibran. Nothing worked.”
    “Well, now it has,” Amy had said, taking his hand.
    “You’re a sucker for Kahlil Gibran?” Henry had said. “Do you know how pathetic that is?”
    “Not Kahlil Gibran,” Amy had said, smiling, crying now. “You. I’m a sucker for you.”
    “Worse,” Henry had said. “Much, much, much worse.”
      
    He hadn’t meant it, of course. He had believed that he could make her happy, that he could offer her his devotion, his attention, his admiration. And he had believed that she would erase—that she had already erased—his peculiar proclivity for melancholy, his abysmally romantic attachment to sorrow. He was, had always been, his father’s child, not in intellect but by temperament—and yet for five years with Amy, he had mostly managed to swear off the pallid and grim, the mournful and forlorn. Amy had cooked for him, and just this was enough to summon in him a dazzling joy—the real thing, complete and total. He felt the same mixture of delirious gratitude and dizzying overindulgence after Amy’s meals that he felt after sex. Amy, notebook in hand, planning her next book, bombarded him with questions, the very questions he might have asked her when he lay exhausted in bed: How good was it? What in particular did you like? How soon would you want it again?
    What man would walk away from such a woman, would hurt her the way he had hurt her?
    Yet he had walked away. He had hurt her. And now—now he had lost everything. He had executed with unlikely depth and precision his grand and transcendent plan for ruin. Sitting at his table at What a Blessing, listening as Miles Davis gave way to Oscar Peterson and then to some tenor player he didn’t recognize, he tried to picture the past year or so of his life as a line drawn on a page. It looked like a child’s scribbles, like a madman’s preposterous treasure map. He finished his lunch, paid the check, and went back to his car. He took out the road atlas, pulled out a pen from the windshield visor, and put an X over the spot where Marimore stood.
    Here, he said to himself. Here. He carved the X into the page as if that would make everything more concrete, more real. Here is where I am.
    And where would he go? How far might he get? He considered the fact that Amy, somewhere near, would be only an inch or two away on the map. An inch or two. Maybe he would find her if he just drove and drove, winding his way from one town to the next, looking for the sort of farmhouse where Amy would be living, some beautifully weathered clapboard and tin-roofed cottage tucked beneath great towering trees, surrounded by