them I didn’t do panels, he said that gave him a brainstorm: how about a panel entitled “Panels: Good or Bad?” I showed them to their boat and said I’d get back to them.
A seventeen-foot Boston Whaler brought me a lanky, cactus-headed Amherst College English major on summer holiday with his parents in Wainscott. In his forties, he will stand before future students like an interminable book dog-eared to a meaningless page. He motored over to interviewme for the honors thesis he is writing on my work. He told me my short stories have been anthologized for use in many colleges and universities. I asked him if any of those institutions were accredited. With specific regard to my work, he wanted to know if the presence of hats symbolized death. I told him yes. He asked if I deliberately avoided the gerund. I told him I did. He asked if I had been influenced by Salinger or by Eudora Welty. I told him yes, by both. He asked if he might send me his thesis when it was finished. I said, By all means.
“Are you going to read at the summer writers conference?” he asked, referring to a worthy event from which I long ago withdrew.
“No conferences, no seminars, no symposia, no colloquia, no festivals, no slams.”
“Why don’t you write anymore?”
“I forgot how,” I told him, a little too close to the truth.
Two teenage girls from Westhampton High School, fair and skinny and both named Kristen, tied up at my dock but remained in their boat, and giggled. I asked them why they had come. They said they had heard I was a hermit, and they had never seen one before. I asked them what they thought a hermit looked like. They giggled some more. I brought them tall glasses of lemonade. They said thanks, giggled, and left.
Finally there was the FedEx man who delivered the Da Vinci parts, but unlike the others, he came at my insistence.Initially, his company had rejected my shipment because it weighed three times the per-package limit of 150 pounds. But I found a way around that by requesting that it be delivered in three separate packages. This required the FedEx man to come over by barge on three separate occasions. By the last of these, he was sweaty and disgruntled. He dumped the parts on the dock. I caught him staring at the hole in my shirt. I’m sure he thought it was put there by a bullet. He told me that the next time I had a delivery weighing 435 pounds, I should try UPS.
He’s had it in for me ever since he brought the current iteration of Chloe over on the barge several years ago. She weighed three pounds under the limit. I don’t see what he was complaining about.
Of course, Dave the contractor comes over every so often to ask if I’m OK. I always tell him, “See for yourself.”
With all this, it must be said that my visitors over these months, however noteworthy, did not compare either in number or in exotica to Lapham’s. Mine were merely human. His consisted of objects and materials that were summoned to his ever-enlarging estate. Often I would sit on my dock and take account of them, make an actual list, I don’t know why. But the arrivals constituted such a dazzling array—like foreign emissaries dispatched to state funerals—that, repelled as I was in principle, I nonetheless found myself gazing aswould a child in a street crowd held back by police barricades as the inanimate celebrities made their appearances.
From Dorsetshire came fireplace stones that had been surgically removed from an English country manor built by Henry V for his fourth favorite mistress, Isabel of Rutherford. The gray stones had bloodred veins running through them, and were fabled to have turned this distinctive color when Henry had Isabel stoned to death after a drunken orgy, in which, incidentally, he had everyone stoned to death, including two royal macaws.
From Padua came hand-painted mantelpieces, twenty-four in all, each bearing stories of the Apostles, two mantelpieces for each, and stacked on the grounds like
A seventeen-foot Boston Whaler brought me a lanky, cactus-headed Amherst College English major on summer holiday with his parents in Wainscott. In his forties, he will stand before future students like an interminable book dog-eared to a meaningless page. He motored over to interviewme for the honors thesis he is writing on my work. He told me my short stories have been anthologized for use in many colleges and universities. I asked him if any of those institutions were accredited. With specific regard to my work, he wanted to know if the presence of hats symbolized death. I told him yes. He asked if I deliberately avoided the gerund. I told him I did. He asked if I had been influenced by Salinger or by Eudora Welty. I told him yes, by both. He asked if he might send me his thesis when it was finished. I said, By all means.
“Are you going to read at the summer writers conference?” he asked, referring to a worthy event from which I long ago withdrew.
“No conferences, no seminars, no symposia, no colloquia, no festivals, no slams.”
“Why don’t you write anymore?”
“I forgot how,” I told him, a little too close to the truth.
Two teenage girls from Westhampton High School, fair and skinny and both named Kristen, tied up at my dock but remained in their boat, and giggled. I asked them why they had come. They said they had heard I was a hermit, and they had never seen one before. I asked them what they thought a hermit looked like. They giggled some more. I brought them tall glasses of lemonade. They said thanks, giggled, and left.
Finally there was the FedEx man who delivered the Da Vinci parts, but unlike the others, he came at my insistence.Initially, his company had rejected my shipment because it weighed three times the per-package limit of 150 pounds. But I found a way around that by requesting that it be delivered in three separate packages. This required the FedEx man to come over by barge on three separate occasions. By the last of these, he was sweaty and disgruntled. He dumped the parts on the dock. I caught him staring at the hole in my shirt. I’m sure he thought it was put there by a bullet. He told me that the next time I had a delivery weighing 435 pounds, I should try UPS.
He’s had it in for me ever since he brought the current iteration of Chloe over on the barge several years ago. She weighed three pounds under the limit. I don’t see what he was complaining about.
Of course, Dave the contractor comes over every so often to ask if I’m OK. I always tell him, “See for yourself.”
With all this, it must be said that my visitors over these months, however noteworthy, did not compare either in number or in exotica to Lapham’s. Mine were merely human. His consisted of objects and materials that were summoned to his ever-enlarging estate. Often I would sit on my dock and take account of them, make an actual list, I don’t know why. But the arrivals constituted such a dazzling array—like foreign emissaries dispatched to state funerals—that, repelled as I was in principle, I nonetheless found myself gazing aswould a child in a street crowd held back by police barricades as the inanimate celebrities made their appearances.
From Dorsetshire came fireplace stones that had been surgically removed from an English country manor built by Henry V for his fourth favorite mistress, Isabel of Rutherford. The gray stones had bloodred veins running through them, and were fabled to have turned this distinctive color when Henry had Isabel stoned to death after a drunken orgy, in which, incidentally, he had everyone stoned to death, including two royal macaws.
From Padua came hand-painted mantelpieces, twenty-four in all, each bearing stories of the Apostles, two mantelpieces for each, and stacked on the grounds like
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