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We were still reading for ideas back then, for style. We hadn’t figured out what literature was for, actually, that it was mostly about loss, that without hope there was no risk and without risk there was no danger and that every story, in the end, is about danger. We still believed literature could be reasoned with, I mean.
LIL LOOKED LIKE this: tall, fleshy, with crooked teeth and a gently scalloped underlip. She’d found me somewhere, at some party, and showed me her tattoo. I was certainly ready for a major disruption.
Lil was just back from a year in Sierra Leone, doing relief work. She had the serenity characteristic of someone who has pushed past her surface fears, and this terrified and thrilled me, as did her decadence, her tendency to gorge on the sensual pleasures. The books could wait.
By noon, we had staggered down to the lake, down the steep rickety wooden stairs that led to the dock, with its quaint boathouse, where, of course, we had done it the previous day, Lil atop a bed of orange life preservers, the scent of rotting beams and boat fuel drifting down onto our sweet salty merger and the spiderwebs rising like faint scarves with our exertions.
There was a wooden float a hundred yards out, and we swam out there, with books held over our heads, Gatsby for me and The Lover for Lil. She was insatiable after doomed love, though she said she read Duras because she liked the way the author shaped her thoughts. I was stuck on Daisy Buchanan, winsome and cruel, gazing tearfully down at Gatsby’s shirts (all those lovely silk collars).
We lay on our backs and held the books up to shade our eyes. And we might have gazed at the pages, absorbed a paragraph or two, but that was it. One of us would shift our weight and the raft would sway and the other would reach out. We could feel the erotic intent, transmitted through the fingertips, and the books would fall away.
