Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
Around the lifts there was still some grass. The mountain started the second you passed the ticket booth: the ground shot up, no trees except between trails. There were rocks Richard had not been able to see in winter, when they made snow. The main chairlift was running. Yellow benches sailed up and down and swung out around the giant engine in a metal house at the base. There was a man in a red shirt on the roof of the engine. He had his head down and was adjusting something Richard could not see. The lift made more noise now than in the winter.
“Hey.” A man in a black windbreaker with wet hair walks toward Richard. The man has a very broad face, so Richard sees his features before he is near. This is a man Richard has seen working the lifts before. The man says, “Can I do something for you?”
“Yes.” Richard’s voice is raised. “I’m looking for a young woman. Her name is Eloise. She works here.”
“Yeah. El is at the top right now.”
“Do you know when she’ll be down?”
“Hold this.” The man gives Richard the car battery he was carrying. His thumb in a thick glove presses the button of a walkie-talkie he has produced. He brings the device to his mouth. His eyes roll up to get the words. “Yeah, can you get me Eloise.” There is a crack and a whir. Someone says, “Sure,” and then there are scratches. Eloise says, “Hey.”
“Here,” the man says, passing Richard the walkie-talkie. Richard puts the battery on the ground and takes the walkie-talkie in both hands. “You press that,” says the man, indicating.
“Thank you,” Richard tells him, and patiently puts the lower half of the walkie-talkie near his mouth. “Eloise?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Dr. Lehren. I just came in my car.”
“Yeah?”
“You still want to use the phone?” Richard feels like he is in a storm. The man in gloves has squatted down to do something with the battery on the ground, and the man on the roof begins motioning for Richard to come toward the lift.
“Yeah, I do. Things just got kind of busy around here.”
“Oh yes?” Richard shouts. “There’s a guy on the roof of the lift motioning to me. I’m going to walk over there now. Are you at the top of the main lift?”
“Yeah.”
Richard is standing underneath the lift now, and the man on the roof comes to the edge and leans off.
“Do you want to come up?” Eloise asks him.
The man on the roof has a brown beard. He is young and smiling, and it seems to Richard that one of the man’s eyes might be slow, but he can’t really tell from this angle. “Are you gonna ride?” the man asks him, one finger indicating the chairs running underneath the eaves.