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Back Loudermilk Save as PDF
Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

Harry screws his eyes shut and tries again for sleep. In his mind, images of Loudermilk blossom, fade, recur. Loudermilk glides across a lawn in Oswego, New York, nods his head in time, tells Harry to stick with him, it’s going to be cool, they know more than everyone, drives Harry down to Rochester, where they contemplate the lilacs and talk about making it big one day, passes him another beer, convinces him to defer his student loans, is inexplicably but so familiarly there. Of course there was an era before Loudermilk, but it’s only worth remembering insofar as it was a time when Harry was alone. And Harry’s alone no more. What a gift, their unity. It’s more than he’d hoped for. It’s Harry’s fate, maybe. And, as fates do, it demands things.

Four. Same

Four

Same

It’s the morning of her first full day in Crete, and Clare, out of furnished rooms, is on her own recognizance. She has been told the name of the progressive supermarket, and now she’s in it, shopping. Given the prices—like imports in Oslo—it’s unlikely there will be a repeat excursion. One must invest in a membership, plus a monthly work shift, and this seems like an incredibly complex proposition given the ubiquity, at least in Clare’s experience, of food.

In one aisle, Clare’s perverse eye lights on a short middle-aged man, still damp from his shower, who is wrangling a chiming case of wine. Clare is momentarily baffled by the unknown man’s familiarity, but is relieved to recognize him, not as a former professor or family friend inconveniently obscured by the disorienting experience of having just relocated to the center of the country, but rather as a slightly more unhinged version of a character of hers, the protagonist from her prize-winning short story, “The Lift,” written now more than three years ago. It is, unmistakably, him. Or, rather, a him, someone further along in the process. Clare skips to two of her favorite short paragraphs in which the female villain’s triumph is revealed:

“No. It’s OK. We can lend you some money.” Then he says, “You aren’t in trouble, are you?”

Her face turns up. “No,” she says. “I just need money.” And very quickly, so he can’t laugh with her, she laughs.

Clare smiles. Here she had done well. Clare watches the man struggle. He is only living a limited life, a life of deadly certainties, and good for him. She will never be anything like this.