We stare out at the sea, the sky, the bathers, the little boats. It’s like sitting in the middle of a postcard.

“You’re always bringing Catherine to postcard places,” I observe.

“What?”

“This looks exactly like a postcard, doesn’t it? Like we’re sitting in the middle of a postcard.”

“Yes,” he mumbles.

“Sky as blue as horseshoe crab’s blood. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? I got that from one of your articles though.”

“Did you?”

“The one on marine animals. You described how blue the horseshoe crab’s blood is.”

“It’s really bluer than that,” he says.

“Are you bluer than that?”

He glances at me. “Let’s walk.”

We leave the beach and enter one of the donkey paths.

“I didn’t know you read my articles,” he says.

“Catherine always clips them and sends them to me.”

“Does she?”

“You sent the one you thought would do me some good, but she sends every one of them. She’s very proud of you, you know.”

He grimaces. He smiles a bit, says nothing. We brace against the wall of a building for a passing auto. I stand pigeon-toed.

Steep stone stairs lead to a promontory, a sort of natural terrace, that looks out onto the beach. We sit down. He strokes his bottom lip.

“I have a world of questions for you myself,” he says softly. “Hazard them,” I say.

He throws his head back and gives a long, luxurious laugh. “Not if you put it that way, I won’t.”

I watch a saffron-colored sailboat, then another that looks like it has been scoured with sand.

“I guess I’ll be heading back,” I say.

“Do you want to go somewhere for a drink?”

“I don’t think so.”

He stands up. I still sit with my back against the rock. He sighs through his teeth.

“Besides I don’t want to get too mellow,” I say, sounding dryer than I’d intended. “Catherine’s in Oz with me again.”

We say Catherine is in Oz when she behaves witchy. Catherine has come up with that one herself too. She’d twisted “at odds” into “in Oz” one time, and we’d laughed so hard and liked the expression so much that we were very quickly out of Oz and giggling companions when we explained to Ernest what it meant.

“Catherine’s always in Oz,” he says.

I stand up.

“Anyway, you’re never in Oz with her long,” he says.

“You’ve got your little red shoes.”

He’s looking like he wished he had his.

14

I met Catherine at an artists’ conference—not writers, but sculptors, painters, weavers, candlestick makers. I was staying at a hotel in Detroit, because some folks at Wayne State University had invited me to give a fiction reading. When I came back from the reading, I wandered upstairs and discovered some people sitting behind a long table piled with fliers and registration forms. I asked them what was going on. They said it was an artists’ conference and asked if I wanted to register, so I gave the fifteen bucks (because the banquet included all the booze you could drink) and went into this conference room where Catherine was standing up front talking about light and surfaces and how she sculpted using light the way a painter does.