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    The Maytrees: A Novel
    The Maytrees: A Novel
    The Maytrees: A Novel
    Ebook189 pages3 hours

    The Maytrees: A Novel

    By Annie Dillard

    3.5/5

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    “Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love.”  — New York Times

    “In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel.” — The Washington Times

    Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. He hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.

    In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.

    In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature's vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard's original body of work.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061809743
    The Maytrees: A Novel
    Author

    Annie Dillard

    Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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    Reviews for The Maytrees

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, and educated poet of thirty. He courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees; decades of loving and longing.
    • 4/5
      Annie Dillard is one of my favorite authors. I enjoy reading about nature & Dillard's prose can turn the barest fact into poetry. THE MAYTREES also reads like a poem. The subjects are the substance of poetry --the sea, the shore, the tides, the starry sky above & the mud-flat swamps below. The problem with this novel is the story. A man & woman fall in love. They have a child, which they love. The man is a poet, at least part-time. They live in a house by the sea, on Cape Cod, by Provincetown, one of this country's most artistic places. We are shown how they love, each other & the beauty of the sea & shore. What we are not shown is how they are able to hurt each other & disrupt the life of their child. I had no sense at all as to why these people acted as they did, only that the man, the poet, was some how above the moral standards of everyone else. And his lady friend who was "Bohemian" in her antics was also excused. And the wife who bears the cost of this mis-adventure? She sails serenely along, we are never shown nor told any emotional reactions on onybodys part. Annie Dillard wrote another novel "The Living" which I tried to read, but had to stop reading because everytime I began to fell close to a character, they died. In this novel, the characters live long lives, but we never feel close to them at all. The writing, however, is beautiful -- very poetic.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the simple message that love can runs deeper than the betrayal and I appreciated the lyrical prose, but I mostly found the book to be rambling and disjointed. Either I wasn't intellectual enough to "get it" or it wasn't that good. I started over two or three times, trying to understand the plot. I really couldn't say I was glad I read it when all was said and done because reading it was such a chore. I found myself wondering who recommended this to me because they have completely discredited themselves. Thank goodness for Library Thing as I was able to make note that is was from Good Morning America's Summer Read spotlight from Jane Magazine.
    • 3/5
      Not an easy book for me to read as I was wondering what the author wanted me to get out of it. Never became swept away into the language although the location was pulling me to the sea. After I finished I was thinking about it and decided she was writing about love, not your typical love story. Not an easy book to read or understand but full of lovely language and set in a beautiful place.
    • 1/5
      I really disliked this. I didn't like the plot line and I didn't think I was smart enough to read Dillard's prose, which is actually poetry. I'm not one to wade through symbolism, just lay out the story already! Most of her efforts were wasted on me, I'm afraid.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this gorgeously written story of Toby and Lou and their life in Cape Cod. Sounds so simple. Prose so rich.
    • 3/5
      Lyrical and enjoyable but her nonfiction works sets the bar way to high.
    • 5/5
      I approached this book warily, as it's fiction, and I've always thought that Dillard was best at essays and inquiries into the natural world. I was prepared to be disappointed, but I was not prepared to be, as I was, blown away. This book is an astonishing, lambent, transcendent meditation on love, marriage and humanity. The story of Toby and Lou Maytree, and their friends and families, works on many different levels. The book is like a photo fussed over in Photoshop- layer after translucent layer, each coloring the whole delicately and almost imperceptibly. Every word drops into place with a feeling of inevitability, so well crafted is this novel. Highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      A novel chronicling the life of a married couple from their courtship to their death. Throughout their marriage, they both grapple with trying to understand what love is, and what life is all about. Dillard's writing style is very pithy - she uses very short sentences, and occasionally a sentence that seems totally unrelated to anything else. Because of this, I found her characters to be rather flat: I just never felt like I really understood any of them, and I couldn't understand their actions, much less their emotions. The writing is amazing, but I didn't enjoy the story or the characters.
    • 1/5
      Widely well-reviewed, but I didn't like it. Non-linear style, with so many unfamiliar words as to seem pretentious. I did not finish it.
    • 4/5
      The Maytrees is so beautifully written that it is a marvel to behold. It's hard to put into words of my own that would do the book justice. The story is about the lives of Lou and Toby Maytree, a couple who live on Cape Cod. There is a bare bones plot, that I won't spoil by reciting here, suffice it to say that it is about love and forgiveness, but the triumph of the book is its prose. It's the kind of book where you have to put it down often just to marvel. I could quote example after example, but even that would not do justice to the totality of the experience of reading this book. What keeps it from being a five star novel for me is that the narration seemed too detached for the intimacy of the story being told. I never thought that I was on the ground experiencing the story with the Maytrees. I felt as if I were observing the action from 20,000 feet.
    • 1/5
      I found the style off-putting and it was just torture to read. I cared nothing about the characters and did not relate to any of them. I finished it only because it was a book club selection. There are a few memorable passages that show the author has talent (and earned her 1 star). But in general, I did notlike this book and do not recommend it.
    • 4/5
      Beautiful. Annie Dillard writes like no one else I know, except for maybe Marilynne Robinson. Her only weakness is that she only knows how to write one type of character (and the internal monologue of one type of character). :(
    • 1/5
      I received a recommendation on this from my aunt and we usually like the same kind of books, but I had a real problem with this one. After around page 100 I told her I was going to quit reading but she begged me to continue saying I wouldn't be sorry. But I am sorry. I could have been reading something really interesting. I just couldn't care what happened with Lou or Toby much less what Lou decides to do later in their lives. And the writing made me think of a poet "wanna be". Too much symbolism in a wavering format. Many times I had to re-read lines to try to figure out what was meant buy certain phrases.Some just didn't connect at all. Just too much work for what it was worth. Maybe it was written for loftier readers.
    • 3/5
      The language is this book is really lovely. It's poetic, it's beautiful. I'm writing this review several months after finishing the book. I don't really remember much about the characters. I have some recollections of the plot. Those elements are not impressive. It's possible that this is a case of style over substance; pretty words that don't say much. But the words are very pretty.
    • 3/5
      With descriptions such as "a clumsy beach" and "a greasy sky," Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees" is nothing if not poetic. This book is perhaps best described as the concept of a book; rather than a detailed rendering it is an impressionistic portrayal. In beautifully poetic language Dillard gives us glimpses into the lives and thoughts of a love triangle as Toby Maytree first marries quiet and reserved Lou Bigelow and then, after fourteen years of seemingly happy marriage, later moves to Maine with dynamic and colorful Deary. But the plot is the fuzzy background; foremost are the lush descriptions and bemusing dollops of insight that, swirling around the characters and the setting, make for a full and poignant story of love, loss and forgiveness.
    • 5/5
      Almost poetic diction
    • 3/5
      This was a very lyrical book. It took a litle to get back into how Annie Dillard writes - but I really enjoyed it. There was another review that described her stories as written in poetry, that seems to be a very apt description.
    • 4/5
      Reminds me of a long ago trip to Provincetown. Very different world from this one though. Excellent read.
    • 4/5
      I picked out this audio book completely at random, having never even heard of [author:Annie Dillard] before. (shame on me!) But what an excellent, poetic and thought-provoking exploration on what love is and what it means to live and love. Excellently written, too.

      The beginning of the novel is a bit slow and descriptive, but stick with it! The story and characters will capture your attention.

      This novel would make an excellent study for literature students, book clubs, and those reflecting on what it means to love, be in love, and live with love.
    • 5/5
      The Maytrees by Annie Dillard is a richly pleasing hybrid—a transcendent mix of a book-length lyrical poem, spare unsentimental love story, and philosophical treatise on the nature of endearing marital love. It is linguistically seductive and unabashedly challenging—a novel to be savored. I almost stopped reading because I was found myself repeatedly put off by Dillard’s use of exquisite rhythmic and lyrical metaphors that I could not understand. She also loves to use antiquated words that I should have looked up in a dictionary but chose not to. Perhaps with a second reading, added by a dictionary, some hidden imagery and meaning will reveal itself. But I continued reading because I soon found myself too engaged in the story and mesmerized by the abundant fresh imagery to stop. Dillard clearly loves the English language and knows it better and deeper than most. She has a remarkable gift for using it in breathtaking and brazen new ways. I could feel my brain erupting with tiny explosions of glee every time new phrasing, sentence structure, and metaphors made their way from consciousness to imagery within my mind’s eye.Throughout, the work depicts a deep love of place—in this case the tip of Cape Cod, the famous artist’s colony of Bohemian writers, musicians, painters, and poets. This is an unyielding, demanding landscape, awash in translucent light and natural beauty. The humans who thrive here—who love this landscape with all their being—are people who must accommodate themselves to its wild and harsh demands. This is the same message that Dillard has for us about the true nature of enduring marital love. It, too, makes wild and harsh demands. If we accommodate ourselves to our beloveds while still being fully true to ourselves, if we allow our beloveds to be fully true to themselves, if we accept our beloveds without judgment or blame, endearing love will follow. This book is not for everyone. But if you enjoy an intellectual and literary challenge, and already possess mature experience about enduring love, this book will transport you and touch your soul.
    • 4/5
      This is an atmospheric love story of Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree in Provincetown. Their story begins shortly after World War II and moves forward in time. He's a poet and she's a painter. Their orbits merge in a community with loose social boundaries on Cape Cod. After 14 years of marriage and a child, there is a betrayal and 20 year separation. A reunion is brought about by failing health.The writing is more prose than narrative. The landscape of a peninsula in water is thematic in the story. The story challenges the reader to ponder love, solitude, acceptance, and the boundaries that we humans establish for ourselves.
    • 5/5
      Quite beautiful. The book is a poem, really. The images were beautiful and painful at the same time. I was sad when it ended.
    • 4/5
      Toby and Lou Maytree, meet, fall in love and marry, in post-war Cape Cod. The second half of the novel, shows them drifting apart. Much of Dillard's prose is lovely but the tone of the book feels cool and aloof. The characters are kept at a distance. Silhouettes. I wanted more depth and feeling. This may work better in poetry but I don't think it fits here, although other readers have praised this novel highly.I loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, so I wonder if she writes better nonfiction. I did not dislike it. I just wanted more.
    • 3/5
      This is a multigenerational saga about the Maytree family, and is short (under 300 pages) considering it covers such a long time span. Dillard’s writing is beautifully poetic, and her descriptions of place are easily pictured, especially the scenes of sea, shore, swamps, sky, and stars. In one part, she captures a mother’s nostalgia for when her son was a young child, and the bond between the two is wonderfully portrayed. I loved the writing. If I were just rating this based on how it is written, it would be 5 stars. Unfortunately, the storyline did not quite work for me. A man and woman fall in love, marry, and have a child. The man is a part-time poet. They live in Cape Cod and frequently interact with the Bohemian community of artists who live there. So far, so good. The issue is that it is difficult to understand their motivations. What happened to make their marriage fall apart? How is the wife able to get beyond her husband’s betrayal? She seems to take everything in stride and move forward as if nothing had happened. We are never privy to reasons for their actions. For a beautifully written book, I would expect it to be an emotional read, but I felt disconnected from the characters. I loved the writing but did not feel much for the characters.
    • 3/5
      I wasn't planning to revisit this book. I have a tree-book of it, and as I am the one who hooked my Young Gentleman Caller on Author Dillard's [Pilgrim at Tinker Creek] (his comment: "Fuck Walden! This is what {nature writing} should be!"), when he was Kindleshopping here this afternoon and saw this was $1.99, I said he could take the tree-book and not spend the money. We flipped through it together for a while....Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature—as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance.That made us both laugh out loud. I mean, given where I am, I'm in a position to say "oh HELL yeah" to the truth imbued in that. And Rob, since he actually seeks my company out, asks me things, and *listens* when I answer (!!), is au fait with it, too. (I preen a little that he speaks without scorn of them, exasperating as they are; he commented once that I was not to plan to go down that road or he'd biff me one.)But that, most regrettably, was as good as it got.If she…had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take—and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight—would she have begun?–and–What was it she wanted to think about? Here it was, all she ever wanted: a free mind. She wanted to figure out. With which unknown should she begin? Why are we here, we four billion equals who seem significant to ourselves alone? She rejected religion. She knew Christianity stressed the Ten Commandments, Jesus Christ as the only son of God who walked on water and rose up after dying on the cross, the Good Samaritan, and cleanliness is next to godliness. Buddhism and Taoism could handle all those galaxies, but Taoism was self-evident—although it kept slipping her mind—and Buddhism made you just sit there. Judaism wanted her like a hole in the head. And religions all said—early or late—that holiness was within. Either they were crazy or she was. She had looked long ago and learned: not within her. It was fearsome down there, a crusty cast-iron pot. Within she was empty. She would never poke around in those terrors and wastes again, so help her God.We kept reading to each other (I've made my hmmfyness about that well-known, but ya know what? it's different when you're in love with the reader! Go know from this shocking revelation, right?) as the hours ticked by and after about two were spent, we silently agreed to stop.It's in the Little Free Library if anyone wants to go get it. So very disappointing.
    • 4/5
      The Maytrees is a dense, lyrical book written in the style of the Beat poets, about a couple of bohemians who meet in Provincetown in the 1950s. Annie Dillard bounces around in time, flashing forward to the ends of the couple's lives, then back to their childhoods. Her well-read characters are as familiar with Greek philosophers as with friends living down the street, yet know how to keep a beach shack in good repair and fish for nearly anything. There's not much plot to it, but it's a beautifully written meditation on love, life, and dying. I listened to this book on CD, and I'm ordering a paperback copy so I can read it again and take my time.

    Book preview

    The Maytrees - Annie Dillard

    PROLOGUE

    The Maytrees were young long ago. They lived on what still seems antiquity’s very surface. It was the tip of Cape Cod, that exposed and mineral sandspit. The peninsula here was narrow between waters. Its average elevation was fifteen feet. It spiraled counterclockwise from the scarps of Truro and came rumpling over dunes to the harbor, Provincetown, inside the spiral. The town name of Provincetown was for a time Cape Cod. Generations before Jamestown—let alone Plymouth—British fishermen loaded their holds with split cod.

    No Wampanoag Nauset tribes, not even Pamets, settled on Provincetown’s poor sand or scrub woods; they were farmers. At river mouths as far north as Truro, however, Nausets stayed, and built permanent villages more thickly than in most of New England, for clams and oysters abounded, and south of the Namskaket creeks they found soil for squash and corn.

    The Maytrees’ lives, like the Nausets’, played out before the backdrop of fixed stars. The way of the world could be slight, then and now, but rarely, among individuals, vicious. The slow heavens marked hours. They lived often outside. They drew every breath from a wad of air just then crossing from saltwater to saltwater. Their sandspit was a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects.

    Toby Maytree grew up in Provincetown and spent most of his life there. His father was one of several guards stationed on the backside, on the cliffs by the Atlantic. Like some other coast guards, Maytree’s father built for his family a rough shack on the bare sands near the coast guard station. Young Maytree and his mother camped out for summer weeks there in the one-room wood shack above the great ocean beach. They exchanged visits with the guards. Later, after the war, Maytree became a poet of the forties and fifties and sixties. He wrote four book-long poems and three books of lyrics.

    His wife, Lou Maytree, rarely spoke. She painted a bit on canvas and linen now lost. They acted in only two small events—three, if love counts. Falling in love, like having a baby, rubs against the current of our lives: separation, loss, and death. That is the joy of them.

    Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading as the Maytrees.

    They remembered the central post office—the post office where everyone met mornings and encouraged everyone else for the day and night ahead. They were young when passenger trains to Provincetown replaced freights. When he was eighteen, he joined crews all over the Cape to clear and rebuild after the big hurricane.

    Toby Maytree wanted to engage the enemy—either one—in gunfight. Instead he spent the war at the San Francisco Office of War Information. He wrote broadcasts for Pacific troops. By then, Lou was in college. Later, married, both Maytree and Lou liked the idea of seeing the world. Neither, however, was willing to sacrifice free time for a job.

    Maytree picked up cash by moving houses for friends and whacking up additions, at whim. They voted. They were not social thinkers, but their friends were. Their summer friends, in particular, harvested facts row on row from newspapers like mice on corncobs. The Maytrees were not always up-to-the-minute. Their city friends envied their peace.

    She owned their house. Her mother bought it when Lou was a girl. Her mother and Lou had moved to Provincetown from Marblehead, Massachusetts, after the man of the family, a lawyer, left one morning for work and never came back. No one knew that ordinary breakfast would be their last. Why not memorize everything, just in case?

    For a long time they owned no car, no television when that came in, no insurance, no savings. Once a week they heard world news on the radio. They supported striking coal miners’ families with cash. They loved their son, Pete, their only child. Between them they read about three hundred books a year. He read for facts, she for transport. Nothing about them was rich except their days swollen with time.

    Lou Maytree’s height and stillness made her look like a statue. Her fair hair and her white skin’s purity contrasted with the red she wore year-round to cheer the scene. Her courtesy, her compliance, and especially her silence dated from a time otherwise gone. Her size, her wide eyes and high brow, and her upright carriage gave her an air of consequence. Intimacy came easily to her, but strangers could not see it.

    When she was old, she lived alone in the Maytrees’ one-room shack in the parabolic sand dunes. She crossed the backshore dunes into the bayside town Fridays and stocked up. A straw hat kept her face clear. Year after year her eyes set farther back and their lavender lids thinned.

    Throughout her life she was ironic and strict with her thoughts. She went dancing most Friday nights in town. People said that Maytree, or felicity, or solitude had driven her crazy. People said she had been an ugly girl, or a child movie star; that she inherited fabulous sums and lived in a shack without pipes or wires; that she read too much; that she was wanting in ambition and could have married anyone. She lacked a woman’s sense of doom. She did what she wanted—like who else on earth? All her life she found dignity over-rated. She rolled down dunes.

    Most of the few and unremarkable things Lou and Toby Maytree did occurred in their old beachside house on the town’s front street, and in fact in its bed.

    Their bed’s frame was old pipe metal, ironstone. Lou Maytree painted its arched headboard and footboard white. Every few years she sanded its rust rosettes and painted it white again. This was about as useful as she got, though she stretched a dollar for food. One could divide their double bed into her side and his side by counting four pipes over, but the two ignored parity. He slept with a long leg flung over her, as a dog claims a stick.

    Once while he slept on his side, his legs thrashed and he panted. She pressed his shoulder.

    Chasing a rabbit?

    He exhaled and said, tap-dancing.

    IT BEGAN WHEN LOU Bigelow and Toby Maytree first met. He was back home in Provincetown after the war. Maytree first saw her on a bicycle. A red scarf, white shirt, skin clean as eggshell, wide eyes and mouth, shorts. She stopped and leaned on a leg to talk to someone on the street. She laughed, and her loveliness caught his breath. He thought he recognized her flexible figure. Because everyone shows up in Provincetown sooner or later, he had taken her at first for Ingrid Bergman until his friend Cornelius straightened him out.

    He introduced himself. —You’re Lou Bigelow, aren’t you? She nodded. They shook hands and hers felt hot under sand like a sugar doughnut. Under her high brows she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls’ schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you. Her wide eyes, apertures opening, seemed preposterously to tell him, I and these my arms are for you. I know, he thought back at the stranger, this long-limbed girl. I know and I am right with you.

    He felt himself blush and knew his freckles looked green. She was young and broad of mouth and eye and jaw, fresh, solid and airy, as if light rays worked her instead of muscles. Oh, how a poet is a sap; he knew it. He managed to hold his eyes on her. Her rich hair parted on the side; she was not necessarily beautiful, or yes she was, her skin’s luster. Her pupils were rifle bores shooting what? When he got home he could not find his place in Helen Keller.

    He courted Lou carefully in town, to wait, surprised, until his newly serious intent and hope firmed or fled, and until then, lest he injure her trust. No beach walks, dune picnics, rowing, sailing. Her silence made her complicit, innocent as beasts, oracular. Agitated, he saw no agitation in her even gaze. Her size and whole-faced smile maddened him, her round arms at her sides, stiff straw hat. Her bare shoulders radiated a smell of sun-hot skin. Her gait was free and light. Over her open eyes showed two widths of blue lids whose size and hue she would never see. Her face’s skin was transparent, lighted and clear like sky. She barely said a word. She tongue-tied him.

    She already knew his dune-shack friend Cornelius Blue, knew the professors Hiram and Elaine Cairo from New York, knew everyone’s friend Deary the hoyden who lived on the pier or loose in the dunes, and old Reevadare Weaver who gave parties. Bumping through a painter’s opening, picking up paint at the hardware store, ransacking the library, she glanced at him, her mouth curving broadly, as if they shared a joke. He knew the glance of old. It was a summons he never refused. The joke was—he hoped—that the woman had already yielded but would set him jumping through hoops anyway. Lou Bigelow’s candid glance, however, contained neither answer nor question, only a spreading pleasure, like Blake’s infant joy, kicking the gong around.

    Maytree concealed his courtship. On the Cairos’ crowded porch, she steadied her highball on the rail. He asked her, Would she like to row around the harbor with him? She turned and gave him a look, Hold on, Buster. He was likely competing with fleets and battalions of men. Maytree wanted her heart. She had his heart and did not know it. She shook her head, clear of eye, and smiled. If he were only a painter: her avid expression, mouth in repose or laughing, her gleaming concentration. The wide-open skin between her brows made their arcs long. Not even Ingrid Bergman had these brows. The first few times he heard her speak, her Britishy curled vowels surprised him. He rarely dared look her way.

    One day he might accompany Lou Bigelow from town out here to his family’s old dune shack. He was afraid his saying shack would scare them both. Without her he already felt like one of two pieces of electrical tape pulled apart. He could not risk a mistake.

    Robert Louis Stevenson, he read in his Letters, called marriage a sort of friendship recognized by the police. Charmed, Maytree bought a red-speckled notebook to dedicate to this vexed sphere—not to marriage, but to love. More red-speckled notebooks expanded, without clarifying, this theme. Sextus Propertius, of love: Shun this hell. From some book he copied: How does it happen that a never-absent picture has in it the power to make a fresh, overwhelming appearance every hour, wide-eyed, white-toothed, terrible as an army with banners? She was outside his reach.

    OF COURSE SHE GLARED at Maytree that fall when he came by barefoot at daybreak and asked if she would like to see his dune shack. Behind his head, color spread up sky. In the act of diving, Orion, rigid, shoulder-first like a man falling, began to dissolve. Then even the zenith and western stars paled and gulls squawked.

    Her house was on the bay in town. He proposed to walk her to the ocean—not far, but otherworldly in the dunes. She had been enjoying Bleak House. Men always chased her and she always glared.

    She most certainly did not ask him in. His was a startling figure: his Mars-colored hair, his height and tension, his creased face. He looked like a traveling minstrel, a red-eyed night heron. His feet were long and thin like the rest of him. He wore a billed fishing cap. An army canteen hung from his belt. She had been a schoolgirl in Marblehead, Massachusetts, when he went West.

    —Just a walk, he said, sunrise. We won’t need to go inside.

    In his unsure smile she saw his good faith. Well, that was considerate, brickish of him, to say that they would not go in. She agreed. She had not seen the dunes in weeks. Maytree suggested she bring, as he did, a pair of socks, to provide webbed feet, and wear a brimmed hat that tied. In predawn light she saw the sunspokes around his eyes under his cap.

    She followed him through the woods and up to the dunes. Morning dew under trees wet her socks. Sand stuck between her toes. She stuck her socks in her waistband. Heat would dry them.

    Bursting uphill through scrubs into the open excited her. She saw a wild array of sand dunes inscribing a sphere of sea and sky. She saw three-hundred-foot dunes swirl around the horizon like a school of fish: bright side, dark side, moving downwind. The world of town vanished as if wind tore it off.

    A low bump between dunes caught Lou’s eye. It angled on a flat behind them near the trees they came through. She and Maytree neared it in a crescent of shade. It was a sail, a rolled canvas sail, a mainsail. From the roll’s side, dark curls spilled like filling. They settled, these curls, on a green lobster buoy. It was their friend Deary Hightoe asleep and swaddled. Lou knew Deary slept in the dunes somewhere. She claimed to like the way starlight smelled on sand. Once Cornelius asked her how the smell of starlight on sand differed from the smell of moonlight. —More peppery. Beside Deary at the forest edge Lou saw, implausibly, a garden of shriveling chilis and kale. Deary woke, blinked, stretched, and opened the sail by rolling in it. Lou and Maytree moved fifteen feet to the slope where she fetched up.

    —What brings you two out so early? While Deary talked and laughed—all her waking hours, it seemed—her mouth bubbled at gums and corners. At thirty-five she was six years older than Lou, small of body and round of face. Lou knew that this month she was playing drums with the band at a seaside bar and restaurant. She must have found her

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