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anywhere but there was always an outside possibility of something urgent occurring that would require my participation. It’s funny how one word means more than one thing. In war, seeing some action was a bad thing, but it was different from
getting
some action. The latter phrase is something you might hear when you’re standing five deep at the bar rail in the safety of your neighborhood tap. I have always disliked the swells and shivers of anticipation. Despite its great symptoms, it is a passive emotion. One can only endure it, drive faster, run up the stairs, move closer. It’s a waiting game.
    Lane had recently moved and was living in a second-floor apartment in a leafy, residential section of Cambridge. It was an exclusive area. I wasn’t surprised at the high rent she was paying because she had confessed to me that she was doing pretty well. She was going to be able to make it through winter without getting a job. She had just published a popular novel that received enough attention to be optioned by a film company, and she was actually getting some checks from it all.
    We had celebrated her good luck earlier that summer at my place on the sea. I was very fond of the cottage I had rented, a tiny Victorian built around 1910. It still had most of the original shingles, quite weathered, and the house was a salted, silvery color with a few asbestos patches.
    “I could buy this place and fix it up. I could start allover, from the floor on up,” she said, and she waved her arms over the room to emphasize how she would have it demolished.
    “It doesn’t need that much done to it,” I said. I was laughing, but I didn’t see anything wrong with the place.
    “I know an architect at MIT who just needs to have the square feet of a place and he draws up whatever you want done. Sunken tubs, skylights, waterfalls, wet bars, cathedral ceilings, anything. From scratch.”
    “You’d have it razed?” I said.
    She said, “Two stories is plenty.”
    Lane had again misconstrued a rather basic vocabulary word. But I was happy to see her looking so thrilled with her news about her book. I didn’t like to think it was just a matter of some money coming in. I wanted her to be pleased she was there with me, walking the narrow gang-planks that edged my lot and led us down to the sea. Then again, she was very excited about her book and didn’t seem impressed by the rough blue presence, the ragged surf, which always made me feel raw and swooning—as if I might, in a spree, drink it all up or let it drink me.
    She didn’t acknowledge the first icy crescents of foam which touched her, the waves which rushed over her legs and rocked her backwards. She followed me into the water completely distracted by her thoughts. I found her very attractive in her preoccupied state, like a woman succumbing to anesthesia—giddy, dreamy, lips parted. One moment she was submerged and the next she was lifted by the waves. I truly believed she would allow herself to be carried out on a raft of amateurish sensations of greed and self-congratulations. I, too, was buoyed by my fascination with her new success. It washed over me as well.
    I hadn’t expected to see immediate rewards for her first efforts. I was surprised. Her writing was that sweet-savage stuff of the popular romance novel coupled with a new frankness and urgency to tell the truth about one’s childhood and coming of age no matter who was implicated. The setting was the rural South, and the novel’s title was
Southern Charms.
She was going to call it
Charms of the South
, but I reminded her of Disney’s feature-length cartoon
Song of the South
, so she avoided that construction. She had tried to write more than a romance, using allusions to up-to-the-minute feminist discoveries and enough pop psychology that she should have included a glossary. She was naïve in her descriptions of sex, paradoxical in her use of muddied lace and bare skin sticking to vinyl car upholstery. But there was