“I’ll run these titles by marketing, see what they think.” He opens the door. “Where are you staying?”
“On the Argo.”
“The Argo?”
“It’s my sailboat.”
It is the only thing that my father, “the Captain,” left me that Edie let me keep. Dad had left me the house in Huntington in his will, but I had sold it to help pay for “Edie’s Dollhouse,” a 5,000-square-foot contemporary glass and metal monstrosity nestled in the woods back in Sewickley where it stuck out like a sore landfill. So now the money from my father’s death gives Edie a house I have no right to live in. I almost wish I had burned the Captain’s body on a funeral pyre on his boat—the old Viking way—to keep him from rolling over in his cremation box.
“It’s moored in Huntington Harbor.”
“I didn’t know you had a sailboat.”
The Argo is one of the few things I own outright besides my laptop and a carry-on full of clothes. “It was my father’s.”
“Was?”
“Yeah. He died a while ago.” In 1990. Where has the time gone?
Henry tugs on his ponytail. “And he named his boat after the ship from Jason and the Argonauts?”
I nod, though I know the Captain didn’t name the Argo. That was simply the name of the boat when he bought the thirty-two-foot Thistle back in the early 1960s. He didn’t change the name because “it’s bad luck to change the name of a boat that’s still afloat.” That made the Captain “Jason,” I was his only Argonaut, and we had a few adventures together. We never found the Golden Fleece, though we did fight a few squalls and bluefish together on the Long Island Sound.
“And you’re going to write a hot, steamy, romantic comedy on a sailboat in Huntington Harbor…in October.”
I shrug. “Why not? I’ll have few distractions.” Even if I will be writing in a ghost ship, at least it will be a rent-free ghost ship. I think. The Captain was always good about paying his yacht club dues.
Henry fishes in his pocket and pulls out a key ring. “You can stay inside where it’s warm at my summer place on Fire Island.” He slips off two keys.
“It won’t be that cold on the boat.” Except for the memories. Those will be cold.
“I won’t have it, Pete. You know where Cherry Grove is?”
I blink. Of all the places…“Yeah, I do, but I’d rather—”
“I’ve had a place there on Green Walk for years. It’s a one-bedroom, and you’ll just love it. We’ve even nicknamed the apartment complex ‘Elysium,’ you know, the resting place for the gods.” He hands me the keys. “It’s fully stocked with food, spotless, and it’s very secluded. And you’ll just love your neighbors, especially Coleman Muse. He’s quite a gifted poet. You have enough money for the ferry?”
This is going way too fast. “Uh, yeah.” I stuff the keys into my pocket. “Um, does all this mean that I have a chance for a contract?”
“Uh, no, not yet. You’re on spec until I see the first three chapters.”
On spec. Wonderful. Two fairly successful novels, and I’m writing on speculation. I’m almost back to the dark days when I was sending out unsolicited manuscripts to agents and praying for a miracle.
“When will you need the chapters, Henry?”
“Oh, as soon as you can get them to me.”
Great. “Okay. Uh, thanks for everything.”
“Don’t mention it.”
As the elevator plunges to the parking garage, I close my eyes. Here I am, a published author reduced to writing on spec, about to write an African-American romantic comedy in Cherry Grove, the oldest gay community in the United States.
Good writing, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.
I just don’t know if I can hold my breath that long anymore.
2
I drift along with the tide of cars escaping New York City, Walt Whitman’s “city of spires and masts,” letting the convoy of tattered flags and red, white, and blue bumper stickers carry me through the wasteland of Long Island, the supposed recreation area for the people of New York City, home to several million commuters and the infamous Long Island Rail Road. I float east with flocks of other idle dreamers and screamers clinging to steering wheels on the Northern State Parkway around lunchtime. From Massepequa to Montauk, where the Amistad landed only to be escorted to Connecticut, Long Island is the melting pot cooked down to the dregs.
Suffolk County: nothing but potato farms, ducks, and Grumman.
I hesitate when I see a sign to Huntington. I don’t want to go there yet. One ghost story at a time.
I waver again when I see an advertisement for Levittown, one of the places the Captain used to live before Levittown became marginally integrated. I don’t ever want to go there. I like homogenized milk; I don’t like homogenized neighborhoods. Maybe the melting pot went to Levittown to die. And all during junior high, Levittown was the only Long Island town listed on the big Cram map on the wall in geography class, the rest of Long Island obliterated by the letters of New Haven, Bridgeport, and Stamford, Connecticut.
Heading south to Plainedge, then east, I read signs announcing so many towns, so many names like Wyandanch, West Babylon, and Bohemia. Native American names coexist with biblical names east of Hedonism on this thin sliver of the American dream jutting out into the Atlantic. What the Dutch took from the natives then shared with the English is now one large faceless neighborhood divided by malls, restaurants, convenience stores, and the empty shadows of industrial parks.
Huntington’s main mall is the Walt Whitman Mall. What would Walt say as he walked around inside his own mall? Would he say, “I am large, I contain multitudes”? Could he bloom at Bloomingdale’s or contemplate leaves of grass at Garden Botanika? Would he echo the sufferings of men like me who don’t like to shop and say, “I am the man, I suffered, I was there” or “I stop somewhere waiting for you”? Would Walt “invite his soul” to observe the indoor sidewalk sales? Would Walt feel connected to all the atoms in the houses in planned neighborhoods on Long Island that look the same, two cars in every garage, a single tree in every yard? A couplet takes shape as I drive:
Welcome to a dark, suburban Hades,
where houses run into the 180’s…
I slip through the redundant Islips (West Islip, Islip proper, and East Islip), past Great River to Sayville, heading to River Road and the Charon Ferry Service for the trip across Great South Bay to Cherry Grove. That’s one of the many nice things about Fire Island: no cars allowed, only your own two feet or a bicycle to get you around. I park the Nova, grab my carry-on and laptop, and stroll to the docks, the scent of diesel fuel and salt air tingling my nose. Great South Bay, while not exactly a quagmire of whirlpools, has been known to belch sand onto the rest of Long Island.
Because the next ferry to Fire Island won’t leave until 2 P.M., I have half an hour to waste counting rows of red Radio Flyer wagons and analyzing the other passengers in a poem on the back of the car rental receipt:
A young man, hacking into a handkerchief,
leans against an older man who winces at every cough.
Another, dressed in black, sits by himself on the dock,
his feet splayed over the rainbow-colored water
while a man in red holds on to a piling for dear life.
Two crew-cut blond women work an old snack machine,
yanking