practical, the realm of easily achieved and sensible to-do lists.
He makes such a list that morning as he waits for the coffee to brew.
1. Clean out my father’s study.
2. Assemble the drafts I find into a potentially publishable manuscript.
3. Assess and curate the letters, notes, and ephemera that might make a useful archive of my father’s long career.
4. Take that archive to the college librarian for assessment and possible storage.
5. Await the sale of my parents’ home and the small but still meaningful percentage of the profit that my mother has promised me.
6. Fuck Claire.
This last thing he writes to amuse himself, to give himself a jolt of energy, but yes, all week he’s thought of her, so close to him in that pool, and he wonders how he will see her again and how he can convince her—husband and kids aside—to fuck him in that pool. It’s a goal and he’s glad to have a goal. He is glad to have a challenge before him; he wonders what he’s capable of achieving. Once, in college, he played Iago. And wasn’t that Iago’s real motivation? Boredom? Not revenge for a passed-over promotion, but an interest in how far terrible things could go?
Lately, Charlie’s done nothing. No auditions, no voice-overs, not even a guest-directing gig with some obscure community theater. Writing this dark and ambitious final task, Fuck Claire , putssomething in his heart like lust. He never knew why he wanted what he wanted, not ever.
But he wanted.
He puts the list up on the fridge with one of Don Lowry’s business card magnets.
Out the back window, he looks at the small guesthouse where his work is, in piles and boxes and mazes of clutter, and he looks at the glimmer of the swimming pool between him and all that work.
He gets the coffee, which is terrible, and goes out to the guesthouse/study and begins to look through the stack for something new to read; maybe he’ll go to the coffee shop downtown and have a decent espresso and read. He is in no hurry to do anything—tackle the clutter of the study, see his father, or give his mother a progress report. None of his friends know where he is or why he has left Seattle: they are all actors and writers and artists, their heads stuck so far up their own self-obsessed asses they have not even noticed his dramatic and sudden exit from their world. It would be weeks before they wondered about him. A man exits a pond without a ripple, he thinks.
He writes this on a Post-it note. Maybe he should write a book, but nobody writes a book simply by thinking maybe and should. His father once said that after a long day of working on his own book. He remembers his father coming in one day at cocktail hour, and taking a gin and tonic from his wife’s hand.
They sat in the living room together, Charlie’s parents, and his mother asked, “How is the book coming?” and Charlie’s father said, “You know what gets me? When people say things like maybe I should write a book . Because the truth is, honey, if you’re a real writer, you have to write a book. It’s as if you don’t even want to do it. You have to do it.”
There was a long silence then and as Charlie sat playing with Legos on the rug in front of them, his mother exhaled.
“That’s insane, Gill. That makes no sense.”
Charlie’s father, wounded and indignant, took his drink backout to the study. Charlie still remembers going to the window and watching him walk down the path. Maybe Charlie was seven, maybe eight. He turned to his mother. He said, “Is he mad?”
“In one sense of the word,” his mother had said.
Out in that same study this morning, that place of constant retreat, he does nothing but scan the spines of his father’s bookshelves. There seems to be no order to anything, and he flips through novels he’s heard of but has never
He makes such a list that morning as he waits for the coffee to brew.
1. Clean out my father’s study.
2. Assemble the drafts I find into a potentially publishable manuscript.
3. Assess and curate the letters, notes, and ephemera that might make a useful archive of my father’s long career.
4. Take that archive to the college librarian for assessment and possible storage.
5. Await the sale of my parents’ home and the small but still meaningful percentage of the profit that my mother has promised me.
6. Fuck Claire.
This last thing he writes to amuse himself, to give himself a jolt of energy, but yes, all week he’s thought of her, so close to him in that pool, and he wonders how he will see her again and how he can convince her—husband and kids aside—to fuck him in that pool. It’s a goal and he’s glad to have a goal. He is glad to have a challenge before him; he wonders what he’s capable of achieving. Once, in college, he played Iago. And wasn’t that Iago’s real motivation? Boredom? Not revenge for a passed-over promotion, but an interest in how far terrible things could go?
Lately, Charlie’s done nothing. No auditions, no voice-overs, not even a guest-directing gig with some obscure community theater. Writing this dark and ambitious final task, Fuck Claire , putssomething in his heart like lust. He never knew why he wanted what he wanted, not ever.
But he wanted.
He puts the list up on the fridge with one of Don Lowry’s business card magnets.
Out the back window, he looks at the small guesthouse where his work is, in piles and boxes and mazes of clutter, and he looks at the glimmer of the swimming pool between him and all that work.
He gets the coffee, which is terrible, and goes out to the guesthouse/study and begins to look through the stack for something new to read; maybe he’ll go to the coffee shop downtown and have a decent espresso and read. He is in no hurry to do anything—tackle the clutter of the study, see his father, or give his mother a progress report. None of his friends know where he is or why he has left Seattle: they are all actors and writers and artists, their heads stuck so far up their own self-obsessed asses they have not even noticed his dramatic and sudden exit from their world. It would be weeks before they wondered about him. A man exits a pond without a ripple, he thinks.
He writes this on a Post-it note. Maybe he should write a book, but nobody writes a book simply by thinking maybe and should. His father once said that after a long day of working on his own book. He remembers his father coming in one day at cocktail hour, and taking a gin and tonic from his wife’s hand.
They sat in the living room together, Charlie’s parents, and his mother asked, “How is the book coming?” and Charlie’s father said, “You know what gets me? When people say things like maybe I should write a book . Because the truth is, honey, if you’re a real writer, you have to write a book. It’s as if you don’t even want to do it. You have to do it.”
There was a long silence then and as Charlie sat playing with Legos on the rug in front of them, his mother exhaled.
“That’s insane, Gill. That makes no sense.”
Charlie’s father, wounded and indignant, took his drink backout to the study. Charlie still remembers going to the window and watching him walk down the path. Maybe Charlie was seven, maybe eight. He turned to his mother. He said, “Is he mad?”
“In one sense of the word,” his mother had said.
Out in that same study this morning, that place of constant retreat, he does nothing but scan the spines of his father’s bookshelves. There seems to be no order to anything, and he flips through novels he’s heard of but has never
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