The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky Page A

think I’m having too good a time. I look at the pond, and I remember a story she once told me about Mark Strand’s dismissal of one student’s work: “If I’d written a poem like this, I’d jump in the pond.” I look up at the podium in the theater and wish she were here to listen to Tim O’Brien, whom she always refers to as Tim, though I don’t think she’s ever met him. It occurs to me that I’m looking and listening for two people. My appreciation for the cloud passing over the mountain is her appreciation as well, but it’s hard to split oneself in half like that. Is she wondering about me back where she is in South Jersey, where it must be humid today, where there must already be a kind of melancholy on the air? Summer is almost over, sweaters are on the shelves, and you couldn’t find a folding beach chair in the hardware store, even if you bribed the clerk to go looking for one in the stock room.
    I am afraid of saying the wrong thing. But I can also sense that it will be hard to keep the wrong thing trapped.
    I think of Famous Writer. That space in front of the Barn is always the space of Famous Writer, even though he hasn’t been back in years, and I walk past that zone warily as if he might leap out from behind the bushes.
    I make friends. That’s not so hard to do. There is a woman named Julie, who recently graduated from Cornell. She is tiny and sarcastic, with a clipped cranberry-colored Manic Panic bob. She looks like Edith Piaf might have looked if she were young now and listened only to the Smiths, New Order, Style Council, and the Cure. Like me, she likes to laugh, but she always has a sad look in her eye, as if she already knows too well that her life will not work out like others might want it to. I like her writing, especially the descriptions in her writing, which have a liveliness and snap to them. It seems to me that everything should be lined up for her. She could be a star. She seems to know that too well about herself, which might be why she’s wary of all that. When it’s time for the waiters to play volleyball, a requirement of sorts, we slink off from the others, sit beneath a pine, and talk about Susan Minot’s Monkeys , the collection of the moment, not sure whether we approve of it or not. We also wonder who might and might not be gay, though I know very well to keep my mouth shut about myself.
    I’m in my room one night. Everyone around me seems to be having sex. People tiptoe down fire escapes onto the lawn long after midnight, people have sex in the woods, in their coats, lying in cold, wet leaves. Even a fellow waiter who was just married two weeks before is leaning into the shoulder of another Famous Writer in the Barn, as if they’ve already gone to bed, or are planning to fuck any minute. Sex is expected of us, sex is charging up the air, but what would my roommate, admittedly a very nice guy, a runner and a wonderful writer, think if he knew I thought about dick a hell of a lot more than he did? Maybe he already knows that I think a lot about dick, which is why another waiter walks in one night, pounds on my stomach while I’m lying on the bed and cries, who are you going to fuck tonight? I laugh uproariously, as if by doing so I’m taking away the sting of the accusation, or the demand inside it. I know he is certainly not talking about fucking anything with a dick, for the message is clear: to be part of the group you must like chicks.
    One day I see Michael Cunningham, who isn’t yet Michael Cunningham of The Hours. He is standing along the windows, in the aisle of the theater. His arms are crossed over his chest; his face is glowing, tanned, sympathetic, wry, alert. He is pretending he is not being watched by everyone in the room when in fact he knows he is. At that moment he is the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. He looks like someone who knows his reaction is important; he knows we’re more likely to steal looks at him instead of the polite reader of the