This All Happened(15)

            I dont always know I’m in a mood. Small things build when they should stop. Mood should not feed on mood.

            Max can offer me no solution to this one.

            10 Helmut Rehm is on his way to Boston for ten days. The company boat, Sailsoft, needs a new boom. I ask Helmut if sailboats, when they cross the Atlantic, take the Gulf Stream.

            No. It doesnt go north now.

            He says the Gulf Stream is a river in the ocean. It’s about ten or fifteen miles wide and sailors use it all the way up the seaboard. It is a mechanical stair, he says. You just coast. But to cross the ocean you must wean yourself off it.

            Everything in nature is a comparison to the human state. There is a stream in relationships, a highway of water you can take that is the easiest route to destinations. But you both must be in that route.

            11 I meet Lydia at the Ship. The bar has a different light to it. Directly behind Lydia there are strings of white pins of light taped to the ceiling beams. White taffeta trailing from the posts in anticipation of Valentine’s. The white taffeta and white pins seem to bloom out of Lydia’s head. As though she is of pure thought.

            Oliver Squires puts on his coat and waves goodbye to us. He is still dressed in his court clothes, so I know he’s been here since five. It’s evident there’s a large block of frost between him and Maisie.

            I tell Maisie I dreamt she read a version of my novel and said,You can’t write it like that, it’s too much like my style. And I realized the style that I wanted was Maisie’s. I had no style of my own. That I’ve never had personal style, but instead adopted the styles that I admire. The fear of being derivative.

            Maisie nods and Lydia says being derivative is a fear we all have. The white taffeta lends a weight of truth to her statement.

            12 I drop off the first few pages of the novel to Maisie. I put them in her mailbox. As I turn I see Oliver Squires walking towards me. He’s just breaking for lunch at legal aid. He’s loosened his black tie. His neck is too big for his shirt. He says, Have you been eating and defecating in my house again?

            He invites me in. Welcome to the hellhole.

            He asks what my place is like; he has never been up there. We are at the window and look up the hill. You can see my bedroom window from there.

            I’ve always admired that house, he says.

            Oliver seems to be in a mood for confession. He appears exhausted. He fixes himself a sandwich and I decline. He keeps the fridge door open with one foot. He says, One thing I miss about being single is sleeping in my own bed. Maisie, she nudges me over to the edge of the bed. It’s like she’s pushing me out. Like I’m a piece of grit in her shell. There’s this acre of bed in front of her. We have this joke that she’s cultivating a national park. I ask if any animals were poached last night.

            He is telling me this story because he knows I’m a writer. He is telling me this so I’ll write it down. It’s as though he knows Maisie is writing about him and he wants me to have a piece of the action.

            Oliver: One time, I dreamt I was in that park. I was tiny, on the duvet, like one of those fairground moonwalks. Puffy. Maisie was a mountain range in the distance, and I had to make my way across this desert. But the animals, of course.

            Me: You didnt make it.

            Oliver: No.

            So it’s good the way you are.

            I suppose so.

            Stick with what you got is what youre saying.

            Is that what it all means?

            Everything he says is tinged with the possibility he’s having an affair.