“I’ll see you at five,” my dear friend Simon Filigree said into the phone and hung up.

“Quiet,” I said, “I’m writing.”

“What is it?”

“A new book.”

“Title?”

“56 Water Street.”

“Oh, about us.” Simon was standing and I was sitting in the large sunny room that was my library, Simon’s former den, and Lawrence Torrance’s parlor in our house at 56 Water Street. The three of us shared the house in college and for a few years more until Lawrence bought it. Now that Simon had moved out, Lawrence kindly let me stay indefinitely, rent-free, in a small attic room.

“Not exactly,” I said. “We’ve had enough confessions.”

“What’s it about then?”

“Shall I tell you?” He sat down in Lawrence’s leather armchair. “It is a watery book, sodden with the weight of the past. Like marshlands in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But sparkly withal.”

“In Purgatory,” I went on, “near the beginning, Dante and Virgil have come up from Hell and walked down to the sea. The sun rises and:

We were still beside the edge of the sea
like people who are thinking about their journey
who in their hearts go and their bodies stay.

They are ‘like’ exactly what they are. When the dead souls see that Dante is still alive they ‘grow deathly pale’; his friend Casella asks why Dante is there and Dante says ‘so that I may return here where I am I am making this journey.’ 56 Water Street is also about a man who circles back, who journeys to where he already is. I shall call him Casella. He is a fisherman in Italy, on the Tyrrhenian coast, it doesn’t matter where. In Chapter One he mends his net, restoring the holes in the mesh to their proper places; in Chapter Two he repaints the hull of his little boat so that it looks the same as before; in Chapter Three he watches a storm at sea clear up as dusk falls, and the sky grows neither darker nor lighter.”

“Sounds boring,” he said.

“I hope so.”

“Well let’s hear some.”

“That’s all I have so far.”

“What’s all you have so far?”

“The title, 56 Water Street.”

Simon stood up. “No one can ever understand what you’re talking about,” he said and left without another word. I turned back to my desk; the afternoon light made its way up the walls, yellowing with age. At precisely 6:15 I closed my notebook and stood up as well. It was time to go to Angela’s for dinner.

Simon was just leaving with some sort of glare on his face when I arrived. “Remember what I said!” he said through clenched teeth. Angela and I embraced.

“I’ve already eaten,” she said, “but I can make you something.”

We sat down at the table together, and while I ate she described her day.

“And you?” she said.

“I have started a new book. Didn’t Simon mention it?”

She looked down.

“56 Water Street,” I went on.

“What’s it about?”

“Angela! You know I never like to talk about what I’m writing.”

“But I so enjoy hearing you talk about it. Insight into the writer’s mind at work and all.”

I laid my hands on the table, palms up, in resignation.

“I hope it’ll be longer than your last book?” she said.

I took out my small blue notebook. “Exactly this long. Or twice as long, but then I will have to order another.”

“Ah, you brought it with you.”

“Well I can’t say no if you insist like that, after such a delicious dinner! It is about an Italian fisherman named Casella.”

“Casella, that sounds like Angela. Is he based on me?”

“Not at all, it’s from Dante. Now that you mention it, maybe I will put in a character named Angela, such a poetic name as I’ve always told you, but she will be nothing like you. I never copy real life.”

Angela gulped down her wine.

“In the first chapter, Casella is mending his net. I shall have to research net-mending. I’ll add that part later. Meanwhile he sees all sorts of debris on the beach: string like seaweed, seaweed like string. The castanet sound of the mussel shells . . .” My introduction had ended and the reading had begun. I pushed my chair back from the table, stared vacantly at a spot on the wall above Angela’s head, and went on as listlessly as possible: “The trick is to catch the sea’s gifts at the right moment. Casella has learned the lesson of water, which softens manmade stuff into natural beauty—driftwood, beach glass, sand—and eventually takes it all back again. The sea . . .”

“I don’t like the word stuff.”

“Angela!”

“I’m just saying. The rest is poetic, it’s nice, but ‘manmade stuff’?”

I closed the notebook peevishly. “Well that’s all I have so far.” This wasn’t strictly true, but if Angela was going to be like that about it. “He’ll go fishing in Chapter Two.”

“That’s all there is in Chapter One? He mends a net and looks at some garbage?”

“Hmmph.”

“Giles,” she said after a long pause. “Why do you write these books of yours?”

It seemed like a fair question. After a moment I said, “So that I will have something I’ve written to read.”

“Well no one else will read it! Simon told me your next book would be just like the last one.”

“All Simon cares about when he reads is what happens next. If there’s one thing in the world I’m not interested in, it’s in what happens next!”

For some reason, this made Angela start to talk about us.

“Let’s do something this weekend.”

“Do something?”

“I don’t know, anything. Can we take a drive out to the country?”

“Angela! But where? We haven’t made plans, things might be closed, the weather. We don’t know the best roads to take. One has to look into these things.”

“You always say that and we never do anything. I want to take a drive out to the country this weekend!”

I made my excuses and plans for dinner the day after tomorrow, same time as today, then hurried home. A drive to the country this weekend—impossible. I reread what there was of 56 Water Street and made a few minute corrections in blue pen until it was time for bed.