The Man Without a Soul by L. Grant Dodge
Sea St. Beach
15  Janey’s House
Strictly speaking, Janey didn’t want to sleep with me. We had sex a number of times – and what a grand, exquisitely tortured, guilt-ridden act of surrender it was for her on each occasion – but she couldn’t sleep in her own bed if I was in it. I offered to sleep on the woven rag rug downstairs, but imagining this seemed to lead her into further agonizing contortions of conscience, so I slept in her bed, alone, while she drew, read, puttered, or kept watch in the night.
Her house was down behind the marina. It was tiny: one room up, one room down, with a slightly spavined roof that gave it a sea-going appearance. The house was only a few hundred feet from the inner harbor, but somehow it had contrived to be surrounded by pavement. On one diagonal it occupied a corner of the marina parking lot. On the other, the corner of Dacey Street and Railroad Bluffs Lane.
Where was the railroad, and where were the bluffs?* Respectively torn up and torn down years ago, leaving no sign of either, just a becalmed sea of salt-pocked asphalt in which Janey’s house seemed adrift. As I lay in Janey’s bed I imagined we were sailing, she at the wheel and I in my hammock, if not the ocean then perhaps the night sky, on our long, dead-reckoned voyage to become insubstantial as constellations.
I awoke in my body, reasonably sure I hadn’t left it any longer than usual, and that Judgment Day had not yet come, unless Gabriel’s horn sounded like a Nantucket ferry – maybe your East Chop – chugging by.
*I used to wonder if Thoreau had made it this far by train. He didn’t. The Northangle Public Library, a real library, unlike this vanity production of Jake’s, has a copy of Cape Cod, wherein I learned that Sandwich was the end of the line when Thoreau made his journey. He proceeded from there to Orleans by stagecoach on a very rainy day, stopping only at post offices, he believes. He has nothing much to say about any town west of Dennis, and nothing at all about Hyannis. I suspect he dozed off.
I’m breaking with a tradition of the Fleagle Street Evening Library by adding footnotes, in my own hand, to my story. Jake may disapprove but characteristically does not protest. I’ve also taken the liberty of adding titles to each page. It wasn’t my intention to tell my story in brief numbered segments, but for reasons of his own Jake started a new page whenever he detected (or desired?) a kind of pause, and he maintained these breaks when he typed up his notes. It may be that he considers each page a story in itself, in which case he managed to collect not one, but seven hundred and twenty-one stories. A neat trick, and good for him, I say.
I note that he has also broken with Evening Library tradition by including his own occasional responses to my mainly rhetorical questions.