He received a package of stories from Montpelier, written by the ten students in his assigned workshop group. One account of a young and world—weary gay woman was sweet and clear. Most of the students seemed to be in their twenties or thirties. His back gave him a scare one morning as he bent over to tie his shoes, but he stood up slowly and the pain went away. He bought a yoga book written for people with back problems and began to exercise.
He spent the holidays alone. Kate and Jackson were visiting Jackson's parents. Max was busy. On Christmas Eve, he strolled through Waikiki exchanging ironic smiles with other missing persons. In one of the hotel lobbies, a Filipino with a deep tan sang, "Roasting chestnuts on an open fire . . . "
Two days later, Joe slung the Filson bag over his shoulder. His apartment was clean, festive even, with Christmas cards taped to the kitchen door frame. "Back soon, Batman," he said.
17
Joe flew to Florida and spent the night in Tallahassee. He rented a car, and took the coastal route through Apalachicola and Panama City toward Fort Walton Beach. Apalachicola was a sleepy Caribbean place—palm trees, dirt alleys, low concrete buildings built for hurricanes. He munched fried shrimp and sipped a glass of beer at a restaurant by the slow moving mouth of the Apalachicola River. A solitary pelican waited on a sunny piling. A hundred writers in one spot. I don't know, he thought. He envied the pelican. Learn as much as you can, he told himself.
The school had rented space in a community built on a barrier island that separated the Gulf from a wide bay. "You're a day early. Let's see—your unit is ready. We can let you in." The woman behind the registration counter gave him a key and a paper pass. "Show this at the gate," she said.
"Gate?"
"Across the highway, over there." She pointed through the front windows.
Joe drove across and held the pass out the car window. A security guard motioned him through, and he followed a blacktop road along the edge of a golf course, passing clusters of houses that had been built at the same time from the same ten designs. Expanses of grass were broken by strips of pine trees and mounds of tended shrubbery. He stopped and checked the map he'd been given. Two older men bounced low drives down a fairway. They followed their balls silently, dragging golf bags behind them on two wheeled carts with long curved handles.
Joe's "unit" was empty and impersonal. First come, first served, he decided. He hung his shirts in the master bedroom closet, spread the rest of his stuff on the bed, and fled.