STORY STARTERS

 I was sitting at the far end of the hotel’s too-bright lobby bar, trying to ignore the other patrons, trying hard to not even think, when I felt the unwelcome presence of the

big man settling onto the stool next to mine. I looked at him narrowly from the corner of my eye, without turning my head.

    “Call me Tederoff,” he said, nodding his head somberly to drive the statement home. “I believe you’d better buy me a drink.”

    We fought and she cried, and I was ashamed because it was our honeymoon. It was Disney World for five days because she had worked so hard at convincing me I would

enjoy it, too. But I made cracks about unbridled commercialism and she accused me of not even trying to have fun and of being a cynic. I should have kept my mouth shut.

    I had known Susan for five years, but only for thirty minutes twice a month, when she trimmed my hair. She was skilled at building an illusion of closer acquaintance than

existed, asking about my dog’s arthritis, relating her enjoyment of a movie I had recommended the previous month -- or perhaps I was simply so lonely, I wanted to

believe we were really friends.

    Years later, we still got together occasionally and talked about that long, black night, shared the memory of helpless, unmanning fear, reaffirmed our good fortune in

escaping alive. Spoke quietly, carefully, of those who hadn’t. The white scar tissue furrowing the back of my thigh would begin to ache as the graying images played through

my mind once again.

    I awoke an hour or more before sunrise to journey to the bathroom, and when I fell asleep again, I dreamed that I was dreaming. The outside dream, the shell, had more

structure and plot than usual, but in the inner dream, I watched myself going mad. And I didn’t care.

    Ledford began to nod his head slowly. Tom continued to talk, forcing the sincerity; he knew the nodding indicated not agreement or acquiescence, but Ledford’s

awareness that someone was trying to sell him a bill of goods.

    After they pulled Johnny Carmichael’s body out from under the ice and had carried it away, the hole froze over again. I tried to return two days later, the afternoon of the

funeral, but I couldn’t even locate the spot. The river had covered its tracks.

    My grandfather, a roundhouse foreman for the railroad, used to come and collect me by train in the summers. I traveled all over with him on his company pass,

sometimes for two or three weeks. Theoretically, these were inspection trips, so Grandad rode in the cab as often as not. I was only about ten, so I was like a mascot to the

crews -- allowed to pull the horn-cord at crossings because I knew all the signals. But the day that the railroad inspector rode along with us, it turned out that I never really

knew my grandfather.

    He was headed east on I-10 with the cruise-control on and mindless C&W leaking from the radio. His hands automatically took care of what little steering was required

on the arrow-straight road. His brain certainly wasn’t involved. And so, when the revelation sprang into his mind somewhere in Louisiana, he had to pull off in the

breakdown lane to consider the implications.

    He knew what was coming the instant he saw the security guard’s expression, but he couldn’t help himself: He stepped into the executive elevator and pressed the

button. Part of him was beginning to panic -- he coulnd’t even consider the possibility of scandal and disgrace, much less prison -- but he was a prisoner of his own routine.

    It seemed strange to him now that he couldn’t seem to recall the details of the births of any of his three children. He vaguely remembered seeing the sun come up

through a waiting room picture window, but they were all “before lunch” kid, so that memory might go with any of them. And now they were grown and gone, all of them,

and he certainly wasn’t going to provide his ex-wife with ammunition by mentioning his loss.

    He became fascinated by the woman’s small movements as she studied the display window: The slow tapping of one foot and then the other, the combing of several

fingers across the back of her head, one finger pushing up the bridge of her glasses, the pursing of her lips as she bent to study more closely the detail on a dress. Then

she smiled slightly and he realized with startled guilt and embarrassment that she had been convertly studying him, too, in the reflective glass.

    It all started with plastic Zeros and Avengers hanging in squadrons from the ceiling of his adolescent bedroom. Then he saw a movie on TV about the Japanese surprise

attack, and by the time he finished high school he was an expert on Pearl Harbor. The summer following his junior year in college, he spent most of his savings on a

round-trip ticket to Hawaii, where he wandered about the shores of the anchorage and the smoggy hillsides, studied the tracks in the sky, and never set foot on a beach.

    Our thoughts about Mr. Daggett were unclear and not terribly important to any of us who sat, nodding, as he droned on about the Treaty of Ghent. We knew he was

divorced and still young, and therefore probably on the make. We knew he drove an old Karman Ghia and was undoubtedly an ex-flower child. But he smoked Marlboros,

so he must have unseen but rugged facets to his personality. Our thoughts twisted away and crystalized when he shot himself in the teachers’ lounge one Friday after

Homeroom.

    In a way, my employer was to blame. The safety railing on the warehouse catwalk came loose and I cartwheeled to the floor below. Okay, it was only a four-foot drop, but

still I broke one leg and dislocated the other knee. The boss was so fearful of an OSHA investigation, he gave me an indefinite period of sick leave with full pay. The hip

cast made movement difficult and painful, so I became a full-time couch potato that whole winter. I even slept on the sofa much of the time rather than face the hassle of

hauling my leg upstairs. And that’s when I became afflicted my soap operas and daytime talk shows. I never did go back to work in the daylight.

    Maggie expertly steered her right-hand-drive Jeep with three casual fingers, flipping over the letters and postcards on the sorting rack beside her. She carefully

examined the return addresses and postmarks, and she read all the postcards. She was a student of the human condition, a practiced analyst of circumstantial evidence.

The story was nearly always in the details. She knew which couples on her wandering rural route were in the throes of divorce, which colleges their teenagers were trying

to get into, and who was out of work and papering the mails with résumes. She knew which families had enjoyed births and which had grieved at deaths. She shared in it all.

    Her parents were in the parlor -- she’d given up calling it a living room -- tryng to strike up a conversation with his parents. Three of the four were on canes now, and

two of them were nearly deaf. Her next-younger brother satnearby, listening bemusedly. Karen raised a questioning eyebrow and he winked at her. As she toured the

house, she could hear two of her nephews daring each other in the kitchen, and then her sister, threatening them in a harsh whisper to just stay the hell away from that

lovely cake -- did they understand?

    As she progressed to the den -- which had become the real living room -- she noticed one of her coworkers pouring himself his fourth three fingers of Canadian Club.

His wife, whose name Karen had forgotten, watched him with resignation. John’s sister, whom she had met only that morning, sighed contentedly at her shoulder.

    “Lovely wedding,” she said. “Really, truly lovely.”

    Karen wondered if the master bath was vacant yet. Maybe she could hide out there, just for a few minutes.

    After he left the island each August, her mood always was different; sometimes she was lightheaded from the sudden solitude, other times more somber. But every year

she swam alone. Last Labor Day, there had been flotillas of Portuguese Men-o’-War, tentacles floating gently in the low surf. The year before, she had stroked straight out,

nearly to her limit, so that the shoreline was like a mirage. Once she had stood on a sandbank but the barnacles, like gray teeth, had cut the soles of her feet and her blood

had soaked into the sand.

    It’s rare in modern American society for strangers to meet without being introduced by someone else. Those who introduce themselves, except at parties or on the job,

are regarded with suspicion. And a woman who introduces herself to a strange man is assumed to have an agenda that involves money. When Melissa walked up to me at

the club, stated her name, and asked what I was drinking, those were indeed my first thoughts. But by the end of the evening, I’d changed my mind. It wasn’t money she

wanted. Money would have been easier.

    When our parents died within two weeks of each other -- at very advanced ages, I have to admit -- I resented the discovery that my younger brother was the chosen

executor of both their estates. Not that he couldn’t do it: He could, better than me, but I was the eldest. And the twins, who were the youngest, seemed to assume that of

course George would be in charge of dispersing our folks’ worldly goods. But I suppose I can’t really claim the whole thing was a surprise.

    He knew he was developing an obsession about patterns. If he climbed a staircase with an odd number of risers, he had to thump the sole of his foot an extra time on the

landing to make the steps come out even. If he rotated to the right to grab his towel off the rack behind him, he had to unwind himself by turning back to the left to face the

mirror. He was beginning to worry that it was all symptomatic of a deeper problem.

    He sat in the empty stands just above the starting line, remembering how it had been. The tension in the back and hips as you waited, poised for flight. The snap of the

gun and the instant reaction of his body, catapulting itself over the cinders. The wind whistling past his face, making the ponytail he’d worn in those days stream behind

him. The immense, fulfilling satisfaction of knowing the lanes on either side of him were empty of challengers. And, more often than not, the joy of the tape pressing lightly

against his chest.

    He sighed and struggled to his feet, groping for the railing while his knee quivered.

               He leaned back in his chair and twiddled a ballpoint pen while she read through the latest draft, nodding her head and pursing her lips on alternate pages. She stopped

dead on the next-to-last page.

    “You can’t write about that!” she exclaimed in angry disbelief. “I told you about that in confidence!”

    He knew what she was referring to, had expected it to upset her. “I changed the details,” he explained as his chin began to jut. “No one will know it’s you. And every

incident a writer observes or hears about is grist for his mill -- you know that.”

    Why did everything have to be personal with his daughter? Anyway, it was just sex.