The two of you sit on the crumbled concrete footing of an outflow pipe abandoned to rust in the west end of Provincetown. The pipe runs into the surf, beyond the edge of the beach, and you dangle your feet over the cold late-spring ocean as it hungrily laps at your perch. You’re as far over the ocean as the long pier off to one side, and you’re going to get wet if you head for dry land before the tide rolls back out.

Windy today, you tell her.

Not too much, she says. I could sit here forever.

Would you like to? you ask.

Hm?

Sit here forever, I mean. Would you like to? Or should we go in? You push up onto your arms over the concrete, ready to swing yourself into the water for the walk to dry land.

Let’s wait, she replies, and leans into your shoulder.

What should we do while we wait?

Just wait.

A bird skims the water in front of you, but decides against landing and swoops back into the air.

It was great, you tell her, Watching all those couples coming out of town hall. How could anyone be against that, if they saw how happy it made them? People who waited forty years together to get married?

It must’ve felt great, she agrees.

We could get married, you say.

What?

Do you want to?

What, wait… what? Are you joking?

No, really. I have a ring right here, you tell her, and fish the ring out of your wallet. I’ve been sitting on it for days.

That’s not really a ring… is that a ring? Really?

Really.

For real?

For real, really. So?

You’re not kidding?

No.

Yes.

Okay.

You slip the ring onto her finger, and watches a boat slide by very slowly. A wave breaks against the concrete below you, splashing the backs of your outstretched legs just like it was few minutes before.

Shall we go in now? you ask.

Let’s sit a bit longer, she says.

All right, you reply, pushing your heels against the rough rusty iron of the pipe to hoist yourself higher onto the footing.

There you were in your own sunlit backyard, merrily minding your business and daydreaming of one thing and another, far from twisty little passages and damp, airless caves. You didn’t notice the grue creeping up from behind, cutting across your neighbor’s lawn on quiet slippers of fearsome black fur. You didn’t notice it coming until the world went black and toothy, and with the last flicker of life in your disembodied noggin as it rolls down the grue’s oily throat, you think to yourself, I didn’t realize I was so likely to be eaten by a grue right here in my own backyard on such a bright, sunshiney day. But you aren’t really all that surprised, because you are always likely to be eaten by a grue, and often when you least expect it and no matter how loud you say, Xyzzy.

The morning’s writing goes slowly, stalled by the conviction that each word you write will never mean more to anyone than it does to you as you type it. That your experimentally inhuman characters won’t connect with one single reader, and even your mom will be lying when she says that she read your novel. You want to write something that speaks to real lives, it’s just that your imagination runs away from you sometimes, and not in the direction of other people.

You need a break from the dense, humid forest of your lumbering plot. You need to inject some light into your dark. And in a flash the solution comes clear—you’re going to write Chick Lit instead.

So you spend the afternoon in the city, strolling from boutique to boutique, making notes on whether your plucky protaganist’s soul is better defined by a Prada, a Chanel, or a knock-off Vuitton. You measure the heights of various heels in consideration of which lifts your character closer to achieving her goals (but not before the third sequel).

You sample sushi at three different counters, because it’s sexy, it’s sassy, it’s the opposite of what your usual characters eat and today you’re branching out. You wash the fish down with cans of cheap beer, but only because you at least owe your regular characters that.

On the train home from downtown, notebook chock full of details and ideas, the quotidian saga of young (but rapidly aging!) Belinda B. Bowles, new to the city, new to her job, new to the complications of love, is taking firm shape in your head. The story’s already so funny it’s making you laugh, right there in your subway car. You decide to alliterate every line of the novel.

Your laughter is loud but not loud enough to raise a single head of the commuters around you, young (but rapidly aging!) women all, reading behind remarkably similar covers with naked crossed legs and pink card stock and fonts weighed down with curlicues. Not one of them looks up, rapt in their reading, as rapt as if they were in conversation with an old friend, their best friend in the world who they don’t see often enough, certainly not often enough that a scruffy would-be-understood novelist is going to distract them from catching up.

You make a note on the last available page of your notebook, after the plot arc and character sketches and comparison charts of little black dresses. Way down at the bottom of the last page you write, Write a novel like an old friend.

Water whistles and falls quiet. Your neighbor shuffles across the ceiling, from her stove to her couch, to an afghan over her knees, a car-accident cough settling through the floor to your rooms every few steps. You watch your daughter asleep and worry she’ll be woken up:

you imagine all this:

your great-grandmother is the neighbor upstairs, talking to herself in thick Scots, shuddering in the blue TV glow of the news. She cries, Mercy! with every headline, and every merciful cry brings more coughing, doubling her under her duvet, doubled up over her divan, all those strange words for blankets and couches you only heard visiting her;

you imagine all this,

because you live in a house, not a flat, and that shuffling and coughing down from above must be happening to someone else. You’ve no daughter, you’re nobody’s Mum, and if your great-grandmother is pacing the ceiling then you’ve sifted her into some story you’ve swallowed, simmering the flavor of other lives into a stew with your own.

I rented a cabin for the weekend with Kiss. They hike in their make-up, and those high platform boots; I’ve never spent so long getting over a mountain.

Peter Criss cut vegetables on a tree trunk chopping board while I skewered beef for our kabobs. Gene Simmons, so pyro-casual on stage, crouched by the fireplace for hours struggling to make kindling catch—the problem was he shied away from each match, so the flame wasn’t near enough to the paper. Dinner was late, and we all blamed Gene, but his perfect cocoa made us forgive.

My bed was the one nearest the door, so when the Kiss Army arrived it was me they climbed over en route to the band. I decided to sleep in the basement, where it was quiet, but the ceiling bowed and bounced all night long so I knew I’d spend the morning clearing a path through the bottles and butts, and serving hot tea to four aging rockers and their hungover fans.

The family across the street came from China long before you moved in, but their children have all been born here. From your porch you watch the boy face off with his sister as she pushes a rotary mower, ramming his sneaker toes again and again. At last he spreads his legs wide and she slides the blades and her body under his own, ducking in a way a tank never would. She mows their postage stamp yard, cutting wide curves in too-big bathing trunks that fall down in the back with Coppertone flair, and the boy throws and catches a ball, spinning and dancing as it comes down. Their father comes to call them inside then takes over the mowing himself, working from outside in, tracing a square that gets smaller and smaller the longer he works.

I was the world champion pinstriper, laying out thin, sharp lines on any surface—car doors, houses, a cat that lay still too long. I carried my paintbrushes everywhere in a leather roll-up intended for chisels, and a few pots of paint on a bandolier slung over my chest, Pancho Villa-style.

If you needed something pinstriped, I was the person to call.

The president wanted a new look for the White House. The Vatican needed more flair. Tommy Hilfiger sponsored the space shuttle, and I made it look like one of his suits.

But I wondered, behind the bars of my stripes, if there were other lines worth painting, too.

Some arguments go on for weeks, implied in the movement of objects between the places where you each think they belong. No one ever asks, Who keeps moving the butter dish? because if you did the hushed feud would end and you’d have to talk about something more painful.

This morning you pulled all the books from your shelves and dragged them to a windowless corner. Starting with the hardcover bricks of reference, history, and theory, you spread a half circle two volumes deep from one wall to the other with you in the point where they meet. When those books were exhausted you moved on to your heaviest novels, layering them on top of the ring. Then another level of smaller novels, and another of short story collections. Finally your poetry and chapbooks, and by now the wall rose up over your head and cast a shadow into the corner. With your back in the point where the two walls run together, you spread tier after of journals and magazines, fanning them an inch at a time, until they reached all the way to the walls and you were closed in by a roof. Your fort blocked out all noises, chased off all light, and you closed your eyes and drifted to sleep with a nose full of paper and ink.

Somehow you made it through most of the day without remembering that you aren’t in France, you aren’t French, and your four years of highschool Français have melted away through the years. You felt the soft pressure of a beret during lunch, and walking the crowded boards of the marina detected strains of live jazz drifting from the rotunda in le jardin du Luxembourg. You made a note to yourself to stop in at that fromagerie in the 14^th on your way home, the one across the street from where the old men play boules. You were so fluent today that nearby conversations sounded almost like English, your mind making sense without even trying, and it was of this fluency you were most proud. Proud until you realized a moment ago that you aren’t in France, you aren’t French, and your four years of highschool Français are a rippling pool in the back of your brain into which something drips now and then, and it takes time for things to settle down up in there.