And then she was pulling down my pants and underwear simultaneously, making me arch my back to pull them over my buttocks, and they were sliding down my thighs, over my knees, my shins, my feet. She tossed them aside and stood up. I opened my eyes. Her breasts rose and fell as she breathed. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. The night air moved, causing a prickling sensation in my scrotum as it whispered across my pubic hair. She took off her own pants and panties at the same time, impatiently, stepping out with one foot and then the other, tossing them aside, kneeling back down beside me. She passed her head back and forth. Her hair brushed against me from chest to stomach. She stopped at one end of the rhythmic swinging. Her warm breath, the wet-slick sliding of her tongue up and down the shaft of my penis, and then the soft ring of warmth, descending and ascending. She brought her mouth away and I looked at her through half-closed eyes as she straddled me. The insides of her thighs were warm against the tops of my own, a contrast to the night air moving across the rest of me. She leaned forward and kissed me, and began moving back and forth, so slowly.
“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.
“Shaughnessy—”
“Shhh. “
I felt that she was wet, rubbing against me, coating the underside of my hard penis. There was a faint ringing in my ears, and through it I heard the soft, coarse sound of her pubic hair brushing against mine. She lifted a little and reached down with one hand to lift me and guide me into her.
“Shaughn—”
She pressed down. A little hiss escaped between her teeth.
And then she was pounding and it was warm and I was grabbing her hips and there was nothing but moving, wet moving, and my own hips bucked uncontrollably, and she arched her back and turned her face up toward the moon, biting her bottom lip, and the expression she wore was pain but not pain and it was happening so frighteningly fast and then something began creeping stealthily into my mind on nightbird wings, and then it was there and it was light and light pulsing, spreading, and I could feel the hot gushing into her, and it rose, and rose, and then slowed into rocking movement that gradually stopped.
She fell against me, and she was crying, and our tears mingled.
Twenty-Four
“I was looking for my people,” the unicorn said. “Have you seen them, magician? They are wild and sea-white, like me.” Schmendrick shook his head gravely. “I have never seen anyone like you, not while I was awake. There were supposed to be a few unicorns left when I was a boy, but I knew only one man who had ever seen one. They are surely gone, lady, all but you. When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be.”
—Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
I awoke at the sound of something crashing through the brush. It was midmorning. Shaughnessy’s naked form was curled beside me. Something was coming toward us, something big, from the sound. Conscious of my nakedness, I picked up Fred and waited as the trampling neared.
The bushes parted and Ariel emerged.
She stopped when she saw me. Her head came up as though she were sniffing the air. She stepped toward me and stopped suddenly after a few paces. Her head was cocked questioningly, the way it had when she’d been blind.
There was a rust-colored smear on her neck where I’d hugged her in the Empire State Building. The dried blood on her horn had begun to flake off. Her hair was matted and tangled. Gone were the glossy rainbow ripples that used to spread across her in the sunlight as she moved. For the first time in her life, her coat was dirty. She looked like a wild thing, a thing that had never before seen a human being.
The first time I had ever seen her I had waded cautiously from a lake. I hadn’t been ashamed of my nakedness then.
She blinked. She’d begun to put weight on her right front leg as she walked, and that was good. It would heal now. The pain was gone, New York but a memory. A bad memory, one with scars, but one that would also heal, with time and love.
She looked thin.
A stirring beside me as Shaughnessy moved in her sleep. I looked at her nude body and remembered.
“Ariel,” I whispered. She couldn’t have heard.
I stepped toward her. She didn’t move. Stepped again, until I stood before her. I reached out and she backed away. I was close enough to see the outline of my naked form in her dark eyes.
Not this. Please, not this.
But as I stepped toward her again with both hands outstretched, she snorted and turned her head aside. A pool formed at the bottom of each dark eye, and a single tear flowed down her muzzle, crystalline.
“Ariel,” I said again.
We looked at each other. I have walked the road with you, my beloved creature of purity. We’ve laughed and cried and traveled and fought, and now it’s come to this. I felt cold inside.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t, I can’t.” A spasm took me, a wave that made me twitch once and then was gone. The side of her muzzle glistened from her tears. I stepped closer to her. “Please—”
And she stepped back.
My sword had fallen from my hand, unnoticed until now. I looked at it and lowered myself to my knees before her. I looked up at her, then at the sword. She stepped forward and placed her horn between my hand and the blade. Gently, she nudged the sword away. I looked into her eyes and the pride was still there, now a part of the wildness. I tried once more to touch her, and she gave the barest shake of her head.
Tears brimmed and I shut my eyes. I brought my clenched fists to them and rubbed hard, as if it would scour me clean somehow, and when I opened them again she was gone.
I stared at the space where she had been for a long time and something broke inside me.
*
It feels as though a lot of time has passed since then, though only a year has gone by. We like to think our lives stop at these climactic spots, that all else will be superfluous, but of course that isn’t so. The cliché holds true: life goes on.
Shaughnessy and I set ourselves up in a house in North Carolina. The place was in pretty good shape but required some repairs, and for a few months I lost myself in work. When that didn’t satisfy me I hunted alone for days.
Even when I surfaced from my fugues I was cold to Shaughnessy, treating her more as a roommate than as the friend she wanted to be, or even the lover she was. Sometimes at night, when she lay breathing deeply beside me, I would lie awake in bed and, if I strained hard enough, just at the threshold of hearing, I felt I could hear the sound of wind chimes tinkling, the sound of silver hooves. I didn’t, of course—life goes on, yes, and our capacity for self-deception accompanies it. It must have been hard for Shaughnessy to live in a shadow.
We went on like this, living our separate lives together, until the middle of winter when I was tracking a deer and thought I saw a unicorn. I couldn’t be sure; it may have just been a trick of the snow. Somehow the incident pried me open and made me see what I had kept inside for half a year.
I spent that night crying in Shaughnessy’s arms. I had been numb too long. The house, the work, our relationship. The façade.
But no more charades. We talked, Shaughnessy and I, and it surfaced that there was something between us, something I had too long denied, something we both thought worth saving. But the foundation of our relationship couldn’t lie in the past, and I could no longer be content with the stagnancy of the present. Rolling stones and moss, I guess.
Before I could reconcile moving on, however, I felt the need to cauterize old wounds, and so this account was written. I will leave it behind when we go. It was intended as a cathartic, but if you wish I suppose you may read it as a sort of subjective history of the first years of these odd times.
Shaughnessy and I are taking only what we need to get by as we wander the land. It is less safe than domestic tranquility, perhaps, but I would rather live the life of a dolphin than that of a clam.
Besides—the world is a different place now, and I haven’t even begun to scratch its surface.
Afterword: Taking A Du
mp In Lothlorién1
I. Some Background (1979-1981)
I was just about to start my second year of college at the University of Tampa, Florida. DISCO SUCKS T-shirts were nearly as ubiquitous as disco itself. Guys wore wide collars, bad perms, and shiny belt buckles. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” was playing on the radio about every twelve minutes, and the big media decision being forced on households was VHS or Betamax.
I was eighteen.
Fiction-writing classes were held around a yellow-lighted table in the school rathskeller under the aegis of Professor Andrew Solomon. I had been writing since I was five years old and sending short stories to magazines since eighth grade. In high school I won a writing scholarship in a national contest and was certain life owed me an existence as a professional writer.
I was about to walk into a tunnel twenty years long.
*
Fiction came easily to me. I went to college knowing how to write, and there wasn’t much anyone there could teach me. This says more about me than about them, of course. “The problem with youth,” said Oscar Wilde, “is that it’s wasted on the young.”
I was failing nearly every other subject because, at eighteen in 1979, I didn’t care about much of anything beyond writing and getting laid. I did a lot of both. In writing class I was knowledgeable, funny, sincere, and insufferably arrogant. What I loved, I loved, and I knew why I loved it. What I hated I cursed unto the seventh generation. I set fire to more than one story in that rathskeller. Literally. With a green Bic lighter.
Over the summer break after my freshman year I started a short story about a Boy and His Unicorn. It had the unbearable title of “The Sound of Silver Hooves.“2 I had just read “On the Downhill Side,” by Harlan Ellison, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L’Engle’s sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. Both stories featured Familiar-type relationships between a young man and a magical creature, so that was on my mind. I have always been fond of post-apocalyptic movies and fiction, and I conjured this mental image of a young man and a unicorn walking along an abandoned interstate fallen into disrepair. I started asking myself questions about that image (Why a magical creature in an urban environment? Because physical law has somehow shifted, the old rules don’t work and new ones do), and a world and a relationship began to unfold.
By the time my second year of college rolled around I’d written, I dunno, fifty, seventy-five pages before I admitted to myself that, oh, crap, I have a novel going here.
I didn’t want to write novels. I’d sworn never to write a novel. I was a (sniff) short-story writer. Once I admitted to myself that the damned thing really was a novel, though, it just sort of uncoiled before me, a long path leading somewhere I’d never been and most certainly never meant to visit.
Sophomore year started up and I workshopped the first few chapters. Some people loved it, some hated it. By this time in my young academic career that love/hate division already split neatly along personality lines: people who liked me, liked what I wrote; people who didn’t, didn’t. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of inbetween about my fiction or about me. Oh, well. In any case, when you can poll the reactions to a piece of fiction before you ever turn it in to a workshop, the workshop is well beyond the point of doing you any good. And I didn’t care about the opinions of eighteen-year-olds who were mostly indifferent about writing anyhow.
I quit going to class.
By then I’d quit going to all my other classes as well. I was obsessed with writing My Novel and thoroughly disinterested in college. I told Andy Solomon I was gonna quit school and finish the thing (the title of which I had, thank god, changed from “The Sound of Silver Hooves” to Ariel).
“I think you should,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything here for you.”
I remember gaping. My writing teacher and curriculum advisor was advising me to quit school?
I quit school.
*
Now I have to rewind a bit.
That second year of college I was in love with two women at the same time. I don’t recommend it, unless they’re in love with each other too—and even then it’s only a matter of time till someone’s toes get stepped on. I was like the mule who starved to death between two piles of hay.
Eventually I lived with one of the women and realized the other one was not at all who I had made her out to be. Lisa, with whom I lived, was cynical and smart; her feet were firmly planted on the ground. Her wit could be quite caustic, but here I certainly cannot throw stones. The other woman was simply a fantasy; I made up most of her character. Or didn’t give her room to be who she really was. I dunno. But as Steve Martin once said, I put her on a pedestal so I could look up her dress. Inventing characters is a writer trait. The fact that I didn’t realize this until after I was already living with Lisa hardly set that relationship on an unobstructed road to Paradise, either.
Lisa and I moved into an incredibly tiny apartment in a place called Leisure City, Florida.3 We worked at a U-Haul, and at night and on weekends I worked on Ariel. I got fired and Lisa quit and then waited tables and supported me while I wrote Ariel, gained weight, and got a little weird.
A strange dichotomy occurs when you work on a first novel—at least it did for me. If you intend to make a living writing but have never published anything or received money for something you wrote, and you are not fortunate enough to have publishing magnates for parents, some part of you must have a great deal of faith, disgruntlement, confidence, and impracticality to sit on your ass and fill pages with words until there’s a stack three or four inches high.4 On the other hand, you also are thoroughly convinced you are fooling yourself and are gonna take slap after slap when you submit your work.
They’re both true. They’re still true. But you have to act as if you’re gonna sell the book anyway, because if you don’t write it, you sure ain’t gonna sell it. This combination of confidence and complete uncertainty can be difficult to deal with—for yourself and for others. (It still is.) Plus, being supported by someone else while you walk blindly into the woods hardly does wonders for your self esteem.
Writing fiction is something I’ve never been able to take lightly. I do it easily but I don’t do it casually. If you are able to treat your writing as a job you do, I envy you. You will have a less turbulent career and possibly a smoother life. Taking your work personally takes its toll.
First novels can be like first loves. Ariel was my obsession. It towered monolithically. It owned me. It was a terrible mistress, the consuming, passionate love that grows you up as it breaks your heart. Maybe even because it breaks your heart.
I was well into Ariel before I realized it was really about learning how to live with the reality of Lisa and letting go of the fantasy of that other woman. It’s not apparent in the text, and it shouldn’t be. But it’s the emotional engine that drives the novel, and I like to think it’s what gives what might otherwise be a fairly archetypal, escapist action fantasy some depth and texture and emotional truth.
I could be wrong.
*
I typed the last line of Ariel late at night on New Year’s Eve of 1980, about eighteen months and a whole life away from when I started what I thought was going to be a short story. Lisa was asleep in bed five feet away. There was a Yoda poster on the wall beside the bed. The window curtain next to it was a white bedsheet, pale orange in the streetlight outside.
I wrote Ariel on a Royal manual typewriter5 on a rickety green metal typing stand with folding arms facing a blank bedroom wall. Lisa used to go to sleep to that sound. Sometimes she’d wake up if I stopped typing, like the old story about the lighthouse keeper who, one night when the foghorn doesn’t go off, pops awake and says, “What’s that noise?”
I loved the feel of her asleep near me while I wrote.
So I typed the last line and stared at it a while. I slid the paper from the platen and added it face-down to the hefty stack on the left arm of the typing stand. I turned the whole thing right-side-up and stared a
t that a while. I remember wondering what it was I felt. I got up and picked up the stack and dropped it on the bed beside Lisa, which woke her up. “It’s done,” I said. I don’t remember what she said.
Then I went to sleep.
So Ariel was done. I waited a decent interval (probably a week, knowing me) and rewrote it.6 Back then that meant scribbling all over it and then retyping it. (Thank god for WordPerfect. How quickly we forget. And to those of you who use MS Word: how quickly you forget.) Then I started sending the manuscript out to publishers. It was thick and cost a fortune to mail. Man, was I flying blind: no publication history, no agent, not the slightest idea how to get an agent or even write a cover letter. I’d been sending out stories and collecting rejection slips since junior high school; these and the ones Ariel garnered were put up on the wall with that gummy yellow crap that leaves an oily smudge.
I filled two walls.
Lisa and I moved to Gainesville, Florida, and ended up living in, I swear to god, an asphalt-shingle shack with a tin roof in the middle of nowhere beside a scum-covered pond. The floor of this princely abode was wavy and off level. The shack had one tiny gas heater in the living room. Gainesville has twelve-degree winters, and we moved the bed into the living room and slept in our clothes with our dogs. Mornings when we got up, the water in the dog bowls was frozen. We’d run hot water in the shower and put baggies on our feet because the floor was so cold and we had no slippers, and we’d race into the bathroom and wedge a towel under the door so the heat wouldn’t escape while we got dressed in the warmth. I remember saying how I hoped some day I’d look back on these times and laugh. Well, I’m looking back on ‘em now, and they big moby sucked.
Lisa waitressed and held odd jobs. I worked graveyard at a Majik Market (think 7-Eleven) before getting fired for failing a polygraph test on which I told the truth, which told me something about polygraph tests. I landed a job word-processing for the History and English Departments of the University of Florida. That was a great job. They let me use the equipment after hours (shhhhh) so long as I used my own supplies. This was back when it took a ribbon or two to print the manuscript on a daisy-wheel printer and the novel took up about fourteen 5½” floppies. PCs were so new that people weren’t sure what you’d want to use them for. I typed the novel into the Lanier NoProblem stand-alone word processor and revised it a bit and sent it out. Andy Solomon from University of Tampa and I had stayed in touch, and he lent me the cover letter he’d used for his first novel so I could have a model. I recall that Ariel was rejected about thirty-five times, all told.
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