Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown - By Michael Cunningham Page 0,3

a silver lamé dress, walking unaccompanied twenty paces ahead, singing “Loving You” like a crackpot Lorelei, still trying to lure sailors to their deaths though she’s no longer what she was.

In fall, from mid-September through the end of October, the opposite process occurs. Fall is probably never so thoroughly suffused with its piquant, precarious beauty as it is in a town about to go to sleep for the winter. The lights are blinking out, one by one: first the movie theater closes, then some of the more ephemeral boutiques. Every week brings more absences. Still, most of the businesses hang on until Columbus Day weekend, but after that the town is in winter mode. It’s much more a year-round proposition than it was when I arrived there twenty years ago—a fair number of places open on weekends through New Year’s Day, and some open again as early as April; there are now two good year-round bookshops and a record store—but by mid-January there will be only a handful of bars, a restaurant or two, and a scattering of shops. By February you could walk down Commercial Street late on a weekday night and pass no one at all. Snow blows down from the rooftops, eddies, and glints in the empty streetlight.

But from Labor Day through Halloween, the place is almost unbearably beautiful. The air during these weeks seems less like ether and more like a semisolid, clear and yet dense somehow, as if it were filled with the finest imaginable golden pollen. The sky tends toward brilliant ice-blue, and every thing and being is invested with a soft, gold-ish glow. Tin cans look good in this light; discarded shopping bags do. I’m not poet enough to tell you what the salt marsh looks like at high tide. I confess that when I lived year-round in Provincetown, I tended to become irritable toward the end of October, when one supernal day after another seemed to imply that the only reasonable human act was to abandon your foolish errands and plans, go outside, and fall to your knees. I found myself looking forward to the relative drear of November, when the light whitened and the streets became papered with dead leaves; when cans and shopping bags looked like simple trash again. At least by November I could get some work done.

My First Time

I FIRST CAME to Provincetown twenty years ago, in a state of such deep embarrassment I could no longer imagine myself without it. I was twenty-eight. I had just finished two years at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and had been offered a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, which awards seven-month fellowships, from October to May, to a small body of writers and visual artists, who are each given a studio apartment, a monthly stipend, and a full, uninterrupted span of time in which to work. It is a remarkable act of beneficence. For me it felt like nothing short of rescue, since I had ended my two years in Iowa with no money and no prospects.

Still, I felt old in a way only the young can feel. I would be thirty soon and had not attained anything even my mother could bring herself to call success. Before going to graduate school, I had wandered around the West, getting odd jobs, trying to write. I had published a couple of short stories and begun several novels, the kind young men tend to write, meant to teach the reading public a lesson or two about how to live. Each time I’d realized that I had no idea how people should live, abandoned the book in question, and started another. I was furious and full of shame. I could, for the first time, imagine myself a failure.

Before I applied for the fellowship, I had never heard of Provincetown. I had never been east of Chicago. I drove there with my cartons of books and clothes, accompanied by two friends from graduate school who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. As we drove in their van down Commercial Street, my friend Sarah put her hands over her eyes and said, “God, it’s like the set of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Sarah was prone to hyperbole (we all were), but I couldn’t disagree with her. I had pictured a small New England town like the ones I’d seen in movies. I had expected prim white saltboxes with well-tended gardens, a modest white church surrounded by modest old