thing. I thought he would laugh it off. Luther Gunn jealous of me? Luther had gone to Princeton, backpacked through Nepal, hung out with famous writers in New York City, gotten his first story published in The New Yorker. The only reason he’d taken a job someplace as provincial as Haywood was because he was doing research for the novel he was writing about his boarding school days.
But the expression on his face stopped me in my tracks: a look of shame followed by mortification. He turned his back on me and walked out the door. A few minutes later I heard in the stillness the scrape of the canoe against the dock and I panicked. By the time I got out to the dock the rowboat was thirty feet away and Luther was only a dark silhouette against the setting sun.
That’s the first time it really sunk in how precarious my situation was. We only had the one boat. What was I doing living on a barren rock in the middle of a lake with a man I barely knew? And then it struck me that this might be my best opportunity to learn something about Luther. I went back inside the cabin and straight to the duffel bag he had brought with him, which he kept under our bed. I was remembering how heavy it had been when he put it in the back of the rowboat. But it wasn’t weighed down with clothes; Luther wore the same three flannel shirts—sometimes layered over each other—and two pairs of jeans day after day. What else had he brought with him?
I expected to find books inside his duffel, but there were only two: a children’s collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories and a clearly unread copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. The rest of the duffel was full of notebooks and eight-by-ten manila envelopes. I slid out the contents of one manila envelope: twenty typed pages paper-clipped together. The Ice Virgin was typed on the center of the first page, a story by Luther Gunn.
Wasn’t there a Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name? I scanned the first page. It was a story about a boy named Rudy who fell into an icy lake and was seized by a creature called the Ice Virgin, whose kiss froze Rudy’s heart. The story seemed familiar. I turned to the next page, loosening a paper clip, which left a rust-colored shadow behind, and read to the end. The story was a fairy tale of sorts, about a boy who is unable to feel any of the normal emotions because he has been cursed by the Ice Virgin, a demonic hag that hungers for his death after his near-escape from her. The boy grows up and learns to pretend to be like other boys, but he always knows he’s different, and so do the girls he pursues. Whenever he kisses a girl she turns into the dreaded ice hag. Only a perfect love will set him free from his curse. At last he finds a girl who is so pure, who loves him so unselfishly, that he is cured. When he kisses her his heart melts. They travel to a sacred island to be married but on the journey the Ice Virgin rises up on a tidal wave, seizes the boy, and drags him down to her ice cave to live with her forever. The girl is washed up ashore on the island. Without a boat she cannot ever get to the mainland. She lives out the rest of her life alone, mourning for her dead lover.
When I got to the end of the story I felt like my heart had frozen. I was the girl in the story: stranded on an island in the middle of a lake, trapped in Luther’s fantasy.
I opened another envelope, hoping for another story with a happier ending, but I found the same story in the next envelope and in the next and the next. Eighty-six envelopes (I counted) contained a typescript of the same story. Some of them had notes attached to the paper clip, many bearing the masthead of a literary magazine—some famous like The New Yorker or Ploughshares; some obscure like the Kalamazoo Gazette, Fernspores, Dragonsprite—with a few words scribbled below: Sorry. Not for us. Try us again. One had a longer note attached. Dear Mr. Gunn, your story is not without merit. There is some fine writing here but the story, besides its obvious reliance