Sublime

His hands were large and expressive, and he had moved easily in his chair, as if he felt it a pleasure to inhabit a body of which he’d never been ashamed – he’d smelt not of soap or fragrance but of clean skin. His lips had looked as if they had ashes on them: ‘He needs to drink more water,’ said Thomas tenderly, ‘or he’ll get headaches.’

Burns was

him

Other nights found a group of us on the dining room deck, sipping whiskey with the assistant director of the camp, Mo, a Stanford alum taking a break from his English PhD, and discussing literature and the weighty matters of postadolescent life. The next year he returned to his PhD, and later he sent me his first published short story, summing up o

Macomber

between an old man who looked like a receptacle of all the world’s dirt and disease and a young boy, a redhead, who would look like that man one day, if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future.

Quite a strange man, thought James, watching him go – but what a relief to discover he still contained the capacity to be taken by surprise.