Ferry Weather
The first book he wrote about her was true. He left it on her step, and nothing came back. This one is fiction, and he says so on page one.
A novel. Kindle and paperback, 136 pages. Paperback ISBN 9798161780855.
Read the opening · The book’s own site: ferryweathernovel.com
About the book
Wes Guidry keeps the lawns on Fishers Island — nine miles of grass cut all winter for people who come in July. He lives at the dead end of a short lane in Mystic, Connecticut, across a cedar fence from Céline Marchetti, a French teacher from Lyon who keeps the minutes for the town’s zoning board, and who ends four years with him in three lines on school paper. Please don’t come to the house.
He doesn’t. That is the whole of the plot, and the hardest thing he has ever done.
He stands at her gate with her key in the lock for eleven minutes and doesn’t turn it. He walks a letter to the mailbox and puts it in the glove box instead. He raises the fence a foot so he’ll stop looking at her window, takes it down nine days later, and is fined for it before a Board where she types every word he says and never looks up. And slowly the town begins to read like a letter addressed to him: a ferry schedule that moves twenty-five minutes, a French film on the marquee, a radio playing in a shuttered house that the caretaker swears he turned off.
Between the chapters are the Rooms — the places where Wes writes Céline from the inside. The first ones are wrong. A retired cop in a church basement tells him why: You keep writing her nicer than she is. The rest of the book is a man learning to write a woman with her back to him, and finding out that it is the only thing she ever asked of him.
Ferry Weather is a novel about keeping a place ready for someone who isn’t coming — a key not turned, a letter not sent, a chair on an island sat in once, and a gate that stays shut.
A love story told by a man who has learned to leave the woman alone.
Read the opening
Before
The first book I wrote about her was true. This one isn’t, and you should know that going in.
It was true the way a maintenance log is true. Dates. The text of the note. The minutes of a hearing about a fence, which I obtained by written request, and which she typed. A photograph of the gate latch. A list of everything she had ever cooked for me, in order, with the dates I could reconstruct and question marks where I couldn’t. I thought that if I put the whole thing down accurately enough, she would have to see it the way I did. I had it printed. I left a copy inside her gate, on the step, on a dry morning, and I went to work on the island and I did not come back by the lane until dark, so that whatever happened to it could happen without me watching.
It was gone the next morning. Nothing came back. Not a note, not a look across the fence, not a change in which light was on. Once I’d have written that gone meant read. Gone means gone.
I imagined her putting it down. In the version I settled on she finishes the last page, which is the list, and sets it on the counter face down, and looks at the window for a while, and says — not to me; there’s no me in the room — Keep writing. Try again. The way you’d say it to a student who’d done the assignment and missed the point. She didn’t want to be documented. She wanted to be moved, and I had sent her a dossier.
So I tried again.
Her favorite author is Murakami. Her favorite film is The Notebook. She told me both early, in the months when people tell each other things. So: a story where a man thinks the town is talking to him and can’t tell whether it’s the town or him. A story where a woman is written back to a man by his persistence. And one who knows he’s writing it, to keep me honest. If it’s good enough somebody will make a movie of it and she’ll see it with her daughter at the Luxury Cinemas on a Thursday and not know until the credits.
That was the plan, when I started. I’ve left it in so you can watch it stop working.
I’ve gone out to the island and come back every working day since before I knew her, and the only thing it has taught me is that you can do that more than once.
This is more than once.
Chapter 1, “The Note,” continues at ferryweathernovel.com.
Also by Troy Taliancich
The Deep End, a novel about a breakup, a building, and a man who cannot tell whether he is being watched or writing a book.
The Record series, five novels about a girl who cannot speak in rooms, in a city where nothing is true until a clerk writes it down: The Record (October 27), The Record Stands (November 3), The Record Counts (November 10), The Record Burns (November 17) and The Record Speaks (November 24).
The One Who Asks, an epic novel of science and faith set under the Texas prairie.
The Sextant Protocol, a trilogy about a device that holds people where they are.
The Dog House
The sequel to The Deep End. Join the mailing list to hear when it’s out.