One of the most important books in my life turned out to be William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. It convinced me that language was essentially ambiguous and therefore multivalent. Sentences could mean different things depending on how you looked at them, especially in the crafty world of literature.

This was a very good thing. I think about realism in fiction a lot and how literature is supposed to describe reality. But I think our language is telling us that reality is inherently mysterious. Call that realism if you want to.

I loved David Long’s story for several ambiguous reasons. I loved how it sounded. I loved the skill DL used to construct it. I loved that David knew just when to be dramatic and when to surprise. But mostly I was impressed because David Long took a very important word, a megaword, attraction, and gave me a critical and canny instance of what it meant. It’s a universe of a word. (Read The Swerve.) Writers should do that for us. They should tell us what our words might really mean.

Long introduces us to an adolescent romantic triangle, circa 1963. Marly Wilcox is 15 years old and has her eye on Charlie Bitterman in the local roller skating rink. I’m saying adolescent triangle but Shakespeare showed us Romeo and Juliet at about that age so I have some respect.

David Long shows us his usual high writerly class by introducing the name of his character indirectly, by reporting that she’s stencilled her name in nail polish on her roller skate case. May you exhibit that much skill when you write your next short story.

More about Marly: the kid lives “by a stretch of dead water called McCafferty’s Slough.” Where Long writes stretch, what I felt as a reader was stench. Marly lives alone with her mother in a rented house with a tin roof. We are not in the high rent district.

Our swain, Charlie, lives decidedly upscale. His older brother goes to West Point. His father is an architect. Charlie is slated for Rensselaer. My gosh, Rensselaer, the Cambridge of engineering schools! When I was in high school, I knew a kid who was going to Rensselaer. He intimidated the shit out of me.

“Charlie danced like no local boy.” I’m totally in love with this because it seems to nail Charlie as awesome. How often do writers describe how people dance anyway?

With Charlie on the dance floor there’s no flailing and no sappy grin. He keeps his eyes shut and his moves minimal. This is one cool kid. There’s a boy like that in most packs of adolescents. Usually there’s only one. The kid who seems to have reached the maturity of 23 when he’s only 16. Reading this description of Charlie’s dance skills, I can’t help wondering how he fucks. I’m being honest here on the Three Guys blog. That’s how I think. But not to worry. Read the story and you’ll find out.

So Marly has gone for the upscale cool kid. But he’s made another choice. He’s dancing with Cynthia, who has elected to careen through her teenage years with reckless abandon.

You know from my last David Long review how the writer can do a number on his character with a physical description. Cynthia is: loopy, flagrantly blond, has a tantalizing gap in her teeth, she had no parents as far as anyone knew. This is a nice story surprise. Marly’s rival is not some blue blood in exclusive outfits from the mall. Charlie’s gone to the bottom of the hill for Cynthia.

What’s up with Charlie? Well, it turns out he’s playing house with Cynthia out in his van, which he parks in remote byways. Cynthia gets pregnant, has a child. Is it Charlie’s? Marly ends up helping out as Cynthia’s best friend or really, the best friend of the couple.

Charlie gets odd jobs in construction. What’s happened to Rensselaer?

This is my way of putting it: Charlie fell off the Sword Bridge. That’s a phrase from Chretien de Troyes. It’s a bridge made of a sword’s edge that Sir Lancelot has to cross. Only heroes can cross it.

Charlie is scared. Going to the Ivy League, living up to what his parents expect, competing with the premier engineering students in the country, it’s too much. So you see two paths for Charlie. One is that he takes in piece-work as a part time construction worker and lives in a trailer with Cynthia of the platinum hair for the rest of his life with a child that probably isn’t his.

Choice two is Marley. Marley tells Charlie that he has to go back to school. And it’s the way she tells him that’s important. Marly tells him with authority. What’s this authority? It’s a mutual inner sympathy that is created between Marly and Charlie. It happens right before your eyes. They become a couple.
Let’s conclude with sex. Charlie and Cynthia have fantastic sex. Cynthia is like a teenaged earth mother. With Marly and Charlie it’s awkward. David Long makes that clear. You feel that if Charlie and Marly get married it’s never going to be great between them that way.

But that doesn’t matter. Marly and Charlie are attracted to each other and its not about sex. It’s attraction as an alliance, as a form of maturity. Attraction comes to mean alliance. Alliance comes to mean attraction. You see what I mean about words being ambiguous and that being a good thing.

The short story “Attraction” is in David Long’s short story collection called Blue Spruce from Scribner and it’s available in trade paper right now.