Becky was not happy to see me. It was in her face and eyes.

She said, “I can’t. I have another appointment at three.”

I said, “I’ll wait. I’ll wait if you’ll talk to me.”

She had nodded and closed her door.

Detective Wise had come by to speak with her that morning and I suppose he might have been a little rough with her. I assumed as much. He had been pretty blunt with me in his investigation, more than once. I accepted it as necessary, but I didn’t think Becky had ever been through an interrogation before. Desiree had been missing for more than four weeks and finding her would not be getting any easier.

Wise had called me early that morning and asked, “Do you think your friend the Professor had a reason to hurt Miss Perry?”

I said, “No. She’s not like that.”

He said, “You sure?”

I said, “Yes.” But, of course, I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure of anything.

Should I have said outright that I thought it was absurd to even consider the idea that Becky might have hurt Des over me. Over me?

Connie has a couple of regular gigs signed up for us all the way through January, keeping an eye on a political candidate who was running for the Senate. The weekend after Thanksgiving was non-stop. Monday was actually the first chance I had to see Becky since Thanksgiving. She had not answered my phone messages.

I waited for her by going next door and wandering through the Harvard Museum of Natural History. This is an old habit and comforting to me. If Becky had one more student to see, the hour could not be better spent.

As a kid I had mused whole Saturdays away there while my mother visited with her friend Mrs. Gerry, who lived only a few blocks away. My brother always refused to come, which made this all the more sweet. As if the place were mine alone.

They have cleaned the dust from the corners since then, but the exhibits are much the same. Just like a kid, I was still taken in by the great arching bones of the whale. Such an unbelievable beast. So difficult to imagine as anything less that a fallen god.

At some point in my childhood I had received a gift of the Roy Chapman Andrews book for kids, All About Whales. This had singularly defined my appreciation of the subject for years. There was no political correctness to it. No pretense. Andrews had gone whaling himself and understood the nature of his subject firsthand. It was all just a matter of fact. Naturally, there was some preordination then to my later discovery of Moby Dick in high school.

I have a special affinity for Melville. Even more so as I’ve grown older. I think of his misery sometimes as if it’s my own…I know. Very grand of me, to see myself in the same light as Melville. But I do. So that’s that.

Back when, back about 1989, when Mary Ellen and I were beginning to have a rough time of it–more me that her I suppose–I read Moby Dick again for the third time. It might have only been an attempt to find refuge in that safe haven of my past. I can’t tell you now why I went back to it, given the way they tried to kill the book in the college–dissecting it in a clumsy attempt to cut the soul out with their dull academic knives.

But this was a stroke of luck, after all. I was too young, the first time I read it, to appreciate anything but the spirit of the book. Afterwards, in college, I had approached Melville’s great humor, and done my paper for that class on similarities between Melville and Mark Twain. The professor–or his stand-in graduate student, who read my effort–was not convinced. And then, surprisingly, in the midst of my failing career as a teacher, I read Moby Dick the third time with the wonder of a kid as it joined to the raw edges of my own life. Right from that first sentence. It all made sense to me, finally, but not just the book. Myself. I was Ishmael! Certainly not the heroic Queegueg. I was not driven by my search for the whale like Ahab, but compelled to watch. This was not the role I wanted, was it? I re-enlisted in the Army a week after the Pequod sank again.

I did not want to be an observer, I thought. I wanted to be in pursuit!

You have to understand, as much as Ishmael is Melville himself standing at the threshold of his own life and looking out onto the vastness of his own ignorance, he is also the very intentional character that Melville has made for us to face that abyss. Ishmael is a foolish man. A fatuous man. Just as Melville sees himself…All right, that is supposition. I don’t know how Melville saw himself. But I bet he did! I can feel it in his words. But he can’t say it outright. Why would anyone waste time reading the words of a self-confessed fool?

And Melville is a conscious and practiced writer. This is not his first creative effort. He knows he has to win the reader over to looking at the world through the eyes of his everyman, and then keep those eyes open to seeing what most people have already closed their minds to. Ishmael is an innocent, but he cannot be without character. Melville makes him the credulous observer–the bigot, the chauvinist, but the observer to the bitter end.

Think of those wonderful portions of the book that so many editors cut away in a clumsy attempt to render the precious oil–supposedly to shorten the reader’s burden—and thereby cut away the bones which give it shape and make it mighty–depriving the story of its driving power so that few students who read it ever comprehend the larger context. Think, for instance, of the chapter where he defines the species of whale in terms of book sizes. That alone is the sort of Swiftian genius that makes the gift of the rest of the tale wholly deserved.

The book size metaphor is so apparently fatuous, silly, and absurd that it must be dismissed out of hand. Yet, there it is, and we must deal with it, not in passing, but in great detail. Such a fine and deliberate act. Whales are not mammals, Ishmael declares, they’re fish! They must be categorized by size alone, as folios, or octavos, or duodecimos, but not quartos–why not quartos I wonder?—all because their insides are simply too complicated to catalogue or understand. Shades of every librarian who forgets the very cause and reason for their own existence in an orgy of call letters and budgetary fulfillments.

Oh, King Procrustes! Such foolishness is colossal and not incidental. The truly ignorant editor who expurgates the bones from the pages has only proven themselves oblivious to their own stupidity. Isn’t true stupidity a refusal to admit your own ignorance? They’ve lost their chance to understand the rest of the book! With the skeleton gone to a museum they’re left to cobble braces from scraps of scripture and jury rig allegorical tales and as if old Melville knew some Twentieth Century professor would someday need a handle to grasp what they themselves had become too small to understand.

Melville was only addressing his audience! He only wanted to entertain them enough to sell his book by word of mouth. They knew their Bible and their Shakespeare and didn’t need a professor to instruct them on the power of the sea. Forcing such a text today on children who’ve never been endangered by the necessities of daily toil, nor dreamt of adventure beyond the push of a button on a video game, nor stood witness to a death or a birth, is a true waste of sentiment. Brine and tar and the sour breath of rot mixed with the sweet perfume of whale oil rendered in the pots cannot be digitalized any more that the unexpected heave and loss of a deck beneath your feet.

Of course I knew little enough about all that myself. But at least I could take what Melville had to say at face value and forget about transposing it and trimming it to a modern template of artificial deconstruction.

What were the bones of all of this, then? I had found more than a few scattered here and there without a good plan. Becky would know about that. She would tag each piece and label it. She would see it in place before moving it to a more convenient context and making assumptions. She would be slow and deliberate. I had rushed in and grabbed at what was obvious. Like an grave robber in the tombs of Egypt. But then, I had thought that time was of the essence. If something had happened, I needed to know as soon as possible.

Nearly a month was gone now. If Desiree was, dead, as I was beginning to believe, my time would be better spent in a more careful study.

The week before Thanksgiving, I had gone to see James Crockett. I was thinking about my novel, not about Desiree just then. I was looking for a match to light a fire.

He’s an impatient bastard.

He was not sitting in his usual spot at the bar, and I almost left, assuming he was not there that night. Then someone moved, and I caught sight of him with his feet up and braced against the bar so that his chair leaned far enough back to see the television. It was comic. It made a visual display of his short stature and I assumed the inconvenience would have him in a bad mood, but I was only right by half.

“What the hell do you want?”

My guess is that he had finished his usual quota of bourbon and was into later rounds.

I said, “I need some help.”

He didn’t look at me but kept his eye on the screen above. “You are a waste of time. You don’t listen to anybody. I’m busy. What’s the capital of Liberia?”

“Monrovia.”

“Bizzzt. Wrong! You’ve got to put it in the form of a question. What good are you?”

He was watching the game show Jeopardy on the television above his head. I pulled a stool over from the wall.

“I have a question of my own.”

“Just a minute.”

He stared more intently at the screen in an exaggerated attempt to ignore me. Alex Trebeck, the game show host, asked the next question, “The numerical equation popularly used in the border dispute between the United States and Britain in 1846.”

I said, “What is fifty-four forty or fight?”

James turned at me in disgust. “I was going to say that! You didn’t give me a chance. That was an easy one for you. I never liked history.”

I said, “Do you have time for a chat?”

He waved me off with a single word, “No,” bending his knees enough to bring his chair forward so that he could grab his nearly empty glass. “What do you want?”

“I’m not getting anywhere with the story. I need some advice.”

He jerked his head to the side and looked at me over the broad expanse of his right cheek. “You don’t listen to advice.”

I said, “If it’s good, I will.”

“I don’t give bad advice. That’s why I sit in bars watching Jeopardy instead of going home to Patrice.”

I liked Patrice. She was a children’s book editor at Houghton Mifflin.

“How’s Patrice?”

“She’s getting married.”

The explanation for his worse than usual mood was explained.

“Sorry.”

James looked for the bartender’s now. “So am I. I told her to stop waiting, and she did. That was good advice. She finally took it.”

“Give me some good advice. I’ll take it too?”

“For free?”

“I’ll buy you another bourbon.”

He didn’t miss the beat. “Okay. What do you need?”

I started in, “Becky turned up some new sources for me. My whole theory about the father killing Mary Andrews is out the window—“

“Defenestrated! They just had that word on Jeopardy.”

“Defenestrated. But that’s Okay. I have other ideas. It’s a better story now, as far as I’m concerned. Only, it doesn’t feel like a story anymore. It feels like history. It feels like research. The narrative is boring.”

“Yeah. You’re good at that. That’s why I told you to put some sex into your Civil War epic. Remember?”

“You don’t let me forget.”

He pushed his glass forward for the bartender to notice. “Because you wasted my time. That’s why. You had something there. You lost it.”

“Will you read what I have now and tell me what you think? Tell me what you think I need?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m busy. I’m missing my show. But I’ll tell you what you need, anyway. I’ll tell you what I thought about it when I read the first version and I didn’t tell you because I figured you’d just go the other way. You need a whale.”

“A whale?”

“Yeah. And you need an Ahab and you need a whale.”

“There are no whales in this story.”

“Don’t be dense! Now go away and let me watch my show.”

That’s James. I felt sorry for Patrice. I thought she loved him. I had met her more than once. James believes he’s a freak and anyone who loves him must love freaks. And he doesn’t like people who like freaks. Simple logic. Only Patrice probably loved him because he is a very funny and generous guy.

I wanted to speak with Becky about all of this. In the end, I though she would understand about my telling Wise she had gone to see Des. I had to do that. But my motivations were more selfish than that. I was as incapable of comforting her over Des as I was myself. What I needed was someone to talk to about my story. After all, Melville had his Elizabeth; his dear amanuenses, if never truly his muse. I had not wanted to discuss my story with Becky over Thanksgiving because I wasn’t settled on it at all.

But James was right. He’s usually right, but not always. He needs Patrice. And I needed an Ahab. I already had my whale.

.