Marlinspike

Excerpt

The blue ferry carrying Julia nodded through the waves to Cyril E. King Airport on St. Thomas. Phineas sat under a tamarind tree above Cruz Bay in his tuxedo, watching it go. The five layers of wedding cake perched in his lap.

He decided to take the cake back to the Westin. He hitched a ride and sat in the back of the Suzuki with the cake on his thighs. The driver, a young Rasta named Desmond, smoked a sugar-sweet bone. Phineas flipped the erect plastic couple at a hiker and laid his palm in the frosted names when the Jeep took air at Power Boyd.

Phineas taught scuba diving at the Westin with a sideline of shark diving off the North Drop. The crashing of shark populations worldwide kept him up at night. Sometimes he counted jellyfish to put himself to sleep. The cake had been a surprise for Julia. In the last month, he had secretly learned to bake in the kitchen of the hotel. She had spent the morning shopping and sightseeing on St. Thomas with her six bridesmaids. He had met her on the dock with the cake held gloriously overhead, so she could see it over the hundreds of disembarking passengers. He thought the tux was a nice theatrical touch.

She got on the next ferry back to St. Thomas with her bridesmaids.

Tom Paine

Tom Paine’s short story collection, Scar Vegas (Harcourt), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist. His stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Story, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. He is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.

Will Allison on “Marlinspike”

I’ve long been a fan of Tom Paine’s work—not the Tom Paine who wrote Common Sense back in 1776 but rather the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize–winning author of the story collection Scar Vegas—so I was thrilled when Tom sent us the story in our latest issue, “Marlinspike.”

Set on the Carribbean island of St. John, “Marlinspike” is about the extraordinary friendship between a grown man, Phineas, and a ten-year-old girl, Julia—a relationship that immediately reminded me of Seymour Glass and Sybil Carpenter in J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

“Marlinspike” opens as Phineas, a med-school-dropout-turned-dive-instructor, is abandoned by his fiancée, also named Julia, on their wedding day. The problem is that Phineas won’t grow up. As Phineas’s sister tells him, “You can do everything, but your heart’s in nothing.”

Phineas is preparing to throw his homemade wedding cake into the sea when he meets a young girl, Julia, who’s visiting St. John with her father, a recently widowed eye surgeon from Savannah. Neither has come to terms with Julia’s mother’s death.

Unsupervised on the island, Julia attaches herself to Phineas—two damaged souls with time on their hands. The friendship that develops between them is sweet, unpredictable, and charming—but also full of danger: rocky cliffs, windswept seas, Carribbean wasps, a five-foot barracuda. It’s hard to imagine, given how reckless and injured they are, that things won’t turn out badly for Phineas and Julia.

I hope you find “Marlinspike” as memorable and moving as we did. And be sure to check out our Q&A with Tom Paine to learn about his years in St. John, the inspiration behind “Marlinspike,” and what Tom thinks of Kenny Chesney.