I am in a hotel room alone by myself, gazing out upon the ocean Atlantic.

It is a gray vista, a gray late afternoon, the bus on which I rode down for this appointment with solitude, a Greyhound.

The hotel is mostly empty. I am mostly empty. My mood can only be described as Didion-esque.

I feel a chill at my back, hear what sounds like a murmurous sigh. I turn.

It is the Ghost of Joan Didion; odd, since its earthly host is still very much alive. She is wearing a cashmere turtleneck the color of undercooked salmon. Her chapped lips move but there is a lag before the words reach me. She says:

"If you don't call Room Service, Room Service will not come. Room Service will only come if you call..."

Then like a tiny tornado her vapor funnels into the carpet and disappears, a genie returning into the bottle.

What Didion's Ghost intoned sounds self-evident, but perhaps there is a symbolic import, a dream logic that eludes me.

I decide to leave the hotel before any other ghosts show up to perplex me with possible koans.

It is a short stroll to the boardwalk, which is bereft of pedestrians, it being off-season and sad.

Up on a dune fence a plump feral cat hops; then over.

The boardwalk stores are mostly closed for the desolate winter, unpurchasable merchandise hanging in the windows.

I pause before a beach towel, one of the more curious renditions I have seen.

The model seems modeled on Estelle Warren, yet there is also a resemblance to my friend Elisabeth Eaves, whose upcoming book I've just blurbed.

But what is that bulldog doing there with Estelle-Elisabeth, what can explain this strange juxtaposition?

This is not a beach towel on which I would want to sit, or drape in the cabana.

At a nearby window hangs another future pop culture artifact, a sun-faded "gag t-shirt."

Can you read the message? The glass reflection and sun-fadedness may make legibility difficult.


It says: "I don't need an encyclopedia...MY WIFE knows it all!"

It is a shame that the store is closed for the winter, because it would be such impish fun to return home wearing this t-shirt under my winter coat, then take off my coat, very nonchalant like. Such a good laugh it would give Laura.

"Of that I would not be so sure," says the Ghost of Joan Didion, who is now standing next to me, casting no reflection in the store-window glass. She says:

"Lionel Trilling once bought such a t-shirt to wear at a faculty party and Diana was ever so cross."

This strikes me as unlikely, since I've never read such a story in the many memoirs and biographies of the Trillings, but there is so much we don't know about them, can never know.

That cold evening I visit a nearby casino hotel where a young man with a neuromuscular disorder, confined to a wheelchair, is having an animated conversation with a statuesque young woman in a mermaid costume and waist-length wig, who is handing out discount coupons. She listens and nods to what the young man in the wheelchair is saying with such animation while keeping her eyes on approaching customers, offering them coupons. I can't decide whether this is a sad tableau or a beautiful one, perhaps it is both, and that's what I decide to tell myself: it is both.