Me. . . and ChatGPT

Here's a story.  I wrote it, gave ChatGPT many, many prompts, and told it to rewrite in the style of James Salter's "Light Years."  It gave me a story, then I edited it, then it made suggestions.  I just wanted to see if it would work.  Then I mailed it to several people I know varying in age and professions.  I sent it to writing profs and college professors from other departments.  I sent it to a playwright. a retired salesman, and a contractor.  I sent it to my Miami friend fresh out of college.  I told none of them it was a story I worked on in ChatGPT.  I wanted to get reactions.  They varied, of course, but in the main, with one exception, people liked it.  

* * *

It rained the day they arrived in Paris, and the day after. A soft rain, drifting like ash, sometimes invisible except on the surface of the river, where it textured the gray sheen like brushed silk. Their apartment was on the second floor of an old building above a restaurant that served duck and tarte Tatin and closed at midnight. The windows opened onto the Seine. If you leaned out slightly, you could see the towers of Notre-Dame.

Nedra stood at the tall windows each morning in her robe, drinking coffee, smoking occasionally, her hair loose. Below, the water moved like memory. Viri watched her from the bed, not speaking. It was her first time in Paris. He had been several times, long ago, before the girls were born, before the house on the river. It felt different now. Quieter. A kind of dream one returns to, already knowing how it ends.

They ate in small cafés and grand restaurants. There was soupe à l’oignon gratinée beneath a mantle of browned cheese, slices of duck breast with fig reduction, endive with roquefort and walnuts. They shared oysters in the late afternoon with glasses of Sancerre that made Nedra shiver slightly as the chill of the wine met the brine on her tongue. Once, in a café on the Rue des Écoles, they ate veal blanquette, the pale sauce steaming in the narrow bowls. Nedra spooned hers slowly, lost in thought.

Breakfast was always taken standing—croissants torn by hand, crumbs scattered across the zinc counters, café crème in heavy porcelain cups. Viri watched her eat, the way she held the spoon, the way she dabbed her lips. In the Latin Quarter, they sat near the window of a brasserie and ordered cassoulet with confit and white beans, dense and warming in the late October cold. She called it “a meal for peasants,” but smiled when she said it, her voice low, amused.

He took her to see Bonnard at the Musée d’Orsay, the rooms full of radiant baths and waning afternoons. She liked the colors but said little. What moved her seemed private. They visited Sainte-Chapelle, the light fractured by stained glass. On the Pont des Arts, she stood still in the wind, staring across the rooftops of the Right Bank. He put his hand on her back, and she did not move.

In the evenings, they returned to the apartment to change. She took long baths. He read or listened to the murmurs from the restaurant below, the occasional burst of laughter, the clink of glassware. Once, he heard music—a violin, not quite in tune—rising faintly from the street. He felt outside of time.

At dinner, they drank a bottle of Chinon and talked about things from long ago—places they had lived, people they no longer saw. A woman Viri had once loved lived in Montparnasse now, he thought, or perhaps she had moved. He had not told Nedra. There was no reason. It was not secrecy but preservation—of mood, of illusion.

She had moments of brightness—touching a bolt of fabric in a shop near Saint-Sulpice, reading the chalkboard menu aloud in a hushed voice, her fingers brushing the sleeve of his coat without thinking. But something was altered. She seemed always to be looking beyond him, at the weather, at the buildings, at a thought she did not voice.

At night they undressed without ceremony. Her skin was cool. She did not always turn toward him. He felt the space in the bed like a continent. He asked if she was tired. She nodded, already far away.

On their fifth day, they visited a bookshop in the Seventh. Nedra wandered among the poetry shelves. She picked up a volume of Rimbaud and read the first page, then closed it. Outside, the air had turned colder. The plane trees along the quay had begun to yellow.

They sat by the river, eating sandwiches wrapped in paper. Viri watched a barge pass slowly beneath the bridge. He wanted to say something to her, something final and full of love, but could find no shape for the words.

"You like it here?" he asked instead.

"Of course," she said. She did not look at him. "It's beautiful."

On their final evening, the rain stopped. The sky had the bruised look of twilight. They went walking without a plan. Lights came on in windows across the river. Somewhere a bell rang. They ended up at a brasserie near the Pont Neuf, drank champagne, shared oysters and steak. It was the best meal of the trip, or maybe it only seemed so because they both pretended nothing was ending.

Later, in the apartment, they made love slowly, like a ritual remembered from youth. Her eyes were open. His were closed. There was no sound except the creak of the old bed and the faint clatter of silverware being cleaned below. She touched his face afterward, not tenderly but with finality, and rose to wash herself in the dark bathroom, where the light did not work.

He lay awake, listening to the river. He did not know what he felt. Not fear, exactly. Not loss. But something had entered the space between them, like a language he had never learned. A presence with no name. In the morning, she would dress carefully, as she always did, and they would leave the apartment key on the desk in the hall, walk down the narrow stairs into the smell of coffee and ash and last night’s rain.

He would remember the week as beautiful.

And afterward, he would not be able to say why it was the beginning of the end.

* * * 

I'm just fooling around right now learning how the program works.  It is pretty good at defining writing styles.  Try it.  Write something and ask it to re-write in the literary style of Hemingway, then Faulkner, then Fitzgerald, and see the difference.  The more specific you are, the more accurate the results will be.  Select one work, for instance, a short story or a single novel.  The point isn't that you can have A.I. write stories, but that you can learn things you might not have realized before, knowledge that can then inform your own writing.  

I know. . . I know. . . most people are simply going to use it to write emails and tell jokes.  That's o.k.  Some people use a calculator to add and subtract.  Others use it to send rockets to the moon.  It isn't the tool; it's the user.  

So this morning I have been waiting on the roofer who bailed on me.  He called me yesterday and wanted money.  Ho!  He said he wanted to meet with me this morning.  

No show.  

While waiting, I made this.  It is just preliminary.  I have a lot to learn.  I will re-edit this later and make it much, much finer.  Don't judge me. . . yet.  Don't tell me I'm a child.  I know that, too.  

But for now. . . isn't this shit a hoot?