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The audience is seated in a part of the store that fits about eighty chairs—not nearly enough. The aisles are packed. Scanning the crowd, I see, among several familiar faces, the people from the Globe I invited. Jamaica Kincaid and I are standing in an area just slightly out of everyone’s view. The readings coordinator gives a short speech, apologizing for the temperature, and then out comes Jamaica Kincaid—who casually takes off her shoes.

“Well,” she says, frowning at the microphone, which appears to be dead. Then she picks up a copy of the anthology, which I had carefully opened to the page where her story began, and, holding it as if it were something from another planet, she turns to me and says in a skeptical voice, “Is this the book?”

Offstage, where no one can see me, I nod frantically. Something doesn’t feel right.

“It has my piece? That’s what you want me to read?”

I nod again. I had assumed, of course, that she would read her own piece, a kind of fever dream called “What I Have Been Doing Lately.” And somewhat reluctantly she does. But then the story, being short and recited in a hurry, is over almost as soon as it began, and the bookstore is filled by awkward silence.

“Hmm … should I read something else?” Jamaica Kincaid says. She starts scanning the nearby bookshelves, while the crowd shifts uncomfortably. We’re in the atlas section, with cookbooks nearby. Through my sweat-soaked shirt you can almost see my heart jumping.

“Well?” Jamaica Kincaid says, looking directly at me.

No time to think. I come out onstage, take the anthology from her hands and open to “Nighthawks.”

Now, “Nighthawks” is perfect because it’s readable and fast, with almost no dialogue. She starts reading:

“The moon, still cooling off from last night, back in the sky—a bulb insects can’t circle.”

The crowd is spellbound. No one, including the reader, knows where this story is headed. And come to think of it, I’m a bit unsure myself. It’s been a few months since I read “Nighthawks.” However, there’s no time to stop. The story picks up momentum quickly, and we’re already flying along. Then Kincaid gets to a part where the narrator meets the “gay divorcée” and starts necking with her in the parking lot. She stops.

Panic! I had forgotten that part of what gives “Nighthawks” its momentum is a good deal of sexual energy. Oh my God, I think, have I asked Jamaica Kincaid to read a sex scene?

“What is this …” she starts to say in my direction, looking more puzzled than annoyed. I have the urge to run out and take the book away, but it’s too late: I can’t breathe, can’t swallow, can’t move. My fists are two hand grenades. Is the piece lewd? Does it have any nudity? Why can’t I remember anything? It’s only two and half pages long, for God’s sake!

“You intend to sit out here all night like teenagers,” the gay divorcée says, when the narrator starts trying to get under her shirt, “or do you want to follow me home?”

This is going to be the worst day of my life. The car chase through the wheat fields is obvious. Everyone knows what it means. But does the piece ever cross the line? Jamaica Kincaid is now coming to the end, where the piece gets really frantic, and I swear to God if she doesn’t finish soon I’m going to run out of oxygen and pass out at those feet I wanted to kiss. Please finish, please …

“She kept driving faster, and I could imagine the toe of her high heel pressing down on the workboot-sized gas pedal of her truck … By the time we hit the dirt roads she was driving like a maniac, bouncing over railroad crossings and the humps of drainage pipes, dust swirling behind her so that her taillights were only red pinpoints, and I wondered what radio station she must be listening to, wondered if she was drunker than I’d realized and she thought we were racing, or if she’d had a sudden change of heart and was trying to lose me on those back-roads, and I wondered if I ought to let her.”

And then it’s over. We made it. The piece is done. The audience is clapping and Jamaica Kincaid