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—You have to wear a badge to all events. It’s in the packet. A rule against which writers surely would rebel, Linda thought, looking around at a room filled with white badges encased in plastic and pinned onto lapels and bodices. — Have you met Robert yet? Let me introduce you, Susan Sefton added, not waiting for an answer to her question.

The woman in the iris-colored suit interrupted a conversation among three men, none of whom seemed to need or want interruption. The talk was of computers (Linda might have guessed this) and tech stocks one might have bought if only one had known. Seizek had a large head — leonine one would have to say — and an even larger body that spoke of appetites, one of which was much in evidence in his nearly lethal breath and in the way he swayed slightly, as if attached to a different gyroscope than the rest of them. Perhaps she would be solo on the stage after all. One of the two remaining authors had an Australian accent that was pleasant to listen to, and Linda deduced (as if tuning in to a radio broadcast that had already begun) that he was a novelist about whom it had been said just the Sunday previous in a prominent book review that his prose was “luminous and engaging,” his insights “brilliant and incisive.” (A novel about an Australian scientist? She tried to remember. No, an engineer.) And it was impossible, despite the overused and thus devalued words of praise, not to regard the man with more interest than she had just seconds earlier, a fact she despised about herself. One bowed to power conferred. And she saw, as she had not before, that the other two men were turned slightly in the direction of the newly annointed, as though their bodies had been drawn off course by a powerful magnet.

—And you, Ms. Fallon, would you say that your understanding of love came more from love itself or from reading about love? Seizek spoke thickly, suggesting that she might at any minute be sprayed with sibilants.

Another conversation she had only bits of. The third writer looked at her not at all, as if she were invisible. It would not be fair to say that he was gay. How odd, she thought, that men would talk of love, had been talking of love before she had even joined them, a topic it was supposed was of interest only to women.

She answered without hesitation. — Experience. No one has ever accurately described a marriage.

—A novel can’t, can it? This from the Australian, in broad antipodean accent. — A marriage doesn’t lend itself to art. Certainly not to satisfying structure or to dialogue worth reading.

—You write of love, the man who could not be called gay said to Linda, rendering her suddenly visible; and she could not help but be pleased that someone knew her work.

—I do, she said, not embarrassed to state her claim in this arena. — I believe it to be the central drama of our lives. Immediately, she qualified her bold pronouncement. — For most of us, that is.

—Not death? asked Seizek, a drunk looking for debate.

—I count it as part of the entire story. All love is doomed, seen in the light of death.

—I take it you don’t believe that love survives the grave, the Australian offered.

And she did not, though she had tried to. After Vincent.

—Why central? asked the third man, who had a name after all: William Wingate.

—It contains all theatrical possibilities. Passion, jealousy, betrayal, risk. And is nearly universal. It’s something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.

—Not fashionable to write about love, though, is it. This from Seizek, who spoke dismissively.

—No. But in my experience, fashion doesn’t have a great deal to do with validity.

—No, of course not, Seizek said quickly, not wanting to be thought invalid.

Linda drifted to the edges of the talk, assaulted by a sudden hunger. She hadn’t had a proper meal (if one didn’t count the small, inedible trapezoid of nachos) since breakfast in her hotel room in a city seven hundred miles away. She asked the men if they wanted anything from the buffet table, she was