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By Root 619 0

that had ravaged his face. It might have been the voice of a proclamation, the basso profundo of an opera singer. It seemed the audience held its breath, lest breathing cause the people there to miss a word. She strained to comprehend the startling phrases, then was left to tumble down a slide of images that were oddly pleasurable even though their terrible meaning could not be misunderstood: “Water’s silk,” he read, and “Bed of sand.” “The mother bent, a trampled stem.” The hair on the back of Linda’s neck stood up, and chills stippled her arms. She held herself and forgot the audience. One could hardly believe in this marriage of confused and servile grief. She knew, as she had not ever known before — as she was certain those around her had not known before — that she was in the presence of greatness.

He read from The Magdalene Poems. A series of poems about a girl who did not become a woman. An elegy for a life not lived.

Thomas stopped and took another epic drink of water. There was the sound of a hundred listeners putting hands to chests and saying, Oh. The applause that followed was — one had to say it — thunderous. Thomas looked up and seemed surprised by all the commotion. He did not smile, either to himself or at the audience, and for this Linda was inexplicably relieved: Thomas would not easily be seduced.

The questions that followed the reading were routine (one about his culpability, appalling). He answered dutifully; and mercifully, he was not glib. Linda wasn’t certain she could have borne to hear him glib. He seemed exhausted, and a sheen lay on his forehead, white now with true stage fright.

The questions stopped — it wasn’t clear by whose mysterious signal — and the applause that followed could be felt in the armrests. Some even stood, as at the theater. Unskilled and unpracticed at accepting praise, Thomas left the stage.

She might have met him backstage and embraced him in mutual exuberance. And perhaps he would be expecting her, would be disappointed by her absence. But then she saw him in the lobby, surrounded by adoring fans, the torturous words inside his head put aside, and she thought: I will not compete for his attention.

Needing air, she walked out into the night. People stood in gatherings, more exhilarated than subdued. She didn’t intend to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help but hear the words “shattering” and “brilliant,” though one woman seemed incensed that a poet would turn a daughter’s death to advantage. “Opportunistic,” Linda heard, and “rape of other people’s lives.” A man responded dismissively. “Dana, it’s called art,” he said, and Linda knew at once the two were married.

She walked around the block, the experience in the theater seeming to require it. The drizzle turned to serious rain and soaked her hair and shoulders before she could return. She entered a side theater and listened to a Rwandan woman catalogue atrocities. Linda sat benumbed, exhausted of feeling, until it was time for her own reading.

She was taken backstage, snake-infested with coils of electrical cables. Her eyes, not adjusting quickly enough to the darkness, made her stupid and overly cautious, and she knew she was being seen as middle-aged by the younger organizer. Seizek appeared beside her, his breath announcing him before his bulk. He put a proprietary hand on her back, letting it slide to the bottom of her spine — for balance or to assert some male advantage, she wasn’t sure. They were led, blinking, onto the stage, which was, indeed, harshly overlit. They sat to either side of the podium. Seizek, ignoring manners and even his own introduction, staggered to the podium first. Nearly too drunk to stand, he produced a flawless reading, a fact more remarkable than his prose, which seemed watered down, as if the author had diluted paragraphs for the sake of length, made careless by a deadline.

The applause was respectable. Some left the theater when Seizek had finished (bored by Seizek’s reading? not fans of poetry? not interested in Linda Fallon?), further reducing the audience to a desperate case of acne.