The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [30]
After that, the poems came like water, flooding the bedroom in which she wrote. It was as though she had been pent up, and years of poems had needed to pass through her. Her poetry was printed with some regularity (listing prior publications had a synergistic effect), and when Maria was twelve, her first editor, with whom she now warmly corresponded, wrote to say that he was moving to a publishing house in New York and would she consider allowing him to put out a volume of her verse?
—You’ve done it, Vincent said when she called him at work to tell him.
—I think I’ve just begun, she said.
* * *
All this she was remembering as she made her way down the hotel stairs. She opened the door off the stairwell (which reeked of cigarette smoke; chambermaids on their breaks?), not certain of the number of Thomas’s room. She thought it was on the seventh floor; had Thomas said 736? But she might be confusing that number with another, earlier, hotel room of her own. She could, she realized, simply go back to her room and call. No, that wouldn’t do. She wanted to see Thomas, to speak to him. She knocked at 736, a confident knock, though she braced herself for a baffled, half-dressed businessman appearing to tell a chambermaid that no, he didn’t need turn-down service. A tall woman in heels and pearls passed her in the hallway and wouldn’t meet her eyes: would Linda seem a woman who had been locked out of her room by an angry husband? Linda rapped again, but still there was no response. Fumbling in her purse, she found a tiny pad of paper and a space pen. These missives, she thought, as she wrote — such old habits, such echoes.
—My son is an alcoholic, she wrote. And what is the antecedent for that?
* * *
Once again, she let herself be herded onto a bus and deposited at a restaurant — this time Japanese, the only food she didn’t care for, having never developed a taste for sushi or for vegetables coated with flour and grease. Still, eating out was better than sitting alone in her hotel room and having to resist the temptation to call either Marcus or Thomas, though she was intensely curious as to where each was exactly. Had Marcus gone to Brattleboro already? Had Thomas left for home? She wanted to ask Mary Ndegwa, with whom she ate dinner, if she knew what Thomas had done during his panel to so scandalize an audience she would have said was scandal-proof; but she worried that such a query might bring on a discussion of Thomas’s history, which she did not want to address just then. Mary Ndegwa and she, though they had never formally met, had a shared history and passed a nostalgic meal together, Linda enjoying the evocative rhythms of the poet’s Kikuyu accent even as they discussed her husband’s release from detention, the banning of her own work in Kenya, the horrendous aftermath of the elections of 1997, and the terrible bombing at the American embassy. Kenya was more dangerous as well, Mary Ndegwa told Linda, and though Linda chose to remember the shimmering green tea plantations of the Highlands and the white dhows of Lamu, she could as well recall the great-coated askaris with their pangas and the horrifying cardboard shanty towns of Nairobi. You must return, Mary Ndegwa said. You have been lost for too long. The African woman laughed suddenly, hiding the gap between her teeth with her hand. Mary Ndegwa, as always, found Americans mysteriously hilarious.
During dinner, Linda noted that Seizek kept his distance, which pleased her inordinately; and the Australian smiled in her direction twice, conspiracy having made them something more than just acquaintances. There was a moment, during the interminably long dinner (which hurt her knees, unused as she was to sitting cross-legged on the floor), when she mused that had