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By Root 627 0

the bedroom, a woman who had momentarily forgotten where she was, and saw the telephone, lifeline to her children. She read the instructions for making a long-distance call. There would be outrageous surcharges, but she couldn’t care about that now. She sat at the edge of the bed and dialed Maria’s number and was disappointed when Maria was not at the other end. Linda opened her mouth to leave a message — people who called and did not leave messages annoyed her — but though she dearly wanted to say something to her daughter and, more important, wanted to hear her daughter’s voice, she could not find the words. A man you’ve never heard me speak about is scratching at the surface. Illogically, or perhaps not, Linda thought of ovum and sperm and of a single cell poking through a delicate membrane. She replaced the receiver, feeling unusually mute and frustrated. She lay back and closed her eyes.

She pictured her daughter and her son, one sturdy, the other not, and, oddly, it was the boy who was the more fragile. When she thought of Maria, she thought of vivid coloring and clarity (Maria, like her father, spoke her mind and seldom thought the consequences would be disastrous), whereas when she thought of Marcus, she thought of color leached, once there, now gone, though he was only twenty-two. He, poor boy, had inherited Linda’s pale, Irish looks, while Vincent’s more robust Italian blood had given Maria her sable eyebrows and the blue-black hair that turned heads. And though Vincent had sometimes had shadows on his face, particularly under his eyes (and had those shadows been early signs of disease they might have read if only they had known?), Maria’s skin was pink and smooth, now that the mercifully brief ravages of adolescence had subsided. Linda wondered again, as she had often wondered, if it was her own response to her children’s coloring that had determined their personalities; if she had not, in fact, mirrored her children back to them, announcing that Maria would always be direct, while something subterranean would form beneath Marcus’s skin. (How Marcus all these years must have thought himself misnamed — Marcus Bertollini confounding everyone’s expectations of him, he who looked so much more a Phillip or an Edward.) She did not regard these thoughts about her children as disloyal; she loved them in equal measure. They had never competed, having learned at an early age that no competition could ever be won.

The numerals on the clock brightened as the room darkened. Poets and novelists would be convening now in front of the hotel, like schoolchildren embarking on a field trip. I will go down, she decided suddenly. I will not be afraid of this.

* * *

At the horizon, the clouds had parted, the pink light a promise of a better day tomorrow. Linda registered everything: the way a woman, stepping up to the bus, could not put her weight on her right knee and had to grasp the railing; the pretentiously scuffed leather portfolio of a poet with fashionable black-framed glasses; the way they all stood in raincoats, nudging and nudged slightly forward, hands in pockets, until they’d formed a thickened cluster. But she willed her antennae not to locate Thomas, who must have been behind her or absent altogether. So that when she was seated at the back of the bus and watched him board, she felt both surprise and embarrassment, the embarrassment for his sudden emasculation, his having to ride a bus as schoolchildren did. He was, in his trench coat, too bulky for his seat, his arms tucked in front of him, his shoulders bulging above his torso. Robert Seizek, more drunk than she had seen any man in years — his face looking as though it would spout water if pinched — needed to be helped up the steps. The authors who had to read that night seemed preoccupied, excessively self-conscious about appearing relaxed.

They drove through graying streets, deserted at this hour, more businesslike than charming. Linda tried not to look at Thomas, which was difficult to do. He seemed disheveled, so unlike Vincent, who’d always appeared impeccable,