Henry Bech, the aging American author, found that women he had slept with decades ago were showing up at his public lectures. He could sense them in the auditorium even when it was dark. Clarissa Tompkins, for instance, slipped in late at a reading in New Jersey, in an old suburban movie theatre converted to cultural uses, after the house lights were dimmed and he had already launched himself into one of the prose poems from his miscellany When the Saints (1958), evoking an East Village junk shop. Lifting his head to project the phrase “a patina of obscure former usage annealing a contemporary application of very present dust,” savoring the sibilance in that clinching duet of words, he saw her silhouette against the dull glow cast by the old-fashionedly ornate sign to the movie house’s ladies’ room. Clarissa glided out of the island of amber light into the dark rows at the back, but there had been no mistaking the upswept hairdo, taffy-colored in his memories, that enlarged her already sizable head, a head poignantly balanced on her petite, breastless frame. After lovemaking in the Tompkinses’ splendid Fifth Avenue apartment, with its view of the Reservoir, they would have a naked picnic on the deep-napped Oriental at the center of the living room, a little further burst of taffy color innocently flared as she sat cross-legged, devouring her half of a turkey sandwich that her cook had made before leaving for the afternoon. Amidst the opulence of her apartment Clarissa was thrifty. One sandwich was cut in two, one teabag served two cups. Her face beneath all that bouffant hair looked tiny, and as she scrunched it into her half-sandwich it almost disappeared—the small straight nose, the myopic green eyes usually straining to see but now swimming out of focus in her orgasm’s aftermath. At each bite, her plump upper lip would leave a cerise blur at the rim of white bread. Her lipstick was messy and indelible; Bech usually needed a full cleanup, not with just a washrag but with paper towels dabbed in vodka, before he dared confront the elevator, the doorman, the avenue.

What had led her to show up in New Jersey, at this community college wedged in the suburban wastes north of Newark? How had she known of his reading? He lost his place, wondering, and a silence stretched above the faces listening in the shadows before he found his spot on the page and went on: “One warily inspects, bending forward, a mostly wooden apple-corer, a piece of carved intricacy suggesting a torturer’s device out of Borges or Kafka, that has somehow, through a chain of canny and, one hopes, profitable transactions made its way from an underheated Vermont attic to this stuffy, jumbled trading post in southerly Gotham.” He disliked the sentence, more wordy than he had ever noticed before.