As he read at the tippy, ill-lit lectern, plowing on with these forty-year-old prose poems, which suddenly seemed fatally mannered as well as badly dated, and then launching himself into the well-worn anthology piece, the truck-stop brawl in his road novel, Travel Light, he scanned the audience between sentences, looking for a stray glimmer from the high airy crown of her hair. She had shifted in the darkness, as best he could make out, from her initial perch in the back row, near the glowing amber sign that was, he squintingly perceived, a kind of magic lantern, a metal box cut, in one of the elegancies common in the old movie-palaces, so as to form against its light bulb the silhouette of a pompadoured eighteenth-century woman at her toilet, above the cut-out script spelling Mesdames.

And when the house lights came up, for the apple-corer torture of the question-and-answer period, Clarissa was quite gone, sunk forever beneath the smiling sea of middle-aged—more than middle-aged, elderly—female book-lovers and author groupies. How mischievous of her to show up so magically and then vanish! Had it been a reprimand for his disappearance from her life, to which he had been granted such unstinting entry? They had not met again, even at an office party, for Tompkins had shortly thereafter withdrawn his patronage from Displeasure, and the magazine had limped along a while and then collapsed.