At the West Side “Y”—so much cozier a venue than the more heavily publicized East Side forum at 92nd Street—Bech sought for a friendly face in the audience upon which to pin his reading. He was trying, for far from the first time, to pump life into that scene from his novel Think Big wherein Olive, having discovered herself at last to be a lesbian, confesses her previous amours while lying in the arms of Tad Greenbaum’s discarded mistress, Thelma, in the orange sunset light that enters the room horizontally, like bars of music, from beyond the Palisades. This passage, with its shuffling back and forth between two love-drugged female voices, was a precarious one to animate aloud, and needed the encouragement of a willing smile from some female auditor. Tonight the smile, so radiant—luscious, even, in its wide white face—did not have to be sought out; rather, it seemed to have sought him out. As he read aloud, murmuring into the rustling, sometimes woofing microphone, he was nagged by the notion that he had known this encouraging face before. The smile, outlined in a lipstick so dark it appeared black in the auditorium half-light, had a sweet, forgiving tuck on one side that implied former acquaintance, an insight into him that bypassed his theatrical attempt to breathe life into the drowsy confidences of two imaginary daughters of Bilitis. The only thing real in what he was reading was the room itself, an exact transcription of the Riverside Drive apartment he had lived in for years, before his ill-fated marriage to Bea Latchett, Norma Latchett’s relatively sweet-tempered sister.

Wait, he thought even as he kept his voice working. There was a cranny, a niche in the era of his life dominated by the Latchett sisters where this disembodied smile fit. Burgundy-lipsticked mouth, long-lashed purple-irised eyes, straight black hair falling to glossy wide shoulders, a vivid black arrowhead centered between white, well-cushioned pelvic crests. A woman encountered at widely scattered intervals, a woman a touch too fleshy and dogmatic for him, but whose amazing waxen pallor, lighting up rooms otherwise dim, drew him back, now and again, as he glancingly, skittishly moved through downtown literary circles in those slovenly Sixties. Gretchen. Gretchen Folz, the would-be poet. Her pathetic cubbyhole on Bleecker Street, its narrow bed snug against a parsley-green wall, access to its other side limited by tilting stacks of New Directions and Grove Press paperbacks. The bed had an Amish bedspread whose pattern of triangular patches reminded him of stars of David, and an iron head whose vertical pipes dug grooves into his back when Gretchen, in the woman-couchant position, straddled him and teased his mouth with her livid nipples.