Tonight, too, after he had doggedly, absent-mindedly completed his reading, and taken half-hearted swings at a few of the puffball questions the audience tossed up, Gretchen met him with no shadow of resentment for his fitful wooing and unapologetic fading-away, but instead with a matured form of her old wistful glee, her girlish hope of fulfillment at his hands. Her kiss of greeting claimed him with a new authority; her bohemian diffidence was gone. “Henry, I’d like you to meet my husband,” she said.

He was a substantial red-faced fellow, sixty or so, dignified but not unfriendly, wearing a pinstriped suit that was more accustomed to board meetings than prose readings. “Good stuff,” he said gamely, guessing why he had been brought here. To be shown off.

“Henry, how you still do go on,” Gretchen said. “A lesbian is the last thing you want to be. You’d have to give up your balls.”

“I don’t know. I’m still evolving,” he said, regretting that her peck to one side of his mouth had been so brief, so dry. She looked fulfilled. Her wide-hipped weight, next to the bulk of her spouse, was no problem, and she had had her hair cut raggedly short and tinged with a metallic cinnabar red, giving her a rather ravishing futuristic look.

“What ever happened to your poems?” he asked. He never knew quite what to say to these women who showed up.

“Privately printed,” she answered. The sharp dark corners of her mouth tucked into her creamy cheeks with the only hint of revenge that her forgiving nature would allow itself. “Beautifully printed. Bob loves them.”

“Bob,” Bech said, prolonging the vowel as if to taste her once again, “is obviously a discerning critic. He likes both our stuff. Stuffs.”

You don’t expect much to happen in Indianapolis, once you’ve seen the Hoosier Dome and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Their pairing reminded Anglophilic Bech of the closer coupling, in London, of the Royal Albert Hall—round and capacious and rosy—and the phallic spike of the Albert Memorial across Kensington Road. Perhaps the world can be deconstructed into these two basic shapes, everywhere seeking the other. Just before his reading at the Marion County Public Library, while he was standing idle and momentarily unchaperoned on one side of the steps to the stage, a crisp, short, pleasant-looking woman in a magenta tweed suit came up to him starry-eyed.

He had encountered starry eyes before, in the visages of women who had read too much into one of his novels, casting themselves as his sketchy script’s heroine. This woman’s approach, however, was not that of a fan. “Henry Bech,” she said, in the fearless flat accent of the great American inland. “I am Alice Oglethorpe. You may not remember, but we once traveled from New York to Los Angeles on the same train.”