Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
Clare is in her trio of furnished rooms north of campus, late afternoon. She stands—as in the second paragraph of a sentimental novel—before the mirror that is screwed to the back of the door between her apartment and the landing of the building’s central stair. She wears a black turtleneck and gray corduroy jeans that used to belong to her mother. She will shortly don an anorak she purchased three falls ago from a Boston Army-Navy.
Her face is big. It’s a soft oval. She has large hands and feet but spindly limbs, a long and narrow rib cage. Her hair is black, shoulder-length, straight. Her eyes are a weird lemon color, like a cat’s. Her small lips form a flat-bottomed heart. Currently her lips are chapped. She grimaces. She is five foot eight.
Clare contains her hair in a rubber band from the carrots.
Clare leaves, walks toward Building 109. The building is at the crest of a hill and the wind picks up at Clare’s approach. Clare enters. Now she is mounting stairs to the second floor; now she is making a left and then a right and is walking down the hall to the office past an open room, its door with diamond of wire-reinforced glass ajar and the beige edge of the seminar table, and she does not turn her head to look inside. She hears a voice, a man, say, “Now you’re here we can make an accommodation and try, at last, to begin. As I was saying—” and Clare turns. She sees a short man. He is with his class, standing. His eyes touch hers. He does a quick probe of her face plus lingering swipe over breasts but does not stop speaking.
Clare recognizes him from the progressive supermarket, the man with wine bottles, a late version of her protagonist Dr. Lehren, who in Clare’s story becomes the butt of an unfathomable and even sordid joke that rises in the mind of the young antihero, Eloise. And Eloise laughs. And Clare is not sure what this means but is glad to find herself successfully mapping her own previous traversal of time and space and literature.
The man is saying, “I don’t give one donkey fuck what you do while you’re here. I honest to god do not. This is not a contest and I do not give out prizes. And the first of you knuckleheads gets that through his or her skull will be the lucky recipient—”
But Clare does not hear what anyone may expect to receive from the man because she has come to the office and the noise of another sort of commerce blots out instruction.