But the fifth session: Here Loudermilk returns, and it’s a new Loudermilk, a more refined and sportive Loudermilk, a Loudermilk who arrives at the seminar table with his recorder switched gamely on, who wants to glad-hand and crack jokes, who manifests an appropriately robust sympathy for Hillary when Hillary arrives, Hillary who—judging from the slurring of his monosyllables and reluctance to even attempt sentences—is not merely nursing a hangover or even tipsy, but in the midst of a full-on bender.

So easy, Harry thinks, to get caught up in the bacchic aspect of the creation of poetry, whatever poetry is. It likely takes a strong person not to get carried away, not to rage or swoon or ride off on the proverbial cawing dolphin. Harry, at any rate, can understand people wanting to escape. He gets the thing of wanting to be overtaken by an aspect of yourself that seems larger and stranger than the everyday, with its petty harms and disappointments. If Hillary weren’t so privileged within the bizarre milieu in which he practices his lifestyle, Harry might have it in him to feel sorry for the guy. But that’s difficult given the fact that Hillary is, by Harry’s standards, rich, and his wife looks a lot like an aging model.

Session five does not really take off. In fact, “does not really take off” is a dramatic understatement. A better description might be founders, implodes. Hillary can’t seem to begin, in spite of Loudermilk’s hearty maieutic gestures toward collective bro psyche. The class is obviously supposed to start, and it’s gotten to the point where by all rights Hillary should be inaugurating things, but no one is talking and everyone’s waiting and even Loudermilk, stalwart that he is, newly minted Hillary adherent, can’t seem to find a thing to kid about.

There is a muffled sound, then a couple of gasps, and Harry recognizes that this new repetitive noise he’s picking up, this pattern of breaths and sighs, must be weeping, Don Hillary’s real, live, late-middle-aged weeping.

Harry shuts off the tape. He has to write a poem.

Twenty-Two. A Portrait

Twenty-Two

A Portrait

Strictly speaking, Lizzie Hillary does not read the poetry packets. She does not concern herself much with those she thinks of as her parents’ “other,” optative children. Or, at least, she used not to, before she met Troy Loudermilk. Something is going to happen this year with the poets, Lizzie can tell. It’s standing right there, in the person of this exquisite criminal, who isn’t actually a poet at all, though it’s possible he brought someone who is a real poet with him, just to liven things up, as it were.

Lizzie doubts that her parents are going to crack the code. They’re too excited about having some sort of superstar on their hands. It’s even possible they’ll delay their divorce another few years.