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Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

It is apparent, to Harry at least, that he has interrupted Marta while she was attempting to listen, unnoticed, to a conversation transpiring in her kitchen. She has abruptly made her face delightful and fascinated in Harry’s general direction. Now she blinks at him as if he is a unicorn come to offer fealty. Her face offers a mixture of mild awe and gentle enthusiasm. She is quick to say, “There you are.”

Harry nods.

The forced expression on Marta Hillary’s face begins to fade. It is replaced by a wistful smile. “We were just about to ask where you were,” she is saying, as if this makes any sense.

The doorbell rings.

“I hear you study psychology.”

Harry nods again.

Marta is gazing intently at Harry. “It’s so interesting.”

Harry thinks he can feel a weird, persistent pressure at the rear of his skull, as if a thin, sharp instrument were slowly, dreamily poking around in the back of his brain.

“How interesting,” Marta Hillary repeats.

The doorbell reiterates its call.

Now Marta Hillary does as her dual role as wife and professional intellectual ordains, which is to say she floats away.

More and more people begin to enter the house. Harry can hear them and he moves to where they are because this is what is appropriate, and when Harry next notices where he is, he is beside the refrigerator nursing a beer. He nurses several beers. It isn’t a dinner so much as it is a long party, an eventually very drunken party. Harry doesn’t talk to anyone and remains in the kitchen. Occasionally, as the night scrolls by, he catches the eye of Lizzie Hillary, who always somehow seems to be looking right at him.

Twenty-Nine. Parity

Twenty-Nine

Parity

Clare has been to the party. She has done what she believes is expected. Appear. She sat in the living room. Here are her peers: The novelists look like money and even the poets seem canny, mathematical. Or maybe no one looks like money, because no one looks at ease. Almost everyone is white. No one, as far as Clare knows, is not straight. Clare does not know much. She pushed herself to attend. She read the listserv invite with a moan. It is precisely the sort of thing she does not care to do but the doing of which convinces her of her sanity. Anyway, all this makes sense, fossil fuels, gynecology, a giant bird on a plate.