By this time Juliana had begun taking night school courses at a branch of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. By day she worked as a paralegal. She was often on the phone, she was often sifting through records. She was a researcher, she accumulated data. She’d acquired computer skills beyond those of her (male) superiors, whom she had to instruct even as they disdained such skills. She understood that until she had a law degree and passed the state bar exam, she would not be taken seriously by any of these individuals; she would not be eligible for any job she might believe worthwhile.

In telling Ned Spires a selective account of her day-life, she felt a small thrill of pride. That life, a life she wore casually, as one might slip on a stylish jacket, was in fact a life of work, effort. Trying to reverse unjust convictions. Investigating corrupt police officers, perjured testimonies. What was required was the most stubborn idealism. You had to be made of something like the roughest rubber. Yet the life seemed often, to Juliana, to belong to another person.

Oh, why did she torment herself—thinking. In a man’s arms not needing to think. That is the point of in a man’s arms.

That is the point of the Wild Goose. Voluptuous night, neon.

A fact: after drinking, lovemaking is possible. Your brain is not loose-rushing like a runaway cog. Your brain is numbed, unresisting. Your brain is childlike. How simple and without complication is your life at such times.

Ned was kind to her. Vowed he would not lie.

Saying—Well, look: she was young.

“And I am worn.”

Ned Spires was a man set apart. Even before Juliana learned that he was a poet, an acclaimed poet, with several books published by a distinguished publisher. Professor of Romance languages at the Jesuit university.

Eagerly Juliana read the poetry of Ned Spires. Seeking some tracery of herself in the man’s life. Some prophecy.

Not her so much as a premonition of her. The poet’s yearning for the not-yet-known, the poet’s guilt over betrayal.

Of course, Ned Spires was married. Twice married. Almost twenty years married, in all. Near-grown children from the first marriage, young children from the second. Are your children the light of your life?—Juliana had not meant to sound mocking, jealous.

If she loved a man too much, toads leapt from her mouth. Vodka released them.

In fact yes. “Light of the life”—the child bearing life into the next generation. In their eyes, the original light, which some of us have lost.

With a strange fatality the poet spoke. A luminosity in his blemished face. Juliana had to look away.

Well! She’d been rebuked. No one had spoken to her in quite this way, a knife to the heart.