It’s odd the way memory works on the sense of time. When it happened, it all seemed to happen so fast. Though the pain seemed never-ending, details flashed by, hardly noticed. The texture of candlewick, smell of greasepaint, the Laughing Policeman, the numbers on Caxton’s arm. When you think about it afterward, it runs in slow motion. You remember the details. But when you recall it so many years later it has settled, then shifted and altered in your memory and become something else. Not that it didn’t happen, and not that it didn’t happen more or less the way I remember it happened, but I have perhaps forgotten some things and even added some. I couldn’t swear to the Laughing Policeman or the click of the camera. It may have been longer between my arrival in the suite and the rape. But I do remember that two men raped me that day. Surely that is the important thing? One was Danny Caxton, the other is the man I saw in the photograph. I did sing “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” and I do remember the numbers. Maybe Caxton said something else when I was leaving. Maybe more was said, but if it was it has gone now. This is the best I can do. It’s as true as I can make it.

When I first started out, my poetry was free, fanciful, shocking, with outrageous imagery and flights of jazzy rhythmic cadences. I couldn’t get it out quickly enough, tripping over my own feet to find out what the next metaphor would be. I hardly ever revised anything. Now, though, my verse seems crabbed, constipated, metaphysical, slow and hard to squeeze out. The critics like it. They tell me it has a certain stately grace. Is that what’s happened to me? Strange that it should flow so easily in my youth, after what happened, then seem to harden, to crystalize and insist on taking certain rigid forms and structures in my middle age. Stately grace is all very well, but sometimes I long for that free loping rhythm and ringing cadence of my youth, like I long for that carefree innocent young girl that was.

Linda closed the notebook and put down the pen. She could hardly see anymore for tears. Darkness had fallen, and the last of the swallows were swooping and diving over the woods. The bats would be out soon. She rubbed her eyes, filled her wineglass to the brim and lit another cigarette.

16

WELL, PAUL, IT LOOKS LIKE THE END OF THE ROAD for you, doesn’t it?”