While he reads, she watches: she has done the same for nearly seven years. One leg crossed, horizontal, broad shoulders slouching over book or page, his features gone boyish and slack, utterly receptive to the written word. A notebook and pen balanced on the arm of his chair. The occasional sigh and settling, the regular sough of fingertip down the edge of paper, the scratch of his pen when he comes across something worth recording. On his back—floating down the duck-littered Cam, relishing a sofa of worn grandeur in the library at Yaddo, in the damp grass of Hampstead Heath, in bed, legs crossed at the ankles, a pillow or a rolled-up sweater propping his book on his chest as Beethoven sonatas play over and over on a phonograph, or birds call, or rain beats down. A sleeping newborn replacing the pillow on his chest. In September, in Ireland: Sylvia threadbare with the tension between them but hoping, for a few days anyway, that words could bridge the gap. The two of them stooping like giants over the poem Yeats carved into the wall of the winding stair at Thoor Ballylee, crows erupting out of the roofless apartment above, Ted’s finger tracing the rough letters engraved into Norman stone:

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

Words: his absorption, his sheer amaze in the pliancy of language. At its best—Shakespeare, Eliot, but also boys’ adventure comics, or a children’s book on foxes, on otters—she could almost see the revolutions of his mind, the words proceeding off the page in a gilded stream, as in some quattrocento Annunciation, toward his beatific face. She has watched time and again, for nearly seven years, for his reaction to her words, the indescribable contraction of the fine muscles in his hands, around his eyes, the acute suggestions forming, his opinions that she had trusted above all others, his approval her sustenance, his encouragement her guide, the leonine poise she knew so innately when he was about to rise from his seat and call her name.

No longer. She observes him coldly, his body hanging heavily on its frame as he reads in the chair by the window. The poems before him now are evidentiary, the tally of his crimes. She is girded for doubleness, anger and justifications, the same old friable rationalizing. Her heart a mortar in her chest, she is daring him to stop the unstoppable, to plead with her to call Cleverdon or The Observer or The New Yorker, to concoct an excuse to shut her up.