there seems to be an obstruction in both fallopian tubes that will need corrective surgery, and she says even that might not work.” “I’m very sorry, really,” he said. “We also want to have a kid right away, and because of my age I can empathize with her husband. Next time you speak to her, please give her my best.” Why did he get so upset at the restaurant? He must have seemed like such an immature jerk to her. There was some affection between them — he liked her and doesn’t know why she denied even that; maybe to make the break easier for them both — but never any love. He knew, as she said, it was only a relationship for the time being, so why the tears? It might have had something to do with being rejected repeatedly in so short a time and that this was happening when he was past forty. First Diana, though he knew that was coming. Then at Yaddo in August he fell for a married woman about five years younger than he. A beautiful intellectual and respected poet and very lovely person and she must have, he remembers telling another writer, the best body of any woman poet around. “It’s good, it’s very good,” this older poet said, “and she’s tall — must be five-ten in flats — and she carries her height well. But her body, splendid as it is, isn’t the supreme. I know we’re talking like two old lecherous idiots, although you started it so I’m not going to take any of the blame, but you’ll have to find out for yourself whose body that is.” They played Ping-Pong a lot in the colony’s pool house, she usually barefoot and in a two-piece swimsuit and beating him with a terrific serve. She also, in the outdoor pool, tried teaching him how to swim more efficiently and with less splashing by cupping his hands and not raising his arms so high out of the water and taking a deep breath and dunking his head every other stroke. And she let him quickly kiss her a few times at a bar she drove them to and later in her car and then one long one that same night at her bedroom door, and he thought he was in, but she wouldn’t sleep with him or even let him rub her rear end or touch her breast. “What’s the point?” she said. “You’re nice, interesting, etcetera, but nothing special to me. If I’m going to risk my marriage and earn the enmity and disrespect of my two boys by getting involved in an adulterous affair, I’d want it to be profound and inescapable and hair-raising and foredoomed. As for a single night? I don’t do those things. So no more smooching; not even hand-holding. Let’s just be friends. Deal?” They stayed friends after they left Yaddo, exchanged letters and their books for a while, had lunch twice when she came to New York to give or attend a poetry reading and take in some theater, all while he was seeing and then going to be married to Gwen. “An infatuation at first,” he explained to Gwen, “but an untroubled harmless one. I’ve had a number of those, but never again. To think I could have been instrumental in busting up her marriage. What a selfish scumbag I was. To me, now, doing that is sacrilegious. Boy, have I changed since I met you. I love it.” Then she got very sick — Robin; no, Roberta. She didn’t say with what but did tell him in a brief letter that she was almost too weak to write any poetry now but very short poems and haikus. “From now on I’ll have to keep my correspondence down to only my closest dearest friends.” He called her a few weeks later to ask how she was doing and she said “Awful, dreadful, frightened, so no more phone calls either. Takes too much out of me and it’s a struggle just to hold the receiver. If I come out of this, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, my friend, this is the end.” For a couple of years he wondered what became of her: if she survived, if she died. He didn’t think it right just to call someone who might know her and ask. Then he had an idea and wrote the new director of Yaddo if she knew what had happened to Roberta. An assistant wrote back saying “The director told me to tell you that as far as she knew Ms. Snow was happy and healthy and busy writing poetry. She was when she was a colonist here last year.” He just realized he could ask one of the kids to go online to see if they can find something about her, but some other time. The third, or fourth relationship, and it couldn’t even be called that it went by so fast, was with a woman about four years older than Karyn. Nadine, sometime in October, last woman he slept with or even went out with before he met Gwen. Doesn’t remember much about it and has no memory of her body other than that when she slipped off her shirt or he took it off for her she had no bra on and had big breasts, which surprised him because when she had her shirt on it seemed she had almost no breasts at all. Next morning he even wondered if he had come. She said he did, but she might have said that so he wouldn’t try to make love again to come at least once in her—“Not spectacularly, and mine hardly reached seismic levels either, but I’m not complaining since you were so inebriated I was grateful you didn’t throw up on me.” “Oh, I couldn’t have been that bad,” and she said “Worse. Feel your side of the bed. Maybe it’s dry now, but after we were done you lost control of your bladder for a few seconds and wet the sheet. You don’t remember grabbing yourself and slipping on the floor? Also from the pee; I had to clean it up. Because this is only a single bed I didn’t feel too comfortable all night sleeping so close to you.” He was a writer in residence for a week at an Ohio university’s creative writing department. He read the fiction of graduate students and upper-level undergraduate writing majors and in a private office had twenty-minute individual conferences with them about their work. There was a huge coffee urn and a hot water dispenser in the office and enough paper cups and tea bags and accessories to serve all the students each day, plus a large tray of doughnuts and sweet rolls. She was a first-year graduate student and by far the best writer he read. Cute, too, a word Gwen hated when he used it to describe an older person’s looks. Frizzy red hair, wire-rimmed granny glasses, bright blue eyes she kept squinting and straining to see with, little pointy ears, freckles and snub nose. So her face he remembers a lot, and though her torso was long, he now thinks she had short thick muscular legs, but he could be imagining that. He was immediately taken with her when he escorted one student out of the room and said “Nadine Hanscom?”—he had a list of conferees for each afternoon and the times they were supposed to see him — and she got off the floor, where she’d been sitting, put her book into her knapsack, adjusted her glasses, which had fallen down her nose when she stood up, and came into the room. “Mind if I shut the door?” he said. “I’ve something to tell you I don’t want the others to hear.” She said “Shut it but don’t lock it, please,” and he said “Never thought to.” She sat across the desk from him. He offered her the beverages and pastries. She said she only drinks uncaffeinated herbal tea and eats nothing with sugar, but she will take a cup of hot water with a lemon wedge in it, and helped herself. When she was settled he said “You say in your cover letter that these three stories are new and haven’t been workshopped or seen by a teacher,” and she said “You’re the first to read them.” “Then tell me, and I’m going to be very hard on you now, how in God’s name did you come to write so well? You’re a budding literary genius, the next who-knows-what. I hope they gave you a full tuition waiver, sizable stipend and a teaching assistantship if not your own undergraduate fiction-writing class, because you could have got in at the top of any graduate writing program in the country. That’s my opinion, at least, not that I ever taught in any; I’m here strictly because of my three books and lots of published stories. But you, if you have a book-length work of fiction or are deep into one, could very likely have a book contract by the time you graduate. Wouldn’t that make your department happy. You’d be a walking ad for it. Anyway, if I were your teacher I’d take a hands-off policy to your work. I’d say ‘Don’t even come to class if you don’t want to. Just write, let me see it solely for the pleasure of reading it but not to steer it here and there or to critique it line by line.’ From what you’ve shown me you’re miles ahead of your peers, miles — well on your way,” and he gave her back her stories. “I hope, with what I said, I haven’t offended you or made you feel bad in any way,” and she started to cry. “Good,” he said, “I finally got a smile out of you. What’s with you — why so serious? Jesus, I can’t be telling you anything new, can I? Because you must get praise like this all the time.” She said “Now and then my teachers and fellow grad students have said kind things about my work, but nothing like this; though more often they’ve ripped it apart.” “The students I can understand — they’re competitive and you’re winning, making them question, when they come upon a natural, what the hell they’re in it for. As for your teachers, they’re either jealous of your talent — I kid you not — or have some misguided or misguiding notion about teaching writing. Or maybe their intentions are good and they’re holding back in their praise because they don’t want to take that drive to succeed out of you — you know, because you’re already partly there — so early in your career. But to me it’s ridiculous they wouldn’t just say how good you are. You don’t seem the type to let it affect you adversely. Have I gone overboard, based on reading only three of your stories? No. Don’t tell them I said this — I might want to come back here — but just use them for helping you get a first-rate literary agent and book and magazine editors interested in your work and what magazines to send to, which should be the highest-paying serious ones first, and things like that. When a young writer’s starting out, he has to be a bit selfish and aggressive. Wrong advice? Maybe. But if they can’t or won’t help you, get my address from your chairman — tell him I said it was okay — and write me and I’ll give you some leads. I’d give you the name of my agent if I were able to get one.” She said she was taken aback — actually used those words: “Really, Mr. Samuels, or should I call you ‘Professor’?” and he said “Call me by my name, ‘Martin,’” and she said “I couldn’t do that so fast. Wasn’t raised that way. But honestly, Mr. S. — that’ll be my compromise for now — I’m taken aback by what you’ve said. I’ve never been this complimented on anything I’ve done, and as a result I’m thrilled…overwhelmed…I’m obviously at a loss for words — deeply appreciative at what a professional writer I respect said about my work.” “You deserved it, every word of it, every word. So, it seems I’ve run out of things to say. Although I could go on in detail as to what I liked about your stories so much, which would prove to you I wasn’t making all that stuff up to get out of reading them,” and she said “That’s all right; I couldn’t take anymore. It’d stop me writing for a week.” “We still have ten minutes left. Like a refill on your hot water and lemon? We could also cut the conference short. But that might make your friends in the hall suspicious I’ve nothing much to say in these conferences and that I’m getting paid for doing very little — or we could talk about other things. Let’s do that.” He asked her about her family, what her parents do, where she grew up, what college she went to, degree she got, how long she’s been writing—“I doubt it can be more than twenty-five years, which is what I guess as your age”—she said he was right — and what writers she likes, “and don’t say me.” “The chairman had a published story of yours put in all the grad students’ boxes. ‘Violet,’ from