The Last Time They Met Read Free Page B

That class.
    — In character, I think. The rest was fraud.
    — The rest?
    — The pretending to be fast.
    Fast.
She hadn’t heard the word used that way in decades.
    — You’re more in character now,
he said.
    — How could you possibly know?
she asked, challenging him.
    He heard the bite in her voice.
Your body and your gestures give you the appearance of having grown into your character, what I perceive to be your character.
    — It’s only middle age,
she said, at once devaluing both of them.
    — Lovely on you.
    She turned away from the compliment. The man beside Thomas would not go away. Behind him there were others who wanted introductions to the reclusive poet. She excused herself and moved through all the admirers and the sycophants, who were, of course, not interested in her. This was nothing, she told herself again as she reached the door. Years had passed, and all of life was different now.

    S he descended in the elevator, which seemed to take an age to reach her floor. She shut the door to her room, her temporary refuge. The festival packet lay under her coat, tossed there as one might have abandoned a newspaper, already read. She sat on the bed and scanned the list of festival participants, and there it was, his name, the print suddenly bolder than the typeface of the other names. In the flap opposite, tucked behind a white plastic badge with her name on it, was a newspaper clipping announcing the festival. The photograph with which the editors had illustrated the piece was of Thomas, a decade younger. He had his face turned to the side, not showing the scar, evasive. Yet, even so, there was something cocky in his expression — a different Thomas than she’d once known, a different Thomas than she’d seen just moments ago.
    She stood up from the bed, replacing mild panic with momentum. Their meeting after so many years seemed a large occurrence, though she knew that all the important events of her life had already happened. She considered the possibility of simply remaining in her hotel room and not attending the dinner. Surely, she had no serious obligation to the festival beyond that of appearing at the appropriate time for her reading, something she could do by taxi. Susan Sefton might worry, but Linda could leave a message at the restaurant: she wasn’t feeling well; she needed to rest after the long flight. All of which seemed suddenly true: she
wasn’t
feeling well; she
did
need to rest. Though it was the shock of seeing Thomas after all these years that was making her slightly ill. That and an attendant guilt, a nearly intolerable guilt now that she had known order in her life, responsibility, had imagined from the other side how inexcusable her actions had been. Years ago, the guilt had been masked by a shamefully insupportable pain — and by lust and love. Love might have made her generous or selfless, but she had not been either.
    She walked into the bathroom and leaned into the mirror. Her eyeliner had smudged into a small, humiliating circle below her left eye. It was one thing to resort to artifice, she thought, quite another to be bad at it. Her hair had given up its texture in the humidity and looked insubstantial. She bent and tousled it with her fingers, but when she righted herself, it fell into its former limp shape. The light in the bathroom was unflattering. She refused to catalogue the damage.
    Had she become a poet because of Thomas? It was a valid, if impertinent, question. Or had they been drawn together because of a common way of seeing? Thomas’s poems were short and blunt, riddled with brilliant juxtapositions, so that one felt, upon finishing a collection, buffeted about. As though one had taken a road with many twists and turns; as though a passenger had jerked the wheel of a car, risking injury. Whereas her work was slow and dreamlike, more elegiac, nearly another form entirely.
    She wandered into the bedroom, a woman who had momentarily forgotten where she was, and saw