Lexicon

someone who might tell her the country needed cleaning up. More solid than normal. He wasn’t smiling but didn’t seem angry, either. He was just looking at her.
    “Hi,” she said.
    He took a white cloth and began to clean the end of his club. This took a while and his eyes didn’t move from her, as far as she could tell.
    She shifted from one foot to the other. “Charlotte brought me here but—”
    “
Vartix velkor mannik wissick
. Be still.”
    Her mouth snapped closed. It happened before she realized what she was doing. The surprise was that it felt like her decision. She really, genuinely wanted to be still. It was the words, Yeats, compromising her, she knew, but it didn’t feel like that at all. Her brain was spinning with rationalizations, reasons why she should definitely be still right now, why that was a really good move, and it was talking in her voice. She hadn’t known compromise was like this.
    Yeats took a golf ball from a basket and dropped it to the green mat. He positioned himself, raised the club. He struck the ball and watched it sail into the distance. When it disappeared, he returned to the basket and did it again. He wasn’t watching where those balls landed, she noticed. It wasn’t like he was taking some kind of perverse joy in turning golf balls into bullets. It was more like he didn’t care. She had misjudged this whole situation. She had thought it was going to be about her. That hourglass in the lobby, she realized, that didn’t tilt. It was someone’s job to come by twice a day and replace the fish.
    Yeats continued to hit balls and she fought to move but couldn’t. She felt violated and angry but also ashamed that she couldn’t control her own body. It was humiliating. It was making her reevaluate her relationship with herself.
Breathe fast
, she told herself, because that would be like being still but not exactly. She had to find a place to drive in a wedge and work from there.
Breathe.
    Yeats’s head turned to her. What he was thinking, she had no idea. But she had the feeling that the golfing part was over. He returned his club to the bag and lowered himself into a wrought-iron chair and began to untie his shoelaces. He did this with great care, as if his shoes contained secrets. When this was done, he entered a black glossy pair. Business shoes. Shoes for business. He laced them firmly, and stood, and headed toward her.
    She breathed. She could force a tiny amount of air between her teeth, making a
hsss
she could barely hear. That was it.
    Yeats removed his sunglasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket. His eyes were gray and characterless as stone. There was a flatness to his face. She’d have suspected a face-lift if it wasn’t crazy for a poet to reveal a mental weakness for vanity. Maybe he’d wanted to erase his expressions. Or maybe he was just like this. If you never smiled or laughed or frowned, she could believe that this was the kind of face you wound up with, smooth and empty as an undisturbed pond.
    He unbuttoned his cuffs and began to roll up his shirtsleeves. He was close enough to scratch or bite or kick in the nuts but she couldn’t do any of that, of course.
He is going to kill you!
she shrieked at herself, but it made no difference. Her brain had become very fatalistic. It knew she was responsible for Jeremy and it was hard to argue she didn’t deserve everything she got.
    Yeats folded his hands and closed his eyes. For long seconds he did not move. She thought,
Is he praying?
Because that was what it looked like. He couldn’t be, because the idea of a religious poet was even more ridiculous than a vain one. Belief in God was a mental weakness, revealing a need for a sense of belonging and higher purpose: desires poets were supposed to master. They were potential avenues of attack. They advertised your segment. She had been taught this. But Yeats was giving every indication of communing with a higher power. Her heart thumped painfully. There was nothing about this situation she understood.
    “Sss,” she said.
    His eyes opened. “Goodness,” he said. She thought he was mocking her, but maybe not. His eyes searched hers. She felt surveyed, as if by engineers: dispassionately, precisely, with instruments. “I was told your discipline was poor,” he said. “But this . . .”
    Moments passed. She could see his nostrils flaring in and out. She said, “Sss.”
    “You are, supposedly, gifted. You possess an aptitude for attack,