Lousiana Hotshot

privilege of this great artistic experience. Aside from that, though, to say it was simple would be bragging on it.
Ah, no,
Eddie thought.
That’s not fair.
It was simple, but it had flair. The walls were tastefully dotted with masks, most of them grotesque, some of them African, presumably; some Indonesian; some Mexican, certainly. Not expensive, but, boy, did they make a statement. Woven Guatemalan belts hung from the ceiling like so many colorful snakes— or like confetti, Eddie thought.
    Grudgingly, he had to admit there was something festive about it.
    The crowd was mixed— salt and pepper, young and old, hip and conventional.
Sure,
Eddie thought.
Poets and their parents. You don’t have to be a detective to get the hang of that one.
    He was surprised when the first poet to read was older than he was, a distinguished black man, professor type, in a handsome dark suit.
    Several poets were evidently about to perform, singing for their supper, which was being served at a large raucous table more or less in the middle of the restaurant. The applicant was there, looking totally different from the businesslike young woman who’d called on him that morning. She wore a cobalt blue, silky flowing thing, like the one in the picture on her website, and she had something on her head that looked like two silk scarves somehow woven and twisted together and tied across her forehead, Indian-fashion. He hadn’t thought about her appearance that morning, other than to register that she had a lot of hair, but now he noted that he was looking at a very striking woman.
How did women do that?
he thought.
Turn from mice to birds of paradise, depending on the time of day?
    He looked at his wife and daughter. Angie had changed into black jeans and a black T-shirt, and Audrey was wearing a soft green pantsuit. Celadon, she called it. Any man in the room would look at either of them; probably had by now. Italian women didn’t do the metamorphosis thing, he thought— didn’t need to.
    The black man was going on and on about something historical. He was boring the pants off Eddie. Poetry! Jesus Christ, what he did to please his women. He was going to bust a gut if the guy didn’t shut up soon.
    He had by now managed to secure a scotch and water, and he clutched it like a baby clutches a bottle, figuring there was one tried-and-true way to stave off the worst boredom in the world. He ought to know— he’d done it often enough before. The poem was about slavery, and it quickly went from boring to angry— or at least the poet was angry. Eddie wasn’t; he was merely uncomfortable at the man’s rising voice. He sipped away at the scotch, vaguely noticing that Audrey was giving him a disapproving look. (She herself was slurping on a white wine, but in her book that wasn’t the point— she liked being boss of herself
and
Eddie.)
    The poet finished, to a faint flutter of applause— evidently the rest of the audience was as difficult as Eddie. And after him came a white woman, housewife type, who read obscene limericks. That he hadn’t expected, and he was oddly disappointed. If he was going to have an intellectual experience, then let it be shaggy-haired, dammit, even if it bored him to the toenails.
    After the white woman came a black woman who’d had a job where people treated her badly. White people, of course. Too bad, but was it poetry? He was in critic mode by now, and also on his second drink. He was kind of enjoying hating it all so much.
    Three more poets came after the black woman, but when Eddie tried later to remember them, he found they all ran together, but it couldn’t have been the scotch, because what he heard after that he remembered vividly.
    He was just ordering a third drink when the emcee said, “And now for our star attraction— someone who got her start at Reggie and Chaz, one of our very first readers, a young lady who’s starting to make her mark in the poetry world— the Baroness de Pontalba!” The guy sounded like some asshole on TV.
    Eddie settled down in his chair, getting comfortable and feeling grumpy, as the applicant flowed forward.
The deep blue sea herself,
he thought, and decided he had an aptitude for this crap himself— probably a lot more than the rest of these bozos.
    He was paying for his drink while she introduced her first poem, but the gist of it seemed to be that some other poet that she didn’t even seem to mind stealing from had written some idiot thing about a cat having