What I Loved

love-in. The kids work themselves up into a frenzy of good feeling. I've heard there are drugs, but I've never noticed any signs that Mark is high when he gets home. They don't allow alcohol." Violet sighed and rubbed her neck with her hand. "He's fifteen. All that energy has to go somewhere." She sighed again. "Still, I worry. I feel that Lucille ..."
    "Lucille?" I said to her.
    "It's not important," she said. "I'm probably just paranoid."
    In November, I noticed an ad in the Voice for a reading Lucille was giving only six blocks away, on Spring Street. I hadn't spoken to her since Matthew's funeral, and seeing her name in print prompted an urge to hear her read. Mark had become a part-time resident of my apartment and my intimacy with him drew me toward Lucille, but I also think that my decision to go was fueled by Violet's unfinished remark and Bill's earlier comment about Lucille's stinginess. It wasn't like him to be uncharitable, and I suppose I wanted to judge for myself.
    The site of Lucille's reading was a woody bar with poor lighting. As soon as I walked through the door, I looked through the gloom and saw Lucille standing near the far wall with a sheaf of papers in her hand. Her hair was tied back and her pale face was lit by a small overhead lamp that deepened the shadows under her eyes. From that distance, I thought she looked lovely—waiflike and solitary. I walked toward her. She lifted her face to mine, and after a moment she smiled stiffly without opening her mouth. When she spoke, however, her voice was even and reassuring. "Leo, this is a surprise."
    "I wanted to hear you read," I said.
    "Thank you."
    We were both silent.
    Lucille looked uncomfortable. The "thank you" hung between us with an air of finality.
    "That was the wrong response, wasn't it?" she said, and shook her head. "I'm not supposed to say 'Thank you.' I should have said 'It was nice of you to come' or 'Thank you for coming.' If you had spoken to me after the reading and said, 'I like your poems,' then I could have said a flat 'thank you,' and we would not be standing here wondering what had just happened."
    "The land mines of social intercourse," I said. The word intercourse made me pause for a second. A bad choice, I thought.
    She ignored the comment and looked down at her papers. Her hands were trembling. "Readings are hard for me," she said. "I'm going to prepare for a few minutes." Lucille walked away, sat down on a chair, and began to read to herself. Her lips moved and her hands continued to shake.
    About thirty people came to listen to her. We sat at tables, and a number of the guests drank beer and smoked while she read. In a poem called "Kitchen," Lucille named objects, one after the other. As the list grew, it began to form a crowded verbal still life, and I closed my eyes from time to time to listen to every beat of the syllables as she read. In another poem, she dissected a sentence uttered by a nameless friend: "You don't really mean that." It was a witty, logical, and convoluted analysis of the intimidation inherent in such a statement. I think I smiled through every line of the poem. As she read on, I began to understand that the tone of the work never varied. Scrupulous, concise, and invested with the comedy inherent in distance, the poems allowed no object, person, or insight to take precedence over any other. The field of the poet's experience was democratized to a degree that leveled it to one enormous field of closely observed particulars—both physical and mental. I was amazed that I had never noticed this before. I remembered sitting beside her, my eyes on the words she had written, and I remembered her voice as she explained the reasoning behind a decision in her clean economical sentences, and I felt nostalgic for the lost camaraderie between us.
    I bought her book, Category , after the reading and waited in line for her to sign it. I was the last person of seven. She wrote "for Leo" and looked up at me.
    "I would like to write something amusing but my mind is blank."
    I leaned over the table where she was sitting. "Just put 'from your friend Lucille.'"
    As I watched her pen move across the page, I asked her if she wanted me to find her a cab or walk her to wherever she was going. She said she was headed for Penn Station, and we stepped outside into the cold November night. The wind blew past us, bringing with it the smell of gasoline and Asian food. As we walked down the street, I looked at her long beige