Painted Ladies

56

With my feet on my desk and the Globe open before me, I phoned Susan.

“I see in the paper,” I said, “that there’s an Evening of Verse being held at a church in Cambridge.”

“Hot dog,” Susan said.

“One of the performers is Rosalind Wellington.”

“No kidding,” Susan said.

“Do you remember who Rosalind Wellington is?” I said.

“No.”

“She’s Mrs. Ashton Prince,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Want to go?”

“ ‘Go’?” Susan said.

“Attend, listen to her read her poetry,” I said.

“You think she is any good?” Susan said. “That any of the poets reading there will be any good?”

“No,” I said. “No, of course not. It’ll be awful.”

“Wow,” Susan said. “That’s persuasive.”

“So you want to go?” I said.

“No,” Susan said. “What I want to know is why you do?”

“Remember you got Prince’s Ph.D. dissertation and read it?” I said.

“I do. An act of breathtaking self-sacrifice, may I say.”

“We learned a lot from that,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I thought I might learn something from her poetry,” I said.

Susan was silent for a moment.

Then she said, “You might. One of the predictable things about the kind of poets you are nearly certain to hear is that their poetry will be about the angst of being them. It will be hideous, but she might actually reveal something useful in the process.”

“I’m gonna go,” I said.

“You’ll have to brave it without me,” she said. “I get enough interior angst every day, fifty minutes an hour.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Not that I don’t admire your fortitude,” Susan said.

I admired it myself. The event started at seven; I was there at quarter of. The room was barren, with cement walls painted yellow. It looked like it should have been swept more recently than it had been. There were about fifty folding chairs and maybe fifteen people, grouped around a maple table with a lectern on it. The lighting was overhead and harsh. The room was too hot.

I took off my coat and sat. If anyone noticed the gun on my hip, they didn’t react. They were too deeply involved, I assumed, in the life of the imagination. They were generally not deeply involved in elegance. At seven, a heavy woman in an ankle-length dress walked in and stood at the lectern and welcomed us to the Evening of Verse. She announced that at the end of the evening, the poems read tonight would be for sale at the back of the room for five dollars.

Then a guy came out and read a detailed description of a series of homosexual acts. In the rhyme scheme, “foreskin” was rhymed with “more sin.” And “between us” with “penis.”

The next reader was a skinny woman with her hair in a tight bun who wrote about masturbation, then came a guy with a very long braid, who read something. But I couldn’t tell what it was about. Sadly, Rosalind Wellington was near the end of the program, and I might have left before she came on if Susan hadn’t admired my fortitude. So I stuck it out. When she came on, she was all in black, wearing a hat with a veil.

“ ‘So Little Left Behind,’ ” she intoned.” ‘An Ode to My Late Husband.’ ”

She looked down at the papers on the lectern and began to read in what she must have thought was a dramatic monotone.

My husband went loudly into the eternal night.

No time to rage, or set things right.

No legacy, though one was promised.

A legacy quite odd,

Two painted ladies like a god.

One true as starlight,

The other one a fraud.

The starlight lady hidden,

The fraud in public view.

As I who’ve come unbidden

Stand exposed to you.

Perhaps I am the found voice

Of his eternal funk.

Perhaps it’s time to simply be,

And put my plaint away.

I guess he didn’t love me.

Maybe all the rest is bunk.

She dropped her head to indicate she was finished, and stood that way for a moment, before she raised her eyes and began her second poem. The evening eventually ended. I remembered a line from Swinburne: “even the weariest river, winds somewhere safe to sea.” I got up and bought a copy of the poems, which appeared to have been run off on a computer and bound in gray cardboard.

At home I had a large drink and sat at my kitchen counter and drank my drink and looked at her first poem.

Two painted ladies.

If I asked her about it, she’d give me a lot of grad-school razzmatazz about meaning and beauty. I wondered how she’d deal with a Middlesex County prosecutor.