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Page 11.
 He shook his head.
She looked again at her cola can. “My husband is on the faculty. He’s an assistant professor of archeology. We aren’t doing too well. You aren’t married, are you?”
He shook his head.
“Wouldn’t help much to cry on your shoulder.”
He started out of his chair, approached hers, and put his hand on her wrist, which rested on the armrest. “I’m afraid I only know about marriage in theory. I can’t do much to help you.” He’d only had one long-term girlfriend during his recent college years, along with a string of flirtations and a confetti storm of gratifications with young women. He was no stranger to the delights of intimacy. He was tall, slender, dark-haired, and intensely handsome. Or so Danielle, his best friend’s sister, had once told him; only he’d been annoyed because he didn’t know if she was teasing him. His friend Jack said it was a trial and a torment having a sister, except when she was nice once in a while. Marc, who’d grown up with two brothers (one younger, the other older, nothing out of the ordinary except one or two fist fights and nosebleeds early on before the rules spelled themselves out), imagined that all brother-sister siblings said that about each other. Having Dani for a sister-in-friend was instructive enough. Thanks but no thanks.
He knelt by this adorable woman’s chair, as if in prayer, or proposing marriage, or tying his shoelace. He was not sure which, himself. Something in this stranger drew his emotional engine closer to hers, and he could see in her eyes, the hunger in her face, her engine closer to his, one silent, aching ratchet of gear teeth after another.
She gave him an intense look, quickened by impulse. “You don’t just mow lawns, do you?” she said, alluding to his stained clothing.
He told her his secret, “Under the name of Léopold Montblé, supposedly a Belgian or Russian émigré, I write poetry. Fits the void left by Nabokov.”
“Léopold Mount-Wheat. How strangely intriguing. I suppose wind blows through the wheat, and it is achingly romantic.”
“Poetic,” he affirmed. “Often a bitter triumph, a strong drink.”
She put down her cola and put her hand on his. “You’ll be famous yet.”
“You promise?”
She laughed. “Oh you puppy. Yes, I promise.” She cupped his face in her palms. “Are you for real?”
“I am only half serious all the time. It’s a survival mechanism.”
She put her fingertips to her lips and laughed again, in amazement. “Wow. That is so cool. I want to be like you.”
“We could write poetry together.”
“I can’t write anything more than a sympathy card. Maybe you could read your poems to me. I listen well.”
He talked jive, while snapping his fingers. “I read the Beats and audit Auden. I compose word-o-phonics like Coltrane or Stan Jets play sax.” Does she get who I am? What Léopold Montblé does? Who those old classics were? What I am saying?
“You play with language,” she said appreciatively. She was thirty but looked younger. The long, elegant cast of her cultured face betrayed a well-trained pursuit of social directions, including tennis courts, cocktail parties, and lawn club debuts—all of the wealthy. The privileged class. Everything he was not, but felt smarter than, so why bother? He was not as impressed as he should have been. They could not write music like Debussy, or paint like Richter, or compose verse like Montblé.
“I type my manuscripts at night,” he confessed while moving to the chair beside hers, lithe as a panther.
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