Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow

conversation we would have. But one evening, during the staff meal, one of the woodfolk, a grandmotherly one, said to me, “That Penfield called. You’re to go over to the cottage.”
    “Who, me? What for?”
    “How should I know?” she said. “I’ll be glad when you’re gone and them with you.”
    I finished my meal as slowly as I could, feigning the attitude of the workingmen of dark green. I washed my tray and lit a cigarette and sauntered back to my room.
    I latched the door and changed from my work clothes to the knickers and shirt and sweater and ribbed socks and saddle shoes. Poor Libby, all happiness drained like the color in her face when I told her I was keepingthese things. Shouldn’t she have known that the fellow who’d write in the guest book would do that? Anyway, she understood the firm basis of our relationship, that whatever trust she placed in me I would betray.
    And as for Mr. Penfield I knew in my bones I didn’t have anything to fear from him. He had a way of canceling himself out if you let him talk long enough.
    I washed my face and combed my hair and got out of the staff house without being seen.
    Already dark on the path, the first stars coming out. Joe drew a sharp breath and tried to calm himself. He was trembling. He had followed her, navigating by her star, and by that means had been sleeping in a bed and eating well and indulging his self-regard for several weeks. An edited view but fervently held.
    In his mind, his feelings were enough. He didn’t need intentions, plans, the specificity of hope. Presenting his heart was enough.
    “Here he is—and look at him!” Penfield said at the door. He held a bottle of red wine in one hand and a glass in the other. “Come in, come in!”
    It was a low-ceilinged cottage with a living room and kitchen and stone hearth all in one. I tried not to look at her she was sitting on the sofa Indian style wearing a robe of white satiny material and it had fallen open across her thighs. I tried not to look she was not looking at me but taking a mighty pull from her wineglass head up neck beautiful pulsing neck.
    “Here he is, Clara—Joe of Paterson, the man I wanted you to meet.” A glass was put in my hand.
    “Miss Clara Lukaćs,” he said.
    Pointing me at a chair, he crossed his ankles and sank his bulk down on the floor at her feet.
    They were both facing me and to my right and their left a fire was going in the fireplace. The light flared and dimmed on their faces as some kind of wavering attention, I thought, especially from her she had not asked to meet me how absurd to have thought that. I sensed some purpose not entirely complimentary in the summons. Yet Penfield was smiling amiably indicating to me to drink and so I did, with the odd conviction that I hadnever tasted wine before. I had ridden the cars with the bums of three states worked with freaks and was wicked and shameless but in this moment it was my inexperience that shone.
    What was the conversation? Mostly his, of course, the brilliant singsong of the failed poet, but how could I have been listening with the attention such beautiful words demanded, people from my world didn’t talk with such embellishment such scrollwork. I had never before met someone who admitted to the profession of poet but believed it by the way he spoke. I kept my eyes on his face but it was her I looked at, this restless cat of inattention sitting quite still and staring into her wine careless of exposed limbs the inner thigh the rounded knee small cream cracked hummock of the underknees she sat quite still but her mind pacing from one wall to another, an expression on her small fair face of grief or petulance I couldn’t tell. But how she felt was of overriding importance to me, how she felt!—then and every moment after—was my foremost concern, what I lived by. This was her quality and I think she was unconscious of it, that her presence occupied great moral space around her though she was