“I don’t know,” she said. “If I were a translator, I’d try.”

He laughed in delight at this, and she thought she hadn’t seen him laugh before; still his eyes went on taking her in, her and everything.

“Do you think,” she said, “you’ll ever write in English?”

“It would be hard choice to make,” he said, as though he pondered it often.

“But why would it be a choice?” she asked. “Couldn’t you write in both?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It may be that languages are like lovers. You can have more than one at a time. But perhaps it is possible to love only one at a time.”

She knew as little of lovers as of languages. She thought of a piece she’d read in National Geographic about an old Indian, the last of his tribe able to speak its language: it had never been recorded, and there was no one else left who understood it. You couldn’t be more alone than that.

He had begun to gather up his things and put them in his funny case. He said: “May I ask you. In your poem. Was it, the soldier, a person now alive?”

“Well yes.”

“It seemed when I read,” he said, “perhaps not. Perhaps this poem told of a boy who every May returns. But who can come no closer.”

“Oh no,” she said. She saw that it could be taken so, she hadn’t seen it but now she could, and always would. “No.”

“Well.” He stood, as though unfolding his long body. “Now. You must come to class next week.”

“Oh yes, yes,” she said ardently. “I mean that was just so not like me. Falling asleep.”

“Since you have no doctor’s excuse,” he said, “you can now not get perfect grade. So you must come always.”

He smiled at her, shrugging on his great enveloping coat; his smile, this amazing open secret. She didn’t know whether to laugh because what he said was a joke, or look grave because it wasn’t. She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.

He looked back, at the door, and she waved a small farewell.

She pushed away her cup, feeling both privileged and besmirched: anyway as she had not felt ever before. On the table was the box of matches he had toyed with, left behind. She touched it, pressed her thumb against the little paper drawer. Then closed her hand over it and pocketed it.

When she got back to her room, Fran was practicing, but stopped and put down her viola as soon as Kit entered.

“I like it,” Kit said. “Go ahead.”

“Eh,” Fran said, a dismissive New York sound that by the semester’s end Kit would have acquired from her.

“No really.” Kit had avoided all her mother’s efforts to give her music lessons, and the sight and sound of someone actually playing an instrument, in the flesh, an otherwise ordinary person like herself, thrilled and fascinated her, a magical act, or at least a magic act.

“Somebody called for you,” Fran said, falling back on her bed with her Kierkegaard. “A sort of redneck-sounding guy? Named Jackie Norden?”

“Really?”

“Really,” Fran said wearily.

“Well,” said Kit. That sense of doors opening if you dared press on them, if you could find their knobs and jambs in the apparently seamless world around you. This one being the one she had long avoided or chosen not to see, the one she had skirted so artfully through school.

Except that she hadn’t skirted it, not in the end. She had not skirted it at all.

“Well,” she said again, alarmed and elated. “Well I’ll be.”

7.

The Christmas when Kit was a senior in high school, Ben came home on the last leave of his enlistment. He had been lucky to be posted in the States, he told her, he could have been one of the GIs they watched on TV, getting turkey dinners on desert islands or arctic airstrips, unwrapping presents from home.

That winter Kit had begun baby-sitting, and learned to write blank verse. She had little interest in babies and no natural ability with them, except in the telling of stories; yet she preferred infants and toddlers, who could be put to sleep early with any luck, releasing her to explore the still house in a close approximation of solitude, close enough to make her giddily gleeful. A sip or two out of the dusty liqueur bottles. Once she came upon the family supply of condoms in a blond dresser, though at first she didn’t know what they were.

Blank verse was just a matter of nerve. At the library she’d come upon the old Mermaid series of Elizabethan poets, beautiful books that just fit into her new Mark Cross bag; and she started reading Marlowe and Massinger and Webster and counting the beats on her fingers, da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum. As soon as she found the courage to do it too, it began immediately knitting lines up as though by itself, long swatches growing longer, like the scarves Marion knitted while watching TV, holding them up at the night’s end startled by their sudden length.

This Park is green. I will not see him here.

So fall, you leaves, and change your seasons, trees;

Turn, moons, from full to dark to full again

Until earth bows her head before the sun

And winter comes, and snow; and so does he.

“Who’s this ‘he’?” Ben asked.

“Nobody,” she said.

“Oh come on.”

She meant it though. She thought her “he” was like that “she” who appeared in the poems of male poets so continually, who also appeared in their biographies sometimes, sometimes not. The Eternal Feminine, George had said, as though he knew this, as though everybody did. Female poets didn’t seem to have an Eternal Masculine; the “you” or the “he” in their poems seemed to be more often actual people, being chided or pleaded with or charmed. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Kit loved nobody, but she thought she had a right to this faceless he anyway, and set herself problems in verse to solve, all about him. One or two she had put, anonymously typed, in Burke Eggert’s locker or bookbag at school, knowing he’d never guess.

Burke was a football player and senior-class officer a year ahead of her, lean and tall (a quarterback), with Ben’s dark short hair, but thick glasses too, designed probably to correct a still-detectable crossed eye: Kit cherished that weakness. She couldn’t think of any way to attract him, and didn’t try. In her diary and inwardly she assembled the parts of her crush like the elements of a hard poem, oddly assorted things to be connected in such a way that they made an anfractuous figure, a tetrahedron maybe, solid and gleaming and worthy of the feelings that had evoked it, that it evoked.

She hadn’t written to Ben about Burke. She found she couldn’t write down his silly name on letter paper. For one thing.

“Well it’s swell,” Ben said, and gave her back the sheet of onionskin.

He had changed while he was away. She watched him, they all did when he wasn’t noticing; they could watch him because he didn’t notice. Watched how he looked out the windows at the brown lawns and bare trees, trying to remember them maybe, or maybe not seeing them at all, his attention on something else: as though during his absence he had grown a private self, and was no longer whole, all of a piece, the way he had been. Kit babbled at him and teased him, afraid and cold inside.