The notebook was finally under the bed. Julia pulled it out; a dustball clung to it. She saw in her mind a small plaque, like the ones on historical houses: DUSTBALL. Once the property of Julia Morse, Poetess. With a few bored schoolchildren looking at it through the glass of a case. That was the future, if there was a future, if she kept on writing, if she became at least marginally significant, an obligatory footnote in someone’s thesis. Fragments left over after the general decay, classified, gathering dust, like the vertebrae of dinosaurs. Bloodless.

She handed the notebook over. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked, in a voice meant to discourage.

“I don’t want to put you out,” Marika said, but she had some anyway, chatting brightly about their plans for a collective show, to be called “Up from Under.” Her eyes shifted around the kitchen, taking in the dripping tap, the smelly J cloth draped over it, the ancient toaster with the crumbs around its base like the debris from a tiny landslide. “I’m really glad we can be friends,” she said just before leaving. “Bernie says we have nothing in common, but I think we get on real well. They’re mostly men down there.” This could have been some ersatz variety of women’s lib, Julia thought, but it wasn’t: Marika’s voice stank of bridge club. “Real well.” How incongruous, with those three-inch platforms, that trendy bum. Marika’s visits made her feel like a welfare case. She wondered how she could get her to stop coming, without being too rude. She begrudged the time, too, she could be using it for work. Though increasingly there was no work.

Bernie didn’t seem to notice that she was doing next to nothing. He no longer asked to read what she might have written during the day. When he came home for dinner he would talk obsessively about the gallery, eating plate after plate of spaghetti and, it seemed to her, whole loaves of bread. His appetite had increased, and they had recently begun to argue about the food bills and who was supposed to do the cooking and shopping. In the beginning they had shared everything, that was the agreement. Julia wanted to point out that since he was now eating twice as much as she was, he really ought to do more of the shopping and pay more than half, but she felt it would be mingy of her to say this. Especially since, whenever they talked about money, he would say, “Don’t worry, you’ll get paid off,” as if she begrudged him the gallery loan. Which she supposed she did.

What time is it? Lift the wrist: six-thirty. The blood seems to have slowed down, but it’s still there, a thickening like sludge at the back of the throat. A teacher, once, in public school, who came into the classroom with her teeth outlined in blood. She must have been to the dentist and then not checked in the mirror, but we were all so afraid of her none of us said anything and we spent the afternoon drawing three tulips in a vase, presided over by that bloodthirsty smile: Have to remember to brush my teeth and clean my face carefully, a drop of blood on the chin might be disturbing to the audience. Blood, the elemental fluid, the juice of life, byproduct of birth, prelude to death. The red badge of courage. The people’s flag. Maybe I could get a job writing political speeches, if all else fails. But when it comes out of your nose, not magic or even symbolic, just ridiculous. Pinned by the nose to the geometric net of this bathroom floor. Don’t be completely stupid, get started. Stand up carefully: if the blood keeps flowing, call off the reading and get on the plane. (Leaving a trail of clots?) I could be home tonight. Bernie’s there now, waiting for me to call, it’s past the time.

She pulled herself up, slowly, holding on to the sink, and walked into the bedroom with her head tilted back precariously. She groped for the phone and picked it up. She dialled 0 and got the operator to place the call for her. She listened to the outer-space noises the phone made, anticipating Bernie’s voice, feeling his tongue already on the inside of her mouth. They would go to bed and after that they would have a late supper, the two of them in the kitchen with the gas oven lit and open to keep them warm, the way they used to. (Her mind skipped the details of what they would eat. She knew there had been nothing in the refrigerator when she left but a couple of aging weiners. Not even any buns.) Things would get better, time would reverse itself, they would talk, she would tell him how much she had missed him (for surely she had been away much longer than a day), silence would open, language would flow again.

The line was busy.

She did not want to think about her disappointment. She would phone later. There was no more blood, though she could feel it crusted inside her head. So she would stay, she would do the reading, she would collect the fee and use it to pay the rent. What else was possible?

It was dinnertime and she was hungry, but she couldn’t afford another meal. Sometimes they took the poet out for dinner, sometimes they gave a party afterwards where she could fill up on crackers and cheese. Here there was nothing. They picked her up at the airport, that was it. She could tell there had been no posters, no advance publicity. A small audience, nervous because they were there and nobody else was, caught out attending the wrong reading. And she didn’t even look like a poet, she was wearing a neat navy-blue pantsuit, easy for stairs and cars. Maybe a robe would help, something flowing and ethereal. Bangles, a scarf?

She sat on the edge of the straightbacked chair, facing a picture of two dead ducks and an Irish setter. There was time to be filled. No television set. Read the Gideon Bible?

No, nothing too strenuous, she didn’t want to start bleeding again. In half an hour they would come to pick her up. Then the eyes, the polite hands, the fixed smiles. Afterwards everyone would murmur. “Don’t you feel exposed up there?” a young girl had asked her once. “No,” she’d said, and she didn’t, it wasn’t her, she read only her most soothing poems, she didn’t want to disturb anyone. But they distrusted her anyway. At least she never got drunk beforehand the way a lot of the others did. She wanted to be nice, and everyone approved of that.

Except the few hungry ones, the ones who wanted to know the secret, who believed there was a secret. They would straggle up afterwards, she knew, hanging around the edges, behind the murmuring committee members, clutching little packets of poems, extending them to her gingerly, as if the pages were raw flesh they could not bear to have touched. She could remember when she had felt like that. Most of the poems would be dismal, but now and then there would be one that had something, the energy, the thing that could not be defined. Don’t do it, she wanted to tell them, don’t make the mistake I made. But what was her mistake? Thinking she could save her soul, no doubt. By the word alone.

Did I really believe that? Did I really believe that language could seize me by the hair and draw me straight up, out into the free air? But if you stop believing, you can’t do it any longer, you can’t fly. So I’m stuck here on this chair. A sixty-year-old smiling public man. Crisis of faith? Faith in what? Resurrection, that’s what is needed. Up from under. Get rid of these haunts, these fictions, he said, she said, counting up points and grievances; the dialogues of shadows. Otherwise there will be nothing left but the rest of my life. Something is frozen. Bernie, save me. He was so nice this morning, before she left.

The phone again, the voice flies through the darkness of space. Hollow ringing, a click.

“Hi.” A woman’s voice, Marika, she knew who it would be.

“Could I please speak to Bernie?” Stupid to act as though she didn’t recognize the voice.