that night - even those who witnessed the evening's sordid. creepy conclusion, agreed that Gardener's reading of 'Leighton Street' had been the best of the night. A good many of them maintained it was the best they had ever heard.
Since it was the last reading Jim Gardener would ever give in his life, it was maybe not such a bad way to go out.
6
It took him nearly twenty minutes to read all of it, and when he finished he looked up uncertainly into a deep and perfect well of silence. He had time to think he had never read the damned thing at all, that it had just been a vivid hallucination in the moment or two before the faint.
Then someone stood up and began to clap steadily and hard. It was a young man with tears on his cheeks. The girl beside him also stood and began to clap and she was also crying. Then they were all standing and applauding, yeah, they were giving him a fucking standing 0, and in their faces he saw what every poet or would-be poet hopes to see when he or she finishes reading: the faces of people suddenly awakened from a dream brighter than any reality. They looked as dazed as Bobbi had on that day, not quite sure where they were.
But they weren't all standing and applauding, he saw; Patricia McCardle sat stiff and straight in her third-row seat, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap over her small evening bag. Her lips had closed. No sign of the old pearly-whites now; her mouth had become a small bloodless cut. Gard felt a weary amusement. As far as you're concerned, Patty, the real Puritan ethic is no one who's a black sheep should dare rise above his designated level of mediocrity, correct? But there's no mediocrity clause in your contract, is there?
'Thank you,' he muttered into the mike, sweeping his books and papers together into an untidy pile with his shaking hands - and then almost dropping them all over the floor as he stepped away from the podium. He dropped into his seat next to Ron Cummings with a deep sigh.
'My God,' Ron whispered, still applauding. 'My God!'
'Stop clapping, you ass,' Gardener whispered back.
'Damned if I will. I don't care when you wrote it, it was fucking brilliant,' Cummings said. 'And I'll buy you a drink on it later on.'
'I'm not drinking anything stronger than club soda tonight,' Gardener said, and knew it was a lie. His headache was already creeping back. Aspirin wouldn't cure that, Percodan wouldn't, a 'Iude wouldn't. Nothing would fix his head but a great big shot of booze. Fast, fast relief.
The applause was finally beginning to die away. Patricia McCardle looked acidly grateful.
7
The name of the fat shit who had introduced each of the poets was Arberg (although Gardener kept wanting to call him Arglebargle), and he was the assistant professor of English who headed the sponsoring group. He was the sort of man his father had called a 'beefy sonofawhore.'
The beefy sonofawhore threw a party for the Caravan, the Friends of Poetry, and most of the English Department faculty at his house after the reading. It began around eleven o'clock. It was stiffish at first - men and women standing in uncomfortable little groups with glasses and paper plates in their hands, talking your usual brand of cautious academic talk. This sort of bullshit had struck Gard as a stupid waste of time when he was teaching. It still did, but there was also something nostalgic and pleasing - in a melancholy way - about it now.
His Party Monster streak told him that, stiff or not, this was a Party with Possibilities. By midnight the Bach etudes would almost certainly be replaced by the Pretenders, and talk of classes, politics, and literature would be replaced by more interesting fare - the Red Sox, who on the faculty was drinking too much, and that all-time favorite, who was fucking whom.
There was a large buffet for which most of the poets made a beeline, reliably following Gardener's First Rule for Touring Poets: If it's gratis, grab it. As he watched, Ann Delaney, who wrote spare, haunting poems about rural working-class New England, stretched her jaws wide and ripped into the huge sandwich she was holding. Mayonnaise the color and texture of bull semen squirted between her fingers, and Ann licked it off her hand nonchalantly. She tipped Gardener a wink. To her left, last