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billboards.
    Must not bring in a lot, I said, trying not to smile.
    She’s between grants, he said. The neck of his Rainbow Gathering T-shirt was frayed; he had a spot of dried tomato on his cheek, above his beard. So! Shira! he said. Nice to see you! What’ve you been up to?
    Temping in Jersey. I’m too slow to type in Manhattan! I said, laughing.
    Your parents must be proud!
    I stared.
    It’s been a while. Sorry! Really! I forgot!
    How long has it been? I asked, though I knew.
    A year? he asked, as if astonished.
    Did he resent being dumped? No, Benny wasn’t a hider. Everything he thought, everything he felt was writ large on his face: he was a billboard artist of the heart.
    He asked about Andi. She was about to start third grade, I said. Her current ambition: to be a White House intern, so she too could be on TV every night.
    Benny looked at me blankly: he wasn’t one for the evening news, apparently.
    I see Ahmad now and then, he said. He single-handedly sustains my Nancy Drew section.
    I laughed.
    He’s greatly interested in the mystery of things, I said.
    I assume you’re here because …
    Yes! I said. He called!
•
    Just a sec, he said, returning a kitten to Marla, who lay regal and sleepy-eyed in her Simon & Schuster box. She stood, and arched her back, and kissed Benny’s hand, apparently uninterested in her prodigal chick, then followed him to his seat and leapt onto his lap. Her purr was prodigious.
    Benny asked for the skinny. I gave it to him, Reader’s Digest –style: Vita Nuova , Romei’s strange requirement that I finish by the end of the year.
    Shira, that’s amazing! he said when I was done, looking at me in wonder, as if he thought this miracle somehow my doing. Which, given his belief in karma, he probably did. We must drink to your success! Ginger beer?
    He put Marla gently on the ground. Offended, she returned to her box.
    Libations! he exclaimed when he returned.
    L’chaim , I added gamely.
    I assume Romei is paying you?
    A lot! I said.
    Good! You can sponsor Son of Gilgul ! It’s reincarnating: next issue by Y2K.
    I hadn’t realized Gilgul was dead!
    You’d know if you were still sending me stories, ma cherie .
    I didn’t bother explaining that I’d stopped writing. Ahmad had despised my last story (“Domino Effect,” about Jonah); Jonah’s sister Jeanette stopped talking to me because of it. I asked instead about the magazine. Benny clasped his hands behind his head and extended his long, jean-clad legs into the aisle.
    I had a few lean years. My board forced me to close.
    That’s the fate of the gilgul, right? The soul eternally reincarnating?
    Until we get it right. Some of us are going to be here a very long time.
    I’m sure your gilgul’s in great shape.
    Humph, he said. So Romei’s an interesting guy, huh?
    I accepted the change of subject.
    Imagine, I said, giving up your homeland and language to write terza rima in Roma!
    Exactly! Benny said. Prose writers change languages all the time—Nabokov, Conrad …
    Ionesco, Tristan Tzara, if we stick to his countrymen. But poets? It isn’t done!
    Except by Romei.
    I assume he was fleeing censorship and communism, I said.
    Or the country that killed his parents, Benny said pensively, staring into the middle distance, which at People of the Book meant the shelf for Games People Play.
    Of course, I said, remembering. Benny’s father had been a Russian POW who’d ended up hunting down Nazis after the war. He wasn’t a nice man, may he rest in peace. Benny’s mother had escaped to the U.S. in 1939 after the murder of her first husband, whom she hadn’t particularly liked. She’d been a dancer; in America she kept books for her brother-in-law’s schmatta business. The family she left behind died, like most families left behind.
    It makes sense he doesn’t write in Romanian, I said. He would have been an imperialist poet non grata in Romania. No one would have published his books there. Who’s going to read poetry in