Read The Last Time They Met for Free Online

hush, like cloud, settled upon the audience. Thomas moved with old authority, careful not to look up at the several hundred faces. When he reached the podium, he took a glass of water, and she saw (and hoped that others did not) that his hand trembled in its epic progress from the table to the mouth. Behind her, someone said,
Wow, he’s really aged,
the words (such power) reducing even the best of them to something less.
    Thomas fumbled badly at the beginning, causing an empathetic flush to run along the sides of her neck and lodge behind her ears. He seemed unprepared. In the growing silence, he flicked pages with his forefinger, the paper having the snap and crackle of onionskin. Linda could hear from the audience murmurs of surprise, the slight whine of disappointment. And still the riffling continued. And then, when she thought she could bear it no longer, when she’d bent her head and put her fingers to her eyes, Thomas began to read.
    The voice was deep and sonorous, untouched by the years that had ravaged his face. It might have been the voice of a proclamation, the basso profundo of an opera singer. It seemed the audience held its breath, lest breathing cause the people there to miss a word. She strained to comprehend the startling phrases, then was left to tumble down a slide of images that were oddly pleasurable even though their terrible meaning could not be misunderstood:
“Water’s silk,”
he read, and
“Bed of sand.” “The mother bent, a trampled stem.”
The hair on the back of Linda’s neck stood up, and chills stippled her arms. She held herself and forgot the audience. One could hardly believe in this marriage of confused and servile grief. She knew, as she had not ever known before — as she was certain those around her had not known before — that she was in the presence of greatness.
    He read from
The Magdalene Poems.
A series of poems about a girl who did not become a woman. An elegy for a life not lived.
    Thomas stopped and took another epic drink of water. There was the sound of a hundred listeners putting hands to chests and saying,
Oh.
The applause that followed was — one had to say it — thunderous. Thomas looked up and seemed surprised by all the commotion. He did not smile, either to himself or at the audience, and for this Linda was inexplicably relieved: Thomas would not easily be seduced.
    The questions that followed the reading were routine (one about his culpability, appalling). He answered dutifully; and mercifully, he was not glib. Linda wasn’t certain she could have borne to hear him glib. He seemed exhausted, and a sheen lay on his forehead, white now with true stage fright.
    The questions stopped — it wasn’t clear by whose mysterious signal — and the applause that followed could be felt in the armrests. Some even stood, as at the theater. Unskilled and unpracticed at accepting praise, Thomas left the stage.
    She might have met him backstage and embraced him in mutual exuberance. And perhaps he would be expecting her, would be disappointed by her absence. But then she saw him in the lobby, surrounded by adoring fans, the torturous words inside his head put aside, and she thought: I will not compete for his attention.
    Needing air, she walked out into the night. People stood in gatherings, more exhilarated than subdued. She didn’t intend to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help but hear the words “shattering” and “brilliant,” though one woman seemed incensed that a poet would turn a daughter’s death to advantage. “Opportunistic,” Linda heard, and “rape of other people’s lives.” A man responded dismissively. “Dana, it’s called art,” he said, and Linda knew at once the two were married.
    She walked around the block, the experience in the theater seeming to require it. The drizzle turned to serious rain and soaked her hair and shoulders before she could return. She entered a side theater and listened to a Rwandan woman catalogue atrocities. Linda sat