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that. But there’s pressure in it. The face says, everything you do is significant; every gesture of yours will be recorded, interpreted, remembered, copied. Her face says, you are living out my life for me, but you’re doing it better, with more poise and beauty than I ever could.
    And how does Joni react?
    She turns in the other direction. She runs like a deer until she is far, far outside the gates of the festival.
    1976 |  Maybe Joni can also see that wanting in the face of the young woman who somehow gets close to the stage at Philadelphia’s Spectrum. Maybe there’s just a flash of that face before the spotlights turn on and blind her. Persistent girl, stubborn girl. Those girls are always around, down in the orchestra, climbing up the towers toward the lights, wherever she performs. She has to think past that face if she’s going to get through “Coyote” and “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.” All everyone wants to hear are early, simpler songs that make them cry, that conjure up the lost nights of their youth, in dorm rooms or in boyfriends’ beds.
    Denise watches Joni from the black zone, through chain link. Joni is wearing a short jacket, a red bolero. Her eyes look exhausted, but she is investing every line, vowel, and break with personality. She is not phoning it in, even though she could certainly be doing so at this point in the tour. The speaker in “Coyote” thinks of herself as a hitcher, “a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway.” There are lovers to be met along the road, on ranches, in roadhouses. She watches a farmhouse burn down, the domestic life going up in flames around her. She loves these men awhile, then heads back to the highway once she realizes the life of the artist is not about routine or staying put. It is a bold new persona for a female pop singer, a role that inverts the usual gender convention. The woman is in power, the man left behind at home, stunned, wounded, hurt. “Why’d you have to get so drunk / And lead me on that way?” says the coyote. The audience goes crazy with applause. They can’t get enough of these songs, that persona. For Denise, Joni is longing perfected.
    1984 |  The upper room of the bar is low-lit, with amber sconces on the wall. It hums with people. Denise’s family is there; her editors are there, people from the Philadelphia press are there. Members of the English department and fellow graduate students. At her side is Sam, the lawyer in tortoiseshell, horn-rim glasses, who seems to have modeled himself on a Bryn Mawr WASP; his most distinguishing characteristic is that he’s scrubbed himself of particularity. I shake his hand, say hello. He says hello back. Since they started dating a few months back, he has been prone to saying things such as: I like you more than I like your book. Or: I like you but I don’t love you. Denise has run these statements by me just to see whether she’s not being oversensitive. My role is to exclaim, he said that to you? Maybe Sam knows Denise has already run such statements by me, which would explain why he’s all too eager to be led away by Denise to her editor.
    In the center of the room is a white cake. It is a Good Deeds cake, a facsimile of the book cover designed by Fred Marcellino. There’s a drawing of the ladder on the cake, with stylized, elongated arms reaching upward on the rungs.
    Toasts are made. To the success of the book! To the success of the next book, and more and more and more books until there’s a great tower of books, a great tower of Denise. Denise says a few words; the publisher, who’s come down from New York, says a few words. Then a man with a knife cuts the cake with all the finesse of a brain surgeon.
    I have not moved from my position by the stairs for an hour. I talk with my fellow teaching assistants; I make small talk (why does small talk make my throat tense?) with people whose names and connections I can’t make out above the din. Then a woman is standing in