Role Models | COMPLETE |

The poet stopped again, and this time he did not go on. He looked into his glass, as if the wine held a vision, and then he looked up and said, “I have spent my entire life trying to get that innocence back. And I have failed.”

“What’s that?”

“You didn’t offend me,” he said. “You just reminded me of something I’d rather forget.” Role Models

I closed my eyes, and I waited for morning. End of text.

And then I went inside, and I went to bed, and I fell asleep. And I dreamed that I was young again, and that I was standing in a field of wildflowers, and that the sun was warm on my face, and that a woman was walking toward me, a woman I had never seen before, and she was smiling, and she was holding out her hand. And I reached out to take it, and then I woke up. The poet stopped again, and this time he did not go on

The poet paused, and took a sip of his wine. He looked around the room, and his eyes met mine. I smiled, and he smiled back, a small, tired smile. Then he went on.

I met him at a party given by a couple who were both therapists. The party was in a large, white, high-ceilinged room in a house that had once been a barn. The therapists, like many in their profession, were rich. Their friends were rich, or at least successful—lawyers, doctors, producers, professors, and, like me, writers. I was a writer of some reputation, but my reputation was not as great as his. He was a famous poet, one of those poets who become famous without ever writing a best-seller, without ever appearing on television, without ever being photographed in a magazine. He was famous because his poems were beautiful and strange and because he had been, for a time, the lover of a famous actress. The famous actress was dead now, dead of cancer, and the poet was old. He was seventy-three, and his face was a map of wrinkles, his hair was white and thin, and his eyes were the color of the sea in winter. He stood by the fireplace, holding a glass of white wine, and people gathered around him, listening to him talk. I stood on the edge of the group, not wanting to intrude, but wanting to hear what he said. He was telling a story about a time when he was young, a time when he had gone to Paris and had met Gertrude Stein. “You just reminded me of something I’d rather forget

“That I used to be young,” he said. “And that I used to believe in things. Now I’m old, and I don’t believe in anything. Not in God, not in love, not in art, not in myself. I don’t even believe in the truth. I just tell stories.”