T , Abigail Des Pres has had "lost moments." As she calls them. When she understands what it will be like not to be. The atmosphere of the house on Wheatsheaf Drive, the tranquil emptiness of the rooms, from which the person she has been, or has thought she'd been, has finally departed.

S * , surprising herself. What's so funny?

"The look on Harry's face. I could see it! When he told me about the skiing 'accident.' Jared plowing into him." Abigail wipes her eyes, it is funny, the spectacle of Harry, Jared, and the gorgeous second-wife what'sher-name Kim, sprawled on their assess in the snow.

Middle Age: A Romance

"Adam? Hey c'mon, crack a smile."

Abigail. Why laugh at others' misfortune?

"Fuck you. 'Cause it's funny, that's why."

Do you want Harry to laugh at you?

"Sure. I'm funny as hell, let the prick laugh. We used to have great times together, Harry making me laugh. Like tickling with rough fingers.

Harry doing his 'ethnic-minority' imitations. Of course they weren't funny in any human, moral way, but they were hilarious as hell in a sick, nasty way."

Are you still in love with Harry, Abigail?

"Asshole! I'm in love with you."

You're in love with the hurt he inflicted on you. It's become your ID tag.

"Like hell. Know what? I wish Harry was dead! Well, sort of dead. Not brain-dead. Paralyzed, maybe. Yes! If Jared had torn into him and sliced his spine in two, so he's just a head propped up in a wheelchair now, pushed around by Kim rolling her eyes behind his head, that's exactly what I wish."

Abigail, you should be ashamed of yourself. Such bitterness isn't worthy of you, have you been drinking?

"Fuck you, who wants to know? None of your business."

You promised Roger. He saved your ass up in Middlebury, remember?

"Fuck Roger. Roger has broken my heart."

You sent Roger away, Abigail. You don't love him.

"I did love Harry, at first. There's nobody like your first. I was a virgin, and there came Harry jamming his boot heel into my cunt. They say women aren't by nature masochistic, it's culture that makes us sick, but how can we know? There's no culture without nature. There's no-shit, what am I saying, Adam? Do I know what I'm talking about?"

You're making a subtle distinction, Abigail. But it's gotten away from you.

"Harry was our unconscious. Mine, and Salthill's. I don't love him but I do miss him. Almost as much as I miss you, Adam."

Now you've said a daring, profound thing. What an insight, for a Salthill resident!

"But, Adam, is it true?"

Silence.

"Adam, please tell me. Is it true?"

Silence. God damn Adam where is he, playing his if you can catch me game as always.

"Adam? Hey, c'mon." Abigail is on her feet managing to keep her

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balance. Once, she'd been a lithe, floating girl-dancer, now there are weights attached to her ankles. She's staggering-swaying-careening through empty rooms. A vertigo-sequence, as in an infinitely reflecting mirror, of empty empty empty beautifully furnished rooms.

A ** from a man who mumbles his name, apologizing if he'd "upset" her, saying he would "very much" like to see her again or at least speak with her "sometime soon, I hope" and Abigail quickly punches "" for erase. No more cripples!

I S P L on this fine May morning there's a sudden commotion near the entrance, just beyond the turnstiles.

Abigail, drawn by curiosity, approaches to see a middle-aged woman with flushed cheeks and short-trimmed graying hair, in a denim coverall with sunflower pockets, confronted by one of the librarians-"Mrs. Hoffmann, please! You know that dogs are not allowed in the library."

It's Camille Hoffmann!

Abigail stares at her friend from a short distance. And keeps her distance.

How incensed Camille is! How firm she stands, legs like tree trunks.

Camille's maternal-mammalian softness seems to have yielded to a tougher, more obdurate substance. Her voice is controlled, with an undercurrent of threat. "Excuse me. These are not dogs. These are not dogs merely." Camille is gripping, on leashes, two large, handsome dogs: Adam's Apollo, who has obeyed his mistress's order to sit; and a lean, sleek young Doberman pinscher, too skittish to stay in one place, tugging at the leash and growling deep in his throat. Abigail recognizes Apollo immediately, of course, but the Doberman is new to her.

A number of library patrons have gathered to observe the confrontation, discreetly. Such public-commotion scenes, in Salthill, are rare. Abigail feels a duty to intervene, but-what could she say? ("Frankly," Abigail would confide in Beatrice Archer afterward, "I was afraid of that Doberman pinscher.") The embarrassed, uneasy librarian insists that Camille must leave her dogs outside the library; Camille repeats that the dogs "are not dogs merely"; the librarian threatens to "call security"; at last Camille turns, with dignity, murmuring, "Apollo! Thor! We will not stay where we Middle Age: A Romance

are not wanted. And we will cease all financial contributions, believe me, where we are not wanted. Come."

In Camille's wake, a furtive outburst of applause, in which Abigail Des Pres, who is Camille's friend, does not join.

A sudden scratching at the door of her bedroom.

Boldly the door is pushed open before Abigail can rouse herself fully from sleep.

A furry animal! Apollo! Trotting into the darkened room, bearing in his strong jaws what appears to be an old red flannel shirt. Adam's gardening shirt, soiled with earth.

Abigail is out of bed, and tugging at the shirt. Apollo will not release it.

Abigail persists. Apollo shakes his head, and growls in warning. Abigail persists, growing desperate.

Through the long panting night the struggle continues.

" I . I am thrilled. As an undergraduate at Bennington College . . ."

As an undergraduate at Bennington College in the late seventies, an idealistic "arts" major, Abigail Des Pres frequently fell in love with older, unattainable men; and one of these, when she was a nineteen-year-old sophomore, was the Irish-American poet Donegal Croom. At the time, Croom had just published his first collection of poems, SeaChange, and was being hailed in the United States as an heir of Dylan Thomas and "a more lyric" William Butler Yeats. Amid a pack of excitable, admiring young women in a white woodframe barn on the college campus, Abigail listened with a quickened heartbeat to the darkly handsome Croom read his passionate, incantatory poetry, which was less obscure than Thomas's and Yeats's poetry but lush, sensuous, "toughly eloquent" and "elemental, mesmerizing" (as reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic praised). Abigail wept with happiness. She'd never been so deeply moved by any public performance. Immediately after the reading she bought Croom's book, and waited in a long line of eager girls for the poet to sign it.

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(He'd spelled her name wrong!-added an "r"!) (Or was that a secret message?) Abigail thanked the poet shyly and stumbled by. If Donegal Croom had given her so much as a second glance, a lithe, slender girl with gleaming dark hair to her waist, in black leotards and an oversized T-shirt, Abigail was too agitated to notice. She was of an age, still virginal, if only barely, and deeply romantic, to clutch the sea-green book to her heart.

She, too, wrote poetry, in breathless fragments, and envisioned one day that she might set her poetry to music, and dance; she would be poet, composer, choreographer, and dancer in one. (Her Bennington teachers, former sixties radicals with predilections for the more esoteric, inspira-tional drugs, encouraged Abigail as they encouraged her classmates, talented and otherwise.) For days after Donegal Croom's reading, lines of poetry, musical, divorced from meaning, shimmered in Abigail's head; like butterflies with fluttering wings; almost, she could see them; almost, she could catch hold of them; but they eluded her. And yet-how beautiful.

She knew!

Now, twenty-four years later, Abigail still has her copy of SeaChange, which has become in the interim a collector's item. Croom has written a number of books of poetry, he has won a number of prizes including the Pulitzer, his reputation in some quarters is still very high. (Out of curiosity, typing in "Donegal Croom" on the Web, Abigail discovers that a signed first edition of SeaChange in mint condition is worth as much as $,. "Of course, I would never sell it.") Rereading the slender book, Abigail feels a vestige of the old, visceral shock; not so strong as it had been, but palpable nonetheless. As the dust jacket claims, this is a poetry of magic and of Eros. "If only. When I held my book out to him, our eyes had met."

Abigail visits the Salthill Bookstore to purchase other books by Donegal Croom. In the window there's a display of a half-dozen books of his, as Middle Age: A Romance

well as a publicity photo of the ruggedly handsome, long-haired poet in his prime. The face is older, but unmistakably Irish; the hair is coarsely threaded with gray, framing the weathered face. How old is Croom? In his mid-forties? Abigail has learned that Croom has been married three times but is unmarried, at least officially, at the present; this, she takes to be a good sign. He's available. Maybe he's lonely. The window display is in anticipation of Donegal Croom's appearance at the Festival of Flowers, which is being advertised everywhere in Salthill. What a good cause it is!

Though for a moment Abigail can't remember what it is. She pushes open the door to the bookstore, the bell tinkles quaintly overhead. She feels a welcome sense of sanctuary in Marina Troy's old-fashioned quarters with its framed photographs of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and other icons of the past century on the walls, as remote to the new electronic-Internet age as the gods of antiquity. These are noble figures Abigail admires and intends to "reread"

sometime soon.

Entering the Salthill Bookstore, Abigail invariably glances about, with a tinge of guilt, looking for Marina Troy. (The guilt is because Abigail has tried, to a degree, to seduce Roger Cavanagh; and there's a prevailing sense in Salthill that Roger and Marina Troy are in some way, however undefined and perhaps unconsummated, a couple.) Abigail misses Marina! For years she's felt a one-sided attraction for Marina; as one might feel for an eccentric, difficult younger sister, or cousin; a solitary version of Abigail herself, bravely immune to the blandishments and temptations of men.

In her soul, she's a virgin. No one can conquer her. But Abigail hasn't seen Marina for a long time.

"Mrs. Des Pres, hello!"

Abigail forces a smile as Marina's assistant Molly Ivers greets her, as always a little too loudly. Molly is a hale, hearty Girl Scout type, in a bulky purple caftan and black nylon trousers; her straw hair falls in a childish fringe around her broad puppet-face. Where Marina was shyly welcom-ing, Molly loves to greet customers! It's being said that, despite intense competition from mall stores and from the Internet, the little store on Pedlar's Lane has been doing surprisingly well in Marina's absence, the result of her intrepid manager's relentless campaigning: readings by local poets and writers, receptions featuring gourmet appetizers, the Salthill String Quartet, Sunday and late-night hours. How does she do it, Molly Ivers is asked, and in an interview in the Salthill Weekly Gazette Molly confessed, "I never sleep!"

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In Salthill it's begun to be rumored that Marina Troy will never return.

She'll lease or sell the store to Molly. So devastated by Adam Berendt's death, poor woman.

Abigail knows she shouldn't inquire, she'll only be rebuffed, but she can't resist asking how Marina is, and Molly says, circumspectly, "Oh, Marina is very well, thank you." Abigail wants to ask where Marina has been since last fall but already she has asked this question and been rebuffed, as others in her social circle have asked Molly, and been primly rebuffed; instead, Abigail asks when Marina is expected to return to Salthill, and Molly says, lowering her voice as if granting Abigail a special favor, "Oh, Mrs. Des Pres! Marina has been working on art, 'sculpted pieces,' and she's very happy, she says. She hopes to return in the fall, and to have an exhibit of her work then." Abigail is astonished by this revelation. She prefers to think of Marina Troy as a more neurotic, piteous version of herself. "She's happy? You mean she's-" Abigail pauses, not knowing what she's saying. She's recovered from Adam's death? How can that be?

Of course Abigail can't ask such a question. And if she did ask, Molly Ivers wouldn't have known how to reply.

Abigail buys several paperback books by Donegal Croom and drives to a park near the Salthill Middle School, to sit on a bench and read. She notes that cover photos of Croom depict the poet as virtually unchanging over the decades. His poetry, critics have marveled, is "elemental"- "fierce"-"lyrical and savage"-"potent as a force of nature." Abigail reads, enthralled, though not always with full comprehension, of the ancient Gaelic warrior-hero Cuchulain, and of the cruel god of the Mexican Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl, overseer of lavish sacrificial rites, flaying, and canni-balism. Croom's poems are populated with falcons, snakes, panthers, sharks, stallions, and bulls. Abigail feels a shuddery identification with the eviscerated horses of Croom's controversial poem, "The Bullfight"- As the screaming horses' entrails twist in dust & Time so my soul twists in mad resis- trance to Oblivion.

Abigail admires the clever slant-rhyme (if that's what it is) and the poet's "intransigent and stoic vision of nature 'before God was love,' to quote Croom's mentor D. H. Lawrence" (a quote from the book cover).

Middle Age: A Romance *

Abigail glances up, hearing voices and laughter. Young teenagers on their way home from school. She feels a pang of loss: Jared is gone from her, and shows no sign of wanting to return. She hasn't seen the Chinese girl in the red beret for-how long? Two weeks? For all Abigail knows the girl has vanished. Her family has moved away from Salthill. Or the girl had never been. Abigail feels a stabbing sensation in the region of her heart, the loss of a presence she never knew.

" I . I am thrilled. As an undergraduate at Bennington College . . ."

On the day of the Festival of Flowers, Abigail rises early. She anxiously rewrites, rehearses her introduction of Donegal Croom. What if the poet, notoriously "sensitive," is offended by her fawning praise! She has an appointment with her hairdresser at nine o'clock. She makes her face up with elaborate, talismanic care. The eyes especially. His poetry is filled with eyes.

She changes her clothes several times, like a giddy young girl in another, more romantic era. At last, in a newly purchased Hermes suit of raw silk, champagne-colored, worn with a black silk scarf and a smart black straw hat and black Gucci pumps, Abigail arrives a half-hour early at the Salthill Inn, as Beatrice Archer has requested. So excited! My destiny. My fate. Why not? I'm still young. Abigail has spent so many hours reading and rereading Croom's poetry, writing and rewriting her five-minute introduction, the pupils of her eyes look as if she's been mainlining belladonna and her brain hasn't been so taxed since college, when she had to concoct twenty-page word-cocoons on such subjects as light and dark imagery in Joseph Con-rad's Heart of Darkness, "original sin" in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the theme of the "double" in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. She sees, in the lobby of the Inn, her friend Beatrice with an older, slack-faced man in a denim jacket. "Abigail, come here!" Beatrice is anxious, and clutches at Abigail's hand like a schoolgirl. The man in the denim jacket must be-Donegal Croom? Abigail stares, shocked. Of course she knows that the poet must be older than she recalls, but this is like meeting Donegal Croom's father . . . His hair is wanly leonine, falling in putty-colored wings that frame his red-cobweb face; his nose is frankly swollen; his eyes are bloodshot and appear not quite in focus. Yet he wears a youthful denim jacket and black T-shirt and jeans; his stomach pushes out above the buckle of his hemp belt. In his left earlobe he's wearing a single gold stud

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that winks like a perverse little eye. When Beatrice introduces Abigail, Croom peers at her rudely. His nostrils sniff like an aroused dog's. He's hardly more than Abigail's height: has he shrunken? He gives off a faintly sour odor, mixed with a fresher scent of toothpaste and cologne. He looks as if he hasn't shaved for a day or more, nor has he combed through his snarled hair. Abigail hears herself laughing giddily. "Mr. Croom, you called me 'Abrigail,' once. A long time ago." Croom says in a booming voice, "Good! That calls for a pre-luncheon drink, 'Abrigail'." He steers her away from Beatrice Archer and several other smiling women waiting to be introduced to the famous poet, and leads her into the dimly lit "tap room" off the lobby. It's only just twelve noon, there's no one behind the bar. "Bartender!" Donegal Croom bares his teeth in a grimace of a smile and pounds on the bar with his fist. "This is an emergency." Abigail, mortified, stands by his side; he's holding her wrist, as if keeping her hostage. Croom says, "Salt-hill. A suburb of New York City? Have I been here before, dear?

You're very beautiful but you all look alike." Abigail tries to explain that Salthill-on-Hudson isn't a suburb really, it's a village dating back to the early *s, but Croom, distracted by his quest for a bartender, isn't listening. She wants to tell him how powerful his poetry is; how much it has meant to her, over the years; what a solace poetry is, as one experiences the turmoil of life . . . At last a moustached black man in a crisp white coat emerges, polite if unsmiling, and takes drink orders. "Two single malt whiskeys. Straight." Abigail isn't clear whether one of these is for her, or whether both are for the poet; she won't touch any drink that contains alcohol, she vows. Quickly Donegal Croom swallows down half his whiskey, with a sigh of satisfaction. He's sitting now on one of the bar stools, his head in his hands. At his feet is a battered canvas suitcase; he'd come to Salthill directly from La Guardia, and hasn't yet checked into his room at the Inn, where he's staying the night. He seems to have forgotten that Abigail is with him, raising the whiskey glass to his mouth, rocking a little on the bar stool, shoulders hunched. He's murmuring to himself-what?

Abigail imagines Gaelic words, potent and mysterious. At such close quarters Abigail can see how thin Donegal's hair is at the back of his head; it looks as if his hair is sliding down, exposing his pale-pink scalp. Donegal finishes the second whiskey and calls for a third, but Abigail daringly in-tercedes: "No more for Mr. Croom, please! We have to leave now."

Croom turns to Abigail, scowling. He seems, for a moment, not to know who she is. Then, sighing, he says, "Good. You're quite right, dear.

Middle Age: A Romance

Always, you're right." He lays an unexpectedly gentle hand on Abigail's slender shoulder. His fingers crinkle the beautiful raw silk. "They've sent you to me, eh? My muse. Good." Swaying on his bar stool, Donegal leans in Abigail's direction as if he's about to kiss her; Abigail stands unmoving, as if hypnotized. What is happening? What does Croom mean by calling her his muse? In the doorway, Beatrice Archer and several other commit-tee members are signaling anxiously. Abigail says softly, "Mr. Croom, excuse me? I think we must leave now. Will you come with me?"

"Anywhere, dear. With you. La belle dame de merci."

Croom takes Abigail's hand and kisses the palm, in a gesture so sudden and so intimate, Abigail feels faint. And my friends saw! For the moment, Abigail Des Pres can't be happier.

L , ungainly fish on its tail Donegal Croom is led by Abigail into the noisy ballroom. Everywhere are banks of flowers, a giddy paradise of flowers, some fresh-cut and others in attractive pots. And there are pyr-amids of Donegal Croom's books, to be sold after the luncheon, and signed by the poet. What an elegant, festive occasion! Croom stares, like a man waking with difficulty from a dream. "Gaelic" music is being piped into the cavernous space, and Croom seems to be looking about for its source. "I must be dead. Dead would explain all." Abigail leads Croom through the maze of lavishly decorated tables, determined to get him to the speakers'

platform. He's leaning rather heavily on her. He's breathing rather heavily.

His hair is falling into his face, his skin is flushed. He stumbles on the steps to the platform, but Abigail steadies him, like an old, dependable wife. Abigail pulls out his chair for him, and sits beside him, smiling. Oh, smiling! Her friends gaze up at her, admiring the black straw hat, the gleaming helmet of hair beneath, the striking Hermes suit; possibly they're envious of Abigail Des Pres, for the first time in years. Abigail likes the feeling. Except she's very nervous. She has no more appetite than Donegal Croom for the luncheon, cream of asparagus soup dribbled with parsley and puff pastries stuffed with seafood, "baby salad greens" dribbled with low-caloric vinaigrette and fresh raspberries for dessert. And meager serv-ings of a very dry, not terribly good chardonnay. (Seeing that Abigail isn't drinking, Donegal Croom unobtrusively appropriates her glass as his own.) Abigail gazes out into the enormous flower-festooned space through the poet's bloodshot eyes: she sees the tables of petal-faced,

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colorfully costumed women, so many tables, so many women, chattering like birds. What a din! And everywhere clusters of roses, lilies, irises, orchids, gardenias . . . Abigail sees the women of Salthill, her sisters: all of them beautiful. Strange, that all are beautiful. The plain have been transformed into beauties by the magic of affluence. And there are no longer "ugly" women, at all. Meringue hair, glaring cosmetic faces, piranha smiles, jewels that wink like semaphore signals. That commingled drunken smell of myriad perfumes. "Help me, dear. Oh, Chri-ist. I think I might be leaking." Donegal Croom mutters in Abigail's ear, she can't determine if he's serious or joking, his flushed cobweb-face drawn into a grimace of-what?

Anticipation, dread? Acknowledgment of the Salthill women's girlish-thrilled applause? But Abigail Des Pres must precede him, and now Beatrice Archer introduces her. In her high-heeled Gucci pumps she's standing at the podium. Trembling visibly. Oh, so frightened! Her friends gaze up at her, willing her to do well. Yet not too well, so that they might envy her even more. "I am deeply honored. I am thrilled. As an undergraduate at Bennington College . . ." In a dream the introduction passes, and suddenly Abigail is returning to her seat, blushing fiercely, wanting to think that the girlish-thrilled applause is at least partly for her. Donegal Croom stands at the podium, nudging his protuberant belly against it. He has put on reading glasses that give him a mock-grandfatherly air, even as the gold stud glitters lewdly in his ear. In Salthill, no men of Croom's generation wear earrings: earrings are worn by gay waiters, and there are not many of these.

Behind the podium Croom looms large, sighing improvidently into the microphone, with a sound as of distant thunder. He frowns as he leafs through much-thumbed paperback books with no air of great urgency.

Hasn't he prepared his reading? Is he taking this occasion so lightly, that means so much to the Friends of the Salthill Medical Center? Eventually Croom begins speaking, his voice near-inaudible at first and then stronger, and more melodic, like a music box that has been cranked up. In an oracu-lar tone he proclaims to the more than three hundred women in the ballroom, each staring avidly at him, that poetry is a "mystical revelation"-it is "anarchic"-it is "Dionysian"-it is "divination." He confides in them, that poetry has "saved my life." Poetry has "given my life its singular meaning." And that one must, to comprehend poetry as well as to create it, "succumb to the demon within. And have faith!" At this there's a flurry of applause. Croom's bloodshot eyes scan the room, the vertiginous flower-space before him, the rapt uplifted female faces, and begins at last to read, Middle Age: A Romance