Oh, that intricate widow’s weave of the feminine grapevine. Sylvia disdained feminine friendship, for the most part. She was neither a borrower nor a lender, and she didn’t much like having her clothes critiqued. All the same, did Ted hold a smile or a handclasp too lingeringly, or so much as leave the house with his top trouser button undimpled, one or another of the neighbor ladies would report him promptly to his wife. Sylvia kept a log in her journal. The dirty laundry ladies had him screwing behind flowerpots. They had birds bending over in the gutter. This was fiction, for the most part. Not that there weren’t trysts, especially once he got on the radio. War-bred romantic that he was, Ted had married for love and not compatibility, and love was all very well while the marriage’s mystery held. Sylvia affected a fetching lilt to her speech. It had an almost flawless Camden Town meter to it. It grated on his nerves terribly when she began speaking to her own mother across the Atlantic and even coochie-cooing to the babies in that voice. Where he wanted mystery, she was providing artifice. When she smiled, there were so many teeth. American dentistry was a lupine burlesque. When they argued, her teeth simply got in the way, masticating Ted into a tight corner.

He was home again. He was married to a talented, midlevel poet for whom he had great affection and prodigious hopes. Nightly, she made up their bed in the first-floor room that they were using for a nursery. The demarcations, you see, were written in rock once those babies were born. It was strange because most poets experience the claustrophobia of blockage only when they are without a set of imperatives and limitations, whereas, in Ted’s mind, circumspection was simply not a perspective that a true poet could work from. Here he was in a psychological lockup. And married to the jailer. Naturally, the only thing that could emancipate him was love as well. New love. That was when he met Assia.

6.

Sylvia

When Sylvia went back into the front room, she saw that the walls were filled with crawling data. Celtic majuscule shimmering on the plaster. W. B. Yeats, the house’s onetime occupant, egging her on from his ghost pulpit.