Thank you, Lois.
Thank you all for coming.
I'm going to read three pieces to you tonight.
First, a section from the start of my novel,
Going Blind and then two short stories.
The section from the novel has a reading time
of about 10 minutes and each of the short stories a little bit
over 20 minutes.
First, from the start of my novel, Going Blind.
By now my friend, Auguste was flat as a man of gingerbread
buckled at the knees and curled at the feet by two hot and oven
up, nibbled cruelly up and down his long limbs and sides.
Apologizing for our lateness, Ruth, bent down to him.
Her right hand touched his cheek and neck
while her left caught up the brown black hair that fell
swinging to shroud their kiss.
A dark delta of damp like the mark of a tongue
had stained the side of her sleeveless summer dress.
Auguste and I had become close friends in college.
We had competed for the praise of professors
nervously showing each other our poems, often gotten
drunk together, though alcohol turned him a steaming red.
From graduate schools on opposite coasts,
we had exchanged letters steadily.
A year after he joined the State University's Manhattan branch,
he helped me get a job there too.
There, I spent so much time with him and his wife, Ruth,
that we were a threesome.
And there we had been colleagues for years.
Before the future seemed so clear, it was unmentionable.
He would die, I would marry her.
This prospect had brightened in a dawn so slow
that I sometimes felt we had glimpsed it from the beginning.
He had always had a way.
Once romantic, later frightening of seeming likely to die soon.
The least of complaints down to sunburn and earache
and insomnia punished him more severely than anyone else.
His aching teeth poisoned him.
His colds became pneumonia.
Cancer beat upon him gradually as a ship
on the horizon that grows taller only after you have
forgotten about it for a while.
Auguste had had big stomach trouble for years-
an ache, a stitch, spasmodic bowels.
And then one day, Ruth told me he just came out
of the bathroom and said it had been bloody.
She hunched her shoulders so that I
wanted to wrap her like a child chilled in a wet swimsuit.
Dark blood, she said from high up.
"Sigmoidoscopy revealed a polyp and nothing."
Said the Surgeon Feldman who removed it.
But not many months later there were more polyps
and Feldman took out part of Auguste's colon.
I went to the hospital every day, then to the apartment
when Auguste came home.
Brought paperbacks into magazines
that grew in stacks on his bedside table,
brought quarts of rich ice cream the color
of old ivory with mahogany swirls,
though Auguste never had more than a swallow or two.
Ruth would slowly eat a dish full
and I would polish off the course
with a silver serving spoon.
Auguste returned to teaching and the book
he was writing on plot in Dickens.
Again, he and Ruth went to meetings of their citizens
commission attacking civic problems whose
hopelessness paralyzed me.
And all weekend afternoons, the three of us
walked in Central Park.
At Christmas, they vacationed in Italy, at Easter,
in San Francisco.
I often imagined his dying far from home.
And when my phone rang I have believed that the voice would
be Ruth's, fuzzy with distance.
There would be calls to airline ticket offices,
a taxi to the airport, and at last I
would descend to where Ruth waited for me alone.
But it was more than a year later
and Auguste was still feeling fine
when Feldman's examination dictated more surgery.
"This time should do it," he said.
He removed what was left of Auguste's large intestine.
Through an off center hole below the navel,
he drew out the stub of the small intestine
so that it emptied fecal matter into a plastic bag held
on with glue and surgical tape.
"Your longevity should now be unaffected,"
Auguste quoted for us giving the surgeon's phrases
a rich juiciness, swimming, skiing, absolutely.
Auguste had never done either.
"Everything should be normal, marital relations included."
A ghastly smile crossed my friend's face.
This time, when he came home from the hospital
he was so gaunt that his wedding ring slipped off and was lost.
His appetite did not recover quickly.
There were nights when I, sitting uncomfortably
in his place at the blond maple table
opposite Ruth, slim clasped hands and evasive eyes,
stayed to eat the dinner that she had made for him.
But again, stubborn as evolution.
At first, pale and perspiring, he got out of bed to his feet
into clothes that sagged and flapped looser
than ever to the kitchen and his study
and the classroom where he taught.
We three again took our walks, though shorter and slower ones
now.
That Christmas, he and Ruth went to Japan
with five days in Hawaii.
Jogging through the snowy park, my breath smoking
as though I were on fire inside, I
thought of them roomed in a high hotel, Auguste resting on a bed
shirtless while Ruth unpacked.
The spring semester was hardly begun
before he started feeling ill and weakened.
The word metastasis was used.
When Ruth asked about more surgery,
Feldman only shrugged his mustache
in a small smile of defeat and said softly,
"There comes a point."
Instead, he ordered chemotherapy and of course radiation.
"This will help him for a while," he told us.
Weekend afternoons while Auguste dozed,
Ruth still sometimes walked with me.
There was no pleasure in Central Park where
he had stepped on the pads beside us,
sat with us on the benches to rest and talk.
Instead near my apartment, West of Amsterdam Avenue
on 123rd Street, we walked the West side.
Along Amsterdam sometimes on sidewalks patched with litter
and glittering with smashed glass, across 125th Street
and up the hill beyond past the empty department of parks
Sheltering Arms pool which shimmered in summer
with every human tint.
On beyond the university's brownstone facades,
past its attendant bookstores, the campus grill,
as far as the Church of Believers
in the Commandments of God, windows
opaque with biblical texts in psychedelic colors.
But farther North than that, it was unsafe to go
and a greener route became our usual one.
We climbed my block to Broadway, turned
left past Jewish Theological Seminary,
crossed Broadway at 122nd, strolled West another block
and into Sakara Park.
Here, Ruth would stop me to gaze at Butterfield 1831, 1901, who
with arms calmly folded with scabbard sword
and brave mustache told us that pain
should be forgotten like insects crawling upon one's plinth.
Butterfield was twice my size and seemed still
to be growing his head in the leaves of the tree behind him.
What did he care for Julio Puppet Sly
125 whose blue and orange scrawled
smeared his military cloak.
He would be watching over tree shaded walks and marble benches
when they were fallen to mold.
We walked on across Riverside Drive and into Riverside Park.
At Grant's tomb on a cement bench inlaid
with bright mosaic swirls, we rested and watched
camera dangling visitors come and go in busloads.
A pushcart vendor sold us giant pretzels.
Walking slowly now, we headed North past children
swarming at too few swings and benches
full of motionless grandparents to the grave
of the amiable child.
Died in the fifth year of his age
Ruth read bending close to the little plaque,
holding back her tumbling hair, removing her sunglasses,
replacing them.
There was a fine view of the Jersey Shore
where shining apartment towers soared
from the steep wooded bank.
Upriver, the George Washington Bridge hung loops of silver
in the declining sun.