Free Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood

legs of the woman poet. He didn’t care any more who she might know. He went over to where Selena had just sat down, with a cup of coffee brought to her by Max.
    “I liked your poems,” he managed to get out.
    “Liked? Liked?” He thought she was making fun of him, although she wasn’t smiling.
“Liked
is so margarine. How about
adored?”
    “Adored, then,” he said, feeling like an idiot twice over – for having said
liked
in the first place, and for jumping through her hoop in the second. But he got his reward. She asked him to sit down.
    Up close her eyes were turquoise, the irises dark-ringed like a cat’s. In her ears were blue-green earrings in the form of scarabs. Her face was heart-shaped, her skin pale; to Richard, who had been dabbling in the French Symbolists, it evoked the word
lilac
. The shawl, the darkly outlined eyes, the earrings – few would have been able to pull it off. But she acted as if this was just her ordinary get-up.What you’d wear any day on a journey down the Nile, five thousand years ago.
    It was of a piece with her performance – bizarre, but assured. Fully achieved. The worst of it was that she was only eighteen.
    “That’s a lovely shawl,” Richard attempted. His tongue felt like a beef sandwich.
    “It’s not a shawl, it’s a tablecloth,” she said. She looked down at it, stroked it. Then she laughed a little. “It’s a shawl
now.”
    Richard wondered if he should dare to ask – what? If he could walk her home? Did she have anything so mundane as a home? But what if she said no? While he was deliberating, Max the bullet-headed coffee hack walked over and put a possessive hand on her shoulder, and she smiled up at him. Richard didn’t wait to see if it meant anything. He excused himself, and left.
    He went back to his rented room and composed a sestina to her. It was a dismal effort; it captured nothing about her. He did what he had never before done to one of his poems. He burnt it.
    Over the next few weeks Richard got to know her better. Or he thought he did. When he came into the coffee-house on Tuesday nights, she would greet him with a nod, a smile. He would go over and sit down, and they would talk. She never spoke about herself, her life. Instead she treated him as if he were a fellow professional, an initiate, like herself. Her talk was about the magazines which had accepted her poems, about projects she’d begun. She was writing a verse play for radio; she would be paid for it. She seemed to think it was only a matter of time before she’d be earning enough money to live on, though she had very little conception of how much
enough
would be. She didn’t say what she was living on at the moment.
    Richard found her naïve. He himself had taken the sensible course: with a graduate degree he could always make an income of some sort in the academic salt-mines. But who would pay a livingwage for poetry, especially the kind she wrote? It wasn’t in the style of anyone, it didn’t sound like anything else. It was too eccentric.
    She was like a child sleepwalking along a roof-ledge ten storeys up. He was afraid to call out in warning, in case she should wake, and fall.
    Mary Jo the librarian had phoned him several times. He’d put her off with vague mumbles about overwork. On the rare Sunday when he still turned up at his parents’ house to do his laundry and eat what his father called a decent meal for once, he had to endure the pained scrutiny of his mother. Her theory was that he was straining his brain, which could lead to anaemia. In fact he was hardly working at all. His room was silting up with unmarked, overdue student papers; he hadn’t written another poem, another line. Instead he went out for gummy egg sandwiches or glasses of draught beer at the local beverage room, or to afternoon movies, sleazy double features about women with two heads or men who got changed into flies. Evenings he spent at the coffee-house. He was no longer feeling jaded. He was