by Evelyn Hooven (December 2025)
Along with my matinée ticket, the box office had a message for me marked urgent. She couldn’t make it for the show, but would, as planned, be at the restaurant for dinner. Her husband arrived yesterday from Peru, was in New York for a medical conference. The urgent message seemed a compressed version of a subterfuge instruction. She and I had met in Barcelona at an outdoor café. Each one was there to see La Sagrada Família of world-famous Gaudi. No time for the details of her note. The show, prompt even for a two-performance day, was about to begin.
When it was over, the press of the crowd lasted all the short way to the restaurant. The man seated alone at a table for three or four was her husband. He seemed welcoming. After a brief, talkative effort, my Spanish, his English gave way to a common language—reliable school French. He seemed fine and honest—dedicated both to work and family—genuine, not merely for an image.
It was toward the betrayal of this man that I was expected to serve as a central tool.
My permission had never been requested. Consent was—arrogantly—assumed. Hendry R, my old friend from student days, had come here to see me, not this man’s wife.
Swiftly, risking severe abruptness, I extracted a bill from my purse, put on my jacket. “I’m not feeling very well, please excuse me. I can manage. At this hour, taxis are easy. Thanks, I’m glad to meet you, too.”
In the taxi towards home, I felt relief—no longer a possible tool for betrayal. This relief, though, was distinctly pleasureless.
I had not yet come upon the poet Auden’s mysterious declarative: “To be free is often to be lonely.”
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Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French and Spanish have appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.
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