Jim Gardener and Patricia McCardle’s relationship

Jim Gardener and Patricia McCardle’s relationship is an uneasy professional alliance sharpened by mutual irritation: she needs a replacement poet and can influence his future work, while he needs the fee and refuses to conceal his resentment. Their exchange moves between practical dependence, pointed teasing, and public antagonism. The strain is most visible when Gard struggles during a reading and suspects Patricia would welcome his failure; instead, he recovers enough to address the audience and provoke her. The evidence establishes no reconciliation, only a rivalry whose leverage is unequal and whose grievances persist.

An Urgent Professional Arrangement

Patricia is the principal contributor and organizer of the New England Poetry Caravan. When one of its six scheduled poets dies shortly before the tour, the resulting vacancy threatens the program she has sold to venues. After approaching four other poets without success, she calls Jim, whom she has employed before and with whom there has already been trouble. She asks directly whether he is still drinking. Jim answers that he drinks a little but is not bingeing; Patricia responds that she doubts him.

Their familiarity makes the recruitment less like a fresh negotiation than a return to an old contest. Jim calls her Patty, knowing she dislikes the nickname, and asks whether she is calling because the Caravan is short a poet or for some more pressing reason. Their mutual awareness of the provocation is part of the exchange: he enjoys irritating her, and she recognizes what he is doing. The teasing does not soften their relationship; it establishes the combative terms on which they will work together.

Contract, Fees, and Leverage

The arrangement serves both parties, but for different reasons. Jim wants the money to buy a used wood furnace before winter; Patricia needs a poet to fill the Caravan’s dates. She comes with a contract in triplicate and a notary, making clear that this will not rest on an informal promise. The written terms give her substantial leverage: if Jim leaves the tour for a reason she considers unacceptable, he forfeits any unpaid fee and must return the advance within thirty days.

Jim understands that leaving would cost him more than the money already at stake. Patricia could pursue repayment, prevent him from reading on other poetry tours associated with her, and affect his prospects through the grants and literary institutions she supports. Her influence is indirect as well as contractual: committees administer the grants, but Patricia helps ensure that the various programs work together. Jim therefore sees her as capable of silencing opportunities he might otherwise have. His suspicion that she would retaliate partly because he called her Patty makes the professional dispute inseparable from their personal antagonism.

Conflict in Public

During a later reading, Jim suffers a painful episode that disrupts his performance. Under the hall’s fluorescent lights, he sees Patricia watching him and interprets her expression as satisfaction at the possibility that he will falter. He imagines her treating his collapse as punishment for having made her plead to recruit him. The episode is filtered through Jim’s perception; the text shows his conviction about her attitude, not an explicit admission from Patricia.

When the vision breaks, the audience’s faces appear worried or embarrassed, while Patricia alone seems quietly satisfied. Jim addresses the room, apologizes, and explains that he had been deciding whether to read new poems. He turns the moment into a joke about the contest between artistic pride and prudence, then directs a defiant remark toward Patricia. The audience laughs, and he sees anger rise in her face. His recovery is not a settlement: it is a brief reversal in which he regains control of the room and makes her frustration visible.

Grievance and Continuing Antagonism

The rivalry continues beyond the reading. Ron Cummings warns Jim that Patricia would like to remove him from the tour and urges him not to give her a reason. Jim answers dismissively, but the exchange confirms that Patricia’s power over his employment remains an active concern. At another gathering, Jim begins discussing the Kyshtym nuclear accident; when he describes the consequences of the disaster, the room falls silent and Patricia’s expression is marked by anger. His account makes the confrontation public again, though the evidence does not show that he gives this speech specifically to attack her.

Jim’s private warning to himself after the reading is that Patricia will not forget or forgive. That expectation captures the relationship’s durable shape: their dealings are practical, but never neutral. Her ability to control contracts and access to professional networks contrasts with his reliance on wit, persistence, and the occasional public retort. The tour brings them into cooperation without resolving the older trouble between them, and the narrative leaves their antagonism in place rather than offering a reconciliation.