"Cal . . . wants to move back in with me into our old apartment on 67th Street across from Central Park. It's where we lived for most of the twenty-one years of our marriage until he left me for Caroline. It's where I've lived for the past seven years without Cal." Cal is purportedly Robert Lowell, the sixth Poet Laureate of the United States, and the speaker, "Lizzie," is Elizabeth Hardwick, a writer and critic whose true-life partnership with...