Boswell

Part Two

At first the voice was simply conversational, pleasant to listen to there in the dark. I settled myself comfortably and tried to guess what the speaker was like. This mattered more than what he was saying, though it wasn’t very important either. Nothing was. It probably wasn’t important for the old speaker either. (I pictured him as very old.) I imagined him to be as comfortable as myself. We might have been in Purgatory together, or on some battlefield after the noise and terror of the day.

After a while the voice became a little husky. He may have been thirsty. That was too bad, I thought; he should either drink something or stop talking. The strain became more obvious, and though I could still hear him almost as clearly as before it was plain that he was making a greater effort. It occurred to me that he may have been in some peculiar position, and I thought, Why doesn’t he change it if it’s such an effort to talk from? As he substituted effort for momentum his speech became less objective, more urgent. I might have been able to learn something from this old man, I thought, if only he hadn’t become thirsty.

“She mustn’t see him,” the voice was saying. “Not after what he did to her. Why do you suppose I’m here now? It was the shock. What a shock that was. Never mind about that. I’ll see to it that he’s punished. She won’t have to be there. You promise me. Promise.”

He was probably right, I thought resentfully, there was no reason to expose the child. (I knew she was very young just as I knew he was very old.) But why did he have to shout? He seemed more convincing, I thought, when he simply stated his position.

“Stop that noise,” another voice, deeper, surly, said. “You’re unappreciative,” it added unexpectedly.

“Will everyone please be quiet?” a third voice said. This last voice seemed very near and I wondered if it was me who had spoken. It seemed odd that I should have said anything. None of this had anything to do with me.

“Oh, shut up,” said the second voice angrily.

“Are you talking to me?” I asked.

“Another county heard from,” said the second voice.

“Look,” said a fourth voice, “my head hurts very bad tonight, even worse than usual. But you never hear me complain.”

“You’re complaining right now,” the second voice said logically. “If your head hurts so bad why don’t you tell her?”

“Promise me,” said the first voice. “Promise me.”

“All right,” the third voice said wearily, “I promise you.” I listened very carefully. It wasn’t I who had spoken. It was somebody older.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the second voice when I realized he hadn’t meant me when he had said shut up.

“Sleep,” the fourth voice said, “if anybody had ever told me I’d be lying down for as long as this and not be able to sleep, I’d have said he was crazy.”

So that was it, I thought. That explains the peculiar sound of the first man’s voice. He was lying down. I was probably lying down also. Then I wondered why I was lying down. I wondered why it was so dark.

“Excuse me,” I said, “where are we?”

“Another county heard from,” said the second voice.

“He must be coming out of it. I’ll bet he has some headache,” the fourth voice said pleasantly.

“I’m James Boswell,” I said. It occurred to me that

if I introduced myself they might tell me their names, and where we were, and why it was so dark.

“How do you do?” the third voice said.

“Charmed,” the second voice said. “All right, everybody get some sleep. That’s the best thing.”

“Promise me. Promise me,” said the first voice.

“Tell him,” the third voice said.

“Buddy? Buddy?” the second voice said.

“Are you talking to me?” I said. I was the fifth voice.

The second voice ignored me. “He dropped off,” he said after a while. “I’m next.”

“Right,” the third voice said.

No one said anything else. I wasn’t tired. I hadn’t been asleep and couldn’t remember when I had been asleep, but I wasn’t tired. It was very dark. If I hadn’t been asleep I should have been able to remember how it had gotten dark.

I wondered if I could move my arms. I pushed them laterally away from my body. I was surprised how easy it was. Suddenly my hands touched something solid and metallic and cold. Bars. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I tried to sit up but couldn’t manage it. It was peculiar. I remembered the fourth voice had spoken of pain but I felt no pain. Probably the fourth voice didn’t either. Men tended to boast about pain. Most of it was just talk.

Then, suddenly, without any effort on my part at all, I understood what had happened. I started to shout. “I’m James Boswell. I’m James Boswell. I’m James Boswell.”

“Listen,” I yelled, “you can ask my uncle. Ask Herlitz. There’s been a mistake.”

Of course, I thought. I still had the mask on; they had sealed the eyeholes. That’s why it was so dark. The idiots, the lazy god-damned idiots — they had buried me as The Masked Playboy!

“I’m James Boswell,” I screamed. “I’m James Boswell!”

“Now, now, now, now,” a new voice, close to me, said.

“Not in a common grave,” I pleaded. “For God’s sake, not in a common grave. I have a name. I’m James Boswell! Take off the mask and you’ll see.”

“That bandage has to stay on,” the new voice said.

“Not in a common grave,” I said.

“Get him out of here,” the second voice said suddenly.

I was very grateful. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate all you’ve done. I realize how it must be for you, but I have a name. I’m James Boswell.”

“We’ll put him in 508,” the new voice said.

Sure, of course, I thought, thirteen.

Hands were suddenly lifting me, scooping me out of the grave.

“He weighs a ton,” another voice said.

Ah, I thought sadly, dead weight.

They shoved me onto some sort of slab and began to wheel me through the dark. It was very pleasant. Sure, I thought. I’m James Boswell. Fair is fair.

“I must have given you people some trouble last night,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It was the morphine talking,” the nurse said. “You’re off it now, anyhow. You have too many anxieties to take morphine.”

“My pain is very bad,” I said.

“We’ll give you some codeine,” the nurse said. “Is there anything else you need?” she asked when she had finished bathing me.

I shook my head. “Nurse,” I said, “am I going to die?”

“Of what?”

“Well,” I said, “my beating.”

“No, of course not.”

“There’s no sclerotic damage?”

“Sclerotic damage?”

“Well, the bandages,” I said.

“Those are for your bruises.”

“What about a concussion?”

“The x-rays were perfectly clean. Look, Mr. Boswell, your doctor should be telling you all this.”

“Was there any damage to the kidneys? To the lungs?”

“Really,” she said, “you do have anxieties.”

“Was there?”

“I doubt if you’ve even been checked for any. You haven’t even any broken bones. You were just very badly beaten up.”

“I’m not in any danger, then?” I said.

“Only from the nurses,” she said pleasantly.

“Where did you go to school, Doctor?” I asked after the nurse had left.

“The University of Chicago.”

“The University of Chicago, that’s one of the best in the country, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s certainly a top-flight school, yes.”

“This may seem too forward,” I said, “but if you don’t mind me saying so you strike me as being a very excellent doctor.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“I’ll bet you were at the very top of your class.”

“I was second in my graduating class,” he said.

“Second,” I said.

“A young woman was first. Dr. Angela Shauffert. She became a mission doctor in Africa and was killed during one of the tribal wars. It was a terrible waste.”

“Well, you’re the top now,” I said suddenly.

“What’s that?”

“I mean if she was first and she’s dead, that means you’re first now. I mean, there’s no living doctor who did better than you did in your graduating class.”

“Well, I suppose that’s true, though I don’t see what difference it makes,” the doctor said.

“You’re very modest, Doctor,” I said. Closing my chart, he shrugged and prepared to leave. The nurse came back with a mirror and held it in front of my face.

“How many stitches did you say I had?” I asked the doctor.

“Thirty-seven.”

“That must be the record,” I said.

“Hardly,” he said, “but it would almost make a good pair of pants.”

“Will there be scars?”

“No, I don’t think so. Most of them will heal very rapidly.”

“I look pretty bad,” I said.

“Did you know I saw the fight?” the nurse said to the doctor. “It was awful. I thought those things were fixed.”

“He damn near killed me,” I said. “When I collapsed in the dressing room I thought I was finished.”

“Well, you’ll be fighting again in no time,” the nurse said.

“In no time is right,” I said.

The nurse took the chart from the doctor and went out of the room. The doctor was about to follow her when I called out to him. “Oh, Doctor,” I said, “one other thing.”

“Really,” he said, turning around, “you’ll be fine.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not about that. Have you ever had anything in the Medical Journal?”

“Well, I have, yes.” He laughed. “You seem so interested.”

“I am interested,” I said. “Could you bring me a copy?”

“Of the Medical Journal?”

“Of your article in the Medical Journal. Now that my bandages are off and I can read again, I’d like to read something really worthwhile.”

“But it’s technical. Anyway, it has nothing to do with anything you’ve got, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“No, of course not,” I said. “Please, Doctor.”

He brought his article when he came to see me today. It was about how blood pressure can affect the secretion of certain glands. As he had warned, it was very technical and I had to read it through three times before I could begin to understand it. But even on first reading I realized that the doctor was right, and I started to feel very good about him, and very proud of the both of us. When I put the article down I leaned back contentedly. That man has dressed my wounds, I thought, taken my. blood pressure.

Really, it is remarkable how I continue to respect the very people I take advantage of.

For three days now I have used my ambulatory status to explore the hospital.

I have met Mrs. Slabe. She is very important to the functioning of this place, yet she heals no one. She is, in a way, its bookkeeper. She defines its larger ends, giving it form, compass, reality. Without Mrs. Slabe the concept of “hospital” would be too abstract. In spite of her importance, however, Mrs. Slabe remains obscure; practically none of the staff know of either her existence or her work. I discovered her by accident.

In a hospital I like to visit the sick, to go into the kitchens in the basement, to see its operating theaters, its therapy rooms, even its furnaces and auxiliary power plant. I like to walk against the inclination of its concrete ramps, to sit in its emergency wards at night and watch the dependable foregathering, like some sullen reunion of a clan, of the losers of fights, the suddenly attacked, the poor, the dying. I like to step into the waiting rooms where the well keep bored vigil turning the pages of back-issue magazines and yesterday’s newspapers, to stop in its corridors where people with a higher stake sit leaning forward on card chairs beyond partially closed doors, listening critically to the noises of their wounded like students in the gallery of a concert hall following a score.

I had gone into its laundry with its white, soft dunes of sheets and learned the lesson there. There were sheets crusted with blood, with brown and yellowish stains, with the bright, obscene paints of the malfunctioning body. There were sheets which to the naked eye appeared white, but the machines were indifferent to these distinctions and ground democratically away at everything submitted to them, assuming filth like some first premise.

I had been on every floor, along every corridor, and yesterday came to the hospital’s morgue. I might have missed it, for it is a room behind a locked, unmarked door, but as I came up two orderlies were wheeling in a dead, pale child. I followed them in.

“Hey,” one of the orderlies said when he saw me, “you ain’t supposed to be in here.”

“I knew the boy,” I said.

“That don’t make no difference,” the orderly said. “This ain’t anything for a patient to see.” He held the door open for me and I had to leave. As I was walking out he turned back to the other orderly. “That guy made me forget to pull the ticket for Mrs. Slabe.”

I went to the personnel office. “Where does Mrs. Slabe work, please?” I asked the girl. She looked it up in her file and read the card to herself. She seemed puzzled.

“Did you want to see Mrs. Slabe for any special reason?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said fiercely, “a special reason.”

Mrs. Slabe worked on the top floor of the hospital’s oldest wing in a small office that must once have been a private room. It was exactly like the room I was in three floors below. Mrs. Slabe, a plump, small woman of about fifty-five, worked at a wooden desk in which were the conventional “out” and “in” baskets, like double bunks in a child’s room. There was an adding machine, and one of those long, thin spikes rising from a broad metal base that you see on the cashier’s counter in restaurants where truck drivers stop.

Mrs. Slabe was holding a green slip and copying information from it into a ledger when I walked in. When she had finished she impaled the slip on the spike as if it were a restaurant check.

“Mrs. Slabe,” I said briskly.

She seemed startled to see a patient. “What is it?” she asked a little nervously.

“Did the orderly bring you the slip on that little boy?”

“Yes,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

“Let me see it, please.”

She reached into the out basket

“Your little joke, Mrs. Slabe?”

“Yes,” she said guiltily.

I looked at the slip. “Then this hasn’t been entered yet,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I was just going to do it.”

“Let me see your ledger, please.”

She pushed the book toward me. As I had suspected, it was a record of all the births and deaths that had occurred in the hospital. The deaths, entered in Mrs. Slabe’s neat little hand, were written in red ink, the births in black. Debits and credits. There were three columns— name, date, fate.

“May I see a total?” I said.

“From the beginning or just this year?”

“Both, of course,” I said.

Mrs. Slabe suddenly recovered herself. “This is restricted information,” she said.

“I’m Dr. Boswell,” I said.

“About the boy,” she said, “has there been a mistake?”

“No, no,” I said, “he’s dead, all right.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Slabe said.

“Those totals please, Mrs. Slabe,” I said sternly.

She looked into her book, punched some figures on the adding machine and then handed me the slip. I glanced at it and gave it back to her. “Interpretation, please,” I said.

“From the beginning through the present, seventy- eight thousand five hundred fifty-three births, eighty-one thousand two hundred sixteen deaths. For 1949 to date, two hundred twenty-seven births, one hundred eighty-four deaths.”

“Does that include the little boy?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Slabe said, “I forgot.”

“Then that should be one hundred eighty-five deaths, is that right?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Hmn,” I said. “Hmn. It’s not good, is it, Mrs. Slabe?”

“Oh, I don’t know Doctor. I’ve been here many years doing this work, and you’d be surprised how each year the ratio of births to deaths goes up. It’s the new drugs, of course, the new surgical techniques. That’s what does it.”

“There’s something in that, Mrs. Slabe, something in that. Still, Mrs. Slabe,” I said, “the books eventually balance, don’t they?”

“What’s that?”

“I say the books eventually balance. For every birth there’s a subsequent death. The books balance. They always have.”

“Why, you know,” she said, “I never thought of that.”

“Well, it’s a technical thing, Mrs. Slabe,” I said,

My bruises heal. Scabs thicken over the cuts. I moult. Everything itches. I do not read. It is more interesting to contemplate the slowly freshening color of my skin — like watching a dawn that comes only in its own time. It is disgusting to know that there is nothing I can do to hasten the process. I croon like Orpheus over my damaged flesh, but nothing happens.

Being in the hospital has been a strange experience. Everything about the life here is horrible, yet it is uniquely fascinating. I have never been so interested. Just as the sea is said to stimulate others, to stir metaphysical speculations in even the sleepiest of minds, so the hospital and the notion of disease affect me.

I find that I am afraid to die.

The fear of death in a young man is usually no stronger than the fear that his house may some day catch fire and burn down — it is a possibility, but hardly likely. It’s fate, chance — the sort of catastrophe that happens sometimes to others. I know better. The analogy is weak. Many houses escape unscathed, but no man does. It is not something that will happen tomorrow — though it could — or in a year, or even in twenty or thirty years. But it must come. When I think that a third of my life, perhaps a half, is already gone, I think, but it was so short, it was nothing. Already, young as I am, the days seem shorter than they once did, and I wonder what the rest will be like. I do not even bother yet about the quality; I speak only of the quantity, Perhaps fear, though, is an inexact term here. I am not so much afraid to die, I think, as sad to die.

The deaths of others are no less terrible. On my floor there are many very sick men, men who need oxygen tents in order to breathe, or who are fed through tubes, or who pass their water through catheters — who do now under difficulty, and only with the aid of machines, what once they did with no effort and no thought. These machines are oppressive; I cannot look at them without feeling sick. And yet, how much better to take nourishment through a rubber tube, to live in an oxygen tent as in a dog’s house, to pass waste through grotesque piping, than not to function at all? I see now what is bad about death. Its most terrible aspect is that it is cumulative— nails that do not grow, eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, flesh that does not feel, brain that cannot think, blood that will not flow. It is like being strangled. I think of a small boy’s panic when a companion ducks his head under the water and holds it there. Of course death makes one insensible, but surely there must be, at the moment of death itself, just this sense of impotence — only greater, much greater, and more terrible. One cannot will the simplest thing, to bend a finger, roll the eyes. There is something horrible in such nullification, to have no more significance than a grain of sand; once having mattered, to count for nothing through eternity.

So shocking is this certainty, and so profound, that the merest hint of it seeping into the still living man’s consciousness is enough to contaminate everything that has come before it.

There is a man in the next room who has an advanced cancer. The others in the room with him are offended by his pain and his odor, but the man himself has grown indifferent to them as one is indifferent toward one’s bowels or the coarse sounds one makes in private. His family visits him — his son has come from Washington — but the man no longer cares about any of them. I learned from his son that the father was a printer, and that all his life he worked hard, making terrible sacrifices for his wife and children. By taking a second job some years ago he was able to earn enough to put his son through the university. Now the son is a lawyer and very grateful to his father, but the father is as indifferent to his son’s gratitude and love as he is to his own pain, as he is even to his own old fierce love for his boy. Already he is beyond this world and functions with a different intelligence. He knows new things. He knows what animals in traps know, what stones know.

Johnson says: “Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation which those who begin it by prudence and continue it with subtlety, must, after long expense of thought, conclude by chance.” He means, perhaps, that everybody’s happiness and unhappiness total up to the same thing finally — that the bill, when it is presented, is always the same. Perhaps. I see that no one ever really gets away with anything, that we all owe a death, but surely it is senseless to argue that some of us do not get more for our death than others. In a way, the housewife’s economy is the highest wisdom. One must watch the ads, risk the crowds, know his needs.

The thing is, I see, to be great, to sit the world like a prince on horseback, to send out the will like a tyrant his armies, with the warning not to come back empty- handed. I need what the tyrant needs. Like him, I need plunder and booty and tribute and empire and palace and slave. I need monuments and flags and drums and trumpets. I need my photograph enlarged a thousand times in the auditorium. I am not, however, a great man. I see that I will never have these things, that I must adjust to my life as I must to my death, and that finally the two adjustments are the same. But despite this, I will never do what others do. I will not write my life off or cut my losses. I will never treat with it as the man in the next room has been forced to treat with his. I see what happens to such men. Their cancers take away their histories. My cancer, when it comes, must not do that. When I am downed, when the latest drug proves useless, when the doctor, embarrassed, asks who is to be notified, when the morphine is no longer effective and pain builds on pain like one wave slapping another at the shore, when the high tide of low death is in, I must still have my history, and it must, somehow, matter!

I have conceived a plan. It is not clear in all its aspects yet, but I envisage a kind of club. It must include all the great men of my time, and I am to be the spirit behind it, mine the long table on the dais. If I cannot be great, then I can at least be a kind of Calypso. Heroes will sing in my caves, sit on my shores, seek sails on my illusory horizons.

Only the gods or death will free them.

My Uncle Myles came into the hospital room. He set his umbrella against the bed and placed his derby carefully over the leather handle.

“James, I did not come before because you refused to see me when I contacted you in your hotel.”

“Contacted me in my hotel? What are you talking about?”

“The evening of the fight. I called at your hotel and the room clerk rang you up.”

“I don’t remember that, Uncle Myles,” I said. “Why would I refuse to see you? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Nor did it to me,” my Uncle Myles said.

I tried to remember the evening my Uncle Myles referred to. It was less than two weeks before, but it might have been in another life. I remembered that I had been trying to locate Sallow. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I was trying to get in touch with John Sallow. The phone rang and I thought it must be him calling, but when I answered, it was the desk clerk telling me that some people wanted to see me. A man, I think, and a woman and a little boy.”

“I was the man,” my uncle said.

“Well, but the clerk didn’t give me your name, you see. I was very preoccupied. I should have asked. I was crazy that week.”

“I read of your defeat in the papers,” he said. “They said you were badly beaten.”

“I was,” I said. -

“You seem recovered now.”

“I’ll be getting out in three days,” I said. “I could have been discharged yesterday, but my policy pays for most of this and… well, I’ve no place to go now. I’ve quit wrestling.”

He seemed to hear this. “It paid well,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m not rich, but I was able to save a little money.”

My uncle nodded. I thought I saw what was troubling him and I said, “I won’t be able to send you any more checks until money is coming in again.” (I had started to send him a little money after I began to wrestle.)

“You’ve been very generous,” he said stiffly. “I haven’t always been easy to get along with.”

“You’ve been very fine, Uncle Myles,” I said.

“We don’t agree about things.”

“I suspect we’re more alike than you think,” I said. “I’m a very conservative person.”

“I hope that is so,” he said. He sat down and looked around the room. “You have a private room,” he said after a while.

“I was in a ward at first — my policy stipulates a ward — but I couldn’t stand it there and I asked to be transferred. I pay the difference.”

“Of course you’ll have to be careful about your money now that you aren’t wrestling.”

“Yes. I suppose I will. It was just that I didn’t like being with sick people.”

“With strangers,” my uncle said.

“Yes, of course,” I said, remembering my uncle’s illness, “with strangers.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s very difficult. Even with people one has a feeling for. You know, James, I don’t mean to offend you, but I can’t say I’ve been unhappy about your going away. People get used to needing others. They are often surprised to learn they can do quite well without them.”

I remembered he had been with others the night he had tried to see me at the hotel. “The clerk said there were a woman and a little boy with you.”

“Yes.”

I laughed. “Uncle Myles, you haven’t gotten married, have you?”

“No.”

“Are you keeping company?”

“The woman is the mother of that poor girl who had your child. The little boy is your son.”

“What?”

“The woman’s husband has died. They were never well off, James — you must certainly be aware of that. They took the child because you were only fifteen at the time. Now that her husband is dead she can’t afford to keep the child without help. They have been staying with me until more satisfactory arrangements could be made.”

“No,” I said.

“They are outside, James. Please don’t raise your voice. When we have concluded these other arrangements—”

“No,” I said. “No arrangements.”

“The boy is six years old now.”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“You are hardly in a position to say no, James.”

“Are you talking as a lawyer now?” I said.

“As a judge, I think, James.”

“Are you talking as a lawyer now?” I asked him again.

“If you mean are you guilty of child abandonment in the eyes of the law, no. The child was taken away from you and legally adopted by the grandparents, but you have a certain responsibility.”

“No,” I said. “No.” I had begun to weep. My uncle had brought me down. I wanted to explain it to him, that I mustn’t be caught just because every son of a bitch who ever lived got caught, but I was inarticulate with sorrow and rage. All I could do was shake my head and wail denials.

My Uncle Myles stood up. “I can no longer keep them with me, James. It isn’t my responsibility.”

“No,” I shouted. “No.”

“You’re responsible. You feel trapped now,” my uncle said. “I understand that, but when you see the lad, James — he’s a nice lad — all that will change. He’s outside now. I’ll just get him.”

“No,” I yelled. “No, no, no, no.”

A nurse ran into the room. “What is it?” she said.

“No,” I wailed. “No, no, no.”

“We can’t have this,” she said to my uncle. “You can’t come in here and upset a patient like that.”

“He stinks, your patient. He should die now.”

“No! No! No! No! No!”

“You’ll have to leave,” she said.

“Get him out,” I screamed. “Get him out. Get him out!”

The nurse pulled my uncle toward the door. Almost comically, smoothly, as if from some keen presence of mind, he managed to reach out and pluck the umbrella away from the bed. Even as he tugged at her he was adjusting his derby. He had begun to shake, and the nurse, mistaking his tremors for resistance, pulled him from the room fiercely. She didn’t close the door and as soon as they were outside I saw a woman rush up to them and grab at my uncle. She was a woman of about fifty- five, and at first I thought it was Mrs. Slabe, but then I recognized that her face and body were aged parodies of the face I had kissed so awkwardly all those years ago, the body I had shot my death into. The nurse struggled with the woman, trying to push her away and at the same time pull my uncle toward the elevator. In a moment other nurses had come up and surrounded them. I saw my uncle’s hat fall from his head and one of the nurses trample it with a white, clubbed heel as she shoved against him. Slowly the nurses moved my uncle and the woman away from the door.

I couldn’t move. I stared appalled at the hat, his derby that had cost him so much money, black and empty and ridiculous on the floor.

And then I saw two thin, bare legs move into position over the hat, straddling it, and a child’s hand reach slowly down to pick it up. As he straightened, his eye caught mine and we looked at each other helplessly.

Then my son began to cry.

I am on a bus. I am going West. Calypso must first be Ulysses.

William Lome is a rich man. A rrrrrich man. As rrrittchh azz Creesusss. He has dollars and pounds and lire and pesos and rubles and drachmas and francs and kronen and Deutsche marks and rials and piastres and fils and dinars. He has sucres and quetzals and gourdes and lempiras and forints and rupees and pahlavis and sen and yen and guilders and córdobas and guaranis and sols and zlotys and leu and behts and kurus. He has monies. He has moneez. He has stocks and he has bonds, and he has securities and certificates. He has gold and he has silver. He gets di-vid-ends. He earns interest. He earns in-ter-est- ing in-ter-est.

He was once asked how much he was worth. “Practically everything there is,” he said.

This campaign has lasted almost three months now. I must make my fortune. As in the fairy tales. And why not? Am I not the youngest son, the orphan, the kid with the squint, the limp, the blue baby? A frog isn’t always what he seems, but kiss me today and I give you warts. An ugly duckling in the swimming pool of the world’s fat swans — who will feed me? Everywhere there are signs, warnings, admonitions: Do not feed the ducklings.

I would share my bread with gnomes under mushrooms. I would give to testing elves, salvage the lives of bosses’ daughters — I haunt the forests, the beaches— tease a belly laugh from the king’s dour daughter and the joke would be on the king.

I must have money!

My way of life demands it. The savings from the wrestling days are almost gone, but there are still bus tickets to buy, meals to eat. My expenses are not great (I am easily shabby), but they exist. Need, the fleet-heeled one, will not stand still.

And what a campaign, this one! Who would have thought? Three months. The complications! Lome travels in his private plane and I follow in a bus. I must anticipate his schedule. Futile, futile. But I think I may have caught up with him. He comes in four days. I wait now.

Croesus, my would-be father-in-law, where are your daughters?

Eleven dollars to the man who rents the costumes. Seven dollars to the tailor to get it to fit.

“You’re sure now he ain’t in yet?” I said to the room clerk.

“I’ve told you repeatedly — Mr. Lome arrives later this morning.”

“You said that yesterday morning.”

“He canceled out,” the room clerk said. “I told you last night.”

“It’s just that I’m his cousin,” I said.

“I understand that,” the clerk said.

“I come down from Muskogee, Oklahoma.”

“I know,” the clerk said.

“Big-shot-millionaire-skinflint bastard,” I said.

“I told you before,” the clerk said, “we can’t have that kind of language about our guests.”

“You ever meet this fella?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, if you do you’ll get an idea what I mean.”

“Please,” he said, “I’m very busy.”

“Who do you think give him that stake those years ago? My uncle.”

“Yes,” the clerk said.

“My uncle give it to him.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, he paid it back, all right.”

“Hmm,” the clerk said

“To the dollar.”

“That’s not—”

“The nickel.”

“—any of—”

“The penny.”

“—my—”

“But not a cent of interest. Well, that’s all right. We’re kin. Kin don’t go around charging each other no interest. My uncle don’t expect that.”

“Please,” the clerk said, “there are things I must attend—”

“Old as he is.”

“Now look,” the clerk said.

“Sick as he is.”

“You’re going to have to—”

“Poor as he is. But no thank you, even — not even a Christmas gift.”

“I can understand how your uncle—”

“Just that old cold check in the mail when he give back the stake. Just that lonely old cold check made out to W. J. Lome and signed W. J. Lome.”

“You may sit in the lobby. I’ve told you that.”

“They got the same names even, but that man’s got no family feeling. What does that kind of a W. J. Lome care about a poor old W. J. Lome who all he’s got in the world’s a run-down hardware store on a highway outside Muskogee, Oklahoma, selling nails to the Injuns or maybe a little bailing wire? ‘Build a motel,’ everybody kept telling him, but is a man supposed to be punished for the reason that he don’t have it in his spirit to make blood money off a bunch of sinning traveling men and their whores? And don’t keep telling me to set in your lobby. I ain’t registered in this hotel and I don’t mean to use none of its comforts. All I want’s what’s mine.”

“Front,” the room clerk said suddenly, slamming a little bell.

“Now stop that,” I said.

“Front, boy!”

“You just cut that out,” I said.

“What is it?” a bellboy said.

“Get Marvin and Frank and show this gentleman out,” the room clerk said.

“All right,” I said. “That’s no necessary thing. I’m going.”

Truthfully, the hotel was not the best place to wait. I had been coming in for two days now and they were suspicious. Actually, I was a little surprised when I saw the place. It was all right — a nineteen-twentyish sort of hotel with commercial traveler written all over it, the kind of place that would fill up during a convention — but not what I would have imagined for one of the richest men in the world. Yet his New York office had told me (I had gone all the way up to Portland, Oregon, just to make the long-distance call authentic) that this was where Mr. Lome stayed when he was in Dallas. I wrote it off as loyalty.

I took up my old position outside the drugstore two doors away from the hotel. It was very hot in the raincoat.

When the pharmacist saw me he came outside. “Look you,” he said, “I’ve told you before. Clear off.”

“You don’t own the sidewalk,” I said.

“Would you like to explain that to a policeman?” he said.

“She’s gonna come, Doc,” I said.

“You’ve been standing here two days now.”

“Please, Doc. She promised. She’s just so pretty, Doc. She’s just so sweet.”

“You’ve been hanging around here for two days now.”

“Doc, she don’t speak no English. If the pretty little thing came along and I wasn’t here to meet her I don’t know what would happen.”

“I’m calling a cop.”

“All right,” I said, “all right. You’ve forced me to tell you the truth. She’s a Mexican wet-back. The immigration authorities are looking for her. They can’t have found her yet or I would have been given a signal, unless they picked up Max, too.”

“Max?”

“Max the Mex,” I said. “Your pharmacy is our new station on the underground railroad. Follow, follow, follow the drinking gourd.”

The pharmacist stared at me for a moment and backed off. I went into the bookshop across the street. The girl looked up and frowned when she saw me.

“Did you find it yet?” I asked.

“Please,” she said, “I’ve spoken to Mr. Melrose and he insists we’ve never stocked the book.”

“But I saw it,” I said. “I saw it right here on this counter.”

“That’s impossible. It’s not even listed in our catalogues.”

“It was published in England,” I said. “Think. In a plain brown wrapper. Felix Sandusky’s Theory of Rings.”

“No,” she said.

“What about the other one then?”

“Which other one?”

I moved over to the window where I could watch the cars that pulled up to the hotel. “Penner on Sainthood.”

“No.”

“Herlitz’s Placing the Teen-Age Boy.”

“No,” she said. “Please, we don’t have any of these books. My goodness, don’t you ever read any novels?”

“Novels? Certainly. Murder mysteries. Like our Presidents — for relaxation. Get me John Sallow’s Kill a Million.”

“We don’t have it.”

“Vita Breve?”

“No.”

“I’ll just browse,” I said.

She walked away and I pretended to poke around among the publisher’s remainders on a table near the window. I was beginning to think that Lome would never come. Like one of the family, I worried for his safety in the private plane. Inside the heavy rubber raincoat I was perspiring freely, but of course I couldn’t take it off. It was the damned coat that called attention to me in the first place. Any coat in this heat would have been conspicuous, but not only was it not raining, Texas was in a drought.

If the cop hadn’t asked to see my license I would have gotten away with it. I had been parading up and down the street with a sign on the back of my raincoat. “RUBBER PRODUCTS ARE BEST,” it said, and beneath this: “RAINCOATS, TIRES, BALLS.” I had been able to watch the hotel for three hours before the cop stopped me.

The girl came over again. “Have you found anything yet?” she asked.

“I — yes. Yes, I have.” The limousine from the airport had pulled up to the hotel and I spotted Lome getting out of it. I took off the raincoat and tossed it to the girl. She stared at my bellboy’s costume. I raced out of the door, popping the little cap on my head as I ran.

I nearly knocked Lome down in my effort to get to him before any of the other bellboys. The doorman stared at me but my uniform was authentic down to the last bit of piping. “Dallas Palace“ stood out in perfect gold script on my tunic. The tailor should have been a forger.

“Mr. Lome’s bags,” I demanded of the driver.

“He has no bags,” the driver said.

“For God’s sake,” I said desperately, “let me carry something.”

Lome was holding a briefcase. In my anxiety I pulled it from him.

“House rule, sir,” I said. “‘In the Dallas Palace the Guest Doesn’t Even Carry a Grudge.’”

ΉHmm,” Lome said, “that’s a good slogan. I like that. All right.”

I took Mr. Lome’s arm and guided him past the doorman into the hotel.

“Hey,” the doorman said, “ain’t you the guy—”

“Front, boy. Front! Front!” I shouted. Four bellboys suddenly appeared from behind potted palms and converged on us. “Mr. Lome’s key. Quickly! Quickly! Mr. Lome wants to go to his suite.”

“But I haven’t even checked in yet,” Lome said.

“Bad flying weather over New Orleans,” I said to one of the bellboys. “Air pockets like something in a mechanic’s pants. Storms all over the South. Lightning crackling, thunder clapping. He’ll sign the register later.” I turned to another bellboy. “Get his key and bring it up to us.”

I wheeled on Mr. Lome. “Come, sir. Your bath is waiting.” There were three elevators and I half guided, half pushed Lome into one of these. My footwork was dazzling; I might have been doing this all my life. The doors closed.

“Aren’t you waiting for the key?” Lome asked.

“They’ll find us, sir,” I said. I had no idea which floor he was supposed to be on. This was an oversight, like the business about the license. I stood by the control panel. “The usual floor, sir?”

“What?” Lome asked.

“Would you like to push the button? Many of our guests prefer to push the button themselves. All the fun in a self-service elevator comes from pushing the button.”

“Does it?” Lome said nervously. “Yes, I suppose it does. Only I don’t know what floor I’m supposed to be on. I haven’t registered yet.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, in that case.” I hid the panel with my body and pushed number two. When the automatic doors opened I peered out. I could see no bellboy in the corridor. I pushed three.

“Must have decided to walk up,” I said to Mr. Lome. The elevator stopped and again I peered out, but there was no one on three either. I pushed four. “Must have caught the one going down,” I told Lome. When the elevator stopped there was no sign of a bellboy on four.

“Why does it keep stopping?” Lome asked.

“It’s a safety device, sir,” I said.

“Oh.”

The doors slid open at the fifth floor. A bellboy holding a key was staring at me.

“Front, boy,” I said. “Ah,” I said, “Mr. Lome’s key. Thank you very much.” I pulled the key from the fellow, pushed him into the elevator and then reached inside quickly and pushed fourteen.

“Don’t call me boy,” the bellboy hissed as the doors closed on him.

“Ah,” I said, looking at the key. “Five-twelve. Of course. Our very best.”

I pulled Lome along behind me through the corridor. “Five-twelve. Five-twelve,” I muttered, looking for the arrows on the wall. I turned left. When we came to the end of the corridor there were some numbers painted on the wall. “545–560. 560–590. Come, Mr. Lome, it’s the other way, I think.” I turned him around and we walked past the elevator again and into the opposite corridor. “Ah,” I said, reading the numbers on the doors, “five-eighteen. We’re on the trail now, I think, Mr. Lome. Five-sixteen. Five fourteen. Here we are. Five-twelve.”

I opened the door. “One of our—” It was a tiny, shabby room. There was a commode next to the bed. “There must be some mistake, sir,” I said.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Lome said. “Just fine. What’s Hecuba to me?”

It struck me at once: he was cheap. Tight. A millionaire-skinflint bastard. It was death to my fortune. Yet again, frog beneath frog. Ugly duckling, ugly duck.

“Well,” Lome said, bouncing on the bed, “thank you very much.”

I saw that I would not even get a tip. “Service of the hotel, sir,” I said.

“Appreciate it,” Lome said.

“‘In the Palace All Guests Are Kings,’” I said.

“Service has improved then,” Lome said. “Terrific.”

“‘In Dallas in the Palace There’s No Room for Malice,’” I said.

“That’s good,” Lome said. “Well, thank you again. Now if you’ll just leave my key.”

I had to act. The room clerk would be up in a minute. There wasn’t much hope for success, but I had come this far and I couldn’t back off now. I turned around suddenly, closed the door and locked it, and pulled off my bellboy’s cap.

“I’m not the bellboy, sir,” I said.

“You’re not?” he said.

“No, sir. I’m a live—”

Someone was pounding on the door.

“—wire.”

“There’s someone at the door,” Lome said with relief. “Perhaps we’d better see who it is.”

“A go—”

“The door,” Lome said.

“—getter.”

“My God,” the clerk was shouting outside the door, “he’s probably killing him. He’s his cousin from Muskogee, Oklahoma, and he bears him a terrible grudge.”

“‘In Dallas in the Palace the Guest Doesn’t Even Carry a Grudge,’” I said miserably.

Lome opened the door. The clerk was standing outside with a policeman and a man I had never seen, probably the house detective. Behind them the girl from the bookstore was holding my rubber raincoat over her arm.

“Ah,” I said, “thank you for bringing that. I thought I must have left it someplace. There’s been no rain, but—” I took it from her and started to move through the small crowd that had gathered outside Lome’s door.

“Just a minute,” the policeman said, “the Border Patrol wants to speak to you.”

“Mr. Lome,” I said, turning to him, “can you lend me ten thousand dollars, usual terms?”

“Well, no.”

“Well, could you put up bail?” I asked.

They took me away and questioned me for five hours. Eventually, I thought, they would have to let me go. All I had done, after all, was to lie to people, and there’s no law against that, is there?

It was the hotel that gave me the most trouble. They wanted to get me for impersonating one of their bellboys. Even after the man from the Border Patrol decided that he had no case and that I was harmless — that was the word he used, “harmless”—the hotel was determined to press charges. “As an example,” the hotel clerk said, as though they had a lot of trouble with people impersonating their bellboys. It looked pretty serious, but that night Lome came to visit me in my cell.

“Say,” he said, “those slogans you kept quoting, were those the hotel’s?”

“I made them up,” I said glumly.

We worked out a deal. I signed a paper saying that I had no right to the slogans and that they belonged to Mr. Lome now and forever in perpetuity — or until he decided what to do with them. In return, he promised to get the hotel to let me off; he would tell them that I had actually given pretty good service and that I had been particularly cautious in the elevator, always looking both ways at each floor.

“‘In Dallas in the Palace There’s No Room for Malice,’” Lome quoted. “It would make a very snappy towel.”

Inside an hour I was free to go.

Lome was delighted, the hotel was delighted, Dallas was delighted. When I dropped by this morning to thank the manager for not pressing charges I was told that in exchange for some slogans Lome had thought up, the hotel was holding a free room for him in perpetuity (this is evidently one of Lome’s favorite phrases — and there is, indeed, something awesome in it; I was reminded of those promises cemeteries make to prune graves or plant roses on them every June, through war, through peace).

The manager tells me that Lome’s assured stay there is good publicity for the hotel and that now that he can stay in Dallas for nothing he’ll probably come more often, which will be good for business in the city.

Only I am not delighted. I have come to make my fortune and have instead added to the fortunes of others. That’s the role of most men, I suppose. However, I cannot believe that Lome’s presence in Dallas can be of any long-range good to the city. I’ve been watching him. He is, I think, one of those absentee landlords of the spirit — a depleter of resources, leveler of forests, drainer of seas. Where he smiles, trains cannot long continue to stop.

This is nonsense. I have no real knowledge of the man. What can there be sinister in him? He is just a very successful businessman, a middleman to need. But he knows something, I keep thinking. He said it himself: what’s Hecuba to him? Having followed him this far, I must follow him further. My fortune is in that man. Why should he yield it up without a countersign?

I continue to follow Lome.

I am waiting for him when he comes out of the hotel in the morning. I wave. He sees me, frowns, and walks to some appointment. I walk behind him. When he turns to see if I am following I am still there, smiling and waving. He changes his mind and urgently beckons a taxi. I am prepared for this; I have instructed a driver to follow at my pace. When he gets into his cab I get into mine.

So now I follow cabs. Making one’s fortune is an intrigue, one of the great adventures.

This morning when Lome left the Palace he saw me and smiled. “How are you?” he asked.

I had not thought his capitulation would come so soon and I walked over to shake his hand. He ignored me and got into his taxi. I shook my fist at this snub and summoned the taxi that I had engaged. Lome’s car waited while I got into mine, and when it pulled away from the curb it moved so slowly that my driver had to follow in first gear. After fifteen minutes Lome’s cab still had not picked up any speed. I realized that we were covering the same few downtown blocks again and again. At one point Lome’s driver turned a corner unexpectedly. I reasoned that he would pick up speed, but when my cab turned to follow, there was Lome’s double-parked and waiting for us. Lome’s cab then turned onto an expressway and drove into the country. Twelve miles from the city he turned off onto a deserted country road and picked up speed. We went deeper and deeper into the countryside, the meter registering alarmingly. At last I realized what Lome was up to. It was a warning; he was telling me that his resources were endless, that I had no chance against him in such a competition.

I told my driver to turn around and go back to the hotel.

When Lome came out this morning and saw me he seemed very angry. I stared at him sullenly. He surprised me by coming up to me.

“I’m leaving town today,” he said. “You’d better not make any effort to follow me.”

“What’s to stop me?”

“You’d be arrested. The law protects people like me.”

“On what charge would I be arrested?”

“On what charge were you arrested here?”

“I want you to help me,” I said. “After all, you used my slogans.”

“They’re mine.”

“I made them up.”

“You signed a paper. Always have them sign a paper — a man’s signature is his own worst enemy.” He started walking, and as I fell in beside him he looked at me. “You’d better dismiss your driver,” he said.

“You won’t jump into a cab if I do?”

“Why should I? What’s Hecuba to me?”

I paid the fare on the meter and told the driver to go.

“Please, Mr. Lome,” I said, “just the name of one stock.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“An area then. What looks good? Steels? Rails? I need money.”

“Compete,” he said.

“All right then. Tell me a product. Give me the name of a product.”

Lome laughed. “Anything,” he said. “Everything.”

“Please, Mr. Lome.”

He stopped and turned to me. His face was angry. “All right,” he said, “let’s talk business. It’s a mine. The world is a mine. It runs on the soundest of business principles. There’s a law in physics which states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. I like the sound of that. If I were asked what I believe in, I’d say I believed in that. Think of it: nothing can be destroyed. Nothing. How many times can an automobile be sold and resold? Four? Five? And then that one last time to the scrap man. Only it’s not the last time — the scrap man sells it to the mill and the mill turns into fresh steel and sells it and it’s a car again. Talk about life cycles, about resurrections. What’s Hecuba to me? There are people who buy lint, broken toys, government surplus, smashed glass, old newspapers. Don’t talk to me about priests — old men fiddling with wafers and wine like someone knotting a tie. Turn waste into profit. There’s religion for you: loaves and fishes, water and wine. Christ knew.”

We were passing a Woolworth’s. “I have to go in here for a minute,” Lome said.

We walked in and Lome went to the toy department. He looked at the toys critically, holding up one, then another, winding them, blowing his breath into the toy horns, posing the tin soldiers. “Look,” he said to me, pointing to a package of clay. “How much is the clay?” he asked a salesgirl.

“Fifteen cents,” she said.

He bought six packages. “Here,” he said to me, “have you got sixty cents?”

“Yes,” I said, a little confused.

“Give me,” Lome said.

I gave him the money and he handed me three packages of clay.

“They’re fifteen cents each,” I said.

“I’m your supplier. I’m entitled to a profit.”

“But I don’t want the clay.”

“Of course you don’t. You want tips on the market, you want to ride in the country in taxicabs. Sell the clay.”

“Who will I sell it to?”

“To a consumer. Find a consumer. There,” he said, pointing to the street, “in the marketplace.”

We went out. “Well?” Lome said.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Sell it. Sell the clay.”

“But I can’t.”

“You haven’t tried. Try.”

I went up to a woman. “Do you want to buy some clay, ma’am?” I asked her.

She looked at me as if I were crazy, and I turned to Lome helplessly.

“Here,” he said disgustedly, “watch me.”

He crossed the street and I followed him. As we walked Lome began to open his packages of clay. Each package contained five strips of colored clay, each strip about an inch and a half wide and perhaps a quarter of an inch thick. “I like to work with clay,” he said. “It’s a wonderful example of what I was saying before. Clay can neither be created nor destroyed.”

“I suppose so.”

“Coloring it — that was a stroke of genius. Adding to it. Newton never said you couldn’t add to it. That’s just merchandising. I need some newspaper. There should be one in that trash basket.”

He went over to it and I watched his arm disappear up to the elbow and reappear with a morning paper that looked as if it had been barely read. “Packaging and display,” Lome explained, showing me the newspaper. “All right,” he said, “where shall we set up shop?”

“But the police—”

“Well, we could try to get away with it, but you may be right. There are some corners which are best not cut. You stand over there by the trash basket and warn me if you see a cop.”

Lome separated the strips of colored clay and arranged them according to their colors on a sheet of the newspaper which he had spread out on the sidewalk. Already a few people had stopped to watch him. He did not look at them as he prepared the clay in little balls and slabs. He worked slowly, and gradually more people began to gather round him. Finally he stood up with a small chunk of clay in his hand. “Clay from the earth,” he said softly. And then, louder, “Clay from the earth!” A few of the people closest to him edged away slightly when he began to speak. “A souvenir of the world,” he called. “Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Clay to make feet, make men.

“Closer, Come! Gather! Yellow clay for the sun. Blue for the sea or sky. Red for the land. Ah, the red clay, the red is the saddest and best, the hardest to hold, to mold. Green clay for value, for emeralds and gems. I sell the world, the universe. White clay for the edifices and monuments of men. Not a toy, not a manufactured product. From God’s hands to you. For a remembrance.”

The people looked at each other and laughed and pointed their fingers at their temples. Lome saw them and stopped. “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “Do you think I would insult you with substitutes?” He broke off a piece from a lump he held. “Here,” he said, thrusting the piece into someone’s hand. “Feel it. Smell it, taste it. This is it. A chunk of the world. Real estate. You — you, sir—” He pointed to a small man at the back of the crowd. “Always go for the man at the back,” he called to me. “Sell him and then work your way to the front. My assistant, ladies and gentlemen,” he explained, pointing to me, “a humble clay gatherer.” He moved through the crowd. “You — you, sir, may I ask you a question?”

“I suppose so,” the man said, laughing nervously.

“Ah, don’t be afraid. It’s a personal question, of course. What’s the use of any other kind, eh, brother?”

The crowd laughed. “All right, friend, what I want to know is whether you own your home or rent?”

“I rent.”

“Fine. That’s fine. You rent, you say.”

“That’s right.”

“Never made it?” Lome asked suddenly, looking at the man sharply.

“What’s that? What do you mean?”

“Never made it. Never broke through. Obligations kept you a tenant. No, no, don’t be ashamed. Please. We understand. Here’s your opportunity. Clay. Clay is land, a plot. A plot for you.” Lome took another piece of clay from his pocket and molded it to the first piece. “The plot thickens,” he said, and the crowd laughed again. He pulled the piece of clay apart. “Or subdivide.” He held the piece of clay out to the man.

“It’s just clay,” the man said.

“Well, of course it is. That’s what I’ve been telling you. But don’t say it like that, brother. Don’t let me hear you say, ‘It’s just clay.’ Take that ‘just’ out. Be just. Say, ‘Why, it’s clay!’ Because that’s what it is. The emphasis is on clay. This is the stuff. Old Adam’s in that clay. Come on, brother. A souvenir, a remembrance of the earth. And here’s something else. I don’t know where it’s from and I don’t make any claims for it — I will not misrepresent. But that clay could be Chinese clay or Polish clay or Canadian or Argentine clay. Who can say who walked these old hills? Jesus Himself maybe, eh?

“All right, give me a nickel. That’s my price for the earth. That’s from the earth, too. We’ll trade, even steven. Clay for nickel. What’s Hecuba to me? Hey? And this is something you can take with you, friend — make no mistake about that. Beware of substitutes. Keep that nickel in your pants and they’ll turn you upside down when you die. They’ll shake you, brother. They’ll shake that nickel loose. They’ll never bury you with a nickel still in your pocket. But the clay stays. Ashes to ashes, pal, dust to dust. How about it? I’m waiting for your decision.”

“It’s worthless,” the man said.

Lome turned to the crowd. “This man has resistance. I like that in a man.” He turned back to the man suddenly and placed his hands on his lapels. “So you say it’s worthless, do you?” he shouted. “Well, I breathed meaning into it! What’s that worth? How much meaning you got in your life, friend, you can afford to let even five cents’ worth go by without jumping at it? You’re suspicious, are you? You’re afraid if you give me the nickel I’ve taken you. Well, maybe I have. You get taken every day, pal. Renter! Tenant! Where’s the gas you bought? Where are the phone calls? the electric? the food? What have you got to show me for the money you’ve spent? Show me something. Show me! Receipts? You hold on to that clay, you hear me? It’s dirt cheap. Cheap dirt. Give me the nickel. Give it to me!”

Hypnotized, the man dug into his pocket and handed Lome a nickel. Turning to the others, Lome took up the clay from the newspaper and broke off pieces and handed them out as people forced their nickels on him. He laughed, taking their money, and at last held up his hands. “All gone, folks,” he said. “No more clay. I thank you for your attention.”

He came up to me. “How’d you make out with yours?” he asked.

“I’ve still go it.”

“With the great demand for clay? It’s a seller’s market, friend.” He took the change out of his pocket and looked at it. “Not bad,” he said. “I made fifteen cents on your three packages and a dollar-twenty on mine. Deducting forty-five cents for expenses, that makes a profit of ninety cents. I doubled my money.”

“You were very good.” I was genuinely moved.

“Pigeons,” he said. “That was the lesson of the clay pigeons.”

Last night the drought ended. There were violent, sudden storms, lightning crackling, thunder clapping, signs and portents. The people came into the street to look at the rain.

I was with Lome in the limousine when the storm broke; he had allowed me to accompany him to the airport. He stared at the heavy rain. “I’ve got to be in Cleveland,” he said. “There’s a deal.”

“They’ll never let you take off in this weather,” I said hopefully.

“We’ll see about that.”

By the time we got to the airport it was raining even harder. Lome brooded about his vanishing opportunities. He went into the tower to plead his case, but it was no use. When he came down he was glum.

“I’ve got to be in Cleveland,” he said. “It’s an act of God, a damned act of God.” He said this as though God might be some competitor who had to make sure that Lome didn’t get to Cleveland first. “What are you grinning about?” he asked me.

“The weather works in my favor,” I said. In the limousine I had been urging him to help me.

“Bull,” he said. “You’ll get nothing out of my prolonged stay.”

We sat silently. Suddenly Lome looked up. “It has to break,” he said. “It has to.” He stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“To the tower. I want to look at those radar screens again.”

I started to follow him. “Look,” he said, “I don’t need you right now.”

I saw him stop to talk with one of the airport executives. I was miserable; I almost wished Lome might be allowed to take off. This was the end, I thought. My money, except for the sum I had set aside to invest on Lome’s advice, was all gone, and I no longer had any hope that he would help me.

More than most men I needed to be free. My controlling vision demanded it. It was grand to be a self- made man, but bliss to be an heir, a gentleman farmer, a hereditary lord, to be fixed in some sinecure where effort bred the soul’s reward. It was simple biology which finally caught up with you; it was economics that dealt the death blow. And duty was simply the food in the icebox, the roof over your head, your lousy needs, your growling upstart stomach and all the rest.

So goodbye, great men, you whose needs are met, all the folks with money in the bank and clothes in the closet, whose duty had been done, whose honorable intentions could be counted in diseases forestalled by health insurance, in down payments of one sort or another, in funds for their children’s educations. They were out of my league now, out of my neighborhood, my life. They lived in drier climates where the penny for the rainy day was a superfluity. I could, of course, continue to show up at their back doors, my hand outstretched in the pauper’s salute. but why should they listen any more than Lome had listened?

If I met the great now, it would have to be in the way others met them, at a humiliating second-hand, conducted into their presence by ushers with flashlights to watch their images on screens, or hear them in concert halls, or applaud them at rallies while arc lamps played across the sky, or read about them in books or hear their voices on the radio. The life I had chosen for myself — or had had thrust upon me by reasons of temperament — was over now. It had been a grand idea, a great idea, a noble idea for a life — I still insisted on that. But, like many before me. I didn’t have the price.

I could still see Lome talking to the official, arguing special privilege, blandishing, terrorizing in his great salesman’s way. They will have to let him go, I thought. I could imagine his arguments, compelling, urgent, single- minded, and I pitied the official who did not know what I knew: that his single-mindedness, his force, his logic, were shammed, his motives all ulterior. I thought of his pitch to the crowd. He knew. He knew. He had the intimations, the hints. The ungodly voices whispered in his ear too. “Save yourself.” Lome knew about death. They would not leave the nickel in his pants either. He knew that, yet he persisted. Perhaps that was it; perhaps that’s what lay at the core of all greatness — a willingness not to abide by logic, to shrug it off in the soul’s own optimism. He was an inspiring sight. If only I knew how to respond, if only I could learn the lesson of the clay and other pigeons that the sight of Lome, grounded in Dallas halfway to Cleveland and death, stirred in me. He sold the clay and had accepted mere money, defying the very arguments he invented, the very truths he alone understood.

All genuinely great men were martyrs whose characters and purposes were like those double ramps in architecture which wound and climbed and never touched in a concrete illusion of strand. The rest of us climbed those ramps in the delusion that the fellow we saw across the gaping space moved on the same path. It was the barber-pole condition of life, and we assumed in good faith some ultimate matrix common to all. But isolate, isolate—that was the real lesson. Hecuba was nothing to any of us.

Then I saw Lome’s briefcase, the one I had carried to his room. He had put it down on a counter when he was talking to the official and when they went off together — to look, I suppose, at the radar screens — he had forgotten it.

I did not hesitate. Isolate, isolate. I moved up to the counter and slid the case inside my raincoat. Inside would be the tips, the speculations, the deals, the weird money lore, the master plan. Inside would be the inside information.

With my prize I went into the man’s toilet. I pushed a dime into the slot, locked myself in a private booth, sat down on the toilet seat and opened the case, feeling as I did a thrill of greed. I was like some pirate before a treasure chest.

The lists and charts which tumbled out of the briefcase were like some paper abstraction of golden bracelets and jeweled crowns and ruby-mouthed statues. There were lists of holdings in foreign counties, discussions of economic prospects for various markets. These I ignored. There were plans for taking over firms, suggestions for mergers, passbooks from five dozen banks. There were lists of stocks which Lome owned, and signed proxies, and a handful of prospectuses for firms which Lome was evidently interested in. But I could make nothing out of them. Perhaps an expert, someone familiar with the language of money, might have been able to take Lome’s hints, but I couldn’t. Before the network of statistics and the strange bookkeeper’s vocabulary I was helpless. I began to fear that I had acted in haste, and as I continued to go through the briefcase I felt increasingly frustrated. In despair I began to stuff the papers back into the briefcase and was about to zip it shut when I saw something I had overlooked before. It was written in pen on a piece of lined, yellow, legal-size paper. The fact that it was on legal paper somehow gave it, even before I read it, the integrity of an official document. I felt a peculiar anticipatory excitement, and as I read over the paper it mounted steadily. Lome had written in his own hand:

The following firms will issue stock on the New York Exchange within the next six months.

There followed a list of four companies I had never heard of. The note had been dated the previous week. Lome went on:

My own plan is to purchase substantial blocks of the first two stocks and to hold them in perpetuity.

“My plan too,” I said hoarsely.

Suddenly, inside the pay toilet, there came the sound of an enormous peal of thunder, growling, sustained, hoarse. For a moment the lights dimmed. The electric circuits hummed and sang and then restored themselves.

An act of God, I thought, feeling suddenly warm, befriended, destiny’s child, son of Herlitz, son of fate, son of luck and chance and circumstance.

My invitation to the Irving Gibbenjoys’ came today. I glanced at the envelope and called the caterer immediately for the guest list. My contact, Davis, was out, so I left word for him to call me at the hotel. Everyone has a weakness, Davis a particularly filthy one, but he can be put off easily enough. I let him watch me in my shower. It’s a torment for him, more pain than pleasure. He sits on the closed toilet lid and talks shyly. He pretends, I think, that we’re somewhere else, in a drawing room or a restaurant. When I turn toward him to dry myself, more often than not he looks away. Davis does not have the strength to go with his weakness. No man without character can support a vice.

Once I’m established I won’t have to rely as heavily on Davis or on my other contacts. Lord, when will it happen? Of course, they’re not all Davises. Beverly Brain in Chicago wants to marry me. Beverly is nice, of course, but she’s insignificant. It’s amazing how many of my contacts fall in love with me — Sheila Mobley in Boston, Anor Lyon in San Francisco, Jeanette Bouchard in Washington. The trick is to make yourself completely dependent on them. That’s why traveling salesmen often have such good relationships with their customers. Ah, but it takes a toll. I can relax only with Nate Lace in New York. Nate is the only one of my contacts who’s in on the joke of my life. I swear I wish the others were, but if I were to say to Anor, “Anor, honey, it’s just supply and demand with me,” she’d never do me another favor. Occupational hazard — like cave-ins for a miner. It’s always what something else does to us. The fault, dear Brutus, lies in our stars that we are underlings.

Still, one has to get along with people. Live and let live. Be let to live and live. If they were all like Nate, though…Anyone who says I don’t work hard is crazy. Look at Philadelphia, for God’s sake. I was stymied in Philadelphia for years. The Main Line was busy! I saw the columnists, the society bandleaders, the golf pros. Who didn’t I see! Nothing. Then I had this idea about the invitations. Idea? It was an inspiration, actually. Suddenly I remembered the prom bids from high school. They were gorgeous, I remembered: cellophane and satin, brocade and cardboard, with long silken tassels that were attached to the pegboards of the parented. The silly, romantic apotheosis of the Occasion. Each printed cardboard page vaguely visible through a covering of waxy, spidery paper, shimmering history books in raised type; the date, the name of the hotel, the band, the charity, the sponsor, the committee; a closing poem, even a page for remarks (“Willy said he loved me and squeezed me up there”). Then I thought, Where do they get that stuff? A service, of course, a service, and I remembered something I had once seen on a tray in a hall.

I called the Philadelphia Board of Education. “Do you give prizes for calligraphy?”

“What’s that?”

“Do you give prizes for calligraphy? Handwriting.”

“Just a minute, please. I’ll check.”

I got the names of all the prize winners from 1925 through 1951. But when I looked in the phone book I could find only a handful of names. Turnover. I called those that were listed.

“Excuse me, madam, does Gerald Vidilowski live there, please? I understand Mr. Vidilowski holds The Brotherly Love Award for Penmanship. I can use a man like that in my work.”

“Mr. Vidilowski wrote a beautiful hand, but he’s dead,” the woman sobbed.

I called the residence of Miriam Spidota. “Excuse me, ma’am, are you the Miriam Spidota who won the 1946 Brotherly Love Award for Penmanship?”

“Yes, that’s right,” the woman said brightly.

“Do you still wield the pen, ma’am?”

“How do you mean, ‘wield the pen’?”

“I’ll be direct, Miss Spidota. Are you now employed in addressing envelopes?”

“Is this Harry? Harry, is this a rib? Harry?”

“Please, Miss Spidota. I’m very serious.”

“Gee,” she said. “I thought you were that pimp, Harry. You a salesman? One of the boys give you my number?”

The third on the list was Davis. He told me nervously that he worked for Affairs, Inc. I arranged to meet him, and that was that. Keys to the City.

Davis called back at six. The Gibbenjoy affair sounds disappointing. Ray Pilchard will be there, of the Pilchard Hotel chain. Leroy Buff-Miner of the pharmaceutical house. Gabrielle Gal — I’ve heard some of her phony recordings of Greek songs. Still, she’s very popular in café society. Dr. Morton Perlmutter, an archeologist. A Mr. and Mrs. Nelton Fayespringer of Pittsburgh. She’s one of the Carnegies, Davis says, and he’s one of the few Pennsylvania industrialists without his own town named after him. All in all, there were about three dozen names, some of which I didn’t recognize at all. I’ll go, of course, because it’s the opening of the season, but it looks pretty grim.

Nate’s call yesterday morning caught me just as I was going out for breakfast. He couldn’t talk over the phone, he said — God, how it annoys me when people call to tell you they can’t talk over the phone — but something big was coming up in New York and I had better get into town immediately. I’ve noticed that I’m an extremely impatient person — invariably, for example, I flush the toilet before I have finished urinating — and during the hour and a half train ride from Philly to NY I could do nothing but wonder what Nate could have meant. Probably it was nothing but another party. Nate gives parties violently, and sometimes I have met middlingly important people at them. I say important rather than great because I have noticed that the great don’t often go to parties— unless, of course, they are the guests of honor. At any rate, I’ve become disenchanted with parties (two years ago I could never have imagined myself saying this), though I never refuse an invitation. It always seems to me that the next one might change my life.

Nate wasn’t in his place when I went up there, but it was already four o’clock when the train got to Penn Station and the traffic was so heavy that the bus didn’t get up to Forty-seventh Street until almost five. I asked Perry whether Nate would be coming back.

“That is to speculate,” Perry said coldly. Perry is one of my enemies. He doesn’t approve of Nate’s careless attachments to outsiders. He calls them “befriendships.”

Perry is a very popular mâitre d’ in New York, though I have never understood the reason. His dignity and aloofness seem spurious to me. I feel that they’re simply tools of the trade with him, ones he uses a little squeamishly, as a professional locksmith might use dynamite. I like to picture him at home in front of the TV with his shoes off and a beer from Nate’s kitchen in his hand. There are softer, sloppier Perrys inside him, I know. Even at that, talking to Perry, I always get the peculiarly grateful, slightly vicious feeling of “There but for you go I.”

“I’ll get him at the apartment. Thanks, Perry.”

“Messieur Nate will have guests,” Perry warned.

I looked at this mâitre d’hôtel, at this head waiter who got his name in the columns and was the constant bête noir of a government tax man who worried about his tips.

“Perry,” I said affably, “you may lead them to the tables, but I, I sit down with them.”

“May I show Messieur to a table?” Perry said viciously, knowing that without Nate there to tear up my check I could not afford even the cheapest item on Nate’s menu.

“I dined on the train, Perry,” I said easily. Much as I loathe myself for it, Perry is always able to force me into transparently absurd positions. As a professional mâitre d’, Perry despises moochers. He once told me that I ate above my station. It is outrageous to Perry that I should even be allowed inside Nate’s. It is, he thinks, like a panhandler coming to the front door of Buckingham Palace. I can see his point, of course, but that sort of demeaning introspection leads nowhere. As well for me to feel guilt because I cannot pay my checks as for a cripple to feel it because he cannot run races. We have our handicaps, the cripple and I, and a gentleman does not look too closely into them. If Perry objects that I do not meet my obligations, I can counter that there are certain obligations which I must simply be allowed to write off in order to get on with my life.

“If I should happen to miss Mr. Lace,” I told Perry, “please tell him that I’m in town and that I’ll get in touch with him later.”

I had a hot dog and an orange drink at a Nedick’s on Sixth Avenue, and walked with my valise over to a special entrance I know at the Radio City Garage which all the advertising executives and TV and radio and publishing people use when they go down to get their cars. I was a little late, but I did see Henry Luce drive off to Connecticut, and just when I was ready to leave I happened to spot Doris Day about to get into a cab. She had some packages, and I rushed up to the side of the taxi and opened the door for her.

“Good day, Miss Day,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you, Miss Day,” I said. “Your voice is a gift from God. Cherish it always.”

“Thank you,” she said, a little nervously.

I was waiting for the traffic to break. As I say, I am an impatient man. I cannot stand to sit stalled in a bus when I have somewhere to go — or even when I don’t have somewhere to go. Frequently I will get out and walk, though I know I lose time this way. This habit is one of my small fictions for preserving the illusion that I am in complete control of my life. I could have gone down to Nate’s on the subway, of course, but I will not travel underground. Finally at about six-fifteen I walked over and caught a Fifth Avenue bus going downtown.

Nate lives in the Village, in the Mews. The houses in the Mews are not very large, but Nate keeps a butler and a full-time maid. (Nate is a bachelor, as will be, I suspect, all my friends. I am not the sort of person wives would normally abide. Perhaps that’s another reason Perry— who after all is a kind of housekeeper — finds me so distasteful.) I banged on Nate’s door and the butler opened it.

“Is Mr. Lace in, Simmons?”

Unlike Perry, Simmons shows no open hostility toward me. I am not sure, however, that I fully approve of his tolerance. It too, after all, is simply a tool of his trade. I like all people to meet me unprofessionally.

“He is not, sir. I don’t know what Mr. Lace’s arrangements are this evening. He did seem to be expecting you, though, Mr. Boswell, and instructed me to invite you to stay until his return.”

Nate doesn’t keep a cook. There’s never any food in his house; everything is brought from the restaurant. “That’s very kind, Simmons,” I said. “I’m a little tired though, after my trip. I think I’ll just go up to my hotel and lie down. Mr. Lace can reach me there.”

“Very good, sir. Should he call I shall certainly tell him that. Where shall you be this time, sir?”

“The YMCA, I think, Simmons.”

“Very good, sir,” he said.

I have always enjoyed my conversations with butlers, and Simmons is one of my favorites. “Yes,” I said philosophically, “the International Youth Hostel is filled up this trip, Simmons. There’s a convention of Children for Peace in town to picket the UN.”

“Ah,” Simmons said.

“And Travelers Aid is just a little weary of my tricks by now.”

“Ah.”

“Well, Simmons, give the master my message. I shall probably be seeing you. You’re looking very well, incidentally.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you, Simmons. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, sir.”

He closed the door quietly behind me and I walked happily back up the frenchy cobblestoned street to the Fifth Avenue bus.

It is interesting how I got to know Nate. It was two years ago. New York is the hardest place in the world for an outsider. I had made about half a dozen trips there and was no closer to the prizes the town has to offer (“offer” is hardly the world) than I had ever been. I could see celebrities, of course, almost at will, but I could not get close to them. What was the difference between me and the teen-age autograph hounds that stalked them on the sidewalks outside their hotels? The techniques which worked in other cities were useless in New York. The great were so often there only for short intervals. Without a formal structure, without a community where the great moved always in habitual patterns, I was helpless. (It is common knowledge, for instance, that Hemingway drinks on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons at the Floridita Bar in Havana and that Faulkner buys his tobacco at Pettigrew’s Drugs in Oxford, but how many people know that Igor Stravinski borrows books religiously on the first Monday of every month from the Los Angeles County Public Library, Branch #3, or that the Oppenheimers dress for dinner every night and that Robert himself brings in the cleaning to Princeton Same Day Cleaners on Wednesday morning?) My blue suit — which I had bought when I quit wrestling — hung unused in my closet.

When I had exhausted all the techniques I could think of (at one time I was so desperate that I palmed myself off as a singer and waited six and a half hours in a cold theater to audition twenty seconds for a part before Rodgers and Hammerstein), I had my inspiration. The problem, of course, and somehow I had lost sight of it, was not to meet any particular great man — that could always be done — but to make a reliable contact. I had always been an avid reader of all the columns. It was in this way that I was able to keep track of the hundreds of celebrities who were constantly coming in and out of New York. It wasn’t long before I became familiar with the name of Nate Lace, through the doors of whose restaurant celebrities of all sorts spilled in a redundancy of fame, like fruit from a cornucopia. With a contact like him, I thought—With a contact like him—And that was it. It was at once so simple and so profound that I could not concentrate on the details, or wait to put it to the test. My original intention had been to wait until evening, but I was so full of my plan that at two in the afternoon I could sit still no longer. I put on my blue suit and went down to Nate Lace’s restaurant. I had no reservation, of course (Nate’s policy is to give no strangers reservations over the telephone; somehow I had divined this), and I tried to give ten dollars to Perry, who at that time I did not know. He looked me over, laughed coldly, and handed the money back. (I thought I had done something gauche. It wasn’t until months later that I discovered I simply had not offered him enough.) “That is not nessaire,” Perry said. “As it happens there is a table.”

I ordered ninety dollars’ worth of Nate’s most expensive food. (Nate says that his restaurant is the most expensive in the world.) I was so nervous when it came that I had difficulty eating it. (Actually, I do not really like good food, though Nate would be offended to learn this.) When I had finished I called the waiter. “You needn’t bother with the bill,” I said. “I can’t pay for any of this.”

The waiter went off to consult with Perry, and I cursed myself for not waiting until the evening, when Nate would certainly have been in. My only hope now was that it was too big a case for Perry and that it would have to be called to Nate’s attention. I needn’t have concerned myself; I should have known my man better from the columns. This was the sort of thing a man like Nate would take great satisfaction in handling personally. Perry leaned across the table familiarly and said with a nice sense of menace that Nate wasn’t in the restaurant and would have to be called. Even better, I thought, by making his rage keener this works into my hands.

When Nate came in he barely nodded at Cary Grant, sitting in a booth near the window, and went directly over to Perry. He had on a heavy, fur-collared overcoat and his nose was red and dripping.

“I couldn’t get a cab and had to walk from Fifty- fifth,” I heard him tell Perry. “Where’s the mooch?”

Perry pointed to my table, where I had been allowed to sit until Nate came. He walked over.

“You the one don’t like my food?”

“It was delicious,” I said.

“I see you didn’t touch the Balinese wonder pudding,” he said, pointing to an enormous, Victorian confection with flying buttresses of a caramelly, fruit-streaked cream which lay untasted on an ornate doily on a snow- white plate on a scalloped, thick damask napkin on a rich silver salver.

“It was a little much after the smoked whale in ambergris sauce,” I said.

“Was it?”

“A little much,” I said. Cary Grant was looking at us.

“It stays on the bill.”

I couldn’t imagine why he made an issue of it since I couldn’t pay for any of it.

“Nate,” I said. “I’m not an actor.”

“What the hell do I care you’re not an actor?”

“I mean to say I’m not using this incident to get a part in a picture or to obtain publicity for myself.”

“Who gives a shit?”

“I know you have allowed certain of your favorite comics to run up tabs of ten thousand dollars and more.”

“You ain’t one of my favorite comics, buddy. What you’re going to run up is a tab of thirty days or more.”

“Where is your vaunted sense of humor, Nate?”

“Where’s yours?” he said. “You couldn’t order bear steak? You couldn’t order tiger filet? Ambergris sauce! Do you know what ambergris sauce costs me? It would be cheaper to pour the most expensive Paris perfume over the god-damned whale.”

“I’m sorry, Nate,” I said. “Look, must Perry hear all this?”

“Perry’s a trusted employee,” Nate said. “Beat it, Perry.”

I told Nate my story. At first he listened doubtfully, but then, as I told him of my past, of my desperate need for a contact in New York, he began to warm up. Soon he was picking at the Balinese wonder pudding with his fingers and I felt I had him. He seemed to find it very amusing. The more I talked the more he laughed. “Hey,” he said when I had finished, “you’re a character, ain’t you?” He said it as though he had discovered something deep and abiding and true about the human personality.

“I guess I am,” I said humbly.

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah. A character.”

“That’s about the size of it.” I said.

“Yeah,” Nate said. “Hey, you want me to show you around the place? You want to see my kitchen?”

He took me with him through the restaurant. I even looked with him into the women’s powder room when Estelle, the attendant, said it was all clear. In the kitchen (which was not very large and none too clean) we sat at a butcher’s block drinking arctic lichen tea and laughed together over Nate’s story of his troubles with the government. It seems that Nate’s was a very popular place for important people to bring important clients. Of course they would then deduct the bill from their taxes as a business expense, and the government found itself in the peculiar position of buying three- and four-hundred-dollar dinners for people. They were going to refuse to allow it by declaring Nate’s off limits when Nate flew to Washington and made his offer. He would rebate the government 15 per cent on everything declared a deduction in his place. The government knew itself to be on very shaky legal ground and accepted at once.

“Why did you offer fifteen per cent? Why did you offer anything if they had such a bad case?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Nate said. “Suppose they took it to court. Look at all the business I’d lose from people who’d be nervous the deductions wouldn’t be allowed.”

“That’s right,” I said, pleased as I always am when I get some insight into the mysteries of business manipulation.

“Sure,” Nate said. “I would give twenty per cent.” He laughed. “The suckers.”

“The dumb suckers,” I said.

“You know, those bozos out there”—with his thumb he indicated the main dining room—“don’t know I’m helping to pick up some of their tabs?”

“The lousy bozos.”

“Those bozos are my friends,” Nate said severely.

“Long live them,” I said. “Bon appetit to all the millionaire bozos.”

“Yeah,” Nate said, laughing. “Yeah.” He got up and told a waiter to get Perry. “Perry,” Nate said, “bring Mr. Boswell’s bill.” When Perry came back he looked at it again and added up the figures.

I groaned to myself. Was it all a trick? I wondered desperately.

Nate looked up at me, smiled, and tore up my check. “With you, Jimmy,” he said, “we won’t even pretend there’s a tab.”

It was about two o’clock in the morning when someone pounded on my door.

“Who’s there?” I asked, startled.

“James Boswell?”

“Yes. Who is it?”

“It’s Potter, at the desk.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Potter. I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, but there’s a call for you downstairs, Mr. Boswell. It’s a matter of life and death, I’m afraid.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right out.”

I put a pair of pants over my pajamas and followed Mr. Potter downstairs. He led me to the phone at the desk and stepped respectfully away from what he thought was my tragedy.

“Hello?”

“Jimmy, it’s Nate. Sorry I missed you before.”

“Yes, Nate, what is it?”

“Jimmy, I told you it was big. Are you ready?” “Sure, Nate.”

“Okay. Can you be at my place tomorrow night about eight?”

“Yes, Nate. I think so. What is it?” “Jimmy, Harold Flesh is in town.”

…like a doctor, perhaps a surgeon, or an engineer, or someone on a committee. The important thing is his aura of conservatism — not respectability, conservatism. He seems to move in a paneled, masculine, conspicuously bookless world, to have come from rooms with bottled ships on their mantelpieces. There would be no guns on his walls though, I think, for he is no hunter. One doesn’t know, finally, what he is, although I got the feeling, hearing him speak, that there is something — what? astrology? Rosicrucianism? the restoration of the Bourbons? — to which, privately, he is deeply committed. It is the measure of how little he is to be trusted that he never talks of this, whatever it is. Nevertheless, when he leaves a place there lingers the smell of something off-center, subversive, wild—what Bruchevsteen calls “the metallic aura of closed systems.”

Flesh is not frank, and one knows instinctively — this is perhaps it — that he is constantly underrating his friends, if he has them, as well as his enemies. Patently, nothing will ever come of this, for he underrates not their talents (he moves in a world of specialists, of the delegation of authority and the division of labor), but their value as persons.

I found myself wondering about him sexually. He is not homosexual — that, at least, would take some sort of passion. I suspect that if he treats with women at all, he is most comfortable with whores. The obvious comparison is to John Sallow, yet there is something wrong here. Whatever one might think of him, Sallow is manifestly a force. Harold Flesh is too clearly only a middleman, someone high and dry within a chaos not of his own creating but which he controls with a mocking impunity and which yields to him in his perverse safety fantastic, endless profit. I was reminded rather of a scion, someone far along in the generations, whose wealth and power, great perhaps as they might be, seem out of touch with that original force which first created and wielded them. The dark-suited son of a distant king, he has hobbies, one supposes, where his fathers had causes, so that finally he seems derived, mutative, some primogenitive fact not so much of nature as of some obscure, still operative law and order.

It was surprising to me to discover how much I disliked him. So rarely do we meet someone of whom we can say positively, “I hate him,” that it is startling when it happens. In addition, I find it an extremely upsetting experience. I am nervous in the presence of my own hatred and behave stupidly.

Perhaps, though, I made him as nervous as he made me, for although there was no apparent reason, he chose to deal with me on a professional basis. He tried to corrupt me. Was I interested in being his bodyguard, he wanted to know.

I had never seen Nate so nervous. He was everywhere, directing everything. Once I saw him begin to fumble with the fastidious Perry’s bow tie, only to abandon it in frustration when he realized it was already correct. To the cook he was unforgivably rude, reducing that man almost to tears and then rushing back five minutes later to offer what was transparently an insincere apology because he was afraid the cook might take it in his head to attempt some damaging revenge. He scolded the waiters for imagined offenses, and even quarreled with the Puerto Rican busboys because he felt they were making too much noise with the silver. After a while, to calm him, I suggested we have a drink together.

“What drink?” he demanded angrily. “Harold Flesh comes to the place in an hour and he tells me to get drunk.”

“I’m not telling you to get drunk. I’m telling you to calm down.”

“Mind your business,” he said. “I’ll throw you the hell out of here. Perry’s right about you.”

“Perry’s a prick,” I said. “Why are you so concerned. about Harold Flesh? What can he do to you?”

“What, you think I’m legal? You think I’m Snow White? Jerk, you been away somewhere? You never heard the word syndicate? The term Mafia is unfamiliar to you?”

“Nate, you’re raving. You’re a nice man with a very expensive restaurant.”

He turned on me, genuinely angry. Before, the first time I had seen him, when I had welched on the bill — that was play. This was real. “What’s the matter, don’t you live in the same world I do?” he said. “Are you from Mars? That’s it, ain’t it, you’re from Mars. From never- never land, and you don’t know the way we do things here. You make me sick, do you understand me? You make me absolutely sick.”

“Nate, what did I do?”

“You make me sick. You do. You got no right, you got absolutely no right to be as big as you are and that stupid. I let you come here. You been to my parties, you meet my friends. You’re a big boy, God bless you, you got an appetite like a horse. I feed you bird tongues would cost a king his fortune to eat them and you don’t know a god-damn thing about me. Who I am, where I come from, how I got this place.”

“You never told me.”

“You never asked.”

“Well, I’m asking. Tell me.”

“I’ll write you a letter.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll draw you a picture.”

“Tell me.”

“What’ll I tell you? Perry carries a gun? Okay — Perry carries a gun. So does Simmons, did you know that? Simmons carries a gun.”

“In the Mews?”

“Yes, in the Mews. In the Mews! Infant! Baby! There are ladies in this world would sell anything. They sell the outside of their bodies. The inside — the inside, do you understand me? Piece by piece they sell it off, like at an auction. They do not always walk in the streets and stand under lampposts. Sometimes they sit in mahogany captain’s chairs on leather seats. They eat from linen thick as carpets with forks of soft pure silver. There are toothmarks on my spoons. There are doctors who perform illegal operations. I do not speak of men with breadknives and dirty fingernails in rooms behind stores. I speak of men on Park Avenue, in hospital amphitheaters with the best equipment. There are men that push junk, that water the liquor, the gas, the milk, the currency. I do not speak of muggers in parks, of creeps at windows with their hand on their thing, or rapers and queers. There are men that cripple and others that kill, that fix fights and World Series and prices and wars. There are wheelers and there are dealers.”

“If you’re trying to frighten me—”

“Baby! It doesn’t frighten you? I go to the track with these men, we sit in each other’s boxes at the World Series, in Indianapolis for the Five Hundred. In Louisville for the Derby we are on the floors of each other’s hotels, and I am frightened of them.”

“Well, of course. I understand that, Nate. But why?”

“Harold Flesh.”

He was in a state of active terror, abandoned to it, yet for all that still trying not so much to deal with it as to preserve it long enough to communicate it to me, his action vaguely heroic, as though I were someone sleeping in a burning house whom he must rouse before he could think of safety for himself. “Nate,” I said.

“The world is not clean.”

“Nate, this—”

“It is not a clean world.”

“I know that. I know it’s not clean. Fixing beyond fixing.”

“So make sense. Be afraid in it.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Good,” he said. “Good news.”

He took out a cigarette, something I never saw him do in the restaurant, though he smokes heavily at home. His hand shook as he lighted it.

“Nate.”

“Harold Flesh is such a son of a bitch.”

“Why did you want me to see him, Nate?”

“It’s important,” he said. “You know too many movie stars.” He put out the cigarette and stood up. “Have Perry bring you something,” he said and started to go.

“Nate.”

“I have to see. In the kitchen, I have to see.”

“Nate, please. Are you clean?”

He looked at me. “Are you?” I said.

“I’m shmutzic,” he said.

“What can you have to do with Harold Flesh?”

“With him? Nothing. I swear it.”

“But — then why do you care?”

“Because,” he said. “Because I’m like you. He’s a champion, ain’t he? From all walks. If they’re champions you tear up the check. Do you understand?”

“Nate, I don’t believe you. Something is on the line.”

“Ah,” he said. He smiled for the first time. “You chiseler. ‘Something is on the line.’ All right. Good. Just one of the things on the line, just one, is my place. Who needs that kind of trade? Who needs it? If those guys make it a habit to come here they could ruin me. That kind of trade. Cardinals eat here, for Christ’s sake.” He leaned forward. “In this world there are two kinds. Those who still bother to lie and those who don’t. On the average it is safer and more profitable to deal with those who still bother to lie. Perry!”

Perry came to the table. “Bring Mr. Boswell a nice pot of arctic lichen tea.” He left.

I looked around the room. Across from me, in a round wide booth, the red velvet upholstery tufted and buttoned like the canopied bed of a baby prince, a handsome man toasted a lovely woman. Were they clean, I wondered. Sure they were. In a far corner two middle-aged men — they seemed as unsinister as brokers — chatted amiably. Which one pulled the trigger? I studied the well- dressed, decorous women. Which were the expensive whores? I watched the carefully polite men moving self-consciously back in their chairs as the waiters placed food in front of them. Which was Mr. Big?

I settled dreamily into a contented vision of duplicity. I saw everything twice, the chic surfaces over the dry, stale mass, the vital appearance skin-tight across the unhealthy frame. Nate was wrong, of course, but his vision was the comfortable one. It was not a worthy cynicism, only a step beyond child’s play, a fantasy not of good versus evil, of good guys and bad, but the all- embracing comfort of bad guys and worse. It let one off, this view, as original sin let one off, or some sterile notion of environment. No, if anything, the world was too fine, people too good. Who would hold their measly temper tantrums against men who had to die?

In Nate’s Place it was an understandable illusion, an honest mistake. The place was like one of those enormous night clubs in films of the thirties. One automatically dipped the side of one’s jaw before one spoke. Somewhere, one was sure, a code knock would move a wall aside to reveal a casino where people in evening dress gaily gambled and talked about the DA and called their girlfriends “Sister.”

I did not think I wanted to stay to meet Nate’s Harold Flesh. Perhaps he was a bad man, but if he were he would be vaguely comic, too, a type who took himself too seriously or always wore a white carnation or carried a silver dollar for luck. Evil, if it exists, is as rare as virtue. No, it was in making something out of the gray, moral middle ground that greatness lay. That’s why Felix Sandusky, who took flesh and spun it into muscle, was great.

So Harold Flesh, whether he was Professor Moriarty out of Boston Blackie out of Damon Runyon — whether he was, as Nate himself thought he was, the Devil himself— was not someone who could matter very much to me. Horseracing, baseball, boxing. Why, Nate’s devils were boys, children.

I looked again at Nate’s comical room, thinking, sadly, that perhaps it was time to write Nate off as a contact. He had said it himself: I knew too many movie stars. His people were not of that middle distance where things happen. It was too easy to hypnotize myself in my friend Nathan’s nighttime world. As Perry, who only held its leaders’ coats, had — as Nate had. Too easy to get caught up in its real but probably incidental melodrama. Perhaps there were the things Nate said there were in the world, perhaps it was unclean. But it was the humdrum mud in cemeteries which terrified me, not the dust indoors. How little the atrocities Nate described had to do with me anyway, I thought, whose crimes, like most people’s, were merely petty, merely against myself, who picked no pocket, peddled no whore, pushed no dope, did no violence. At that moment it came to me as a revelation that I was just one more good man.

I went to the washroom. The porter did not look at me when I went in and when I left he didn’t get up to brush my jacket. He knew me, knew my circumstances (which in some views are the same). He expected no tip and withheld his services, one more who would deal with me on a professional basis only.

Outside there was a pay phone. I had no change in my pockets. I went back into the toilet and washed my hands slowly in the marble basin. The attendant did not even seem curious at my quick return. He sat reading his paper in his high shoeshine chair, his feet on the brass shoe forms.

“Slow tonight?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm,” he said.

“Tough.”

I could see him in the mirror. He glanced at me for a moment over the top of his paper and then went back to it. Soundlessly I slipped a dime from his plate of change among the bottles of hair lotions and trays of combs and stacks of hand towels on the marble shelf above the washbasin.

“Look,” I said, turning to him, “do you mind some advice?”

He put the paper down.

“Cut your overhead. A guy comes to a place like this, his shoes are already shined.”

“Where would I sit?” he asked.

“Well, that’s a point.”

I started to leave. “Say,” I said, “did you know Harold Flesh is going to be in tonight?”

He smiled. “Not bad,” he Said, “not bad.”

“You know him?”

“He used to pee over at Lou Mizer’s old ‘Monte Carlo’ when I was there.”

“Well, he’s coming in tonight.”

“Not bad,” he said. I pushed the door open. “Mr. Flesh is a good tipper,” he said.

“There are wheelers and there are dealers,” I said and walked out.

I called Penn Station. “When’s the next train to Philadelphia?”

There was one at ten o’clock. I looked at my watch. It was eight-thirty.

In the end, however, I did not go; in the end I had to stay and see him. In the end an important person is an important person.

At about eleven o’clock Perry came over to my table with a message from Nate. “He wants to see you in the private dining room. He wonders if you will take coffee with him at the table of Harold Flesh.”

“Yes, Perry. Thank you.” I got up to go. “Oh, Perry,” I said, “Have you got your gun?”

“I lead them to the table,” Perry said, “but you, you sit down with them!”

Dr. Morton Perlmutter is not an archeologist. He is an anthropologist, and it was announced in Stockholm today that he has just won the Nobel Prize.

Last year I followed the campaign trains of both Eisenhower and Stevenson. I’d be there, right beneath the platform, as they came to the rear of their trains to address the crowds. (It was interesting. I used my strength to force my way through the crowds. Only the old ladies knew I wouldn’t hit them, whereas such is the illusion of continued virility in man that old men thought themselves vulnerable at eighty.) My technique was always the same. I would let the candidate make his opening remarks and then, as he came to the essence of his talk, I would begin to raise and unroll a banner I carried with me on two long poles. Carefully spreading the poles I would take up the slack gently until the unfurled banner was level with and just in front of the candidate’s face. The message was simple. If Eisenhower was speaking, it read “STEVENSON”; if Stevenson, “EISENHOWER.”

The campaign failed (I speak of my own). It cost a lot of money and a lot of time and it was silly. I had meant to gain attention with the strategy of schoolboys punching little girls on the arms. But though there were moments when I seemed to anger Eisenhower and made Stevenson wistful and perhaps a little sad, I realize now that mostly I must have appeared ridiculous to the two men. They expected such nuts and wrote us off beforehand, like a restaurant anticipating the “shrinkage” of its spoons. (I have since met Mr. Stevenson and when I reminded him of the incidents he recalled them vividly. He told me that they had seemed to him at the time symbolic, and that each time I showed up a little more energy had gone out of his campaign. He seems to think that if he could have maintained his confidence he might have gone on to win the election. Perhaps he was just being kind. I am naturally inclined toward for-want-of-a nail constructs anyway, but even if I were not I should want to believe this one. I have the hard-minded perversity of the humdrum and insist on influencing events, even if only negatively, and even — sadly — against my own and everyone else’s better interests. What the hell? If that’s the price, that’s the price. Everybody dies.)

I am the sort of person who is good at salvaging at least something from bad situations. They should put me to work reclaiming fresh water from the sea. I had made a fool of myself, had spent money wastefully, had disappointed or angered everyone with whom I had come into contact. Yet I came away from that foolish campaign with something of value; I formed a new impression of the great. Since then I have had it again in all its original force.

One summer afternoon in New York I was browsing in a bookshop. I was looking through the stacks of books with a deep concentration, not even thinking of my ferocious preoccupation with the great. Yet suddenly I was aware of another presence in the shop—“presence” is the very word. It wasn’t the bookseller, a typically dusty, foreign-looking man who padded back and forth between the narrow book-close aisles. It wasn’t any of the two or three other browsers; it wasn’t even anyone who had just entered the shop. The place had one of those bells above the door, and I had heard no ringing. I simply knew that someone great was in the shop with us, someone whom I had not seen before, who had been stooping perhaps in one of the dark corners when I entered the shop. I’m keenly sensitive to the great, of course, but I have no sixth sense; I see no visions, hear no voices. I am simply stage-struck to the point of sickness. I turned around. Behind me was Orson Welles. In other circumstances (if, for example, I had walked into the shop and come upon him) I would have invented some reason for talking to him. I admire Mr. Welles. We might even have had a successful gam. Now, however, all I did was confirm yet again the stunning validity of the impression I first had when I followed the campaign trains.

It is this. There is about great men a physical presence that always matches their symbolic one. They look like great men. They are like jewels set off against black velvet in a bright white light. But take away the black velvet of their deeds, the bright white light of their fame, and they are still like jewels, their worth as clear among broken bottles in an alley as in the jeweler’s case. Somehow, too, they seem smaller than they really are — like small, heavy bronze reproductions of famous statues. Like the reproductions, they have the air of impressive compactness. Their faces and bodies do not bleed into the surroundings as do our own; they preserve always a nimbus of self, of opaque and valuable and hard surfaces. I cannot account for the odd discrepancy between their reduced physical size and this clear impression of weight, except to speculate about the notion of solidity. There is something expensive about their queer compactness, their bronzy being. It is no wonder that we speak of men of substance. Mr. Welles is a big man, almost as large as myself, and yet, as he shuffled through the shop in his dark blue suit, the cigar he held between his fingers long-ashed but not burning, I had the impression that I could hold him in my hand.

The faces of the great are ruddier than ours, their strange health the physical manifestation, perhaps, of their symbolic immortality. Their bodies are fit. They are better tailored than we are, but that does not explain it. Nothing explains it, but I’m glad it’s so; it’s a confirmation of my way of life. No one need ever be ashamed of his expensive tastes.

Busy as I was following the campaign trains, concerned as I was for the success of my bad scheme, I saw all this in Eisenhower and in Stevenson. They were like heavy bags of precious coins, like treasure in firm caskets at the bottom of the sea.

(I have just thought of something. Perhaps cause and effect are somehow mixed up here. Perhaps we pick our leaders as we pick our actors — for their looks; perhaps the great are destined by nothing so much as their physical well-being; perhaps the world is all appearance. Is this the meaning of life? I may have stumbled onto something. I shall have to think about it.)

I was reminded of all this again last night when I met Dr. Morton Perlmutter.

Perlmutter was not yet at the Gibbenjoys’ when I arrived. When I am operating on a contraband invitation I take care to come after the other guests. In that way I am often unnoticed by the host, who, after all, doesn’t usually have any idea who I am. If you have to arrive at an affair late, it is important to be precisely as drunk as the other guests by the time you get there.

The Gibbenjoys were in the hall when I presented my invitation to their butler. I didn’t know they were the Gibbenjoys, of course. All I saw were some men and women in evening dress talking to each other, but I couldn’t take any chances. Indeed, it’s only logical that if someone is standing in the hall it’s probably the host or hostess. If I walked past without acknowledging them they might have blown the whistle on me immediately.

I walked by the group slowly and gazed warmly into their faces. It was my trickiest maneuver; with it I try to make it appear that I am personally known to all the group save the individual I am immediately looking at. It requires the nerves and timing of an acrobat. I look expectantly and just a shade blankly into a face, and at precisely the instant when recognition and intelligence must dawn or be abandoned, I flash a smile of recognition and overwhelming intimacy immediately to the person’s left. (Most people are right-handed so their peripheral vision is greater on their right than on their left side.) I may even wink. Frequently there is nothing to the person’s left except a statue or a piece of drapery. So precise and delicately off-center is this movement that even when someone actually is there he takes my look as intended for someone to his right. There are variations; sometimes I have tilted my head back, smiled, opened my mouth and exhaled an inaudible “Ah, there!” to pictures on the wall just behind and above the fellow in front of me.

I peered into the faces of the small gathering, nervous, as I say, that my host and hostess might be among them. If they were, my technique would flush a nod from one of them.

“Hello there,” a man said uncertainly. “Nice to see you.”

“Good evening, Irving,” I said without hesitation.

The man looked startled and for a moment I thought I might have made a mistake. Then he glanced in desperation toward a woman in a rose-colored evening gown and I knew I was all right. I turned to the woman quickly. “Eugenie,” I said. “How are you, darling?” I leaned down and brushed Mrs. Gibbenjoy’s confused face with a deft kiss. I turned back to Irving. “Perlmutter here yet?” I asked.

“Why no, not yet. We were waiting for him,” he said.

“He told me he’d be a little late,” I said, “but I thought he’d certainly be here by now.”

“No,” Irving Gibbenjoy said, “Not yet. We’re waiting for him.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, look, I’ll go get a drink. When he comes in tell him Jim Boswell wants to see him.”

“Yes. Yes, I will, of course,” Irving brightened at once. “Oh, Mr. Boswell, forgive me for being so rude. You may not know all these other people.” I blew a kiss to a waiter serving drinks in a room behind Irving Gibbenjoy’s back; I waved the fingers on my left hand to an umbrella stand just as a woman walked by. She stopped, turned, and pointing to herself mouthed, “Who, me?” I looked back hastily at Irving Gibbenjoy. “Mr. and Mrs. Philo Perce,” Irving Gibbenjoy said.

I bowed to Mrs. Perce, shook Mr. Perce’s hand.

“General and Mrs. Bill Manara,” said Irving.

“General,” I said, “I go to all your wars. Mrs. Manara.”

“Hope Fayespringer.”

“Ah,” I said, “the Carnegie. How’s Granddad?”

“Mr. Jim Boswell, everybody,” Irving said a little uncomfortably.

“Are you a Philadelphian, Mr. Boswell?” the General asked me. Irving looked eager, thinking that now, perhaps, he might learn something about his guest.

“Not for some time, General,” I said.

“Where do you live now, Mr. Boswell?” Mrs. Gibbenjoy wanted to know. She was a tough one, Mrs. Gibbenjoy. It did not do actually to lie to these people. One hoped that the necessity for the truth simply did not come up.

“I’m at the Love right now, Eugenie.”

“The love?” said Hope Fayespringer.

“It’s a hotel,” I said.

“In Philadelphia?” the General asked.

“For some time, General.”

“Is that one of yours, Pilchard?” Mr. Gibbenjoy asked a man who had just joined us.

“What’s that, the Love? Lord, no, I wish it were. It’s a gold mine. It’s actually a kind of flophouse at the bad end of Market Street. Marvelous profits. Fresh linen just once a week. What do you pay, young man, a dollar a night?”

“One fifty.”

“There, you see? An enormously successful enterprise. Fellow named Penner owns it. He buys some of his supplies from us. There’s a motto on his letter head: ‘For We Have the Poor Always With Us.’ I tell you, Hilton and Sheraton and Pick and I are in the wrong field. A chain of flops, that’s the thing. Can’t you see it? ‘The Bowery Pilchard.’ ‘Skid Row East, a Pilchard Enterprise.’ It makes the mouth water. ‘For We Have the Poor Always With Us.’”

Mrs. Manara and Irving Gibbenjoy looked from Pilchard to me doubtfully. General Manara smiled, and Mrs. Gibbenjoy rubbed her cheek where I had kissed her.

“Do I know you, Mr. Boswell? When you came in and looked at our little group I had the impression we’d met,” Irving said.

“No, sir. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“Is Mr. Boswell your friend, Eugenie?”

“No. He’s not.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Boswell,” Irving said, “this must be embarrassing for you, but may I ask how you’re here?”

“I crashed.”

“Do people do that?” Mrs. Perce asked.

“But you had an invitation,” Irving said. “I saw you hand it to Miller.”

“It was an invitation to a bar mitzvah, Irving,” I said.

“Oh,” Irving said.

“You’ve not come to rob us, have you?” Hope Fayespringer asked, touching her necklace.

“Well, of course not,” I said.

“Well, you can’t stay,” Irving said.

“Why not?” I asked. “I probably know some of the people here.”

“You do?” Mrs. Manara said.

“From other parties,” I said.

“That makes no difference. You’ll have to leave,” Irving said.

“All right,” I said. “I hope I haven’t spoiled anything.”

“No, of course not,” Irving said. “Actually it’s rather flattering of you to try to crash, but… well, I just can’t have it. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

“I quite understand.”

I turned to leave, then looked back. “General Manara,” I said, “it’s been delightful.”

“Yes, it has,” General Manara said.

“Mrs. Manara,” I said, reaching for her hand. “And Mrs. Fayespringer. I’ve enjoyed meeting you. Don’t you worry — Nelton will get a town one day. I have hunches about these things.”

“Thank you, Mr. Boswell.” She seemed to understand what I meant.

“Pilchard,” I said crisply.

“Boswell,” Pilchard said.

“Perce, Mrs. Perce.”

“Goodbye,” they said together.

“Eugenie, goodbye.”

She didn’t answer.

“Irving. I really am sorry about all this.”

“It’s all right, Boswell.” He leaned forward. “You’ve money enough for a cab, haven’t you?” he said softly.

I frowned. “Please, Irving,” I said. “It’s a warm, lovely night. I may walk back to the Love.”

“You know best,” he said.

I retrieved my hat and coat from Miller and left.

When I stepped outside the Gibbenjoys’ big doors I saw that most of the party had moved outdoors. Although I had not noticed anyone when I came up the long drive, by now there were dozens of people strolling about through Gibbenjoy’s gardens. I took off my coat, folded it, put it and my hat in the low branch of a tree and lost myself among the other guests.

I was astonishingly content. I had been discovered, exposed, humiliated, but one can never be wholly miserable in a tuxedo. Indeed, one cannot be miserable at all in a tuxedo. At least I can’t. The tuxedo is a uniform, like any other. Inside one, the wearer’s emotions are dictated by the game that is to be played. In the case of the tuxedo this calls for charm and a disciplined lightness of step (after all, it’s the uniform of the dance). Why else had everyone been so agreeable? Gibbenjoy had thrown me out, of course, but because he had been wearing a tuxedo he threw me out with charm, with a disciplined lightness of step, with a man-of-the-worldiness which winked at the upsetting of convention. If either of us had been in a business suit we would have gotten down to business. I might have been arrested.

What is the gigolo? A manipulator, a liar, a thief, a cheat, a whore. But in a tuxedo! Redeemable, so long as he keeps his black pants on, his shoes shined, the velvet on his collar buffed. In a tuxedo his sins are comic, have nothing to do with the cellar, the ginny room, the unmade bed. Gibbenjoy had said, “Oh, it’s all right,” and the General, a man who understands uniforms, had chimed in, “It certainly is,” because all the world loves a prankster, a crasher. Crash is a funny word, even. It’s the word in comic books when two buffoons bang their heads together. I was a crasher. A clonker. A bang-smasher. A dealer in comical impacts. A cartoon cat who lost his fur in one reel, was whole again in the next. (A joke resurrection. No, a joke catastrophe, since all resurrections are serious, all second chances somber.)

So I walked immune, eternally young, in an oddly suspended autumn, foolish, forgiven, smiling, through the garden. I smiled at the brothers in the tuxedos and the sisters in the evening gowns on the marbled benches, and they smiled back at me. I took drinks from the trays of the servants. They were in formal dress themselves, a gay servitude. Princes, perhaps. In disguise, like myself. Masked playboys. I smiled in coded recognition.

A long-stemmed champagne glass in my hands, I walked through the garden of the Gibbenjoys, in weather preternaturally warm for the last day of October, among trees which had lost their leaves, but which seemed in the strange warm night to have lost them prematurely, like bald twenty-year-olds whose hairlessness — like my gaucheness — was just a joke.

I sat down next to a girl on a stone bench. “Why are you crying?” I said.

“I’m not crying.”

“Then why are you sitting alone?”

“I’m not doing that either,” she said.

“You’re tough,” I said. “All I get tonight are the tough ones. Isn’t anyone tender and vulnerable any more? How do you account for this warm weather? What’s the word you people use — unseasonable. How do you account for this unseasonable unseasonableness? This unreasonable unseasonable unseasonableness?”

“Dry up,” she said, and moved off into the trees.

A youth, I thought. You can’t con youth with youth.

I strolled some more. I interrupted conversations; I started others. Almost everywhere I was welcome. Once I spotted Mrs. Gibbenjoy and ducked behind a tree until she passed by. Another time I saw Hope Fayespringer. I tried to turn away, but it was too late; she had seen me. She shook her head and made shame-shame everybody- knows-your-name with her fingers. I smiled and gave her my caught-with-my-fingers-in-the-cookie-jar special and followed it with my boys-will-be boys-bangsmasher. She sighed deeply and walked away.

At about eleven o’clock the band came out of the house and set up their stands near a fountain and played while people danced among the trees. Servants were on ladders everywhere, hurriedly stringing lights.

I had stopped drinking. I didn’t want to get sick. Throwing up is amusing, too, of course, but not for the person doing it.

I went up to people. “Have you seen Perlmutter?” I asked. “Is Perlmutter here yet?” “Where’s Perlmutter?”

I went up to a dark, Jewish-looking man. “Dr. Perlmutter?”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

Gabrielle Gail was singing a Greek song while the band faked it. As phony as it sounded to me on records, it seemed beautiful there, and I danced in Greek on the lawn while she sang. I raised one leg and turned around slowly on my heel, digging a neat little divot in the Garden of the Gibbenjoys.

“Eureka,” somebody said.

“Is good my dance? You like it?” I said. “In old countrys is used to do all nights. Is ruins grow like flowers in my countrys. Is dig hole with heel once while dance and to discover temples. Like Dr. Morton Perlmutter.”

“Perlmutter’s an anthropologist.”

“Sure, but a terrific dancer.”

Gabrielle Gail stopped singing and I stopped dancing. “Is Perlmutter here?” I asked.

“Over there,” someone said, pointing to a group of people about fifty feet away. From where I stood, they looked like players in a huddle. The moonlight shone on the backs of evening dresses and dinner jackets. Strangely, the formal dress increased the impression that I was looking at some sort of a team of athletes.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Listening,” the man said who had pointed out the group. “The little Yid is making a speech.”

I walked toward them. As I got closer I saw that even more people than I thought were gathered around Perlmutter. The ones in the back were standing behind others who sat on the damp grass. I thought about the abandon of the rich, of their scorn for the indelible stains of chlorophyll. Real class, I thought. I moved closer, stalking the group from an oblique angle. (I have learned never to waste an important first view from a conventional position.) I walked past them, tracing behind their backs their semicircle on the lawn. Going by quickly, my gaze fixed on the interstices between their ears, I looked instinctively downward where Perlmutter appeared and disappeared rapidly like an object seen through the pickets in a fence. When I had twice moved past them in this way, I made a place for myself at one end of the semicircle.

My first thought was that something terrible had happened to Perlmutter and that these people had gathered around to watch while he died. He was stretched out in front of me on his belly, moving erotically up and down. In his left hand was a fistful of earth which he kneaded through his fingers.

“Like that,” he said suddenly, sitting up. “None of this occidental crap about beds or anything like that. They’ll screw in rivers, in fields, on the sides of mountains. I’ve seen them nail each other amongst a herd of their sheep, and on the day’s catch from the sea. You understand? Always against some natural background. Never in a house. Now, you noticed I had some earth in my hands. That’s necessary. The man holds one clod and the woman another. They smear it over each other’s organs when they begin and again when they finish. It’s very clear. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’”

“That’s amazing,” a woman said.

“What’s so amazing about it, lady?” Perlmutter demanded.

“Well, it’s amazing, that’s all,” the woman said uneasily.

“There I beg to disagree,” Perlmutter said fiercely. “Where are my pills? Where are they? They must have dropped out of my pocket during the demonstration. Who has a flashlight? Darling, run get a flashlight from the house. Ask for the gardener. The gardener has to come out sometimes in the middle of the night after rainstorms to see the damage to the flowers. He’d have a flashlight.”

“Here they are, Doctor,” a man said, handing him a small flat box.

“Thank you.” Perlmutter opened the box and took out two shiny white pills and popped them into his mouth. He waited until they dissolved before he spoke again. “Interesting about these pills,” he said. “There’s a direct correlation between a society and the form of its medicines. In Ur-societies — in no place in my forty-seven published works do I ever use the pejorative word ‘primitive’—among people whose cultures the lady here describes as ‘amazing,’ the medicines are always taken in their raw states. Bark. Herbs. Grasses. Flowers. That’s natural, of course, but I mean they aren’t even cooked. But wait. In cultures like Tahiti where the people have seen Europeans — let’s face it, white men are Europeans — but live apart from them, they begin to prepare the medicines. The bark is scraped, the flowers are pressed for their juices. Now, in only partially industrialized societies, or in economically underprivileged areas like Poland or Nazi Spain, the medicines are almost invariably in a liquid solution. Only in technocracies do you find tablets, pills. Why? It’s no cheaper to prepare a liquid solution than a pill. The only reason for this phenomenon is that a liquid solution is closer to a natural form and has a counterpart in nature — water, sap, flowing lava, et cetera. The pill, however, has no counterpart in nature and thus flourishes only in a society like ours.”

“That’s amazing,” the same woman said.

Perlmutter glared at her. “It’s obvious to me, lady, that you’ve had no formal intercourse either with science or with scientists. Everything amazes you! The world exists as a fiction for you, does it?” He put another pill in his mouth and, impatient for it to dissolve, began to speak thickly, careful not to crunch it with his teeth. He had a very strong New York accent, but pronounced his words, burdened even as they were by the pill, with a distinctness that made me believe English was a second language for him. One felt he might have learned the language and the accent at two different times; he sounded somehow like a ventriloquist who had confused his normal voice with the voice of his dummy. Even in the dim light, and though he was still sitting, I could tell that he was an extraordinarily slight man. His face was clear, and very pale. He seemed indeed a little Yid, everybody’s tailor, everybody’s Talmudic scholar — like someone who still took piano lessons at forty. Nevertheless, his head, brittle as it seemed in the watery light, gave the same impression of weight and value that I had observed in other great men. He had the same odd precision about his body, the same carved aspect to his features, and, despite the fact that he was the only man there not in a tuxedo, the same faint dapperness. Of course, I realized, hadn’t I been thinking in terms of the ventriloquist and his dummy? Of the miniature reproductions of statues? There was something doll-like about the great. Here was a new substance, that’s all, something satirical and a little vicious.

“You’re a victim of a Philadelphia civilization which smothers credulity,” Dr. Perlmutter said. “That’s the difference between you and the so-called primitive — only a difference of the heart. The savage isn’t shocked by the world, and you are. He can believe in appeasable rain gods, in implacable demons, and you can’t. You say he’s more naïve. I say he’s more sophisticated. Your sophistication consists in saying ‘No, no,’ or, when the evidence or the authority is irrefutable, ‘Amazing. Amazing,’ while his sophistication, like my own, consists in a willingness to concede everything. Tell me, lady, when you saw the newsreels of Buchenwald did you say then, as you do to me, ‘Amazing, amazing’?” He looked accusingly at the rest of us. “The Philadelphia fascist mentality makes me sick,” he said. “Help me up!”

Whether by design or unconsciously, he offered his hand to the same woman he had been attacking. With a terrible self-effacement she reached down and pulled him to his feet. She was not a tall woman, but when he stood he came only to her shoulders. He pushed through the crowd. “I’m going inside,” he announced.

The others made room for him. I ran after him. He was going toward the house. I couldn’t risk going inside after him, so I stopped him on the lawn.

“Dr. Perlmutter,” I said.

He looked around at me. “Call me Morty,” he said.

“I’m James Boswell.”

A little piece of Dr. Perlmutter’s index finger was missing. We shook hands. “There’s a little piece of my index finger missing,” Dr. Perlmutter said, “but nobody ever notices it until I tell them about it.”

We walked along toward the house. Morty had a slight limp. “I’ll let you don’t notice my limp,” he said.

“Are you limping, Morty?” I asked. His left shoulder was slightly higher than his right.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s my left shoulder. It’s just a little higher than my right. I try to have my clothes cut to compensate for it. You’ve got to be loyal to your own culture.”

“That’s right,” I said.

We walked along. “You know what a lot of that Nobel Prize dough is going for?” Morty said. “Suits.”

“You can get a lot of suits with all that money,” I said.

“Appearance is very important in our culture,” Morty said solemnly.

Walking next to him I could see that his nose had an odd down-plunging aspect to it.

“My nose was broken once in the jungle and improperly set by a medicine man. It was so long before I got back to a non-Ur civilization that the bones had already healed. I think it’s too late to do anything about it. Probably people don’t notice, but I’m conscious of it.”

“Was your nose broken, Morty?”

“Kid,” he said, “I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist.”

We were on the steps of the Gibbenjoys’. “Morty, don’t let’s go in there,” I said.

“Why not? Gibbenjoy is all right.”

“He called you a little Yid,” I said desperately.

“He what?” Morty exploded. “When did he say that?”

“Before. When you were saying all those interesting things on the lawn to his guests.”

“He did, did he? Let go of my arm. Let go of my arm, damn it, I need a pill.” I let him put a pill in his mouth. He pushed past me.

“Where’s Gibbenjoy?” he asked Miller angrily.

“I think Gibbenjoy is in the library, sir.”

“Come on, Morty,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I looked at Miller nervously, but he didn’t seem to remember who I was so I brushed past him and rushed after Morty. He must have been familiar with the house, for he was hurrying in what I supposed was the direction of the library. “The library’s always on the ground floor in these places,” he called back, stretching his neck over the shoulder that was slightly higher than the other one. “Conspicuous consumption,” he explained spitefully. He pushed through a double door. We were in the dining room. “Come on,” he said. I followed him into another room, a sort of office. An elderly man was kissing the young lady I had spoken to on the bench. “Where’s the damn library?” Morty yelled.

“Downtown, I should think,” the old man said calmly, “but it’s probably closed.”

“Oh, come on,” Morty said impatiently.

We went up a staircase. Morty kept putting pills into his mouth. “It’s even worse than I thought,” he said, talking this time over the lower shoulder and appearing oddly taller, “inconspicuous conspicuous consumption. Did you know that there is no word for ’snob’ in any but the Indo-European family of languages?” On the second- floor landing he chose a huge set of double doors and marched through.

There were about a half dozen men in the room. They were smoking cigars and drinking sherry. It was the first time I had ever seen anything quite like it and I was sorry that Morty was about to spoil it.

“Gibbenjoy?” Morty demanded.

By this time he had so many pills in his mouth that it was hard to understand him. “Gibbenjoy?”

“Yes?” Gibbenjoy said, breaking away from the men to whom he had been talking. “Ah, Perlmutter.”

“So I’m a little Yid, am I? Evidently the Nobel committee in Stockholm takes a different view of little Yids than people in Philadelphia. I’m a little Yid with the Nobel Prize. A little Yid with four brothers, all of them brilliant psychiatrists. A little Yid who earned the only doctoral degree ever awarded by the Columbia University Night School. A little Yid who’s been married six times and never had to bury a single wife and who during one of those times was married to a full-blooded black African princess six feet two inches tall. A little Yid who used to drive a taxi in the streets of New York and pulled a rickshaw for ten months in the city of Hong Kong, the only occidental ever so privileged. Also I speak fluently eight European languages, and thirty-one dialects of African and Indian tribes, including Hopi and Shawnee in this country. So that’s your idea of a little Yid, is it? Well, fuck you, Gibbenjoy.”

“Come on, Morty,” I said.

Gibbenjoy stared open-mouthed. If I had bewildered him before, Perlmutter astonished him now. He looked from Morty to me. “What have you to do with all this?” he asked me.

I looked at Morty. He was waiting patiently for me to deliver my evidence. I looked back at Gibbenjoy, rapidly calculating which of my hopelessly severed loyalties was liable to produce the most enduring results.

“You and the whole anti-Semitic crew aren’t worth the little piece of index finger Morty gave to science,” I said drunkenly. “Come on, Morty, let’s get away from these Nazis.” I pulled him with me out of the room. Since his angry speech to Gibbenjoy he seemed calmer, almost sedate.

“You were wonderful, Morty,” I said. I could believe in Morty’s courage though I had no reason to believe in the need for it.

Morty shrugged carelessly. It was neither a modest gesture nor sententious self-effacement. Morty would never buff elegant fingernails down well-bred lapels. His movement seemed instead rather hopeless, and I felt a brief panic of guilt.

“I thought Hitler would have finished all that,” he said quietly.

I nodded helplessly. “Well,” I said, “let’s get out of here.” A little extravagantly, I motioned for him to precede me down the staircase.

He went down the stairs apathetically and we left the house.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “I left my hat and coat in a tree. Wait right here.” I ran off to get them. When I returned a minute later Morty was sitting on the wide patio steps, his elbows on his knees. His chin was in his hands.

“Are you all right, Morty?”

He looked up at me sadly and pointed to his mouth.

“Are you dissolving a pill, Morty?” He nodded. I waited while Morty’s pill dissolved. “Morty, how did you come here tonight? Did you drive?”

Morty swallowed deeply. “I drove,” he said in a minute.

I looked down the long necklace of cars in Gibbenjoy’s curving driveway. “Which is yours, Mort?”

He pointed listlessly down the driveway, indicating a place somewhere near the gates. “It’s a Forty-seven Buick,” he said softly.

“Well, come on,” I said. “You’d better give me the keys.” I pulled him up gently. “Come on, Morty, we can’t stay here.”

I led him down the drive past the shiny Cadillacs and Lincolns and Rollses. Chauffeurs in funereal livery lounged against the highly polished fenders talking quietly to each other, or sat, the driver’s doors thrown widely open, staring vacantly at the tips of their boots.

We came to Morty’s car, black and blocky and vaguely powerful. It was the car of a traveling salesman who did a lot of driving alone and carried his sample cases in the back seat and missed his family. I had a sudden surge of feeling for its owner when I saw it. I imagined him in some midwestern university town on a week night in the winter. He was there to give a lecture and he couldn’t read the street signs very well and he moved with stiff effort inside his heavy overcoat and his thick gloves.

“Shall I drive, Morty? You seem a little tired.”

“Yeah,” he said, “all right. You drive.” He gave me a ring of keys on a dirty bit of string. There were only a few keys on it.

I opened the door for Morty. “Well, where to?” I said when I was sitting behind the wheel.

“Listen,” he said, “there’s really no need for you to leave the party.”

“Come on, Morty, after what I said to Gibbenjoy?”

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose you’re right. I hope I didn’t get you into trouble with him. He’s very powerful.”

“That’s of no importance, Morty,” I said. “I wish you’d put that out of your mind. Everything’s all right.”

“Well,” he said, “I hope so.”

“How about a hamburger, Morty? I know a place on Market Street that’s open all night. Cabbies and cops eat there. And truckers.” I was thinking of the Maryland Café. It was across from the Love.

“All right,” he said without enthusiasm.

We drove through the curving, wooded suburbs of the wealthy and into the city. Beside me Morty sat with his head resting on the back of the seat and this thin short legs stretched out. His eyes were closed. I felt very good, very powerful. I was driving through the streets of the city with the world’s newest Nobel Prize winner beside me. It didn’t bother me at all that I’d practically had to capture him to have him with me in this way. What would General Manara do with someone like Morty? The Mortys were his company clerks. What would Hope Fayespringer do with him? Or Gibbenjoy? He was better off with me. I smiled to myself. I was a Nobel Prize winner winner.

We went down a cobblestoned street with two sets of streetcar tracks. I skidded in one of the ruts and jolted the car in pulling it out. Morty woke up.

“Feel better, Morty?”

He took out his box and put two more pills into his mouth.

I turned onto Market Street, drove down it to the Maryland and pulled near the curb a few doors away from the restaurant. “This is it, Dr. Perlmutter,” I said.

Morty revived when we walked into the café. It was a big place with wide red-plasţic-covered booths along two walls. Down the center of the room was a double row of booths. A counter with stools ran along the back; behind it were grills and ice cream freezers and shelves with small boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies and red and white cans of Campbell’s soups. The whole place was lit by strings of long fluorescent tubes that hung exposed from the ceiling.

Morty seemed pleased. “This is very nice,” he said. “This is really nice.”

“Yes,” I said. I had picked it because it was the only place in Philadelphia I knew. I always ate there.

He went over to the cashier’s glass counter and bent down to look into it. “Look,” he said, “Look. ‘Brach’s Peppermint Curls.’ ‘Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit.’ ‘Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum.’ ‘Holloway’s Milk Duds.’ ‘Hershey’s Milk Chocolate.’ ‘Mallen’s Malties.’ ‘Evans’ Little Licorice.’”

The cashier, sitting on a high stool behind the counter, looked down at him nervously. “Can’t you make up your mind?” she said.

Morty peered up at her.

“Can’t you decide what candy you want?”

“Oh,” Morty said. “Certainly. Give me a package of Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum.”

On her side of the counter the woman slid back the wooden doors and reached inside. Morty put his finger on the glass to show her where the gum was. She sighed heavily. Morty looked up at me and winked.

He stood up. “Five cents, is that right?” He had a quarter in his hand. He stooped down again, and looked inside the case. “Let me have a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate, too.”

The woman got off her stool and bent down. “Where is it?” she asked.

“Right there,” Morty said. He smiled at the woman through the glass.

“That’s fifteen cents,” the woman said, straightening and sitting again on her stool. “The candy is a dime.”

“I think I’ll take my change in a cigar,” he said. “Which cigars are a dime?”

“It says on the boxes,” the woman said wearily.

“Yes, of course. Do you see these wonderful cigar boxes?” he asked me.

I stooped down beside him and peered into the case.

“Look at the emblem on the Dutch Master. That’s really a very fine reproduction.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is.”

“Look at that one,” Morty said. ”‘That Grand Imperial. The Smoke of the Czars.’ That’s a dime. Do you want one?”

“No, thank you.”

“I’ll take a Grand Imperial,” he told the woman.

“Say,” she said. “Candy, cigars — how about a nice glass of milk and a bottle of beer?”

Morty stood up. He put his gum and his candy and his cigar in his pocket. “You know what’s wrong with girls like you?” he said. “You’re wise guys. I had my eyes right up your skirt the whole time I was looking through that glass case. You’ve got a run up your left stocking starting at the knee that goes up to the thigh.”

“Morty!” I said.

He leaned across the counter. “My second wife was a cashier,” he said to her.

The woman rolled her eyes upward in what she meant to be massive boredom.

Morty laughed. “I used to get her the same way,” he said.

“Will you listen to him?” she said.

“Come on, Morty,” I said, and led him to a booth. He followed, still laughing.

“This place is really nice,” Morty said again when we had sat down. He seemed as lively as he had earlier in the evening. Evidently he was one of those people with an emotional second wind.

He spread out a napkin he had taken from the metal dispenser and put the candy on it, placing the wrapper so that he could read it. Then he put the gum beside it and looked from one to the other. All expression was gone from his face as he studied the wrappers. I looked at the brown and gray candy wrapper, wondering what he saw. He picked up the package of gum and holding it in front of his eyes turned it so that he could study each side. He put it down on the napkin again and sat back. Then he leaned forward, bending down slowly over the napkin. The napkin might have been a slide, the gum and candy cultures on it.

“What is it, Morty?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Suddenly he slid out of the booth and rushed back to the cashier. I saw him pointing to the glass case. He took some coins out of his pocket and looked into his palm for a moment. “Twenty cents’ worth,” I heard him say excitedly. “Any kind, that’s the point.” The woman gave him more candy, but instead of coming back to the booth he went to the counter at the rear of the café and leaned forward across it. In a moment he was back in the booth.

Morty put all the candy on the napkin. “See?” he said excitedly. “‘Mallen’s Malties.’ ‘Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum.’ ‘Hershey’s Chocolate.’”

“Morty,” I said, suddenly frightened, “are you a diabetic?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Don’t you understand?” he asked impatiently. “All the candies, all the gums have the name of the man who makes it prominently on the label. Showing the possessive! Hershey’s. Peter Paul’s. Beeman’s. Curtiss’. Brach’s. Wrigley’s. I looked at the products behind that counter there and it’s the same thing. Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Why? It’s an important question. Think of other products. Is it Remington’s typewriter? Chevrolet’s automobile? Bayer’s aspirin? No! But you do find Pond’s cold cream. Cold cream yes, but typewriters no. What an insight! There’s Welch’s Grape Juice, but it’s Schlitz Beer! I’ve explained the culture!” Morty said, his eyes shining. “I was looking for the key. I knew there must be a key. There had to be a key. Margaret Mead said no, it was too complex to have one, but I knew she was wrong. ‘Go for the belly button of the culture,’ I said. ‘Something that’s there but no one bothers to think about.’”

“Morty, what is it?”

“All the bugs aren’t out yet,” he warned.

“Of course, but what is it?”

“It will have to be refined.”

“I know that. Certainly, but—”

“I’ll have to do a lot of legwork. Research. Dull stuff.”

“Well, that’s to be expected,” I said.

“I’ll have to get a complete list of brand names somewhere.”

“Brand names?”

“Do you suppose the Department of Commerce?”

“What is it, Morty?”

He looked at me suspiciously. “What’s your field?” he asked me suddenly.

“What?”

“What’s your field?”

“Morty, I haven’t got a field. I swear to you.”

“What’s your field?”

“Left.”

“You’re not an anthropologist?”

I shook my head.

“Are you in academics at all?”

“No, Morty.”

“All right,” he said a little uncertainly. “I suppose I can trust you. I have to tell somebody. As I say, though, it’s not perfected yet. There’s plenty of thinking still to be done.”

I nodded.

“Well,” he said, “when I first realized about the candy wrappers I thought it might have something to do with pride or craftsmanship or something. Most candy makers were probably small businessmen initially. Working in their own candy kitchens from private recipes, caramel up to their elbows. When they branched out maybe they just wanted to keep that homemade touch. So they put their signatures on the wrappers. That’s the term, ‘Signatures’! Maybe they thought it might even be good business. But that’s crap. Who buys candy? Kids buy candy. What the hell does a kid care if the stuff’s homemade? What does a kid know about good business? Then when I saw the cereal boxes, I realized it was bigger than that. Who eats cereal? Kids. Who eats soup? Again kids. Always kids. Kids! All right, let’s skip to the grape juice. Who drinks grape juice? Kids, right? But who drinks beer? Adults! Welch’s grape juice! Schlitz beer. The possessive disappears. The name is absorbed into the product, do you follow me? Pullman car, Maytag washer, Ford. It’s the conspiracy of anonymity, don’t you see? Just as long as Wrigley keeps that apostrophe ’s’ after his name, he remains an entity, a human being. We see him among the gum base, the cornstarch, the artificial, fruit flavoring. But who’s Morris that the Morris chair is named for? Who’s Macadam of the macadam road? Can you imagine such a person? Now, why should products that relate to children have this aura of individuality, and products that relate to adults have this aura of anonymity? Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”

“I don’t know why,” Morty said, suddenly weary.

“Morty,” I said.

“It’s no good. I can’t even state the problem.”

“It is good, Dr. Perlmutter,” I said.

“It stinks.”

“Work on it, Morty.”

“Do you want this candy?” Morty asked. “I break out.” He shoved the candy across the table to me.

It was painful to see him subdued again. I wondered if he had a third and fourth wind. What he said about the names had excited me. After all, if I had a field, that was it — brand names. The grand brands of the great. I wished Morty would go on, but I saw that he wouldn’t. He was tired, bored. I decided to find out more about him.

We sat quietly for a few moments. When the waitress came over and took our orders I ordered a hamburger and potatoes. Morty wanted tea.

“Morty,” I asked after a while, “was that all true what you told Gibbenjoy? About the six wives and all the rest?”

“Certainly it’s true.”

“You’d have to be eighty-five years old,” I said admiringly.

“I’m fifty-six,” he answered sadly.

I was astonished. He seemed fifteen years younger.

The waitress brought our food. I was hungry and ate my hamburger quickly. I offered Morty some French fried potatoes, but he hook his head. He played with the little tag attached by a string to the tea bag inside the pot.

“Morton’s tea,” he said, showing me the tag.

“You could still work it out.”

He ignored me. “Well, maybe I saved myself in time on that one. It’s too bad it’s such horseshit. You see how it is? That’s the sort of thing I have to depend on. ‘The key to the culture.’ Right in the old home town, the old back yard, Grandma’s trunk in the attic. I’m too old for anything else now.”

“Too old, I said. “I thought you were about forty.

“Appearance and reality, sonny. The real key to the culture. Intrigue, secret letters, what the President really said, what really happened. Inside stuff!”

“That’s true,” I said. “That’s very true.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I believe,” I said, “that certain people are in control of everything that happens, and that unless we find out about them we can’t know about ourselves.”

“Infant,” he said, “I know about myself. I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist. Too old for the really important things in the field. It’s changing. There’s Coca-Cola in the jungle. It’s all different now. The new stuff is about the death of the old cultures. It’s a de-mystification process. There are medicine men at Oxford, chiefs in Harvard Law School. You get to a place you think is still raw and the UN has been there before you. They’re singing folk songs. They’re not wild. Do you understand that? They’re not wild any more, all those savages. They’re just like everybody else now, or soon will be.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s awful.” He closed his eyes. “There ought to be killing. There ought to be blood. Murder. Atrocity. My beauties have their violence intact. It won’t be all that easy for the new men. They could have their tape recorders smashed.” He laughed softly.

“You talk as though you were retiring.”

“It’s too hard,” he said. “Tuberculosis is the anthropologist’s disease, did you know that?”

“Really?”

“Sure,” he said. “TB and the various jaundices. I’ve had them all. And six wives. Can you imagine that, a little shrimp like me? I’m a very licentious man,” he said softly. “I became interested in anthropology because of the color photographs of the bare-breasted native girls in The National Geographic.” He looked at me to see if I believed him. I did.

“What the hell,” he said, “it was a life. If you waste it you waste it.”

“You didn’t waste it. You’ve got the Nobel Prize.”

He laughed.

“You’ve got the Nobel Prize, Morty.”

“For work I did eighteen years ago,” he said. “Anyway, what has that got to do with it?” One prize. I’m a man of appetite. I need committees in all the world capitals; I need clamor.” He called the waitress over. “I’ll have some more tea, please, sweetheart,” he said. His elbow was against her thigh. “Have you read my books?” he asked me.“The Proper Study of Mankind. Chicago University Press. Four volumes. Six ninety-five each. The proper study of mankind. I failed, do you know that? Don’t breathe a word to Stockholm. I failed. I tried to get at their savagery, their violence. Somehow it all came out sweet. The worst things sounded like the acts of naïve, unsophisticated children — like those cartoons in The New Yorker where the cannibals roast the missionaries in big kettles. I’m a satirist. No one understood that. Have you read my books?”

“No, Morty, I haven’t yet.”

“‘A popularizer.’ That’s what the professionals call me. ‘Not serious.’ The Journal of International Anthropology said that. ‘Not serious.’ I’m serious, I’m serious.

“Of course,” I said. “I’m serious too.”

“It’s the impulses,” he said. “I’ve lost my energy in impulses, but even the impulses never interfered with my seriousness. It was what I really saw in the jungle. They could do it… I don’t know… gracefully. They made impulse seem calm. Not me. I still had the other thing— the civilization, the good manners at the last minute. Still, I have leaped before I have looked. I have pounced on my life,” he said bitterly. “Now I pay. I pay and pay.” He groaned.

“Morty?”

“What is it?”

“What is the proper study of mankind?”

“It’s man,” he said. “At his worst.”

“No,” I said. “It’s men at their best. I’m a kind of anthropologist, too. Morty, you’re a great man.”

“I am not finally a public person,” he said.

The waitress brought our check and this time Morty didn’t even look at her. He poured the last of the tea into his cup and smiled. “Look at me,” he said, “I won the Nobel Prize less than a week ago and I’m sitting in a fly-specked café drinking tea with some kid I don’t even know. Always I get the kids. What’s your name? I don’t remember your name.”

“It’s Boswell,” I said.

“‘A popularizer.’ Well, maybe so. I’ve always been very interested in the education of the sorority girl. Maybe all my professional life I’ve been writing to the chubby knees in the first row. None of my wives have been Jewish, do you know that? I mean, what the hell kind of a record is that for a man who can’t hear a dialect story without getting sick? Christ, what am I doing here, Boswell? I should never have left that party.”

I moved uneasily in the booth. “We had to get out of there. After what Gibbenjoy said, how could you stay?”

“What Gibbenjoy said. I didn’t even hear him. Impulse. Always impulse.”

“Morty, he’s nothing.”

“What do you know about it? He’s a rich, generous man.”

“He called you a little Yid.”

“What am I, tall?”

“Morty.”

“Forget it. I’m persona non grata now.”

I was a little alarmed. I couldn’t understand why he seemed so worried about Gibbenjoy. This wasn’t a third wind; it was a fresh wind in a new race. “What difference does it make?” I said.

“No difference,” he said. “No difference. It’s finished. Impulse. Again impulse.”

He pushed the teacup away from him suddenly. A little brown tea spilled over onto the table. “What happens to my project now?” he said wearily.

“What project, Morty?”

“It was my opportunity. I won the Nobel Prize. Now I could have earned it.”

“Morty, what project? What is it?”

“Gibbenjoy was going to give me thirty thousand dollars,” he said.

“What? Why? What for?”

“For my project. Before it’s all changed. I was going to show the UN what they were really dealing with. It’s finished,” he said.

I couldn’t think. I had cost the man thirty thousand dollars. “The prize money,” I said. “You’ve still got the prize money.”

“Alimony,” he said hopelessly, “a few lousy suits.”

When we left Morty insisted on paying both checks.

Yesterday and tonight, the strangest thing.

Morty called the night before last and I went with him to a party in his honor at the apartment of one of his grad students. Almost everybody except myself was from the University, and almost everybody except Morty was as young or younger than myself. Kids. Mostly grad students but some undergraduates and a handful of freshman girls.

I had the impression that none of them, though they call him Morty and not Dr. Perlmutter or Professor, really like him. They are embarrassed, I think, by his friendship, and out of some queer propriety disapprove of him both as a teacher and as a man. Morty does not deal with people professionally. After seeing him at that party I can imagine him striking up morbidly personal relationships with the very savages he had gone to study. I can hear him referring, in the manner of the very rich or the very old, to intimate situations, to his four brothers and their wives, to his days as a student, to his love affairs, using always first names, as though the natives might be expected to respond as he himself had responded. I don’t know what Morty’s stories would sound like in the savage babble of some South Seas or African or Indian tongue but I know that he would be able to put into them all his absurd, vulnerable humanity.

“These are good friends,” Morty insisted to me as we watched them dance in the dim apartment. “They’re my students and my friends. I like young people.”

“Do you, Morty?”

“Certainly,” he said. “I like young people. I like everybody who hasn’t made it.”

I had told Morty my story when I went to his apartment the night after I had met him. I had wanted to tell him about the trouble I had caused him, about my lie, but he was so resigned and even pleasant about his loss that I never did. For all his volatility, Morty is apparently an optimist, with that solid, purblind sort of faith that defies all the bad breaks. One wants to shake such people, to rub their nose in their troubles. (I can barely abide so profound an advantage as my clearer vision over my friends gives me.) The temptation always is to defile, to mar sublimity with some deft slash. How many times in museums, when the guard is not looking, do we seek to touch some ancient painting, to press our thumbnail into a dry crack and shatter some vulnerable square inch of the painter’s immortality? I have left my finger marks on the shellacked surfaces of masterpieces; I have unraveled the corners of priceless tapestries. It is a constant temptation to record obscenities in our neighbor’s wet cement. It is the same with opposite conditions. We lie to the sick man, puff some friend’s failure. We are exterior decorators.

All of us had a lot to drink. Morty, who is a slight man, does not hold his liquor well, though in many ways he is keener drunk than sober, quicker to sense offense, more concerned with people’s reactions to him. He began to talk, first to individuals and then to the room at large. Morty does not have to force people to listen to him. He knows so much and despite his naïveté has experienced so much that one is eagerly a part of his audience. Only when he talks about his concern — himself — does the interest of others flag. Yet he seems to sense this, for he brings out his subject in a subtle, almost deceitful way, and only after he has finished do we realize that what we had thought was a professional anecdote is really a revelation about Morty himself, a confession.

As he talked people took up casual positions around the room. Most of us continued to drink and two or three couples danced, though one of the dancers had turned down the phonograph. A few people maintained their own private conversations, but these were pitched almost subliminally beneath the level of Morty’s. The result was a comfortable, almost soporific buzz which gave us all, I think, a peculiarly distant sense of toleration. It was as if interest persisted while wonder slowly died. I had the sense, too, that at last we had come to terms with ourselves and with each other, as though we were sitting there in the room naked, as indifferent to each other’s nakedness as to our own. There was something only vaguely sexual in all this, a sense of infinite availability, as though each of us had been given a kind of promissory note. It was like bountifulness in dreams. There was so much and all time to contemplate it. Perhaps this is what Morty means when he says he likes young people, for it is chiefly among young people, I think, that this illusion of plenty is generated.

“When I was a young instructor,” Morty was saying, “before I got my degree, I went out to the Midwest. Maybe you saw my book, The Flatlands. The title is a pun. What did I know, a punk kid from the big city? Well, I wasn’t trusted. I had been hired by the University of Nebraska for a turn in summer school — I’ve been a teacher in fourteen state universities and seventeen private institutions, five of them abroad, where my reputation, let’s face it, is greater than in this country, and I’ve never stayed any place more than three semesters running in my whole career — which, incidentally, is the secret of how I manage to produce so much. Stay in the night schools and the summer sessions, you young teachers, and compete for the temporary chairs here and abroad. At that time I had no record, a very scanty bibliography — I was a kid. Probably the only reason they took me on at all was that in May — it was 1933—I had come back from the Pizwall camp in Tespapas on the Upper Amazon and I had these pictures — phonies, incidentally, which I bought in Hollywood one time, stills from some Tarzan picture. In one shot you could barely see Elmo Lincoln’s leg. Well, who needs pictures? To tell you the truth, I don’t even bother with a camera any more. A tribesman, I don’t care where he’s from, is the craziest son of a bitch in the world if he thinks you want pictures of him. He’s always got to gild. Explain to him all you want is an ordinary picture and he turns into a silly whore — pardon my French. He puts flowers where he’s never put flowers in his life, or beads in his nose, or he climbs into skins or something. These pictures in the magazines give me a laugh.

“But Nebraska could get me cheap, and after all I had been with Pizwall — though frankly, at the risk of talking disrespectfully of the dead, I never cared much for his system of collecting data. Anyway, even if I was cheap, and even if I had been at the Tespapas digs, I was an unknown quantity and Nebraska didn’t feel it could trust me. Not only was I Jewish but I was an easterner, and in those days — it’s no secret — I was a Communist, too. I would be again. I was no damned nineteen-thirties liberal. I would be again if conditions changed, but what’s the sense of revolution if you’re not revolting against intolerable conditions? I’ve seen intolerable conditions, and these aren’t intolerable conditions. Anyway, the kind of conditions I’m talking about have almost nothing to do with economics and never did. They have more to do with the culture itself, with national attitudes. I was in Rome once — this will illustrate what I mean, I think — and I was having lunch and wine in a sidewalk cafe—”

“I’m getting out of here,” I heard someone say. “This is just the way he teaches, too.”

“—in the Piazza del Popolo and suddenly I became conscious of this woman. A big woman carrying some sort of a bundle. At first I thought she was carrying laundry. She had the thick forearms of a laundress, broad powerful shoulders, colossal legs, but when she came close I could see she was carrying a baby all wrapped up in a kind of sheet. She was young — it’s hard to tell a gypsy’s age, but she looked about twenty-five and was probably closer to nineteen. In the same hand that she held the baby she had a beer bottle. She had this wide rent in her dress, no underwear on at all — I could see her strong ass. I couldn’t figure out the beer bottle — for a beggar, that’s lousy publicity — until I saw there was a little milk in it. Now why a strapping thing like that wouldn’t breast feed I don’t know, unless it was the poor woman’s concession to the rest of us, not to make a brutta figura by showing a tit in public. I remember it was a nice day; it had rained earlier, but now the sun was very bright and all the streets were dry. Rome and Lago Torvu in the Pacific are the only two places I know where absolutely brilliant afternoons follow cold, dreary mornings. Well, as I say, she was a beggar. The kid was a prop, of course, and could just as well have stayed home with the beer bottle and the mama’s pregnant little sister, but probably the woman felt she needed it for her begging. She came up to all of us. She didn’t miss a table. She’d go up to each of these fine diners sitting in the sun in the café and she’d hold out her hand. Well, they didn’t even look at her. I mean, it was as if this woman and her baby were invisible. They looked everywhere else — out of the corner of your eye you could see them sizing up all the other people in the café—but they ignored her. I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t think they saw her. It was as if I, the only person watching her, were having some sort of a private vision. She stood there with the baby and the cruddy milk and asked for money. I mean she begged— she really begged, if you understand me. ‘For the sake of the baby, signore and signori, five lire. Five lire.’ A penny is six lire, you know. Well, it was amazing. They didn’t even refuse. It was as if not only hadn’t they seen her but they couldn’t hear her, either. Finally she’d get tired and go to the next table. She didn’t seem mad. No expression. It was as if she couldn’t see them, either. It took her ten minutes before she got to me. I gave her all my money. About fifteen dollars, I think. That’s shit about how they’ll take it and just buy drink for the lazy gypsy fucker that lives with them. What the hell. Milk, booze — need is need. After the way those others treated her I couldn’t do enough for this woman. I asked her to sit down with me and share my lunch. I couldn’t eat after that anyway. She misunderstood. She thought I was trying to buy her when I gave her the money.

“‘Prego, signor,’ she tells me, ’there is the child Here, under the table, touch my organs.’

“Look, it’s no secret. I’m oversexed. And I particularly like big women. My third wife was an African princess six feet two inches tall, two hundred pounds and strong as an ox. But I didn’t want a thing from this woman, you understand — for me it was just another futile gesture against an endless regime of human misery. But she couldn’t understand this. She sat beside me and ate my lunch with one hand and squeezed my prick with the other. I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t move. I had a hard-on that big. ‘Please, signora, that isn’t necessary.’ She wouldn’t stop. That hard gypsy hand was all over me. Well, it happened. I’m a man — jerk me and I come. She finished me and my lunch at the same time.

“What are you laughing at? Do you think this is a funny story? What are you laughing at?

“So she took the kid which she had put down on an empty chair beside her — she never once fed that baby a thing — and she got up to go. ‘Signora,’ I said, ‘please. I’ve given you all my money. You’ve eaten my lunch. You’ll have to pay the check.’ Well, she didn’t listen to me any more than the others had listened to her. She just got up and got the hell out of there. In the end I had to run off without paying. What are you laughing at? All right, I can see the joke, too, but please try to understand the point. Be adults, for God’s sake.

“That night, without being invited by anyone, I made my first speech. In the open air, in the Piazza di Spagna. Then, the next day, I made the same speech in St. Peters’—in four languages, Italian, French, German and English. I was a guest of the government, you understand. I was there as an exchange professor at the University of Rome, and it wasn’t for me, but everywhere I went until they threw me out of the country I made that speech. Later I dropped the French and German and English because I realized I wasn’t there to put on a show, but to get things done. The trench coats! Everywhere you looked. I tell you, whenever I see trench coats I know that Fascism is the next step!

“My speech was as follows:

“‘My Italian friends. There is poverty in your country. That is not my concern. In all countries there is poverty. What troubles me rather is your indifference to it. I have seen beggars ignored. Ignored. As well to cause poverty, to bring about another’s misfortune oneself, as to ignore it when it happens. You are a morally culpable people. So advanced is the brutalization in your society that the poor themselves have become brutalized. I have seen beggars ignored, but what is perhaps worse, I have seen the giver ignored by the beggar. I do not blame him — it is you who have caused this.

“‘I demand a change.

“‘You think there is safety in indifference; there is none. You think there is forgetfulness in the turned back; there is none. Or, if you are one of the few who give, you think there is remission in alms; there is none. There is none. In the altered condition only, in the revolutionized circumstance only, in the new beginning only is there the chance for grace. I address the remnant of your Catholicism — I mean to stir that.

“‘Revolt! Revolt!

“‘In Africa, among the Rafissi people, there is a tradition. When there is a crime, it is the chief who is punished. He is dragged from his king’s hut to be humiliated and dismembered. Modern intelligences balk at this practice. How barbarous, they think! And yet I hasten to assure you that there is no lack of candidates for chieftain. There, among the Rafissi people, evil is a risk they run. Though I do not advocate indiscriminate violence, I see in this practice a wise deal. Who is to blame for a crime if not the father? All kings are fathers. Why, the very texture of their reign is determined by primogeniture, by the ability to make heirs. If there is crime those heirs are not well made.

“‘Italians. Throw off your chains. Begin again. Reform! Reject! Revolt!’

“I told them that — in St. Peter’s, in my classes, everywhere. Until I was stopped.

“Well, in Nebraska, in 1933, I was worse. I was a firebrand, not a cautious person. And it didn’t help that my chairman was a jealous man. We split a section. Mine had a larger enrollment than his and he found out through his network of classroom spies that I wasn’t sticking to the syllabus—his syllabus, I might add. Well, why should I? What was anthropology in 1933? The tolerance level of an Ur-culture toward its missionaries? Artifacts? Snapshots of people with bones in their noses? How many serious people were there in the business in 1933? So, to my eternal credit, in 1933 I taught my classes what I had experienced myself about mankind and about life. That was the syllabus.

“Now, though I was a Communist in those days, I believed in God. The God I believed in was a Jewish-Brahmin-Zen-Buddhist mystic who wore a yarmulke and squatted in a room filled with art treasures, telling his beads. You prayed to this God and he turned a deaf ear. He was supposed to, you understand. Acceptance of fucking suffering was what he taught. He bled in four colors over the art treasures and posed crazy riddles. He answered all questions with questions. Revelation was when he said, ‘The meaning of life is as follows,’ and he’d pick his nose with his little finger. Profound? Bull- crap, my young friends who still believe in such a God, a tongue-tied God who is not so much indifferent as bewildered by life. Go ask him questions? Go talk to walls. You can’t give in to him — give in to him and you’re dead. I wish I had them here now, those old students from Nebraska in 1933. I would take back everything I told them. Everything. I would use the chairman’s syllabus, rotten as it was.”

In the dim light I tried to watch Morty’s eyes. In the dark, smoky room they seemed singed, unable to focus. “Marry six wives,” he was saying. “Take women in adultery! Spin theories! Write articles! Write books! Win through!

“I’m not like that God I told you about. I’ll tell you what it all means. I’m fifty-six years old and I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist and the other day one of our leading philanthrophists called me a little Yid and threw me out of his house and I know what it’s all about. It’s mistakes! It’s learning not to accept. Accept nothing— there’s no such thing as a gift. It’s learning to make mistakes. Make lulus. Make lulus only. Don’t crap around with errors, don’t waste your time on faux pas. Go for the lulus. And if you’ve got to believe in God, you young people who have got to believe in God, try to picture him as some all-fucking-out lulu maker who wouldn’t have your heart on a silver platter.”

Suddenly Morty stopped, and rubbed his hand across his forehead. What had seemed like freckles on his thin young face appeared as liver spots on the backs of his old man’s hands.

“What about the chairman of the department, Morty, and the network of spies?” someone asked.

“What about him?” Morty said, revived. “The chairman of the department hated my mystic-Eastern-Bolshevik-Jewish guts, and his network of spies were two kids, one a moronic football player from Omaha, the other a fantastically busted coed from a farm outside Benton, Nebraska. She appears in my book, The Flatlands, if you care to know further what she was like. She and the football player kept a perfect stenographic record of everything I ever said in that class. As a matter of fact, they did me a favor; two thirds of my book came from those notes. The girl herself told me what they were up to when I had the class over for coffee once. I think she had fallen in love with me. I think she liked me a lot. Well, it made me sick to find out about it, just sick. What was it, Hitler Germany? Anyway, I wasn’t rehired for the second term, and by the time I found out what was happening it was too late to get back into the Columbia night school, so those bastards out there cost me a half of a year. Seriously, the State of Nebraska is a very bad place.”

Two of the dancers had sat down and were embracing in one corner of the room. Billie Holliday was singing “Sophisticated Lady.” When she came to my favorite part I sang along with her softly.

I was propped against a wall, my legs out in front of me, like someone sitting up in bed. A girl beside me kept filling my glass. My hand was in her lap, though neither of us seemed conscious of this.

“Those are stupendous lyrics,” I said to the girl. “Is that what you really want?” I sang. “Stupendous.” I chuckled to myself. I jiggled my behind forward a few inches and leaned back lower against the wall. Above me the last dancers moved dreamily to the music. My face was beginning to get that stunned, flushed feeling it always has when I’m drunk. As the couple danced by I could see the girl’s garter straps. I watched these happily until her partner suddenly turned her and moved her back toward the other end of the room.

“This bottle is empty,” the girl next to me said. “There’s another in the pocket of my coat. I’ll go get it.”

“Sophisticated lady,” I said.

The girl stood up a little clumsily and moved off toward the bedroom. I got up and followed her. She had to step carefully over and around several people lying about on the floor. She was like someone crossing a stony road barefoot, and it was very pleasant to watch the look of intense, almost deadpan concentration on her face. We went into the bedroom and she snapped on the light.

“Oh, look,” she said excitedly. “Look at all the hats and overcoats on the bed. Look at them all. I think that’s the most wonderful sight.” Bending down she scooped them in her arms and held them against her face. She put them down very gently.

“I really think that’s the most wonderful sight. Don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“When I was little and my parents had company, they’d put their hats and overcoats down on the bed that very way.”

“Yes,” I said, kissing her. “I love you.”

When I let her go she looked at me curiously for a moment and shrugged. “Let’s find that bottle,” she said.

After she found her coat and took out the bottle we went back to the living room and took up our old positions against the wall. Morty was still talking but I had stopped listening to him, though I still heard the pleasant rumble of his Eastern-Jewish-Bolshevik voice. I put my hand back in the girl’s lap. There was a boy sleeping somewhere near my left shoe. He sat up suddenly and turned to us. “What’s he been saying?” he asked us.

The girl shrugged, and he turned to a somewhat older student who had been sitting in a deep easy chair all evening long. “What’s he been saying?” he asked.

“He’s been explaining how Ohio is essentially an immoral state.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” the boy said, turning back to us. “That’s really rich. He’s been explaining how Ohio is essentially an immoral state. Morty’s a regular moralist. He can tell you the relative moral positions of the states the way some people can name the capitals.”

The kid hadn’t bothered to lower his voice and Morty heard him. “I can,” he said. “I can. What do you think, culture isn’t reflected in morality? What would be the point? What would be the point? I’m a professional anthropologist,” Morty said. “I know these things.”

“He says that per capita North Dakota is the most virtuous state in the Union,” my girl said.

“Not now,” I whispered. “I don’t care about that now.”

“He says people from Connecticut are the least virtuous,” the girl with garter straps said. “I’m from Connecticut,” she said, lifting her dress. “Whee.”

“Tell us about the Empty-Seat Principle, Morty,” someone said. Most of the people in the room laughed.

“What are you laughing? Don’t laugh. What are you laughing?” Morty said, smiling himself. “It’s perfectly scientific.” He popped some pills into his mouth. “After one ride on a rush-hour bus I can tell you the precise moral position of a culture.”

“Oh, Christ,” somebody said.

Silently I agreed.

“I can. I’ve done it. Take two cities of comparable size. Take Philadelphia and São Paolo, Brazil. Now, I tell you that Philadelphia is infinitely morla, morl moral, more moral—”

“Eugene Pallette,” I said.

“—more moral than São Paolo. No, I take that back. ‘Infinitely’ is not a scientific term. Philadelphia is precisely five times more moral than São Paolo.”

“That’s ridiculous,” someone said.

“Who’s the anthropologist here? Who has the Nobel Prize?” Mort said angrily.

It was true; I had forgotten about that. He had begun to bore me. He lived a dangerous life full of enormous, self-imposed risks. I thought of Harold Flesh, who for all the violence in his life was like a baby in a crib compared to Morty. Morty, I thought, suddenly fond of him, please be careful.

“In large cities,” Morty was saying, “the buses are designed to handle rush-hour crowds. The engineers create standing room in the buses by putting in a relatively small number of seats. Now, remember the thing we’re measuring is awareness of others. That’s what morality is, finally. Now, in São Paolo I’ve noticed that during a busy hour those people who are standing do not rush to take up the vacant seats when people who have been sitting down start to get off the bus. Often I’ve seen a bus full of empty seats and people standing in the aisles. It’s a question of scanty awareness of others. Those people who remain standing simply aren’t aware of the others. Now I say that Philadelphia is five times more moral than São Paolo because the ratio of occupied to empty seats averages out to about five to one.”

“Empty seats,” the boy at my shoe said.

“It’s a gauge. It’s a gauge,” Morty said. “I’ve checked it against police statistics. The crime rate in Philadelphia is a little less than five times what it is in São Paolo.”

“That’s really impressive,” I said to the girl.

“Make a fist,” she said.

I made a fist and my knuckles sprayed into the soft flesh of her thighs. She sighed.

“This is some way to make love,” I said.

“Who’s making love?” she said.

“Would you like to dance with me?” she asked after a while.

I got up and helped her to her feet. In a few moments I had to sit down. I had become excited and I was embarrassed. I put my hand back in her lap and made a fist.

Morty came over. “Are you having a good time?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Would you mind if I danced with Thelma?”

“No, of course not.” I hadn’t known her name until Morty said it.

I watched them dancing with a sullen jealousy. It no longer seemed, as it had before, that there was abundance and all time in which to contemplate it and choose and enjoy.

When they stopped dancing Morty pulled the girl down beside him on the couch. She made no move to return to me or even to look in my direction. From where I sat I could watch them and hear them.

“I saw her again yesterday,” Morty said, “and I’m sure.”

The girl nodded seriously. “Do you want to talk about it?” she said. “Here?”

“What do I care?” Morty said. “Secrets are for kids. I love her. I’m fifty-six years old and for the first time in my life I understand what real love is. Isn’t that a strange thing?”

“Not so strange, Morty,” the girl said.

“I’ve had six wives. What kind of man am I? Didn’t any of those girls mean anything to me? Sex — it was just sex. I’m a licentious man.”

His arm was around Thelma’s shoulder. Casually he let it drop until his right hand lay lightly against her behind. “I was married one time to a full-blooded African princess who was six feet two inches tall. That was just sex. After all, what could a girl like that have in common with a Jewish guy from the Bronx? I respond to a certain wildness, I think. That’s a very dangerous thing. But with Dorothy none of that enters in; Dorothy’s a gentle person. She has three kids, you know. She’s very mature, very ladylike.”

“That’s wonderful, Morty, that you should find it at last,” the girl said.

“I bought her a pair of beautiful earrings. I’d like to show them to you and get your opinion before I give them to her.”

“I’d like to, Morty,” she said. “Do I know Dorothy?” she asked.

“It’s Dorothy Spaniels,” Morty said. “Professor Spaniels’ wife. In History.”

“My roommate has him for a class.”

“Sure,” Morty said. “That’s the one. Listen, ask your roommate what he’s like in class. You’ve got to know your enemy,” he said with a nervous little laugh.

“I will, Morty.”

“It’s easy enough to imagine that he’s a brute, but a lover isn’t always fair.”

“Does Dorothy love you, Morty?”

“We’ve slept with each other just once,” Morty said, “and she was as shy as a little girl. I had to do everything.”

“Poor Morty,” the girl said.

“I fell in love with her the first time I saw her.”

“Poor Morty.”

“Listen, it’ll work out, kid. When two people love each other the way Dorothy Spaniels and I do, nothing can keep us apart. Nothing.”

“She has three kids, Morty,” said the boy at my shoe.

“I love them,” Morty said. “I swear it to you. If I love them there’s no problem. I told Dorothy, ‘I’ll support them, I’ll treasure them as if they were my own.’”

I stood up and started for the door. Morty saw me and ran after me. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“It’s late, Morty,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to my hotel.”

“Well, listen,” he said, “give me a ring in the morning. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Sure, Morty.”

He put his hand on my sleeve. “You think I’m a prick,” he said.

“I don’t know, Morty,” I said. “You’re not careful.”

He took out his little box and started to put some pills in his mouth, then checked his motion and opened his palm and stared at the pills in his hand. “These keep me alive,” he said weakly.

“Then take them,” I said, and left.

Then, today, the strangest thing. When I got up I had a hangover. I am a strong man and unaccustomed to illness or to feeling weak. Because of its rareness I look upon a feeling of weakness as rather an odd sensation— the way other people might react to a shot of novocain.

Despite my hangover I felt a queer relief, a sense of having done with something, of good riddance. This is my invariable reaction when people have disappointed me, as though my growth is in direct proportion to the people I can do without.

This afternoon I went to the park and sat on one of the stone benches across the street from the art museum. It was one of those intense, brightly crisp afternoons that are like certain fine mornings. Ripeness is all, I thought, and wondered what that meant. In the dazzling acetylene sun I was almost but not quite warm.

I had a pencil and some paper with me and I started to write down the names of all the great men I had ever seen. It was exhausting work and soon too much for me. It was easier to put down the names of the great men I had known, but after a while it was even more difficult to decide what I meant by “known” than what I meant by “great.” It was depressing to think that Morty, although we had met less than a week ago, was the only great man I had ever really known. I decided I was being too restrictive, unfair to myself, and began to count the great men to whom I had spoken. There were plenty of these, but how did it mean anything if all I said was “Fine, thank you” to their mechanical “How are you?” on a receiving line? I changed my procedure again and began to write down the names of those men about whom I could say something as a result of our contact. It was soon clear that this wasn’t any more satisfactory than my other attempts. My senses are extraordinarily alive when I am in the presence of a great man. Frequently what he wears or what cigarettes he smokes or whether he smokes at all has almost as much weight with me as anything that happens between us. As real evidence of our contact this is worthless; I could tell almost as much from seeing a photograph. I decided to reduce the list by including only those men I had actually touched, but I soon saw that this made for serious omissions. I had never touched Stevenson, for example; I had never touched Thomas Mann. In despair I was about to throw away all my lists when the solution occurred to me. I made out a list of all those who had said my name.

Although it was Sunday and the day was fine there were not many people in the park. A few women pushed strollers. Occasionally a man with a fat Sunday paper would sit down on one of the benches to read, but the sun was too bright for reading and in a little while he would get up and walk to some more shady spot. Occasionally I heard shouts, and when I looked up I would see a group of boys playing on the wide stairs of the art museum or challenging each other to cross the building’s narrow marble ledges which began at the top of the stairs and framed the thin, pointless bas reliefs which ran like some dark undecipherable script around the building.

I was about to leave the park and begin the long walk back to the Love when for no particular reason I started to watch a compact little family that seemed to have just arrived in the park. There was a woman, a boy of about four, and the father (Why do I say “father”? He was a husband, too.) My attention was compelled — I don’t understand why — by the father. He was about twenty-nine or thirty and he wore a brownish herringbone overcoat. He had on rimless, vaguely archaic eyeglasses. I could see that he was a good, gentle man, someone who had never been in a fight, who had missed the war, who if he didn’t make much money now would one day make more. Though it was the father who had first drawn my attention, as I watched I began to feel strongly about all three of them. The father had a camera with him and was posing his family for photographs, protesting that they must not squint, that the sun had to be over his shoulder and in their eyes if the pictures were to be successful. Once he shouted impatiently at the little boy, who had moved just as he snapped the shutter. He used an old-fashioned box camera and peered seriously into the view finder fixed like a postage stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the camera. He said something I couldn’t hear, and the wife laughed and hugged the little boy. What was impressive were their clothes. All three were immaculately, fashionably dressed, and I had the impression that they were wearing everything for the first time. Perhaps it was this that made me feel so strongly about them, but whatever it was, I watched them with a powerful, unfamiliar emotion.

Pretending that it was an idle, spontaneous motion I got up, stretched and walked absently toward a bench closer to them. I stared at the wife’s wool suit, the soft fur collar around her neck, and at the rich, thick leather of the man’s shoes. The little boy wore knickers, an Eton cap, a white, stiff collar that reflected the sun and a paisley bow tie. The man had managed to purchase for himself and for his family one good thing each of everything, as in a collection of some sort. That was it, of course. He looked after his life, his family, his wardrobe, his apartment, as if he were the curator of some minor but almost definitive collection. Perhaps one room in their home was well furnished. I could see the wall-to- wall carpet, the expensive coffee table, the costly lamp, the custom-built sofa, the richly upholstered wing chair, the single oil painting in the good frame. In the bedroom their mattress had been specially constructed and cost three hundred dollars. They had a set of Rosenthal dishes, and silverware for four, to which they would add. They had all they needed, and a list of all they wanted, and slowly, piece by piece, brand name by brand name, consumer’s report by consumer’s report, they would add to this, fulfilling one dream by a carefully ordered scrapping or postponement of another. They would add as they went along, their way of life a demolishment of empty space, an ethic of filled drawers, closets, rooms, houses, devoted as misers to some desperate notion of accumulation.

The wife had a sort of turban on her head, and this, together with the father’s rimless glasses and the boy’s knickers, lent a peculiarly 1930-ish aspect to the family. But for them there had been no Depression, no war, no bereavement. Almost as if I knew their fate, I realized that the collection would never be completed, that they would grow tired of it first, that the little boy would either die or abandon them. I shuddered to see them. Their substantial laughter, their little private gestures of affection seemed hollow but tremendously brave.

The father took his son’s picture and then his wife’s and then the son and the wife’s together. The wife took her husband’s picture and then a picture of the father and the son. The father changed the film in the camera, going under a tree for the shade, and then came up to me.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if I could trouble you to take a picture of all three of us?”

“I’m not a very good photographer,” I said. This isn’t true; I have an eye for arrangement.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “It’s just a box camera. There’s not much that could go wrong.”

“All right.”

I asked them to stand beneath a stone lion on the steps of the art museum, the child between them. “Why don’t you put the boy on the other side now, sir?” I said. “I’ll take a picture of you in the center.”

“Well, all right,” he said.

I took the picture.

“Let’s have one with Jerry on your side,” the father said to the woman.

“Is it too much trouble?” the wife asked me.

“No ma’am,” I said. “I’d be delighted.”

I snapped the whole roll. As soon as one picture was taken I suggested a pose for another. The family, contented, let me have my way. I made them stand in certain poses, one foot on a particular step, one arm touching the other’s shoulder at a precisely conceived angle. Suddenly selfless myself, suddenly concerned only to help them, to fix them in some permanently desirable position, to make them, on the steps of the museum, invulnerable as the stone lions, I caught them in all possible arrangements of their love.

Wild to stop time, I ran out of film.

I am awake now because I have been dreaming of this family. It seems the dream has lasted forever. In my dream one by one they sicken and die. Accidents happen to them and they lose their limbs, or passing each other like mechanical horses in a shipboard game, they age jerkily, irrationally, growing older or younger with no regard for the continuity of their relationship to each other. Suddenly the wife is an old woman, though the husband is as I saw him in the park. Or the son is his parents’ contemporary. I see their things age — the Husband’s good belt of soft Florentine leather cracks; the boy’s knickers tear; age erodes their silver. I see some new piece; a hand-carved headboard for the old bed, still in its crate. Now the family reappears; they are of drastically independent ages (though somehow all are old) and are strangely indifferent to each other.

Awake, I remember that in a few years I will be my father’s age when he died.

I’ve been trying to make better use of the daylight hours. Too many of my gams happen at night. People meet me then off the record, off the cuff, in a kind of democracy of evening when their time is discounted.

I’ve been going up and down the high-rent districts — Wall, Madison, Fifth, ducking in and out of Radio City (the scene of those old guided tours; how far I’ve come). I’ve been in the reception rooms now of many of the country’s most prestigious firms, and though I do not always meet I often get a chance at least to see their top men. (It never fails to strike me that these magnificent lives are built on simple profit and loss.) Brashness does not work here. It’s not like the movies. I must subdue myself in order to subdue others. It’s the high espionage of high finance, the subversion of self. Calmness is what these babies pay for.

However, this campaign isn’t organized yet. I have no really firm goals or procedures. Mostly I walk their neighborhoods like a kind of rube, my eyes on the tops of the buildings. On a hunch I pick one and go inside.

Yesterday I spotted a new one, all aluminum and glass, like some colossal upended tray of ice cubes. The impression was that the books all balanced, that I would even be allowed to examine them if I liked. The lobby was vast, a marbled, climateless hall which gave me the feeling that somewhere nearby a spectacular ice show was in progress, or a revival of Porgy and Bess in French, or one of those concerts for children, judiciously Negroed and Puerto Ricaned and Central Park Wested, narrated by this handsome symphony conductor who explained Wagner as though the Walkyries were a kind of baseball team in the American League. This aura had less to do with the building’s architecture, perhaps, than with its state of mind. I felt that above me, in all the offices, suites, executive dining rooms and marbled toilets bright as ballrooms, were men of our time doing the work of our time. It was as if the American Can Company’s vision of the world had finally won through, and that here, throughout this new, light, sleek-angled temple of new materials-through-chemistry, duty and profit mixed and were, at their highest level, one.

I gave in at once. I usually do, of course, but this time I gave in eagerly, turning over my will to the will of the place, the Anglo-Saxon genie god of Western Man who folded out, like a picture in Life magazine. If I had spoken just then my voice would have been low, reverential, like the voice not of the believer himself but of the visitor in an alien church who cannot keep the exaggerated respect out of his tone.

I examined the directory hastily.

There was a tremendous tier of elevators which looked like a solid wall of chrome, a huge, wide block of the stuff, in which, one day, some artist, some Western Man, would chisel the faces of the New Heroes and make of it a fresh Rushmore. Looking at the imposing set of elevators I had the feeling that somehow I would have to book passage, that there were low seasons and high, family plans and excursion tours, and perhaps, despite my feeling of being in a new and better democracy, different classes.

I went up to one of the starters. “The Complex is on what floor, please?”

He looked at me critically. “Which office?” he asked.

“Which office?” I repeated lamely. I stared gloomily at the emblem on his tunic, a highly edited map of the world with the shapes of all the European and Western Hemisphere countries. “Western Civilization, Inc.,” it read.

“Press, Radio, TV, the Magazine? Which department?”

“Oh,” I said. “Executive. Editorial.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes. Yes I do. I have an appointment.”

“With whom?”

“With — with the Chairman.”

“Gordon Rail?” He looked at my clothes doubtfully, the slacks-and-sportshirt and Toby Tylers in which I meet the world. I look not so much like Western as Bleacher Man.

“Look,” I said, “I’m an ex-dope fiend.”

“What?”

“A junkie. You know — pot, snow, horse, shit. They’re doing a story on me, man. How I had the courage to shake the monkey. You know.”

“Oh.”

“Mr. Rail thinks I’ll be an inspiration to all the other dope fiends. He’s doing the interview himself. You know.”

“Oh.”

“I’m getting five thousand bucks,” I said.

“Oh,” the starter said. He took my arm and led me to one of the elevators. “Thirty-eighth floor, Bill,” he said to the operator.

When the doors closed the world was shut out. Unfamiliar music purred. “Pretty,” I said to the operator.

“It’s on tape,” he said. “A special composition. Lasts exactly seventy-two seconds, exactly the time it takes to get up to the thirty-eighth floor. There’s a whole cycle of these compositions. They’re done by a very famous composer. That’s Stokowski conducting.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Pretty.”

“Sure,” he said. “There are two hundred different compositions. It would take hours of riding in the elevator to hear them all.”

“I suppose if one had the time it would be very worthwhile,” I said.

“Every elevator will have its own cycle one day, except for the lower floors maybe. You can see why it would be impractical for the lower floors.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Right now only thirty through sixty are installed with the service.”

“It’s terrific,” I said.

“Mr. Rail himself commissioned it. Oh, it’s very sound psychologically. You take most elevators. You get into the average elevator, you come on it’s the middle of a song and usually you’re out before it’s over. There’s a sense of incompleteness, of frustration. There’s something… you know… missing. It could upset you. You’d want to hear the whole tune; you’d worry about it unconsciously.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“In a creative place like this precious man-minutes could be lost.”

“Yes.”

“Tum-ta-ta-tum. Tum-tum-ta-ta-tum, tum-tum. Here we are. Thirty-eight. Right on time.”

“Remarkable,” I said.

The doors opened and for a moment I thought I had gone blind. After the brightness of the lobby and the elevator I was unprepared for the dimness that greeted me. I seemed to be in a large room of a deep, profound brown, amid deep, profound brown walls and a deep, profound brown ceiling. My feet sank four inches into deep, deep profound brown carpet. There was no furniture in the room, just deep, profound brown space.

The very bowels of Western Man, I thought, astonished.

After a few moments I became aware that I was not in an empty room. At one end of the place, at a distance of perhaps a little less than the length of a bowling alley, there was a deep, profound brown desk, uncluttered except for a single deep, profound brown telephone. Behind it was a girl, her face washed in a nimbus of sourceless light. I went toward her, moving through layers of soft, sourceless music.

When I was closer I saw that the girl was beautiful, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She had a face like Laura on a train that is passing through, and even before she spoke I knew what that voice would sound like. It would be a mature blend of Bronx and London drawing room, intelligent and sexy and comfortable and a little hoarse — the voice of a girl who had quit Vassar or Smith or Radcliffe in her sophomore year, and had slept around and drunk gin neat and toured Europe on a motorcycle and been in air raids and spent evenings of the revolution in sleeping bags on mountaintops with a guerilla leader who had lost an arm. She’d had poems published and once been in love with a bald, fat, sensitive little man who sold insurance door to door in Omaha, Nebraska. She had gone there to have her baby which the beaten-down brain surgeon, later a suicide in Vera Cruz, had given her. She was neurotic and sick and a black-belt judo champion who could play the guitar and the recorder and sing songs in strange, unremembered languages like Babylonian, Urdu, and Red Chinese. She had sat turning tricks in the windows of Amsterdam and been a Gray Lady in a Chicago hospital. She had been stranded during the war once in a low café in Saigon where she sat beneath a chuffing palmetto fan dealing cards to a Japanese general, all the time collecting information which would later be of use to the Allies. A beat Beatrice, she had been the lost love and inspiration of poets and philosophers and kings and to more than a few men of good will who’d had nothing before she met them but their despair. She was four hundred and thirty-seven years old but she looked twenty-six.

We looked at each other and I smiled from across years, in love, inviting her to love me, inviting her to let me screw her right there on the deep, profound brown carpet. She would have let me, I know, if only the light had been better and she could have seen my eyes and realized who and what I was. (That is no argument, of course. They all would.)

Instead, she smiled back and said, “Yes?” It was code if ever I heard code. I understood. It was the most gracious, the wittiest thing any woman had ever said to me.

“Mr. Rail,” I said right back to her. She knew what I meant.

“What is your name, please?” she asked.

“It’s James Boswell. I am James Boswell,” I said, getting several dozen levels of meaning into the remark.

She said something I couldn’t hear, but I knew that it was my name and that she was communicating somehow with inner offices, with upper echelons, that even now the name was being spoken into machines, that cards gave it back unrecognized, professing ignorance.

In a few seconds she turned her head slightly as if in a listening position. “I’m sorry, Mr. Boswell,” she said, “you don’t seem to be on the appointment schedule.”

“I’m not.”

“Mr. Rail won’t see you,” she said sympathetically. It was a kind of warning. It was enough for me that she understood.

“Come away with me,” I said suddenly.

“I can’t do that, Mr. Boswell,” she said.

“Please,” I said. “Say my name. Say ‘Jim.’”

“I can’t do that,” she said.

“Who are you kidding?” I said roughly. I indicated the deep, profound brown space around us. “This isn’t Western Civilization,” I said.

“It’s what we have instead of Western Civilization,” she said. “You know that.”

“Of course.” I gazed intensely at her. “One day I’ll be back,” I said. “One day I’ll have an appointment and be back. Perhaps then.”

“Good luck,” she said. “Good luck… Jim.”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye, Jim.”

In the elevator, going down, I listened carefully to the seventy-two-second symphony. As long as either of us lived, I knew it would be our song.

That scheme I had for suing celebrities and settling out of court was pretty harebrained. It’s different for a girl. If worse comes to worse a girl can always throw a paternity suit at a movie star, but what chance do I have? And unfortunately I’m too damn big for anybody to beat up in a night club. Suing for plagiarism might get me into the offices of one or two network presidents, but there’s no future in that. Too costly. Too risky. Besides, I of all people mustn’t start screwing around with the law.

I’ve been doing all right, I suppose, but it’s slow, it’s slow. I meet these guys one by one and only after fairly arduous campaigns. It’s like doing piecework. One-fell- swoopism, that’s my philosophy. Some sort of club is the only way, I know, but who’s in a position? Of course I might always be able to marry contact the way others marry money — but then I’d have to share. These goddamned community property laws are a menace.

Something has happened. My uncle Myles was buried this afternoon. Launched in his wooden box, he seemed more like some object on loan from a museum than a human being. He is low in the earth now.

I was struck, at the funeral, by how lone a figure my Uncle Myles was. There were mourners — more, I suppose, than I might have expected — but I didn’t recognize many of them. It seems unlikely that this is simply a consequence of our estrangement. He had been an obscure Mason and the Masons buried him and some of them came to see the job they had done. And I recognized his doctor, a man whose presence at his patient’s funeral apparently did not strike him as in the least ironic. He was as professional as ever; this might have been simply another call. Certainly, when he took me aside at the chapel, cautious to steer me wide of the trestle on which my uncle’s coffin lay, to tell me that my uncle had been a gravely — that was his word — ill man for whom medicine could do nothing, it might have been only another diagnostic conference beyond the patient’s bedroom. I remembered these from the time when I still lived with my uncle, and I experienced again the same peculiar mixture of boredom and conspiracy. Oddly, my knowledge of my uncle’s death was simply an extension of my knowledge of his illness. That he could not know of his own death seemed to deepen it somehow, as his naïveté about his sickness when he lived had made that more profound.

I was impatient with the doctor’s insistence on giving me the details, though I understood that it was simply the logical consequence of his function, as though his job was finally advisory, admonitory, his position that of a man who explained death rather than of one who could cure it or hold it off.

The others at the funeral were, I supposed, fellow lawyers and one or two of my uncle’s strange, pathetic clients. Perhaps some were the few mysterious friends he would visit sometimes in the evening. (I remembered, guiltily, how glad I had been to come home and find my uncle gone.) They were the raggle-taggle crew even the loneliest of us can claim, irrelevant to our existences but solidly there in our lives despite that. (I think of all the hotel clerks whose faces are familiar to me, of all the elevator operators.) They were the supernumeraries with whom finally we spend more time than with those we dream of, as though the landscape of our lives has always to be filled with people, crowds, masses, populations, the tradesman who brings the bread, perhaps, the man who waits with us each day at the bus stop, those yeasty populations of the unknown, there by accident, to whom we talk and talk and talk. They are legion. How many words, I wonder, can have passed between us? How many gestures of affection or civility?

Someone said my name. My uncle’s minister was beside me. “When I’ve prayed, Jim, I’d like you to speak.”

“I couldn’t. What could I say?”

“You’re his only survivor,” the minister said. “Just offer a few words for the repose of his spirit.”

“Wait. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

But the minister had already gone up to the side of the grave and opened his Bible. I barely heard his prayers; my mind was full of the things I might say. Though they all seemed hypocritical, there was something pleasant, even thrilling, in the idea of speaking there. It was like being a guest of honor, or the best witch at a birthday party. Nevertheless, I didn’t know what I could say about my uncle, and I looked down before the minister could catch my eye.

“I’ve asked Myles’ nephew, Mr. James Boswell, to address his thoughts to this sad occasion,” the minister said finally.

Someone touched my arm and I moved up beside the grave. “I’ve been asked to speak,” I said. “I didn’t know this was a custom. I’m unprepared.” I felt silly. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I thought giddily.

They watched me. No one there, including myself, had loved my uncle; I knew this as if it had been a fact of nature. And we had been as supernumerary to him as he had been to us. It came to me that the major relationship between people was a kind of reciprocal indifference. It was comforting. I realized that no one ever had much to lose. Strangely moved, I began to speak.

“My uncle and I didn’t understand each other,” I said. “He’d be surprised to know that I am delivering his eulogy. We always postponed as long as we could answering each other’s letters.”

They looked at me stonily, but having that audience gave me a strange confidence. I might have been addressing a ship’s company, or men before battle. I had a sense of heightened opportunity; it was now only a question of finding out what I needed to say.

“Well, what can I say about him?” I asked seriously. “He had very few friends,” I began. “Truthfully, I don’t think I recognize more than two or three of you., You couldn’t have been close to him — I wasn’t close to him myself. Yet he’s dead and we must all have felt something because we’re all here to watch his funeral. Well, I feel something. I do. Jesus, I really feel something right now.

“We didn’t get along. Finally I had to leave his house.

“Some of you probably knew him better than I did.

“I remember one thing. He belonged to a lot of clubs. Now maybe you think that was a defense against his loneliness, but I don’t think so. He took pleasure… Look, this is a little ridiculous, I hardly knew the man—” Suddenly I felt myself coming close to my theme. I had broken off to address the minister, warning him. He smiled and waited for me to go on. It was out of both our hands now.

“Well, he seemed to get pleasure out of certain things even if he couldn’t have them himself. It was okay with him just as long as somebody had them, just as long as they existed to be had. I don’t understand that.”

I looked again at the minister and he was still smiling. Even if he weren’t, it was too late; he’d had his chance. Now the power was on me. Hallelujah! I turned back to the small crowd around the grave.

“He lived a lousy life. His life was shit. Let’s understand that. But he made allowances and he had his defenses, his way of dealing with it. He should have been on the other side. He was sick, even when he was a young man. He had the shakes. He stuttered. He was always poor. He should have been on the other side! His resentments should have been against the well and the strong and the rich. But they weren’t — they never were. My uncle thought like a banker. His sympathies were all with influence, with prestige, and he hated men of hard luck as though they had sinned against God, as though misery were illegal.

“Jesus, he was a snob! I went to a class breakfast once, given by one of the rich girls in my high school. She lived on an estate. She was very rich. There were footmen, butlers. My uncle never tired of hearing abut it, of having me tell about it. He was proud that some people still lived like that. He was proud of me for being so clever as to be invited there. It was crazy…

“Well, it was a comical thing, to live like that, in the ballrooms of the mind. In the heart’s formal gardens…

“He took taxis. Sometimes he’d have the driver drop him off in front of some bank downtown. He didn’t even have an account there. You know?

“But you know what was wrong with my uncle? He was a coward. All of that respectable crap, that was just fear. He didn’t even have a dream — he had an outline for a dream. And all the things he did, all the notions he had, they didn’t help at all. He was the sort of Peeping Tom that Power needs to have outside its windows. But what the hell, he’s inside his box now. See him? So what he was a snob? I write it off. I forgive him. His death takes care of that. He just didn’t go far enough.” I pointed to the coffin. “Ah, sap! Ah, jerk! CORPSE!”

The minister cleared his throat as though he meant to interfere, but I raised my hand, silencing him. When I had started I had been speaking haltingly. Now the words poured out; I said them without having to think about them. Something was clear.

“Some of you may know about me. About my lousy life. Anyway, that’s the way my uncle would tell it. I’m on the make for the great. Well, you know something? He was crazy not to understand that. We were on the same side. We were on the same goddamn side. He should have had my anger!” I was crying.

Something was clear. I wanted to wail, to let it out, to moan and scream, to stand there and never leave, to hold this moment of my clear, strident grief, to make it my life, grow old with it and die when it began to wane. I felt a deep relief. It was like the climax of some fierce and mounting anger, when for a moment one is freed of all thought of consequence, when for a fraction of a second one is the equal of the world and the will soars like a bird in some passionate whirling flight. It was a moment of hard and infinite ruthlessness, of triumph, in which any end at all was justified by any means at all. I floated deliriously buoyant in a sea of self, with some blank check of forgiveness, forever beyond guilt or crime or folly or reality, having all future like a gift, like a prince, all choice underwritten.

Suddenly men, intruders, were holding my arms and pulling me away from my uncle’s grave.

Something has happened. Something is clear. People do not change. I am no believer in epiphanies. What we are is what we come to. Lear dies passionate still. We are stuck with ourselves. Rehabilitation is when you move to a new neighborhood, but some furniture travels always with us, the familiar old sofa of self, the will’s ancient wardrobe, the old old knives and spoons of the personality. Yet something has happened.

Just when I was breaking through! Recently I have had successes. Such successes! Last week I had lunch with Ezra Pound at St. Albans and with Jackson Pollack in New York. Two weeks ago I was in Albany at the governor’s mansion. There have been invitations. Gams. Something is clear, something has happened. Uncle Myles has raised me. He raises me. I learn from death. Grist. Grist and Truth.

To hell with successes. Something is clear. Something has happened. Something is changed. They’re not enough! I have let the great off too easily. Dinners, conversations, two hours in a bar — what is that? What am I, my uncle the corpse? I have let them off too easily. They have taken me into their parlors instead of their lives.

Something has happened. Something has changed. Something is clear.

In Lazaar’s apartment — on the desk, on the piano, on the coffee and end tables, on every surface — there are picture frames from the dime stores. Inside, behind the glass, the figures lean away from the eye, angled to the upright world like any other shadows. The thin tins of the frames are gold or silver; each has the integrity of its cheapness, like some product of our youth freshly seen. I look at one, a somewhat larger frame with wide, mirrored margins down which run extravagant, impossible flowers, lush, red, fantastic as a beanstalk in a fairy story. The pictures are of movie stars in pale, colored tints which resemble the hand-tinting of those years before color photography. The lips are pungent with pastel blood, the skin a kind of grayish pink, like the skins of people with heart disease. The faces are familiar, of course, but strike me somehow as preposterous. Suddenly I understand why. There are Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, William Powell, Deanna Durbin, Wallace Beery and Humphrey Bogart as they appeared twenty years ago. Paul Muni is a young man. Beneath each photograph is a stamped signature, a flamboyant, meaningless greeting: “Best Wishes from Hollywood, Robert Taylor”; “Musically Yours, Deanna Durbin.” I am oddly moved by the pictures. They might be pictures of things. I ask Lazaar about it.

“The photographs came with the frames. My mother never understood that you were supposed to remove them and put in your own,” he says.

He leads me into the kitchen, and makes tea while I sit on a white wooden chair beside a metal kitchen table. When he opens a cabinet and takes down a cup I catch a glimpse of a strange assortment of patterns. The dishes are familiar, too, the geometry of their designs like something remembered, known always, like a landmark or some permanent combination of old things, its impression stored on the lids of the eyes.

On the kitchen table is a glass sugar bell. Its sides are ridged; it has a chrome lid that screws on. I used to see them in restaurants.

Lazaar puts my tea in a cup and his in a glass. He takes half a shriveled lemon from the icebox and holds it above my cup and squeezes. A few cloudy drops fall into the tea. “Excuse me,” he says. “I didn’t even ask if you take lemon.” He puts the hull in his glass.

There is an open box of Jack Frost sugar cubes on the table. Lazaar takes a cube in his fingers and puts it between his teeth. Like everything Lazaar does, this act seems foreign, faintly unhygienic. I have a vision of Lazaar as a young boy. He is on the toilet. When he finishes, his mother stands over the bowl and stares down into the bowel movement he has made, examining the turds. She wipes him.

I sip my tea. Lazaar makes a slushing sound as he sucks his through the sugar. The heat and the wetness and the sweet taste are palpable for him, tactile, sensual. If I were not there he would grunt in pleasure. It comes to me again how well I understand Lazaar. For all the difference in our experience, for all our difference as persons, we might be Doppelgängers. Even when I am not with him I sometimes see him in some particular situation. I know how it is for Lazaar.

“Do you want more tea?” Lazaar asks. He smiles, his corrupt teeth stained, chipped, like the teeth of some careless animal.

Sweets, I think. I have a sense of all the candy, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of it, that Lazaar has eaten in his life.

“Yes,” I say, “the tea is very good.”

“There’s no more lemon.”

“I’m indifferent to lemon,” I say.

Lazaar laughs. “You’re indifferent to tea,” he says.

It has been so pleasant in Lazaar’s apartment, I have been so content just to sit with him, that I have almost forgotten why I am there. I see that Lazaar prefers me to leave. He knows there will be trouble for me, that I will be drawn in, if he kills himself in my presence. Lazaar is considerate. He is the kindest person I have ever known. Putting the lemon in my tea without first asking if I wanted it was, for him, an almost violent breach of conduct.

“Please,” I say, “I’d like some more tea. I really would.”

I drink four cups, five; Lazaar prepares another pot. I have to urinate but don’t dare leave him alone. Life is absurd.

“Another cup?” Lazaar asks.

“No.”

He sits down across from me and stares at me. I make him uncomfortable. I am rude to be there. Good— good I make him uncomfortable; good I am rude.

“Well, then,” Lazaar says finally, “let’s talk, then. Let’s have one of our conversations.”

“Why? Why, Lazaar? Why?”

“The trouble with you is that you think only in terms of life or death,” Lazaar says.

“What else is there?”

“Please. You’re involved or you’re not involved. I’m not involved.”

“Terrific.”

“Why are you angry? What do you think I ought to want?”

“Age.”

“Well, that,” he says mildly. “That’s easy. Live in a sealed room. Eat what the dietician says. Do moderate exercise. Take all the shots.”

“Sure.”

“Please,” he says patiently, “you’re still caught up in it. Of course you don’t understand.”

“You need a psychiatrist.”

He seems to consider this. “If I wanted to be cured,” he says. “I don’t need a psychiatrist any more than an arsonist needs the fire department.”

“I don’t understand suicide,” I say.

Lazaar looks at me. For a moment he seems genuinely interested, as though I have offered some fresh philosophical position. “That’s because you want to live forever,” he says quietly. I am startled to see the tears in his eyes. I have ruined it; I have ruined his death. He understands that it will bring me pain, that I will not forgive him. “Boswell,” he says, “please. I take no pleasure in my life. It gives me pain. If I could kill my feelings without harming myself I would settle for that. But that’s impossible. To continue to live would be a disloyalty to my needs.”

“I should have called the police,” I say.

“That wouldn’t make any difference. By the time they got to me I would have killed myself. I don’t mean to turn on the gas, to wait for the sink to fill with warm water. You must be made to understand there is nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Then why did you tell me about it? You must want me to do something.”

“That was a mistake,” Lazaar says sadly. “I meant to do you a favor.”

“Some favor.”

“Why? You’ve always wanted me to share a secret with you. This is my only secret.”

“That’s crazy. Nobody’s killing himself for me.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m not to blame.”

“No. Of course not,” Lazaar says.

“Then don’t give me that stuff.”

“I thought you’d be able to use it, to share it.”

“What the hell do I want with your death? I can’t use it. It’s off the record — not for publication.”

“I’m sorry,” he says gently.

There is a knife in his hand. It is ridiculously small, the one he uses to cut his lemons, perhaps. It glints dully in the warm kitchen. Like the dishes and the photographs, it seems familiar. Everything in my friend’s life is an old story to me.

“Maybe you’d better leave me alone now, Boswell. If something should happen, if someone were to see you, you could be accused of my murder.”

I lean across the table almost lazily and strike the knife from his hands. It is as if it has never occurred to him that I would be capable of hitting him. The knife skids on the metal surface of the table. It lands against the sugar bell, clattering faintly, harmlessly. He looks at me, startled, confused; shaking his head as if to clear some false vision from it, he reaches for the knife. I slap his wrist sharply and he pulls it back as if it has been burned. His eyes go dark and suddenly he seems stupid, incapable of any perception. Again he reaches for the knife. I punch him in the stomach and he doubles over foolishly in a classic, almost comic posture. I expect him to say “ooph.” I take up the knife and snap it in two. I drop the pieces on the floor. I have pulled up my chair beside him. He looks at me as if to protest; he has never been hit before. He slides off the chair onto the floor and on his knees grovels for the broken knife. I kick it from him, grazing his chin with my shoe. He falls and turns over on his back slowly. Now he has been hit and kicked for the first time in his life. He seems puzzled by it; violence is a strange food he is judiciously turning over in his mouth for the texture, the taste.

I pick up Lazaar and carry him to the telephone, and call the police.

Lazaar is in Bellevue. They are observing him.

Lazaar has told the doctors that he does not mean to kill himself, that he never meant to kill himself. They will give him psychiatric tests.

Lazaar has convinced the doctors he is sane. His tests show no self-destructive tendencies.

The doctors tell me they will have to let him go tomorrow, that they can’t hold him on my charges. What do I do?

As soon as they release him today Lazaar will kill himself. They won’t let me near him. I have been told that if I try to meet him at the hospital I will be arrested. He has to be watched — someone must be there to overpower him. There is no way of saving another man’s life if he really means to kill himself. Life can be spilled in a minute. With a lousy kitchen knife. With a jump from a building. Or in front of a car. Or a subway. Or by running, head down, across a room and into a wall.

Is Lazaar dead? The genius? The maker of systems? Is Lazaar dead? Has he killed himself? And me not there to see it?

Lazaar does not answer his telephone.

When the phone rang this morning I leaped toward it from my bed. (I am like that. Even in normal circumstances. A ringing telephone, a knock on the door, makes me… not nervous — what bad news can there be? a bachelor, an orphan, disaffiliated — so much as compulsively responsive, insanely anxious to please. Here is something I can do, some way I can be of service. It doesn’t even occur to me that the call will change my life. What can change anybody’s life? We’re not sweepstakes winners, we’re men. I cannot bring myself to disappoint strangers. I have this meaningless humility in small things.) I was hoping, of course, that the call was from Lazaar. I wanted to hear him say, “Boswell, I am alive and I am reconciled to life.”

I dropped the phone onto the floor. At once I knew it could not be Lazaar. On the rug, by my bare foot, there was the sound of a girl singing love songs in the morning.

“Yes.”

Music.

“Please, who is this?”

“Jimmy, did you see the Times yet?”

“Nate?”

“Who, then?”

“Nate, what is it?”

“Did you see the Times?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s a little item about your pal. The genius. Some genius.”

“Lazaar?”

“Jimmy, the company you keep!”

“Lazaar?”

“Yeah. Him.”

“Nate, what is it?”

“Wait a minute. I’ll read you.” He left the phone and I could hear the girl again on Nate’s combination hi-fi, stereo, TV, tape recorder, AM-FM, Short Wave, Long Wave, Living Theater, Puppet Show.

“Jimmy? Wait a minute. Simmons, turn that thing down. I’m reading from the Times to my friend. Jimmy?”

“Come on, Nate.”

“All right, don’t rush me. If you took a classy paper like the Times you wouldn’t have to depend so much on your friends. I’m beginning to read, Jimmy. ‘Dr. Herman Lazaar, Lyman Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, was released Tuesday from Bellevue Hospital. In the hospital for extensive psychiatric tests and observation, he had been taken to Bellevue by an unidentified companion who alleged that the Brooklyn College professor had repeatedly made attempts on his own life. Hospital officials, satisfied that Dr. Lazaar is not suicidal, have discharged him.

“‘Dr. Lazaar’s work in philosophy, while comparatively unknown to the general public, is highly esteemed in professional philosophic circles. He is the founder of “Yeaism” and “Nayism,” two systems of philosophic logic which, starting from identical premises, lead to exactly opposite conclusions.’ How do you like that? The guy tried to kill himself. Go get a college education… Jimmy?”

“I’m here.”

“You didn’t forget the blast over at the place tomorrow night, did you?”

“No, of course not, Nate.”

“Many famous chicks. Movie stars, the works. Bring your autograph book.”

“Sure, Nate.”

“How do you like that? An ‘unidentified companion.’ The creep’s probably queer. Watch yourself, Jimmy.”

“My eyes are open, Nate.”

“Look, come over a little early. We’re playing Frank’s new record. A premiere.”

“Thanks, Nate.”

Nate said ring-a-ding-ding and I said ring-a-ding- ding yourself and we hung up.

I do not miss the significance of Nate’s call. He was warning me, telling me to choose sides. He knew Lazaar was going to try to kill himself because I told him about the threats. I ran to him with them. What the hell is the matter with me? I sit with Nate and gossip about Lazaar; I sit with Lazaar and gossip about Nate. I make offerings to each of them.

Nate doesn’t approve of my having friends like Lazaar. He says, “If they can’t hit high C, if they don’t do imitations, if they ain’t actors, if they don’t have prime time on a Sunday night, if they ain’t SRO at the box office, if they ain’t show biz, Jimmy, they’re bums.”

I tell him there are many great men who aren’t in the business. “So let them cure cancer,” Nate says. “They got to make it with the public.”

When I tell Nate that I cannot come to some party of his or meet some celebrity, he is hurt. He thinks I’ve changed. Sometimes I see him look at me with a kind of awe. It is the way one looks at an old pal who has just announced he will take holy orders. This is touching, but Nate, who is made for awe, is nervous if it’s a certain kind. Still, he will never turn on me. His is a world, finally, of permanent loyalties. A commitment once made among men who do not yield their trust easily is a commitment for life. There is something sappy in this and sentimental and incredibly noble. Nate should smoke cigars, heel wards, play poker with appointees on the take. He has the soul of the tinhorn; he confuses graft with friendship, conspiracy with love. Perhaps this is why he is so fond of me. I am on the take. I take Nate’s meals, his introductions. I give him nothing at all in return, and this pleases him. Perhaps my gossip is an attempt at independence, an effort to even the score. I notice that Nate takes no pleasure in hearing it. He thinks I’ve changed, and he fears change. That is why he bothers to warn me; he is defending himself.

But I know what Nate cannot know. I have not changed.

Boswell is Boswell is Boswell. His truth is that the personality is simply another name for habit and that what we view as a fresh decision is only a rededication, a new way to get old things; that the evolving self is an illusion, fate just some final consequence. I have never surprised myself, come upon myself unaware. Always I know it’s me.

I do not want to have to pick between Nate and Lazaar — not because I would have to betray one or the other (I talk as though Lazaar were still alive), but because I need both. I am like some small businessman enough ahead of the game to open another store. If I have a new type of man in my collection it is not because I have changed, but because the old techniques have worked.

Lazaar is an instance. It cost me almost thirty dollars in long-distance calls just to get Lazaar’s name. I put in person-to-person calls to the chairman of eight Departments of Philosophy. (I will stint on lunches, wear old clothes, live in cheap, cheerless rooms, but a campaign is a campaign.) Before they came to the phone I had honed the precise edge of brassiness I wanted.

“Professor, this is Jim Boswell. I’d like to put you out on a limb for a second.”

“What’s that?” (Exactly. Confusion. Confuse and conquer!)

“Well, professor — say, what do I call you, sir? Professor? Doctor?”

“Either. None. Mister. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“How about that? Well, as I say, this is probably a toughy, and maybe you think it’s a silly question, but I’ve got my reasons. I’m not at liberty to say what those are just now, of course.”

“What is it?”

“I want to know who’s the best going?”

“I am invincible. Who can stand against me? Had I sounded less stupid the man would have been more guarded. But I came at him sounding like the world— vulgar, probably powerful. None of the chairmen even asked for my credentials. My name (I never falsify that) couldn’t have been more than a blur of sound, but it was enough. Nor did they ask my reasons. It is enough when someone who always has reasons comes at you. The long distance, the chairman was thinking. He was thinking endowments, chairs.

“What I want, Doctor, is the name of the king, the champ. Who’s the heavyweight in your bunch? I don’t know what you’d call him, the wisest man or something, but the guy who’s doing the best stuff.”

And Nate thinks I’ve changed, gone fancy. Nate is a fool. I do my imitations too. All time is prime time.

Almost all of them said Lazaar — and in under three minutes.

I branch out. I know more people. I use the universities extensively now. There is a big market for the famous in the universities. I add mathematicians, musicians, astronomers, biologists, historians, writers-in- residence. (See journal entries for months of February through May, 1955, for October 12, and October 23–30, 1956 and for December 2, 3, 7, 8, 1956, et al.)

There are ways. Oh yes, ways. A ninety-day excursion ticket takes me from the East Coast to the West Coast and back again. I know more campuses than a textbook representative. What do I need? My wardrobe serves. There’s a simplicity in it. You want? Take; the world is open. The frontier is all around us. Like the sky. Don’t talk to me about class, station, opportunities. Don’t make excuses. Show me a door — I will knock on it for you. Lead me to a gate — I will ring the bell. Walls? Don’t give away your age. There are no walls in a democracy. Something there is doesn’t love a wall. Boswell doesn’t love a wall, but in extremity it can be scaled. These are men, just men, even as you and I. Only men. Merely men. The ferocious declination of the infinitive to humanity. That’s how it is; I didn’t write the language. (Of course I don’t say it’s easy to do what I do. A few aren’t made for it. The lamb will not lie down with the lion.)

I rip through their campuses, smelling of streets and streetcars, smelling of the line at the check-out counter, of the super-marketplace, of the world. These people are no match for me. What do they know? They think Red China should be admitted to the UN. They believe in fairness, civics, rights — the closed shop, the Negro vote, the happy man. Utopians! Yet there is a deep democracy in me, too. It is the democracy of giving no man quarter. I will not patronize the enemy; I will empty both barrels into him every time. I will waste advanced techniques on him in a gratuitousness of slaughter.

This year I attended some lectures by a theologian in the Harvard Divinity School. An expert on God. A very big man in the field, influential, respected by atheists. I sat in the front. (I always sit in the front; the principle of no quarter again.) I let him have the first round. Then, ten minutes before the bell was due to sound for the end of the class, as he was describing the relationship of Man to God, I began to fidget and look uneasy. I have a way of looking disturbed (it’s my size) that is felt across continents. In that small room, among those rapt faces, my restlessness was like something out of the whirlwind. Nothing snotty, you understand — no vulgar mouth sounds or laughter or anything like that (though I have, on occasion, used laughter, too; one time, at the University of Chicago, I laughed like a hyena when a Nobel physicist wrote his formula on the blackboard). Just a kind of profound uneasiness as though I were wearing new underwear and hadn’t taken out all the pins. People next to me frowned. Some said shush (though I had made no sound). At last, inevitably, there was a look of helplessness from the lecturer himself.

“Is something wrong?” he asked innocently.

“Is something wrong?” I exploded (as though I might yet have kept silent had he not been the one to bring it up). And then, softly, remembering where I was and who I was and who he was and who He is, “Forgive me. I’m sorry, sir. Please forgive me.”

“Well,” he said, “you looked so—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “Please go on.” I held up my pencil as though what he said next had to be a note.

The theologian began to speak once more. I waited for him to make his first point before allowing my anguish to return. By this time he was lecturing directly at me. I produced my most difficult effect. There was pain; there was mute, martyred, superior knowledge; there was fear; there was sadness; there was the young man’s flushed squeamishness in the presence of senility. All this. Everything played across my face like an intricate sequence of waters in a fountain.

It was too much for him. “Please,” he said. “I must insist that you reveal at once what you’re objecting to. If I’ve made a mistake in dogma or interpretation I’d like to know about it. We’re all of us students here.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Of course. Yes.”

“Well—”

“Yes?”

“Sir, if you’ll permit me, it seems to me that the implicit lesson in all religions, the essence of the ecumenical pronouncement, is—”

The bell rang. I shrugged sadly and left the room. He wooed me. He followed me in corridors, Boswell’s little lamb. He kept his office door open all day hoping for another glimpse of me. I strolled by maddeningly. He came up to me in the Yard and spoke to me; I answered politely but with reserve. We had coffee together; he bought.

Eventually he began to suspect that I was playing with him and I moved to consolidate my position. At the beginning of the next class I asked permission to make an announcement.

“I would like to apologize for my lack of humility last time,” I said softly. “It is of course unforgivable that a person like myself — I’m from the Pennsylvania coalfields — who ought to thank God just for the privilege of hearing a wise man like the doctor here, could dare to bring even a moment’s anxiety to such a saint.” I watched him squirm. “Yes, a saint,” I repeated. “I would be bereft of hope for my arrogant soul except for my knowledge of God’s infinite mercy. Thank you.”

When he began to lecture, the students couldn’t keep, their eyes off me. They had to see how I was taking it. I was taking it like an angel. I looked like God was scratching my back.

Finally, during a pause, I gasped. He stopped talking at once, thinking it was the old business all over again. Out of a corner of a veiled eye I could see he was angry. I gasped a second time, but it was nothing like anything I had shown them before. There was terror in it, but the terror that exists before grandeur. The man could see he hadn’t caused it. He could see, as I meant him to see, that he was insignificant there. I pitched forward in my seat, the movement heavy, strained, as though I were being tugged by invisible hands. I trembled and there were tears in my eyes.

“What is it?” a student asked, frightened. “Is he sick?”

“Leave him alone,” the Doctor of Divinity said sharply. “Don’t touch him.”

Then, by a supreme effort — who says the will ain’t free? Free? Hell, it’s absolutely loose — I managed to bring across my face, like one leading a child to a fair, an expression of absolute beatitude, of a serenity so profound it could stand before Death. My face became a crazy quilt of intelligent joy. I looked exactly like someone who could do the job, taking instructions that weren’t to be questioned. I nodded gravely.

“I think he hears something,” a student whispered hoarsely.

My eyes opened slowly. They rolled up into my skull and my lips parted. Then I slumped back in my chair exhausted. It was over.

I shook myself. I pulled myself together. I looked around. I smiled compassionately, bravely. I looked at the Doctor of Divinity sadly, as if I knew his fate. (I do!) “What was it?” he said.

I stood up.

“What was it?” he asked again.

“I am not at liberty to say,” I said, and left the room.

As a matter of fact, this religion thing has taken a good deal of my time lately. Just a few weeks ago I read about a miracle rabbi who lives in the orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg, and I went to find him. It was very strange.

The lights shone redundantly from the windows of the apartment buildings even at noon, vaguely like some kind of public act, a candle-lighting ceremony in a large stadium, or perhaps some wartime measure. On one side of the street where municipal signs warned no parking was allowed on Saturdays, the curb was lined solidly with cars. Each had been ticketed. I thought of ancient taxes, old impositions. I seemed to be in a place under siege, where heroism was communal, vaguely timid. There was no life in the shops; the streets were deserted. Occasionally, in doorways, I saw clusters of old men in dark gabardine, their faces shadowed under black, wide hats. They seemed to add weight to the aura of helpless conspiracy about the place. As I went by they stopped talking to watch me. I might have been a centurion, some Roman fop. When I had passed they spoke again, talking in Yiddish. Arguing, quietly indignant with one another in the street, they had the air of persons anxious in minor causes.

In the apartment building I rang the rabbi’s bell. There was no answer. When I came out a group of old men was standing about outside the building.

“Where do I find the rabbi?” I asked one.

“It’s funny. To me you don’t look Jewish.”

“I’m looking for the miracle rabbi.”

“Italian he looks.”

“Italian looks Jewish. He don’t look Jewish.”

“But he looks for the rabbi.”

“To hit him on the head. See his size? Since when is a big one like that friendly?”

“It couldn’t happen.”

“I have to see the rabbi,” I said.

“Take advice. You don’t appear stupid. Listen to me. Don’t look for no miracle rabbis. Don’t seek to know mysteries which are beyond even big-shot Talmudic scholars,” said the first man.

“Do you need from a miracle rabbi in America? In America is Nature. Nature and Time. Let them take their courses.”

“You couldn’t go wrong.”

“I called his home. He doesn’t answer,” I said.

“On Shabbos he should come to the telephone? That would be a miracle. Am I wrong, Traub?”

“That would tahkee be a miracle,” Traub said.

“Tell him. Don’t pull him apart,” a tall old man said.

“Tell him yourself,” Traub said.

“This miracle worker you mention, this Jewish magician you seek to find, he is the Rabbi Oliver Messerman? The same Rabbi Oliver Messerman who makes the old women and the young girls and the children crazy with his hocus-pocus dominocus and his chants from the Cabala?”

“The fella written up in the World-Telegram?” another said.

“He don’t look Jewish to me, Rabbi Messerman,” the first man said.

“Yes,” I said. “Rabbi Messerman.”

“Let me ask you a question, young man. Where would a rabbi be on the Sabbath?”

“In the temple?” I said.

“The shul, he says.”

“Reasonable but incorrect,” the tall man said.

“Where is he, then? Please, I have to find him. It’s a matter of life or death.” It was a strange phrase. It thrilled me to say it, as shouting “Remain calm” in a burning theater might have thrilled me. Even as I said it I thought of all the times it had been spoken to telephone operators, to policemen, to airlines reservations clerks— always somehow to strangers. It underwrote one’s need. Emergency was a password, a universal language. Yet all those times it had been said, just as now, there was something spurious in it, as though the language of urgency undercut urgency, as though it was understood that it could never be our life, our death.

Perhaps they heard the evasion. “Life and death?” one said.

“A very important matter,” Traub said.

“We are his congregation,” the first man said.

“His minyan.”

“He is our spiritual leader forward march,” Traub said.

“A Messiah.”

“King of the Jews.”

“God’s small son.”

“All right,” I said, “where is he?”

“In his house is where he is,” the tall man said.

“You can see him through the window. He stands in a white sheet and makes prayers for the world. Go, you’ll see.”

“See? He’ll hear.”

“Three days this time.”

“Messerman,” Traub called, “it’s enough already!”

“Where?” I asked. The man pointed to a basement window.

I went to the window. It was barred and screened, and only about a third of it was above the street. I squatted on the pavement and looked in. Through a crack I could see someone moving about. I went back to the men. “He didn’t answer when I rang the buzzer before. Is it broken?”

“What broken? Can a miracle rabbi that gets pilgrims from all over afford to have a broken buzzer? If he doesn’t answer it’s because it’s Shabbos.”

“Listen,” someone said seriously, “he’s crazy. He’s a very crazy person. For three days we need him for services in the shul.”

“He knows we’re here,” another said. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“Some miracle rabbi.”

“Some rabbi,” Traub said.

“If you ask me, Messerman don’t look Jewish,” the first man said.

“Why don’t you get rid of him?” I asked.

“There’s a law,” one of them said. “A rabbi is like a captain on a ship. You can’t go up to a captain on a ship and say, ‘We don’t like the way you’re running the ship. You’re not the captain no more.’ This is a mutiny, you understand. You must make first a report to Cincinnati.”

“Are you from Cincinnati?” one of them asked excitedly. “Maybe he’s from Yeshiva in Cincinnati to question the rabbi.”

“Him?”

“I’ll tell you the truth, I never seen him in the neighborhood.”

“Excuse me but he don’t look Jewish,” the first man said.

“Nobody looks Jewish to you, Plotman. How is that?”

“Excuse me but that’s not true,” Plotman said.

“Yeah? Yeah? Name one person who looks Jewish to you. Name one.”

“You look a little Jewish to me,” Plotman said.

“Are you from Cincinnati?” the tall man asked me.

“No.”

I moved away from the men and entered the building a second time. A card by the bell listed Messerman’s name but didn’t give his apartment number. I tried the hall door, knowing it was locked. I went back to the mailboxes, found the superintendent’s bell and pressed it. In three minutes I went back outside. “Look,” I told the men, “the super doesn’t answer.”

“It’s Shabbos,” one of the men said.

“Well, is there anyone in the damn building who isn’t Jewish?”

“In this neighborhood, young man, you’re the only one isn’t Jewish.”

“There’s Mrs. Helferman on six,” Traub said. He turned to me. “She’s Jewish, but she lost her husband and her son on the same day in two different car accidents. Maybe she would press the buzzer.”

“Yeah, yeah, Mrs. Helferman,” the tall man said.

I rushed back into the building. One of the name- plates said “Marvin Helferman”; I pressed the button. The men came inside to watch. In a moment I heard a voice through the speaking tube.

“If you’re look for Marvin Helferman,” it said, “he’s dead eight months Tuesday. His son Joe ain’t alive either. This is Bess.”

“I knew she would,” one of the men said behind me.

“Apostate,” said another.

“Bess,” I said, “ring the bell. I must get inside.”

“Do you mean to rob me?”

“No. Please, Bess. I’m an honest man.” This is ridiculous, I thought; this is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened to me.

“How do I know you don’t mean to rape me?” Bess asked.

“Rape her?” Traub said. “She should live so long.”

“I’m a widow. My husband and son, alla sholem, are dead. The one lays in Portland in Oregon I didn’t have what to ship back his body. Robbers. Marvin came back from Chicago on the train. Did you ever hear? I didn’t go to my own son’s funeral.” Her voice over the speaking tube was broken, her sobs lost in the brassy static.

“Bess, please. I have to get inside to see the rabbi. He won’t answer the ring.” I turned to the men. “Does she know any of you?”

“Sure. Marvin was a good friend.”

“Bess,” I said, “there are some men here who could vouch for me.” I looked at the men. “Tell her it’s all right.”

The old men looked at each other uneasily. “It’s a sin,” one of them said shyly.

“I dassn’t,” another said.

“It’s Shabbos,” said someone else.

“Superstitious old men,” Traub said scornfully. “You expect superstitious old men to help you?” He moved two or three steps closer to the speaking tube. He was still half the distance between it and the door. “I say the young man is all right,” he said, raising his voice. “Traub says Bess ought to ring the bell.” He was almost shouting in the small hallway.

Another came up beside Traub. “Al Frickler says so too.”

“Al, do you miss Marvin?” Bess’ voice said.

“Everybody misses Marvin,” Frickler said. Though he was shouting he managed to make it sound kind.

The buzzer sounded brokenly, like a machine gun in the distance. I rushed to the door before it stopped.

“Which apartment number?”

The men shrugged.

I took the elevator down to the basement. When the door opened I was near the incinerator. Two days’ garbage was piled high in the bin; there were empty wine bottles, chicken bones, the rinds of oranges. I moved through the corridor trying to orient myself with the window outside the building.

I knocked on a door. “Who?” someone said immediately.

The abrupt response startled me. Throughout the building people seemed not so much celebrating or observing the day as besieged by it. I could see them in their apartments, in the redundant glare of the unnecessary electric, not answering their phones, their bells, not using machinery, not resting so much as marking time until the sun went down.

“Rabbi Messerman’s apartment?”

“Further down.”

“To my left? My right?”

“Further down.”

I continued in the direction I had been going in. I saw a mazuzah, the prayer cylinder, nailed to the doorway like a tin whistle. When I put my ear against the door I could hear a voice.

I knocked. “Rabbi Messerman,” I called. “I’m James Boswell.” The voice inside stopped. “Rabbi Messerman, let me in. I’m James Boswell and I’m here to find out the meaning of life.”

The little metal loop slid aside and I saw an eye stare out at me. I had an impulse to push my finger through the hole and touch it.

“What do you want?”

“I’m James Boswell and I want to learn the meaning of life. Let me in.”

The eye jiggled up and down behind the fixed peephole on the door. It was as though the pupil were somehow loose inside the eye socket.

The door was opened by a man dressed in a dirty white silk robe which hung in loose, heavy folds about his body. On his head was a white skullcap. I was startled to see that he was barefoot.

There were pictures everywhere, as in Lazaar’s apartment. Faces I had never seen but which were somehow familiar stared out of ten-cent-store frames. They were the relatives that should have been behind Lazaar’s frames, the cousins and fathers and uncles and brothers and mothers and aunts and grandparents and sisters, their faces stretching away in time to the very beginnings of photography. In strange ways, behind the alien fashions and notions of cosmetic, a queer resemblance emerged— as though they had all been painted by someone who had found his “style.” They offered a weird, elaborate genetic testimony. A certain shadow beneath an old woman’s eye would suddenly appear in some young boy, or a chin, like some flesh heirloom, made its way down the generations, sometimes recessive, sometimes dominant, as though it reflected the fortunes and attitudes of its successive owners much as a proper legacy, a house perhaps, might go through periods of repair or disrepair depending on the diligence and luck of its inhabitants. I much preferred. Lazaar’s pictures — movie stars, pastless, ghostless, one- shot beings who dwelled in an eternal present, like gods who sprang from some private conception of themselves. It was difficult to imagine that the rabbi and I were both men, that we were both human beings. He, so familied, so clearly the sum of his parts, related to the past as a model of one year’s automobile is related to a model of the next. At least I was not the incarnate nose, ears, hands, mouth of some primal Boswellian despot. Or at least I had been spared the knowledge. Who we didn’t know didn’t hurt us.

I remembered a greeting card I had once gotten from a school friend when I was still wrestling. It was one of those cards which celebrates no particular occasion but pops out at you every once in a while in the mail as a sudden windfall of contact. It was cheery, bright, the kind of card a man could decently send to another man, with a cartoon drawing of “The Thinker.” Inside were big inky letters that said “JUST THINKING OF YOU,” and beneath the greeting my friend had written a small note. “Caught you on TV last night in a wrestling match and couldn’t help remembering those wonderful days as kids together. My best wishes to you in your new career. May good fortune and health be with you always.” There was something touching in the message, but I remember feeling crowded, bullied. It was as though I were being asked to value what I had never valued. A sales technique, another piece of junk mail — you could send it without sealing the envelope and it would cost you a penny less for the stamp.

I considered what it would be like to have brothers, parents, to nuzzle in the bounty of breasts, to sit on laps, be taught to suck sugar. There were only so many ways to die. You took your choice — that was what the will was for. For some people, for myself, the past made no difference; it was beside the point, like my friend’s declaration. There were some — some? we were legion — who neither made fortunes nor inherited them, congenital third sons of the woodchopper.

“Rabbi,” I said, “I don’t trust all this lace, that aunt’s nose repeated generation after generation. What is your cabalistic chant, ‘Auld Lang Syne’?”

“What do you want?” he asked, frightened. A loose nerve like some secretive, subterrestrial animal, slid under the surface of his skin. It was like watching the slow uncoiling of a whip. Like so many things recently, it was familiar.

“Well, I was in the neighborhood,” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

“Well, I’m a Baptist, don’t you get it? I’m making my ecumenical call.”

“Please,” he said.

“Oh, come on. I’m a Methodist, a Roman Catholic, a Christian Scientist. I’m Episcopalian, Lutheran, a Church of Christ man. Some of the Eastern things.”

He looked at me curiously.

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m a converter. I join everything. Always willing to take a little instruction. Come on now, tell me, what’s the meaning of life?”

“What do you want?”

“What I said. I’ve been becoming everything. It may be hereditary. Perhaps I got the notion from my Uncle Myles’ charge accounts that he never used.” I started to tell him about the time, a year before, when I had gone into one of the confessional booths in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It was outrageous.

I had gone into the confessional and pressed the buzzer for the priest. When I heard him enter through the other side and slide back the grill, something indescribable came over me. (It was this that I had forgotten, that even then the experience had been meaningful, not a prank.) When I realized that there was really a priest there, not an impostor like myself, there was nothing to do but what he expected of me. I began to tell him about my life. I had never been in a confessional before. I wasn’t a Roman Catholic at the time; I knew nothing about the forms, the language.

After a while the priest interrupted me. “But what sin have you to confess?” he demanded.

“I’m telling you, Father.”

“No. You must be direct. You must be honest,” he said. “When did you make your last confession?”

“Well, I’ve never made one. I’ve never made a confession before. I never have.”

“Are you Catholic?” he asked me angrily.

“Well, I have a soul, Father.”

I thought he would melt or something at the mention of the word, but all he did was ask again if I were Catholic. I was afraid that he would leave me there alone if I admitted I wasn’t, so I lied.

“Please get on with it,” he said.

“We’ll be here all afternoon, Father, it looks like,” I said, and I started to tell him again about my life. I told him about Herlitz and the wrestling and about Perlmutter and Lome and all the others, how I had extorted contact from them, and about the things that had happened to me. I told him about what I believed and how important it was for me not to die. At first he didn’t seem very interested, but as I went on I could sense an attention even in his silence. Every once in a while when I mentioned some famous person he would say, “You know him?” or “Really?” and I could see that he was impressed. It was odd. I knew that for him none of this, even his hearing my confession, had anything to do with religion or with his function as a priest, whereas for me the experience was more solemn than anything that had ever happened to me. We get different things from each other.

After I had finished I asked him my question. I asked him where the sin was.

He wasn’t very interested, I think, and he told me that it might be a good idea if I saw a psychiatrist.

“Come on, Father,” I said, “there’s a sin there someplace. Don’t push me off onto a psychiatrist.”

“God forgives your sins.”

“Yes, I know that. But what are they? What good is it if I don’t understand what God is forgiving? Shouldn’t I have some idea about that?”

He thought about this for a while. I don’t think he was trying to get rid of me. What he had heard must have sounded insane to him, but I think he also realized that there was something wrong somewhere, wrong in his sense. But he just couldn’t cope with me. He’d been trained to deal with masturbators and adulterers and the profane and the various larcenies — to transmit forgiveness, not to recognize sin. What did he know about sin? He dealt with those who had yielded to temptation, who had coddled their flesh, who had been temporarily delivered from the deceptive needs, had fought it out on their body’s battleground and lost. Finally he coughed and said something I couldn’t hear.

“What was that, Father?”

“Misrepresentation,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Of course I’ve told many lies, but I’ve been more honest with others, even about myself, than most people are.”

“Desire, then,” he said. He was really interested now.

“Well, maybe—”

“The failure to acknowledge God,” he said.

“No, Father.”

“Pride.”

“Father, I stink.”

It went on like that, neither of us able to put our finger on it.

“Father?” I said at last.

“Yes?”

“Father, I think — this may sound crazy—”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just an idea…”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I think you better go get the Cardinal.”

The rabbi stood barefoot on the uncarpeted floor glaring at me. He seemed wild and tough. I stared at his feet, pale and rough on the smooth brown wood, the toenails chipped and incredibly filthy. It was as if he had crossed deserts, knelt by streams, lived on nuts. (I thought of the old wrestling days. In his robe and skullcap, barefoot, the rabbi might have been in disguise for a match. It might have been another identity, like The Masked Playboy or The Grim Reaper. For me there had always been something more ferociously real about those identities than false. The Wild Men were wild, the bad guys bad, the good guys good.)

“There are prayers,” he said hoarsely.

“Come on,” I said, “it’s a joke. Pleased to have met you.”

“There are prayers,” he said again.

“Come on,” I said. “For what?”

“For your sin. That the priest couldn’t tell you about. There are prayers.” He put his hand on my face suddenly and began to chant.

“Hey, cut it out,” I said.

He was swaying in front of me now, as if I were an altarpiece.

“Now cut it out,” I said again. “Just stop it.”

He put his arms around me and pulled me forward and pushed me back to the rhythm of his chant. I felt tight, heavy, blocked, impossibly like some sentient trunk in an attic, filled with things no one would ever use. Suddenly he roared the word “dibbuk” and began to beat my breast.

“Why, you old-timey Polish man. Dibbuks, is it? So that’s the meaning of life. Soul infesters, spiritual viruses, termites in the heart’s old woodwork.” I pulled away from him. “Enough’s enough, Rabbi. Pleased to have met you.” As I stepped out the door, instinctively I kissed my finger and touched it to the mazuzah in exactly the way I had read somewhere that Jews do.

My techniques grow increasingly desperate and bizarre. What is it? Why? I begin to break through. I begin to know the famous. I begin to see them a second time, a third. I am young; I am a young man. How many young men have the lists I have? Yet I become extravagant, bolder, wilder, as though I were without the glands of shame. I am driven to outrages of the spirit. I plunder. I rape. A barbarian of the better neighborhoods, somehow my own victim, too. There is in me a kind of prurience — not sexual, a misappropriated lust, misinformed. I am at large, a subversive in the suburbs. It is startling that I have not been arrested, that I do not languish in jail, that civilization has not brought charges.

Sometimes, when I pass policemen, I feel like dropping little notes in crayon saying, “Catch me before it’s too late!”

June 30, 1958. Los Farronentes, Q. R.

Lano’s incredible sources of supply continue to amaze me. Today a plane with Polish markings landed at the airstrip here. The Chinese pilot had a Maori, a Greek, two Canadians, an Egyptian, a Sherpa and a Pakistani with him.

Lano greeted the others warmly but was furious when he saw the Pakistani. “This man weighs only eight stone,” he shouted. “He weighs only eight stone. Where’s my Turk? I was promised a Turk. How can I make an international revolution if I have no Turk?” He turned to me. “In his country is the famine so to here he comes. Already I feed nine Pakistanis. To make a revolution with so much Pakistanis is very bad.” He turned to the Chinese pilot. “Where is my Turk?”

Although he had been flying a DC-6, the man wore enormous pilot’s goggles over his eyes. The lenses were faintly steamy and behind them his pupils looked like some weird seafood. He stared at Lano sadly.

“Get him to say,” Lano demanded of Dr. Mud.

Dr. Mud said something to the pilot in Chinese.

“This is unnecessary,” the pilot suddenly replied in English. “No Turk could be found. Perhaps next trip. There is a Turk in London who has expressed interest.”

Lano sighed wearily. “I go in the plane,” he said. He climbed into the DC-6 and we heard him moving around inside, shoving aside the heavy wooden crates. “Machine guns,” he shouted. “Hands grenades. Revolvers. Where are my automatic rifles? Never mind, I see them.” He stood in the doorway. “Where are the magazines?”

“With the rifles,” the Chinese pilot said.

“Not those magazines. The magazines. The press.”

“There’s just this,” the pilot said. From his flying jacket he produced a copy of Time and handed it up. Lano took it eagerly and sat down in the cabin of the plane and began to thumb through it very rapidly. “Two paragraphs,” he said dejectedly and stood up. “Here,” he said, “Boswell, from your native land.” He threw the magazine to me.

Tonight, in my tent, I have been reading it. It is the issue of May fifteenth, but I’ve been in the mountains since early April. As I read each of the departments— The Nation, The Hemisphere, The World, People—I began to compose a letter to the editor:

Sir:

We here at The Revolution don’t get much chance to hear about what’s happening to People back in The Nation. We’re kept pretty busy making over The World. Then, too, we don’t often have the opportunity to see The Press, and so miss out on the latest developments in Art, Books, Cinema, Education, Medicine, Religion, Science, Sport and Milestones. So, believe me, when even an old copy of TIME comes through it’s pretty well thumbed, believe me…

I was having a pretty good time. Toward the back, in U.S. Business, there was a picture of William Lome, and I started to read the story. It spoke of Lome glowingly, recounting anecdotes which, despite their familiarity, were interesting, but somehow I couldn’t see the point of the article. It was only after I had almost finished it that I realized that it was an obituary and that William Lome is dead.

Uncle Myles. Lome. Lazaar. Turnover, turnover. Herlitz. Turnover. My parents. Turnover. Turnover. Turnover.

Yesterday I got another chance to speak with Lano.

Rohnspeece came into the tent excited. “It’s Fourth of July,” he told me. “The General is going to give all us Americans a special toast. You better hurry.” He flashed a rag across his boots and raced out. “He’s taking us through the gate himself,” he called back to me.

I wasn’t going. I had been disenchanted for weeks. Jesus, I thought, how do I get involved in these things? There were enough great men around without going into the jungles to look for them. I had made a mistake. It was the thought of being in on something big from the beginning that did it. When I’d first heard about the revolution it was still only a rumor, something plotted in a tavern. Not all the people were even out of jail yet.

Now I wait for one of three things to happen: Lano to win the war; Lano to lose the war; Lano to get me out through one of his complicated channels. “Only the deep wounded can go,” Lano says, and adds, “when there is time.” And ought to add, “And when there are wounded.” There are no wounded, no dead, no missing. We might be in the Catskills waiting out the summer. We sit encamped in these damn mountains and Lano makes his revolution over the radio, sending out phony communiqués about towns taken, bridges blown, labor unions out on sympathy strikes, leaders of the regime committing suicide. He makes up a terrific revolution, Lano. Privately he explains that this is the “Valley Forge phase” of his revolution and that Los Farronentes is our chrysalis. A classicist, Lano.

Dr. Mud came in. “God’s first attribute is His eye,” he said. “Lano will perhaps note the American’s absence.”

“He doesn’t need me. I’m not one of his soldiers.”

Mud shrugged and gave me his mysterious smile.

Dr. Mud is the only genuinely sinister man I have ever met. I’m always looking for the fez which ought to be on his head, the Palm Beach yellow-white suit on his back. I had coffee with him in his tent one night and automatically I found myself switching our paper cups. As far as I can make out he represents “certain foreign interests.”

He shaded his eyes (it is dark in the tent, but whenever he looks at you Dr. Mud shades his eyes) and told me in his amused, Cauco-Asiatic voice, using the upper register tones this time, that it would be better not to anger Lano.

“The shell of the young turtle is hard,” he said, “but exceeding brittle.” (Mud uses a lot of sinister Eastern sayings. I think he makes them up. I have taken to answering him in kind and have gotten pretty good at it.)

“The east wind never blows without first consulting the west wind,” I said.

“Ah,” said Mud, “every ocean climbs mountains to the shore.”

“Your ad,” I said.

When Mud left the tent I decided I’d better go to Lano.

I went out. The east wind tells the west wind when to blow, I thought, polishing as I passed Dr. Mud. He was by the Lister bag. It made me a little nervous to see him near our drinking water. “Ah, Mud,” I said, “the thirsty man drinks deepest.”

“A hungry man is no judge of food,” he said back, quick as a shot.

Sinister bastard, I thought.

Outside Lano’s compound one of his supernumerary Pakistanis stood guard. He carried no rifle but in each hand he held a grenade from which the pin had already been pulled. His famine-thin thumbs strained against the safety device to depress it.

“I’m invited,” I said.

He shook his head and looked troubled.

“I’m American. I go inside, yes? The Generalissimo Lano awaits.”

He didn’t understand.

“A hungry man is no judge of food. North wind blows south wind,” I told him Easternly.

He looked helplessly at the grenades in his hands. He was, I knew, ordered to throw them at anyone who tried to get past the gate.

I whistled “Yankee Doodle” and he smiled suddenly in recognition. “Foh Jul,” he said happily, “Foh Jul.” He motioned me inside.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “don’t wave.”

I had never been inside before (none of us had) and did not see immediately where I was supposed to go. From outside Lano’s electrified fence the compound looks pretty much like the one I am in myself, but once inside I noticed some subtle differences. For one thing, there were flowers. Not the exotic man-eaters that grew in such abundance elsewhere in this steamy jungle, but gentle, familiar ones, homey ones. They grew along both sides of a tree-lined path that wound up the mountain. I climbed the path for about a quarter of a mile and then heard voices. I knew I must be going in the right direction and walked faster. Suddenly the path leveled off and I came into a clearing. About fifteen yards away were the thirty- three other Americans in Lano’s army.

Lano, on a high platform exactly like the one at the drill field where the men did their calisthenics each morning, saw me and waved.

“What’s happening?” I asked a thin soldier in a shabby Class A American uniform.

“We’re celebrating the Fourth,” he answered glumly. “Only he does all the drinking.”

“Attention,” Lano called out through a megaphone and raised a canteen cup. “Attention there! I propose a very important, very special sentimental toasts to the memory of the great General Washington. Proclaim liberty throughout the land.” He leaned forward and drank. “Happy Fourth July to all,” he said, smiling. He put down the cup and placed his hands on the railing. “Celebration over. Back to your stations at once,” he shouted abruptly. “And don’t forget,” he said, pointing to a tent. just below and to the side of the platform, “you saw yourselves how your General Lano shares with you disfortune and hardship, as he will share with you the prizes of the victory. Tell the others. Dismissed!” The soldiers turned and began to walk off uncertainly. “Go back the way you came,” Lano roared from the platform. “Follow the flowers down.”

I was walking beside Rohnspeece when I heard my name shouted in Lano’s deep voice through the megaphone. “Boswells,” he called again. I looked back at him over my shoulder. “I dismissed only the soldiers. My aides cannot yet go,” he said. Rohnspeece looked at me admiringly as I walked back toward the platform.

Lano rested his arms along the railing and leaned down toward me, smiling. He seemed very pleased. Raising his megaphone again he spoke into it in a normal voice. “What’s the matter,” he said, “don’t you want to be my aide no more?”

“I want to go back.”

“Only deep wounded can be moved. My planes bring in equipment, take out deep wounded heroes.” He laughed. “Relax,” he said, “it’s not a bad war. I fight for freedom. You free man yourself, you understand good cause.” He climbed down from the platform. “Hey, Boswells, when I win, you fix me up with big-shot pals?”

“Lano, I told you. I only said that to get you to take me in. I don’t know any big shots.”

“Sure you do. You know me. I make world’s first international revolution. Everybody come.” He slapped me across the shoulders. “Hey,” he said, “I show you my operation here.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said.

“No, no, not that. Something special. My operation. Big military secret. Come on. Special day, Fourth July. Sentimental occasion for Lano. Live Wilmington, Delaware, three year. Seen Du Pont firework display. Beautiful, beautiful. See that, think, America the beautiful. Some day Lano make international revolution, Du Pont do the firework.”

With his arm across my shoulders he led me off across the field and into the woods. In a few minutes we struck another path and started to climb again. “You don’t know what Lano got back here,” he whispered. “Only Dr. Mud see this. Now you. Special. Very sentimental.”

I had come a long way in my life. There had been a time when I had responded to the bizarre without understanding it, feeling only the need to be curious, to remember it, as though anything truly outlandish were a kind of signpost, an indication of a sort of clumsy, cloudy truth. I can remember as a kid in school during the war being visited by a private named Pressman. He came to us several times. Needing a platform, he used our classroom and told us endlessly of his pathetic life in the army, apologizing, laughing at the jokes the other soldiers played on him, losing the thread of his story in his own roared laughter, shouting above it like some comedian who has lost control of his audience, “But wait a minute, wait a minute,” taking it or some new shame up again, recounting humiliation like a braggart in reverse, but mixing it all up somehow with a kind of civics and endorsing everything, everything — the Pledge of Allegiance, our penny milk program, the Second Front, casualty lists— insisting in a crazy, personal grammar on the fitness of everything that happened in the world. Pressman was insane. His desperation, his clumsy, Jewish being, his self- hatred had brought him finally into a mad agreement with everything that forced him down. Forever short- sheeted, a man with frogs in his beds, he came to accept all insults, to convert them into proofs of justice and the wisdom of power.

I used to stare fondly at the Pressmans of the world, primitives holding their insanity as a sign from God. Now I know better. Pressman’s nuttiness was just the self trying to get out. Death gives us nerve. I am calmer now; I see pain everywhere.

“Not far now,” Lano said. “What a surprise for you. There. Look!”

I looked in the direction Lano was pointing and saw — a ranch house. A ranch house! There, high on a mountain, hidden by the pines, in still unmapped Los Farronentes, Q. R., two miles from the tents, the quiescent bivouac of the world’s first international revolution, a ranch house. Landscaped with a patio, a barbecue pit, picture windows. A carport, for Christ’s sake! I could not have been more surprised if he’d shown me a full-scale replica of the Taj Mahal and informed me that he used it as an outhouse. What simple things were at the core of our revolutions, finally! What little content to our discontent! And how unmysterious the world mysteriously was! Dr. Mud sinister? Don’t make me laugh.

“Lano,” I said, “I want to get out of here. Tomorrow. Tonight. Now. The next plane, Lano, the next plane. Lano, do you hear me? The next plane.”

“How about that?” he asked, excited. “Beautiful. Like in Wilmington, Delaware. I had it built to specification. Everything to specification. Four bedroom. Sunken living room, three bathroom, full basement. Half bath downstair off pine-paneled rumpus room.”

“The next plane, Lano. Do you hear me?”

“Very special. Sentimental. Beautiful. In capital, when I win war, I make another. Better than this one even. Come on, I show you.”

He started to run toward his house and I ran after him. I caught him by the fake gas lamp.

“Wait a minute,” I yelled, holding him. “I want to get out. Lano, you’re crazy. I want to go back to the real Wilmington, Delaware, and I want to go back now.”

He looked confused for a moment and then began to struggle to free himself. I shoved him down on the lawn. “Give me an answer, Lano. I’m warning you.”

“Only the deep wounded,” he said.

“Goddamn it,” I shouted, “there are no deep wounded. And even if there were, do you think I’d let myself get shot?”

“There will be deep wounded, don’t worry about that,” he answered as though that were the point.

“Stop it, Lano. I’m warning you. If you don’t get me out of here I’ll break your face. I’ll tear you up, Lano, I promise.”

“Counterrevolution,” he screamed suddenly.

“Give the orders, Lano. Give the orders.”

“Counterrevolution!”

“What are you talking about? Goddamn it, don’t you hear me?”

“Counterrevolution! Go ahead. Be ridiculous. Hit me, kill me. Counterrevolution! Revolution in infancy. At delicate stage. Anyone who punches Lano in face be its new leader. You want that?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Seven hundred forty-one men. From all over world. Hundreds of thousands of dollars equipment. You want that? You want that responsibility? You hurt me you make successful counterrevolution. You the new leader. Move into the ranch house. You want that? You ready for that? You have to want a thing like that. Where you stand on certain issues? You got five-year plan? You got even lousy three-year plan? No — you don’t even have fucking ten-minute plan! What you think of agrarian reform? Compulsory education? Shit, what you think of freedom?”

“You’re crazy.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go on, you hot to make revolution, hit me. You be new leader. No, you don’t want? Then you go when I say. Go on, get off my lawn. Doesn’t mean a damn no more if you tell troops what I got here. In two days we attack!”

Lano started moving the men out at two in the morning. He had trucks for only half of them; the rest went on foot. Corbonzelos is a nineteen-mile march.

Rohnspeece couldn’t understand why I was staying behind. The Eskimo was drunk and Rohnspeece got to drive his truck. He was very pleased.

Before Lano gave the command to move out he had the men gather in the training compound in order to address them. I had dissociated myself and remained in the tent. Some men came to move it. They said it was equipment earmarked for the trucks and I told them, fuck that, it was staying put, I was in essence a prisoner of war and entitled to be housed as such. I cited a Geneva convention which I made up on the spot and got a young Persian lieutenant to agree with me. They let me alone finally.

A quarter of a mile away I could hear Lano haranguing the men in several broken languages. Then, after the men did the Chant of the Revolution and the War Scream, they re-formed into their units and went away.

At about three that afternoon I heard the abrupt dull pops of distant explosions. I walked higher up the mountain, into Lano’s abandoned compound, and followed the flowers to the scene of the celebration and crossed the field and went into the woods and made my way up to the ranch house. I broke in. Through the big picture windows I could see flames, smoke rising.

It was crazy. Lano’s argument had been enough to destroy whatever ideas I had of doing something about my situation. He was right: to act against Lano was to make a counterrevolution, to drag others into it behind me. A strong man travels very light. Unless I murdered him — and I am no murderer — and hid his body, I couldn’t get away.

At seven Lano came racing back in a jeep. Dr. Mud was with him. He pulled the jeep into the carport and they got out. When he saw me in his house he didn’t even seem surprised.

“Many deep wounded,” he said. “Terrible.”

“The flame that cools one burns another,” Dr. Mud said.

“Heavy resistance. Terrible. It was better over the radio,” Lano said.

“So,” I said, “you lost. The revolution’s over. Now I can go.”

“We won, Boswells,” Lano said. “My grief special, sentimental grief of all generals. On the other hand, victory glorious, brilliant! I blow up whole town entire!”

That night I stole Lano’s jeep.

Down the mountain, on the plain, I saw the fires. Corbonzelos was burning, and I turned the jeep in that direction.

There was death. There was turnover.

People were burning. Lano’s soldiers moved leadenly among the corpses and survivors. It was awful.

It was not entirely unpleasant.

“Okay,” I shouted when I brought the jeep back. “Mud can’t help you. He’s unconscious. Hey, Dr. Mud,” I screamed toward his collapsed, Boswell-clobbered body, “heal thyself.”

“Get back to your tent. You’re a prisoner of the revolution,” Lano said.

“Balls,” I said. “When does a plane go out? Come on, come on. I’ll stick dynamite up you, blow up whole ass entire. Get on your radio. Give orders. Get a plane.”

“Take the jeep.”

“I’d get pretty far in your jeep, wouldn’t I? Come on, come on.”

“Counterrevolution.”

“Lano, don’t start with me, Lano.”

“Counterrevolution.”

“All right, then. Your way. Counterrevolution. Okay. Counterrevolution. I’m ready. Yesterday no, today yes. Counterrevolution. I’ve got a five-year plan now… ten years… twenty… a million: Live forever, live forever! Where’s a knife? A gun? Give me bombs! Lano, you bastard, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you!”

Lano backed away from me. “All right,” he said quietly, “in a few days. A ship. From Texas. It brings mercenaries, supplies. You’ll get out. I promise. I promise you.” His face was white. “Please,” he said, “don’t kill me.”

A man came out of a shop on Michigan Avenue that made shirts. His chauffeur opened the door for him and he stepped into a Cadillac. They drove off and I stared after the big car. It occurred to me with the force of that vision in which we suddenly see familiar things for the first time — a postage stamp, a pattern in the wallpaper, the shape of our own hand — that I had never ridden in a Cadillac. It was astonishing: I had never ridden in a Cadillac. I had never sailed a boat or been on a yacht. I had never screwed a belly dancer or an acrobat or a contortionist or a movie star. I had never paid fifty dollars for a meal or had a suite in a hotel. I had never owned a self-winding watch or gone Pullman. I had never flown a plane or bought property. I had never been dressed by a valet or made a recording. I had never acted in a movie or performed surgery or climbed a mountain for fun. I had never ridden a horse or played golf or been a member of a country club. I had never played in an orchestra. I could not speak French or German or Italian. I had never been elected to public office or seen my name in a book. I had never had an unlisted phone number. I had never gone fox-hunting or deep-sea fishing or on a safari. I had never had a suit made or my own mixture of pipe tobacco. I had never taken out a patent, written a song, made a will, danced till dawn, bought a painting, eaten snails, drunk Pernod, been to Europe, shot a gun, played a piano, bought perfume, given a speech, made a touchdown, owned a tux, a par of skis, learned to waltz, worn a vest, a top hat, a ring, a monogrammed shirt, bet on a horse, been to an opera, a coronation, a costume ball. I had never broken the bank at Monte Carlo!

It was a formidable list of experiences not to have had.

What was happening? As I watched the Cadillac disappear, I saw clearly and with a sudden sense of massive, infinite privation, that I would never do or have most of these things — further, I should have to do without. Even if I started now, rolled up my sleeves, tightened my belt, went to work, pitched in, buckled down, hoed the row, held the line, went the distance, I could not hope to make more than a dent in those glittering abundances. It was like trying to tunnel through to China: it was like the feeling you got sometimes in museums — angry that you didn’t own anything there. I felt overmatched. My three-score-and-ten, even if I could be sure of them, seemed as paltry as loose change. And how many of those years had I already used up? How many were left which could be enjoyed in health? Already the pains began, the summer colds, the mysterious backaches, the malaise in parts that yesterday gave no trouble; already the hair began to catch in the comb, the food in the throat; already there was aspirin in the toilet kit, a prescription I carried in my wallet. Even giving myself the best of it, granting health (as if it were some premise I could demolish later in the argument), granting more — granting luck — how much could a man hold in his hands anyway, how much could he grab? How much could he touch, smell, taste, see, hear? And of what use was it? How much could he keep? That was the important thing; was it possible to keep anything? Was it possible to keep one single solitary thing? Never mind the money in the bank, the good looks, the health—could you keep your fingernails?

Suddenly everything I saw was the enemy. The silk scarves, the smooth-handled canes, the expensive umbrellas in the warm window. The tall buildings named for a single man. The cars that passed in the dusk, their dashboards glowing like Christmas lights. The girls who went by me in the street. I felt a quick powerful stirring of lust, greater than any I had ever known. I stared at the girls ravenously, so frankly that they looked away. I saw their legs shiny in the nylons. I saw the behinds, the cunts, the breasts, the ears, the nostrils, the mouths, all cleavages, all openings. I stood in the street like a rapist. Under my coat I held myself. I knew the rapist’s desperation, his singleness beyond mere loneliness, his massive urgency greater than any legitimate need, greater even than the convention and morality and law that forbade its satisfaction. It was a confirmation of what I already knew about the uselessness of the senses. It was as if I had already abandoned them and was pressing, like some mute seeking his voice, toward a sixth sense, as yet unevolved; of containment, possession, the ability to know final things finally.

I stopped behind a girl who had paused to look in a window. It was a travel agency, and the whole window had been made over into a kind of crêche. Whoever had designed it had been very clever; it was very real. Oddly mature dolls lolled on some sunny, idyllic shore. In a toy sea, blue as ink, small boats bobbed. The sand around the edges of the sea was as white and fine as powdered sugar. Close to the shore tiny waves lapped perpetually at the knees of bending bathers. On the shore the dolls lay on colored pocket handkerchiefs while little white-coated waiters leaned over them with trays of drinks. Inside the miniature glasses the liquid shone like colored apothecary waters. Cabañas of vaguely biblical fabrics, like the thick- striped garments of Old Testament heroes, dotted the beach. In the background a model of a hotel, white and smooth as a pebble, shaped like some cement scroll, rose over the frontier of beach like a monument. No advertisement intruded; the place was not identified. It was Nassau, South America, Miami, Puerto Rico, one of the Rivieras. It was elsewhere and it was very real. It was only here that was not anywhere.

By watching the girl’s reflection in the glass I could see that she was having my insight — or at least part of it, a fraction of an inch of it. As she stared at the scene the corners of her mouth edged down in an unconscious, piecemeal bitterness and her nostrils flared in a brief flutter of desire. She turned away from the window protectively, as if she might escape the implications of what she had learned. ‘

“It’s a big boulevard, miss,” I said. “There are windows everywhere.”

She moved by me cautiously, downlooking. It was all I could do to keep from grabbing her, taking her to my hotel, holding her prisoner there.

It was true. Here wasn’t anywhere. Sunk in my finite body, things were helplessly reversed for me. I might have been a stone at the bottom of a well, dust in the corner of some closet. A cat who could look at a king. Big deal!

It was doom to know so much. As if I had just been told by some doctor who was never wrong that I had so many days to live. I knew what men rarely knew: the exact dimensions of the insuperable odds against them. Nor did this make me brave, as hopelessness sometimes does. It was disastrous. Now I would have to live always as though in the presence of some overwhelming fact of nature, like some primitive on the edge of the jungle, the vast desert.

Suddenly, however, as quickly as it had come, my lust began to subside. The knowledge that had caused it remained, but I could no longer see it in detail. All that was left was all that was ever left: a renewed desire, a controlled lust, a heightened hope. I continued down the boulevard, past the expensive shops, against the grain of the evening traffic, lascivious, dangerous, capable of heroic crime.

“We are the jet set,” Angel Farouk, the filling- station heiress, announced to the waiter.

“Ready, jet set, go,” Astarte Morgan, the central- heating heiress, said.

“Whee-ee-ee,” said Angus Sinclair, the contour-chair scion.

“Whee-ee-ee the people,” said Wylia De Costa, the miracle-drug widow.

“Let ’em eat cake,” said Rudy Lip, the international playboy and rat.

“Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen,” Buster Bird, the white-paint tycoon, sang softly. “Nobody knows the truffles.”

“I say,” the general said, “I’m hungry.”

Angus Sinclair clapped his hands. “Caviar. Caviar for the general.”

The waiter presented a bottle smartly to Marvin Rilroyl, the wax-paper magnate. “Thirty-eight,” Marvin Rilroyl said. “A very good year.”

“The Nazis were in the Sudetenland,” the general said wistfully.

“I don’t know,” Astarte Morgan said, “Rome’s changed.”

“My God, what hasn’t?” asked Rudy Lip.

“Africa’s not the same,” Buster Bird said. “When I was on safari there last, I thought I was in some kind of zoo. They’ve spoiled Africa.”

“The Côte d’Azur isn’t azur any more,” Angus Sinclair put in.

“They’ve spoiled the world,” Angel Farouk said. “It’s not like it was in Grandad’s time.”

“Her granddad was a baron,” Angus Sinclair explained. “A robber baron.”

“I think I’ve planned my last campaign,” the general said.

“Ars longa, dolce vita breve,” said Wylia De Costa.

K.O. Bellavista, the movie starlet, turned to Marvin Rilroyl. “How much are you worth, Marvin?” she asked.

“Depends upon the market,” Marvin said. “My cotton is down, my land is up. My steels are mixed, my utilities off. My glamour stocks, of course—”

“Kiss me, darling,” K.O. said, “your glamour stocks are glamorous.”

“I know,” Astarte Morgan said, “let’s fly to Bombay.”

“Bombay Away,” the general said, and chuckled.

“People don’t talk like this,” I said.

“The best people do,” Angel Farouk said.

“Well, the best people,” I said.

“He’s cute,” Rudy Lip said unpleasantly. “Wherever did you find him?”

“Oh, he’s not mine, Rudy, but I found him in Washington, at the Vice-President’s party. He’s a kind of gate crasher, but it’s all absolutely high art with him. Boswell is devoted, aren’t you, Boswell?”

“I’m very pure,” I said.

“He’s an absolute pauper,” Wylia went on, “but he knows more people than I do. Tell them the people you know, Boswell.”

“Alphabetically by country?” I said.

“Whatever’s convenient,” Rudy Lip said, giving me some.

“The Archbishops of Aden, Australia and Austria. A big shot in the Bahamas. A bananaman from Brazil. A—”

“That’s marvelous,” Marvin Rilroyl said. “Rouse the Principessa.”

“Principessa, Principessa,” Buster Bird said, shaking a woman at the other end of the table who had laid her head on her arms and gone to sleep. “Principessa, you must hear this.”

“Please stop that screaming,” the Principessa said. “I need my rest. Too much depends upon my longevity. Shut the windows. I feel a draft. Throw someone on the fire.”

“It is too sad,” Bizarrio said to me. “Such a lovely young woman and she goes on like that.” He shook his head.

“I heard what Bizarrio told you,” she said. “What would a clown and fop know about it? I am thirteen hundred years old, the last of my race.”

“Cheery beery be, Principessa, old pat,” I said. “Every cloud has a silver lining.”

“Who, I wonder,” she said, “is your jeweler, young man?”

She came to my pensione and we made love.

“What are you a Principessa of?” I asked afterwards, looking down at her.

“Mmrrhhghh,” she said comfortably.

“What are you a Principessa of?” I asked again.

“Of all the Italies,” she said. “I am Principessa of all the Italies.”

I rolled over on my side. “You’re very beautiful.”

“Molte sano,” she said, “like a classy whore.”

“What’s wrong?”

She sat up swiftly. “Hasn’t it registered with you yet just who you’ve got in your bed? I’m Margaret dei Medici. A Medici. The Last of the Medicis.”

I put my arms around her. “Medici,” I said, “Medici. Poisoners and conspirators, weren’t they?”

“You’re thinking of the Borgias,” she said. “The Borgias were a bad lot. ‘The Bad Borgias,’ we used to call them. What are you, Guelph or Ghibelline?”

“I beg you pardon?”

“Guelph or Ghibelline? Who do you root for?”

“Which is the home team?”

“Oh, Guelph,” she said.

I put my hand lightly against her face. “Are you really a Principessa?” I said.

“What is more to the point, are you really a commoner?”

“Common as clay.”

“You’re quite sure that gypsies didn’t steal you at birth?”

“No,” I said seriously, “as a matter of fact, I’m not.”

She smiled.

“I might yet turn out to be a Princippe or something,” I said. “I may just be in reduced circumstances.”

“Who isn’t?” she said.

“Principessa?”

“Who isn’t?” she said again.

“Principessa?”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Stop calling me that, will you! It sounds as if I’m supposed to precede you out of bed or something.”

“Will I see you again?” I asked.

“It’s not much as personal tragedies go, is it? Selfish, isn’t it, to be concerned about being bored? Why, it’s trite. A bored princess! But you see, that’s all made up. I’m the only bored princess I know. The others keep saying they are, but it’s just talk with them. Well, I’m sorry. I’m not poor or crippled or anything like that, but unhappiness is unhappiness, isn’t it? It’s fatuous to quibble about degrees of unhappiness.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Do you know the Pitti Palace in Florence? The Uffizi Gallery? My people gave them.”

“Will I see you again, Margaret?”

“Principessa.”

“Will I see you again?”

“No. You can’t come to the castle.” She giggled.

“Please.”

“No playing in the palace.”

“Margaret, I think I love you.”

“Heavy, heavy lies the head that wears the crown, did you know that?” She moved away from me and sat up on the edge of the bed. “Well,” she said, “is it all over?”

“What do you mean?”

“The lovemaking. It is all over? Was that all there was to it? I’ll be damned. And I thought you commoners were supposed to have such extraordinary sexual powers.”

Angus Sinclair called to say that he and Buster Bird and Rudy Lip were on their way over to the Hassler to have dinner and catch Mussolini’s son, who plays piano there.

“A lot of the boys will be there. You come too.”

It occurred to me that being alive was beginning to seem like being off on a convention somewhere. “I don’t think so, Angus,” I said. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with someone all day.”

“Principessa Poison? The Royal Welcome Wagon?”

“Hey, listen,” I said.

“Not so edgy. She’s the ignoblest Roman of them all. Common knowledge. Public domain. Come hear Mussolini’s son. I’ll introduce you as one of the Allies. No kidding, wait till you hear him. Great jazz style. Does a riff on ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles’ makes strong men weep.”

I decided to go. Angus might be able to tell me something about the Principessa. Only after I began to walk to the hotel did my indifference about meeting another celebrity strike me as peculiar. Was this a stiffening of character on my part? Probably I had simply made a choice. Between the son of a dead, discredited Duce and the daughter of a once great family, I had chosen the daughter. Boswell, you old fraud, I thought, you family man.

I asked Astarte Morgan about the Principessa.

“Oh, Boswell,” she said, “you aren’t falling in love with her, are you?”

“Oh, love,” I said. (This is my new style in conversation. People say something to me and I choose one of their words and repeat it back to them. It’s very sophisticated and Henry Jamesish and sounds as if it might mean something.)

“Because it seems such a touristy thing to do,” Astarte Morgan said, “like seeing the Colosseum by moonlight or attending Mass in St. Peter’s.”

“I’d hardly say that wanting to be with the Principessa is anything like attending Mass in St. Peter’s,” Buster Bird said.

“Well, is there anything wrong with her?” I asked.

“She’s a character,” Buster Bird said.

“She’s middle class,” Astarte said firmly.

“That’s ridiculous, Astarte,” I said.

“She is — she’s middle class. You’d think all those centuries would have bred something into her. Not Margaret. I tell you she’s as surprised to find herself a Principessa as my char would be.”

“That’s just her enthusiasm,” I said.

“Enthusiasm, indeed. It’s all she talks about. She’s always going around giving the secret handshake,” Astarte said.

“She carries herself like a queen,” I said.

“That’s difficult to bring off with your head on the table.”

“Well, that’s just a remark, Astarte,” I said.

“Is it? You were there. You saw her that night. No, Boswell, forgive me, but she drinks.”

“Oh, drinks,” I said.

“And she screws,” Buster Bird said.

“Oh, screws.”

I borrowed Mussolini’s kid’s car. It’s something called a Rameses X-900. I couldn’t find first gear.

“Are you sure you can handle this?” Mussolini’s kid asked me.

“Well,” I said, “if you’d just show me how.”

“It’s very simple,” he said. “You just make a trapezium.”

“Oh,” I said. “In the States you only have to make an H.”

“America is so innocent,” he said.

He drew a trapezium for me and I drove, off toward the Appia Antica, bouncing over the old Roman stones black and shiny as lumps of giant coal. On either side along the narrow road were ancient tumuli, crypts, broken statues, their noses flat as boxers’, the wrecked monuments of Romans dead two thousand years. Spaced every thirty or forty feet were Italians incongruously having picnics, their Fiat 500’s and 600’s pulled up on the grass, their picnic hampers balanced carefully on the tomb-tables. Except for the cars and their clothes they ’ might have been people who had assured themselves of a good view of a triumphal procession by taking up their positions before the others got there. They waited good- naturedly and passed their time by posing each other for photographs beside the ancient monuments. Inside hollowed-out tumuli or in niches from which statues had been removed I could see young lovers hugging and kissing each other. As I drove along several people noticed my super car and waved; I waved back. Some of the younger ones amiably made obscene gestures; I amiably made obscene gestures back.

I came to the Principessa’s villa. It was surrounded by a high stone wall. I stopped the car just outside the gates and honked the horn of the Rameses X-900. It sounded the opening notes of the “Triumphal March” from Aïda. No one came to the gate, and I got out of the car. I was feeling pretty good. Further down the road I saw an old woman in a black cloth coat who stood weeping beside an ancient crypt. I laughed and climbed back into the car.

An old man in a peaked cap came up to the gate on the other side, stared at the car and then said something in Italian.

“Permesso,” I yelled, trying a word I had heard people use when they wanted to get by me on the crowded bus.

He shook his head.

“Scende,” I said, using another word I had heard on the bus. He shook his head sadly.

I pounded the horn. “Ta ta ta ta-ta-ta-ta ta-ta,” I sang. He turned away. “Hey, wait,” I called after him. “Get the Princess. The Principessa.” He looked at me curiously for a moment and waved me away with his arm. “Io”—I pointed to myself—“volere la Principessa.” I speak only in infinitives. It gives my Italian an air of command and a certain good-natured sinister quality, like a Mexican bandit in the movies. The old man answered in Italian. My difficulty with a foreign language is that given time I can usually frame what I want to say, but I can never understand the replies. Perhaps if everyone always spoke only in infinitives, as I do, there would be universal peace and understanding. It would be the dawn of a new era. If everybody to speak as I to do, to be peace, to be dawn of new era. Lions to lie down with lambs.

The fellow started away again, and I got out of the car and rushed up to the gate. “To want to get to see Principessa,” I called.

“—,” he said in Italian.

“To need to talk to marry,” I said.

“—,” he said.

I got back in the car and blew a few more bars of Aïda, but my heart had gone out of it. I was studying Mussolini’s kid’s diagram of the trapezium in order to figure out where reverse was when the old fellow reappeared. He had someone with him, another old man, in a chauffeur’s uniform.

I leaned out the window. “To open the gate,” I said.

“You to speak English?” the new old man asked.

“To do,” I said excitedly.

He looked at me curiously.

“I mean I do,” I said.

“What you to wish?” he asked.

“I want to see your mistress,” I said.

He blushed. My God, I thought, him too? This was some Principessa!

“I want to see the Principessa. I’m a friend of hers.”

“To say your name if you please,” he said.

“Boswell. James Boswell, King of Pennsylvania, Prince of Indiana, Duke of the Republican Party.”

“I to announce you,” he said quietly, and added, “Mister Boswell.”

“To hurry,” I said.

He went into a little sentry booth I hadn’t noticed before and evidently called the house. In a moment he had reappeared.

“Not to home,” he said.

“Of course she’s home,” I protested. “You’re her chauffeur and you’re home.”

“Please to clear drive,” he said.

“No. I want to see her.”

“To do,” he shouted. There was a gun in his hand.

I got back in the car and drove away.

That night I returned to storm the wall. Mussolini’s kid wanted the Rameses X-900 back, so I had to catch a ride on the rear of a motor-scooter. Going over those stones on the scooter wasn’t as gentle as in the Rameses X-900, which had been rather like being drawn down the Nile in a basket, but I have not entirely lost the common touch. After the fellow let me off in front of the villa he wanted to hang around to see what I was going to do. He pointed to the wall. “Principessa Medici,” he said, and clicked his tongue.

“To appreciate it,” I said, “to beat it, please.” He bounced on his scooter a few times to start it and zoomed off.

I reconnoitered. Finally I chose a spot near the house and began to scale the wall. When 1 got on top, pressing myself tightly against the narrow surface so as not to be seen, I was seen. Three men were waiting for me. “James Boswell, requesting permission to come aboard,” I said. They jumped toward the wall. Before I could let myself back down the other side two of the men had reached up, grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me toward them. The Palace Guard, I thought as I tumbled through the air. I was going to tear them apart as soon as I had recovered myself, but the new old man from that afternoon was standing over me with his gun.

“To rise,” he said in English.

“To stop to point that at me,” I said in Italian.

“To rise,” he said in English.

“To don’t rush me,” I said in Italian. Experience teaches me one thing anyway, I thought. Infinitives will not bring peace to the world.

They took me to the Principessa. When she saw who it was she told them they could go, but asked the new old man to wait outside in case she needed him. She took his gun and held it in her lap.

“My God, Principessa,” I said. “We’ve slept with each other.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” she said, “and don’t presume on old favors. You’ll never receive them again.”

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

“Does it to you?”

Of course it does. Indeed, I have become embarrassed in the presence of divorced persons just imagining their memories of each other. I have always been unable to understand some people’s casual acceptance of intimacy. It amounts, in effect, to an indifference, and yet I have noticed that those people who are the most casual about sexual experience are frequently the most avid in seeking it. Once a man has made love to a woman he is marked for life — they both are. Of course I have not been very successful sexually, and perhaps this is because of my attitude, but I carry what experiences I have had— mostly, sadly, with whores — indelibly. I will see a whore I have been with only once, and it is anguish that she does not remember me.

Once at a party I was in a room with two women with whom I’d had what they would have considered minor affairs. Of course neither knew that I had slept with the other — nor would they have cared much had they known. They might have regarded me with the same interest they would have taken in some mutual hairdresser. Nevertheless I remember being paralyzed with fear, as convention-stricken as a kid. I would always love both of them, I told myself, and our relationships began to seem tragic as I recaptured them. That nothing final had come of them was somehow my responsibility. We should have had children together, sat in hospital corridors during one another’s illnesses, snared cemetery lots. That this was impossible never even occurred to me; I understood only that it was tragic that emotions play out, that feelings lose their edge and in time become meaningless. Perhaps I have too much respect for the gift and for its giver. My mistake, if I make one, is that, like all people on a dole, I have never understood that the giver can usually afford his gift.

“Of course it means something to me,” I told the Principessa.

She laughed. “They told me you came by this afternoon in that foolish car. Wherever did you get it?”

“It’s not mine.”

“Well, thank God for that,” she said. “What do you want, anyway?”

“Just to be with you,” I said.

“Well, you’re with me,” she said. She put the gun down beside her and laughed.

Then she grinned. Then she smiled. And then she looked at me.

I shall try to describe my love’s person.

So lucky am I, I think. For example, I am thirty-two years old (My God, am I thirty-two years old already?) and Margaret is thirty. A man should be older than a woman. He should be taller, heavier, stronger, coarser. (I don’t approve of these mixed marriages.) He should be knowing and she innocent. It is all right if he breaks wind, but she must not even hiccup modestly. He can be plagued by beard, but her hair must be of a fixed and permanent length on her head. What, follicles in my love? Glands? My love has no follicles, no glands. That moisture on her body after exercise isn’t sweat. Perhaps it’s dew. Yes, dew. Her body is mysterious, its ways fixed— unlike my own — like some planet in its orbit, performing its rounds unconsciously, with no surprises, like a law in physics. To think of her as subject to the queer nether turmoil of the flesh is monstrous, disloyal, a lover’s sedition. She could not have had childhood’s disfiguring diseases, your poxes, your measles, your mumps; she could never have made its disfiguring sounds, your whooping coughs, your diarrhetic groans and sighs. Indeed, it is difficult to think of her as a child at all, as one subject to anything as vulgar as growth. Yet of course she has a body, and that is what is so mysterious: she ought not to have one at all. But she is so clever about it that she has somehow marvelously arranged it. It is as if she pulls it out of the wall only when it’s needed, like a Murphy bed. And indeed there is something of fake bookcasery about her, of hollow woodwork, unseen passageways, secret staircases, hidden crypts — something plotted, designed, carefully contrived for contingency. She is absolutely Tudor, Renaissance, manorial.

She is of medium height. Admittedly I was piqued by that at first. What, medium height? Average? Do you say “average”? But then I saw the artful subtlety of it — to work only with the given. How clever of Margaret, really! (She has the air of being responsible for her entire being, the curve of her ears, the shape of her hands— everything.) To avoid an ungainly tallness (women do not know how to handle height; it is above them) and yet to finesse a coy compression. Women do not know how to handle depth either.

Her hair, the color of ancient coins, is a lushness beneath lushness, as though spilled from a cornucopia of hair, from the very source of hair, her sweet hirsute hair source. It is a Niagara of hair which tumbles from hidden bluffs of scalp. (I have seen this scalp. It is so pale. I have touched — the wondrous whiteness, thin, I’m sure, as paper — my tongue to it, its very center, the point where it begins its slow careful spiral, more complex than a thumbprint.) It frames her face and lends to it the aspect of a tan gift on some golden platter. Max Factor, you are no factor here.

Her nose is a propriety. An attribute. Her mouth… How I love to gaze into the marvelous machinery of her mouth, to watch the tongue as it scales the walls of teeth, to spy on it as it makes its mysterious, wondrous noises. I do not even listen to the words. I don’t even hear them. One listens as one listens to a song, ignoring the words. It is strange to think that they are formed by a brain, that they demonstrate a will. (Away from her I can sometimes think of her as a human being, but when I am with her, never. Even her name, Margaret dei Medici, with its alliterative melody, seems something improbable and anthropomorphic gotten up for children, so that I ’ find I must patronize her, pretend that she is as real as I am, talk of her to herself as one talks of Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse to a child.) How bright of her, I think, to make speech, show anger. It must be just some clever parlor trick performed for company. I should like to see her dance, hear her sing, recite. It is comical that she should wear a dress, jewelry, stockings, complicated underwear, that she should take food and need sleep.

She has eyes. I presume they see. They are green. How remarkable!

How much does she weigh, I wonder. I shall have to lift her.

I have seen the pulse in her neck. It starts my own.

I have seen her legs. Don’t speak of them; they will break your heart.

I have seen her breasts. Enough. You will go mad.

Rudy Lip said that Margaret is the whore of the world. I knocked him down.

Rudy stared up at me from the floor. “This won’t get around, you know. I’ll never say you hit me defending Margaret’s honor. I’ll say you hit me as a professional warning from one international gigolo to another. Well, it’s too late. You should have hit me years ago.”

I was with Margaret at the cocktail party at the Embassy. She had seen Rudy Lip and he’d told her I had hit him.

“Why did you do such a stupid thing?” she asked me.

“He’s a son of a bitch.”

“We don’t slam people around for that, do we?”

“He said some things,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “About me.”

“No, of course not. Why should he say anything about you?”

“Why not? He told you he made love to me.”

“I’d never believe anything like that,” I said.

“Why not? It’s true. Rudy is an attractive man.”

“Oh, Margaret.”

“Don’t look so tragic. You know all about me. You won’t reform my character.”

I told her that character had nothing to do with it, that I was worried about her.

“Why?”

“Damn it, Margaret, what if you had a child?”

“I won’t.”

“Why not?” I said gloomily. “You didn’t let me use anything.”

She laughed and said who did I think I was dealing with, anyway? She was a Principessa, a Medici. She had status. She was one of five unmarried women in Roman Catholic Italy fitted for her own diaphragm.

The Principessa had gone to a concert at the Teatro d’Opera.

I bought a ticket. “Near the Principessa dei Medici’s box, please,” I told the girl.

“Oh, sir,” she said, “the Principessa has a season box. I am not sure where it is. Perhaps the flunky would be able to show it to you.” She indicated a big, distinguished-looking old man in elegant livery. So, I thought, they’re really called flunkies. “He does not speak English, however.”

“I’ll make out,” I said.

I went up to the fellow. “Dove Principessa Medici?” I said.

He looked at my clothes. ‘Non lo so,” he said.

“Come, come,” I said. “Venire, venire. Sono Principe Boswell il Eccentrico. Dove Principessa Medici?”

“No lo so.”

“Sono Mister Boswell, il ricce Americano, molti dollars, molti macchinas, lotsa lire. Dove Principessa Medici?”

“No lo so.”

“Sono Boswell the lovesick. Dove Principessa?”

“No lo so.”

“Flunky!” I said to the flunky and walked off.

I rented a pair of opera glasses and scanned the boxes. It was half an hour before I located Margaret. I waved to her but she did not respond. During the intermission I went to her box. She didn’t seem very surprised to see me. “Look,” she said, “there are sixty-three princesses in Europe — sixty-four if you count Anastasia. Twenty-six of those girls are the real thing. Perhaps eight of them will one day succeed to a throne. Why don’t you bother one of them?”

“Oh, Margaret,” I said.

“Just thinking of your career,” Margaret said lightly.

“Margaret, I am not Rudy Lip.”

“Don’t be so self-righteous,” Margaret said. “Mr. Lip serves a worthwhile purpose. Mr. Lip is a craftsman, like a leather worker or a blacksmith. You ought to feel sorry for him — and for me too. We’re both in danger of technological unemployment.”

“Margaret,” I pleaded, “talk seriously with me.”

“How can I when you wave those ridiculous opera glasses at me? Besides,” she said, “you are not a serious person.”

“I am so.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not. You are not serious. You’re only obsessed.” She was serious.

“By love,” I said lightly.

“Maybe,” she said. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“I’m taller than you are,” I said absently.

“What?”

“I’m stronger.”

“Don’t show off,” she said.

“I’m older and heavier. Oh, Margaret, we’re perfect for each other.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s because I’m a commoner.”

“Oh, honestly, Boswell,” she said impatiently, “would you want your sister to marry one of them?”

The music began and she had nothing more to say to me.

This conversation with Margaret has illustrated an important principle to me. It was something I was aware of before, of course, but it was only our exchange and something that happened earlier in the week that brought it home to me so forcefully. I had gone to one of those movie houses here in Rome where there is a variety show after the film. They are sort of haphazard and just barely professional, and I find they relax me. When the lights came on after the picture and I looked around to see who was in the house, I noticed two men coming down the aisle toward me. As usual, I was sitting in the front row in order to see into the wings, and when the men passed I saw they carried instruments. The piano player and the drummer were already set up in the pit. The men with the instruments still had their coats on. There was no way of getting into the pit unless they climbed over the railing. It was a little awkward with the instruments, and the piano player reached up and took their cases from the two men and then offered his arm to steady them as they climbed into the pit.

Once he was in the pit the taller of the two men picked up his instrument case and took out a saxophone. He was fitting the pieces together when the piano player came up and started to talk to him. By the earnest expression on both their faces I could almost guess what they were saying.

The piano player was saying, “Henry, it’ll depend upon the timing. If it looks like we’re going to be pressed we’ll just have to forget it, but if I nod after the seals I want you to go into your solo on number 14. It may work out. Douglas was telling me that the trailers will be very short tonight, but the time saved there may be lost during the collection for Victims of Earthquake Relief.”

The sax man nodded and said, “My lip’s a little thick anyway. I was doing a wedding until two this morning.”

“Well, we’ll just have to see,” the piano player said. Then he twirled around on his stool and leaning slightly forward began to address the others. “Listen,” he probably said, “take Rose’s number pianissimo. She was complaining last time that the audience couldn’t hear the taps.”

“There’s a crack in my drum,” the drummer probably said.

“Bass or snare?”

“Bass.”

“Why didn’t you get it skinned?”

“Walter the Skinner is down with flu,” the drummer probably said.

“Oh,” the piano player probably said. “Well, just hit it very lightly. That’ll work out all right in Rose’s number anyway.”

“I use the snare in Rose’s number,” the drummer probably said.

“Okay,” the piano player probably said. “Are we all straight?” He looked at the other musicians.

The other musicians nodded that they were all straight, and indeed they were. It was this which my life lacked. I had never had a conversation like this. I mean, this is the way people talk to each other. This is the way things get done. One man asks another man where Taylor Street is, or what train his wife is coming in on, or how many beds are set up in the hospital for the casualties, and the other man tells him. There’s no hanky-panky. It’s very professional. Serious! Scientific! There are no conversational flights soaring toward planes where life is not lived, no badinage, no repartee. What a calm, silent, serene world, I think.

The Principessa sensed this about me at once. She cannot love me because she thinks she cannot talk seriously to me. She is afraid of me, as one is always a little afraid of anyone who one suspects is not entirely serious. From time to time I have even felt this myself. Why else do I always have so much to say to elevator operators, to clerks, to officials? It’s as though I deliberately seek them out to practice some foreign language on them. But I haven’t the art of it, really. Even with them I am soon involved in conversational maneuvers. I fall back on my English, as it were, and instantly we are into a routine, like two people at some college reunion with nothing in common but their briefly mutual past. If I am ever to be successful in my campaign with the Principessa I must remember what I learned from the musicians. I will be ruthlessly clinical; I will introduce shop talk into love.

“Look, Principessa,” I will say, “the angle hasn’t been right. Slip this pillow beneath your buttocks. Let’s try for fifteen minutes of pre-play tonight. Of course, we’ll have to see how the time is. I haven’t had an orgasm in three weeks and I may not be able to control it. But let’s see how it works out. Are you ready? All right, begin!”

I told Margaret that I meant to have all the experiences and she said she had already had them and couldn’t we do something else, and I told her very frankly, I said, “Listen, Principessa, Margaret — dear — this is my love affair and we’ll do it my way. It’s not my fault you’re a depraved sybarite and come to me deflowered and spoiled and idly rich and all.”

“Well,” she asked, “what are all the experiences?”

“Actually,” I said, “I was hoping you could help me. After all, this is rather outside my usual line.”

“Well, what did you have in mind? Something flashy and expensive?”

“No, no,” I said. “I think not. Why not utilize the resources at hand?”

“Like Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday?”

“That’s it, that’s it,” I said. “You can pretend you’re just an ordinary shopgirl and I’ll be an ordinary shopper. Cinderella in reverse, you see. Young love at its simplest and most innocent, with all the anxiety about screwing and everything left in. I’m thirty-two years old but I think I could handle it.”

“Well,” she said doubtfully.

“Please,” I said. “You’ll see.”

“What could we do? The things I can think of don’t seem like much fun.”

“Say what you’re thinking.”

“We could go to the Colosseum by moonlight,” she said doubtfully.

“Excellent,” I said. “We’ll do that. For a starter we’ll go to the Colosseum by moonlight.”

We went to the Colosseum by moonlight, but we had to wait two days because it was raining. On the morning of the third day I called Margaret and told her that the paper said fair, and we promised to meet that night

“I’ll pick you up at the pensione,” Margaret said.

“No, no,” I said. “I mustn’t see your car. Come in by bus.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Margaret said. “No buses come this far out the Appia Antica that time of night.”

“All right,” I said, “but don’t pick me up. Park your car on a side street and I’ll meet you in front of the place.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll be raped?”

“Are you kidding? The whore of the world?” This was our little joke.

I met Margaret at the main entrance to the Colosseum.

“It’s locked,” she said.

“Why? What could anyone take?”

“It’s locked,” she said. “Try it yourself.”

I went up to the big iron gate that had been set across the main arch. It was sealed only by a small Yale lock. I’ll break it, I decided, queerly pleased that I was still something of an outsider, that some violations were still a matter of strength.

For some reason I did not want Margaret to watch me. “I think I might be able to pick the lock,” I said. “You stand over there and warn me if anyone comes.”

I turned back to the lock. I spat on my hands. Tugging at the lock experimentally, I saw that I wouldn’t be able to twist the metal. It was sturdier than I had thought. If I were to break it I would have to pull the bolt loose in exactly the same way that I would if I’d had a key. Gripping the torso of the lock in my palm I pulled heavily against the bolt. It didn’t move. What’s this? I thought testily. What’s this? I put both hands around the lock, working my finger through the steel arch. I set my feet carefully into position, like an athlete seeking leverage, and strained against the lock mightily. I heard the gate itself creak as it bulged petuantly on its hinges, but the lock remained intact. I could almost see the thick, brutish overbite of the jagged metal inside the lock.

“Hurry,” Margaret said, thirty feet away.

Shut up, I thought. Leave me alone.

“In a minute, Margaret,” I said. “This is delicate work.”

All right, I thought. Now! I folded both hands about the lock, lacing my fingers. I invoked Sandusky. It was an intrusion. I thought of myself alone in the gymnasium, in the jockstrap, under the weights, the tons of metal on my back. I heaved against the lock. “Because,” I murmured, “because my heart is pure.” It didn’t budge. “Because, because,” I insisted, “because my fucking heart is pure!” I broke my heart against that lock. It wouldn’t give. My strength is gone, I thought. And in an Olympic year. It was important. Panic filled me like something sour. I was out of condition and the condition was singleness, and my strength — any I’d ever had — had been in that. You were not in it for the money, I thought. You were not. I had been shorn. Had I touched my head I would have felt scalp. Hairless as Samson, like some gross fairy, I sweated outside the Colosseum in the moonlight, in the soft air. In rain I might have broken it, I thought. In rougher weather. The condition was singleness, and I was out of it. Aloneness. My strength was in solitude. In being a stranger in town, in lies, in indifference. In the heart’s decision to go it alone, in its conviction that it could hold out against the world’s ponderous siege. For months, for years, guaranteed for life like an expensive watch. Oh Christ, I thought, it isn’t fair, to be burdened like that, to have to be a hero. Who needs it? To have always to reject and refuse and negate like some saint in reverse. Not to give quarter, that was simply good generalship, but not to accept it, that was insanity.

“All right,” I confessed. “I’m in it for the money. Margaret is nothing to me!”

I fell to the ground, but the lock — the lock was in my hand.

“What happened?” Margaret asked, rushing up.

“Just fell for you, Principessa,” I said.

“Oh, get up,” she said.

“The Rape of the Lock,” I said, showing Margaret the lock.

We went inside. “Oh,” Margaret said. “Oh! Oh! Let’s go up.”

With only the light of the moon to guide us we went through the dark passages and up the ancient, dangerous steps. At the second landing Margaret paused for breath. I kissed her.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ve just begun to climb.”

We went to the very top. Here the Emperors had sat. I looked out over the broken stones below; they resembled some harrowed cemetery in the moonlight.

“I could have been a gladiator,” I said. “If I’d lived in those days I could have been a gladiator.”

“Not a Christian?”

“The gladiator had a better chance than the Christian.”

“I could have been a Roman,” Margaret said.

“It’s funny,” I said, “I never thought of being a Roman.”

“Poor Boswell.”

“Well, maybe a freed slave,” I said.

I clapped my hands imperially. I turned my thumb down. I lifted it high. “Which is the real me, Principessa?” I asked.

“Oh, the thumb up,” she said.

“Up it is,” I said. “All the way.”

I put my hand in my pocket.

“What’s wrong?” Margaret asked after a moment. “Isn’t it working out? Isn’t this what you had in mind?”

“Oh, it is,” I said. “Exactly.”

“What shall we do now?” Margaret said.

“The Spanish Steps,” I said quickly.

“By moonlight,” she said.

“Moonlight it is,” I said.

I let her drive me in the car. “Come on,” I said once we were there, “let’s go up.”

“But it’s so high. Must we?”

“Of course,” I said, starting up. Margaret came along behind me. “Come on. Two, four at a time. Rome, Margaret,” I said, calling over my shoulder in the manner of one explaining an important principle on the run, “is a test of strength.”

We were in the Piazza di Spagna yesterday afternoon by the Bernini the Elder fountain and it was two o’clock and the shops were all closed and there wasn’t much traffic in the street and a horse carriage went by. “Say,” I said to the Principessa, “that looks romantic. Is it expensive?”

“What’s expensive?” the Principessa of All the Italies said.

“Listen,” I said, “I think we ought to try it. You translate for me and say everything I tell you.”

“But we were going to lunch.”

“We will,” I said. “We will. I’ll just call the next one over.”

I raised my hand as an old man in a long brown smock was guiding his carriage past the fountain. “Horseman,” I called, “I say, horseman!”

“Sair?” he said, drawing up the reins.

“He must be made to think he’s dealing with Italians.” I whispered to Margaret. “Tell him that I mean to engage him, but that first certain arrangements must be made.”

“Oh, Boswell, he has a meter.”

“Never mind that. Tell him ’certain arrangements must be made.’ Can you say that in Italian—‘certain arrangements’?”

The Principessa said something to the horseman and he said something back.

“What’s he say?” I asked.

“He wants to know what you mean, ’certain arrangements’?”

“Tell him that when I say ’certain arrangements’ I am speaking in reference to the fact that he has nothing to pull that cab but a single horse, that this is an age of mechanization — of horsepower, that is true, but of horsepower in concert, as it were. Tell him that this is the horsepower age and that it would hardly be fair for him to expect people to pay a man with only one horse the same rate they would pay a man with thirty-five or forty horses. Tell him also that a motor-driven taxi can cover a given distance in a fraction of the time a single-horse- drawn carriage can cover it.”

“Oh, Boswell,” Margaret said.

“You are a Principessa,” I said. “I am a lousy commoner. I have to think about these things. Tell him.”

She told him. He looked from Margaret to me, staring at me curiously, but not without a certain admiration. He hesitated for a moment and then said something to Margaret.

“What’s he say?”

“He says that all that has been taken into account by the people who make the meters, but that you have to expect to pay a little something extra for the romance.”

“Tell him that I do expect to pay a little something extra for the romance, but that it must be held to a minimum, that one is always paying a little something extra for the romance, and that one expects service rendered too.”

She told him.

“What’s he say?”

“He says what do you mean?”

“Tell him I mean that I see he has a kilometer gauge in the cab. Tell him that I will undertake to engage him and the horse if he will accept payment for distance delivered plus one hundred lire for the romance.”

Margaret told him.

“What’s he say?” I asked.

“He says all right, where do you want to go?”

“Tell him around and around the fountain.”

“Around the fountain?” Margaret said. “Just around the fountain?”

“Around and around the fountain. Tell him.”

She told him. “He says get in,” she said.

We got in and we drove around and around the fountain. After about three circumnavigations the people sitting on the Spanish Steps waiting for American Express and Keats’ house to open began to watch us with interest. Every once in a while one would point. The horseman muttered something, but I didn’t ask Margaret to translate. Soon there was a crowd, and in a little while people began to call things to us. The horseman growled and said something to Margaret.

“What’s he say?” I asked.

“He says this is crazy.”

“Tell him he wants romance I’ll give him romance and a deal’s a deal. Can you say that in Italian?”

Margaret said it in Italian.

Now there was a big crowd watching us; people were standing in the street. As they pushed forward the traffic had to slow down to avoid hitting them. Many of the drivers craned their necks out of their car windows to discover what the crowd was looking at. When they noticed our slow pace around and around the fountain they were as interested as the others. Some of them turned off their ignitions and waited to see what was going to happen.

“Wave,” I said to Margaret. Margaret waved.

“Tell him,” I said.

She did, but he wouldn’t wave. There were too many cars piled up and he had to use both hands in order to maneuver the horse around them. We had barely made another circuit around the fountain when the cars, now bumper to bumper, almost stopped our progress altogether. The horseman applied the whip ruthlessly and tried to force the big carriage through narrow and narrower spaces. He drove valiantly. He used the whip with an almost arch indifference. He swore at the stalled drivers. But none of it was of any use; we could not go another ninety degrees. We were stuck tight in a solid sea of metal.

From our greater height we stared impassively down on the shiny roofs.

“Well, then,” I said after sitting amiably, arms folded across my chest, for about ten minutes, “I think we’ll get out here. Tell him.”

Margaret told him. Tears came to his eyes.

“I notice on his kilometer gauge that we have gone less than one kilometer. Tell him.”

Margaret told him.

I paid the old man for distance delivered, plus one hundred lire for the romance, and Margaret and I stepped down from the carriage.

“But I can get a pass to the studio,” Margaret said.

“I never bring my own bottle and I never use a pass, Principessa.”

“But it would be so easy. Fellini and Antonioni are friends of mine.”

“We must do it my way,” I said. “A man moves in more mysterious ways than a woman.”

“Well, I’ll be recognized anyway,” Margaret said. “There will be no trouble at the gate.”

“There must be trouble at the gate,” I said. “There’s always trouble at the gate. How could you respect me if there were no trouble at the gate? How could I show you what I do? But that’s a point about your being recognized. Perhaps you’d better not come.”

“But it’s my courtship,” Margaret said. “Yes, there’s that.”

Margaret wanted to use the Maserati but I told her that she would certainly be recognized if we did, and so we took the streetcar out to CinecittÃ. We got off one stop before the movie studio.

“But it’s five streets further,” Margaret said. “Never mind,” I said. “We have to get off here.” We got down and I went into the men’s room in a gas station. I took off my shirt. “Here,” I said to Margaret, who was standing just outside the door, and I handed it to her. Then I took my jar of Vicks VapoRub and began to pat the stuff over my arms and chest and back and neck and face. I am not the kind of person who tans, but I am darkish, and the Vicks, thick as butter on my body, gave my skin the fine, high gloss I wanted. I felt like sixteen cartons of burning Kool cigarettes and smelled like something in a sickroom, but the visual effect was startling. The Vicks added a sweaty, faintly greasy definition to each muscle, so that I looked, even at rest, like someone hard at some powerful labor.

It was wonderful, I thought. I had used to think that something always turned up. It was true, of course, but inadequate, and as an only partially optimistic vision of the world it was a little vague. It was no philosophy to live by unless one enjoyed long waiting. I know now that although something will always turn up, one needn’t wait. Any position, any action, however absurd, produces consequences. The wilder the action the more desirable the consequences. Everything works; anything works. Chewing gum will plug a dike. One must remember that, as all aggressors are fond of saying about their enemies, the world is decadent. It won’t fight. So right away I have the advantage of surprise, the high ground of the insane gesture. A steady hand and a poker face are all one needs. Only be bold — brazen it out and the day is yours. Therefore have chutzaph!

Listen, one man with a cap gun and the proper attitude can take the Bank of England. If there’s little comfort in this, all right. If you think, What can I do with the Bank of England, you’re right — but that’s another story. What can you do with victory itself? We winners know, yes? But rich or poor rich is better, and give or take take is nicer. Are you with me?

With the rest of the Vicks Margaret got the spots I had missed and we walked the five blocks up to the gate. She was a little nervous, I think, but outside the gates is familiar territory for me. It’s my home town, so to speak.

“Hi, Pop,” I said to the policeman behind the gate. “It’s a line I learned from the movies,” I told Margaret. I turned back to the policeman. “Parle Inglese?”

The policeman shook his head.

“Sono Boswell,” I said. “Capito?”

The man said something which of course I didn’t understand. Margaret opened her mouth to translate and I interrupted her. “Don’t speak,” I said, “don’t say a word.” I put my hand on the gate to push it open and the policeman moved stubbornly in front of it. He asked me something.

“Sono Boswell,” I said again. “Capito?”

He looked at me a little uncertainly, trying to decide whether he had ever seen me before. He examined my shiny, shirtless torso as if, after all, it was not such a very unusual sight. “Sono Boswell. Boswell,” I said. “Capito?” I said very softly.

He was going to say something, but before he could open his mouth I spoke again. “Sono Boswell. Capito? Capito?”

He shook his head, deciding he did not know me, but a little unsure of it.

I said it slowly, sounding a little exasperated this time. “Sono Boswell. Capito?”

Now he was very unsteady. I gave him another one. “Sono Boswell. So-no Bos-well. Bozzz-well. Ca-pi-to?”

He said something in a very rapid Italian. “Tch- tch-tch,” I said. “Sono Americano. No parle Italiano.”

He repeated whatever he had said more slowly.

“Americano,” I said when he was through, smiling widely, innocently. I shrugged a little stupidly and smiled even more broadly. Then I turned to Margaret and spoke very quickly in English. For his benefit I tried to make it sound as if I were saying, My my what are we to do now here it is already such and such o’clock and we’re late for our appointment and all of us will lose our jobs if we don’t get inside. I said, “Don’t look so nervous, Margaret. We’re almost through. I recognize the third degree of self-doubt on his face. I want you to say something in English now. Anything — it doesn’t make any difference. Make it should like a suggestion.”

Margaret hesitated.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Say something. Anything at all. It ought to sound as if you’re giving me an idea.”

“I might be able to live with you,” Margaret said.

“Ah,” I said, “ah.” I turned back to the policeman.

“Sono Boswell, capito?” I said. I flexed my muscles. I held up my left arm and made the biceps jump around on it. I did some of Sandusky’s best stuff. I pointed to the high gloss on my body. All the while I repeated the simple formula. “Sono Boswell. Capitol Capito?”

The policeman began to nod in faint recognition. The more I asked him if he understood, the surer he became. I smiled, nodding vigorously, repeating my name. Boswell, smile, vigorous nodding, muscle spasm. Boswell, smile, vigorous nodding, astonishing sudden appearance of hidden muscle like a submarine surfacing. Boswell, smile, vigorous nodding, delighted pointing to some intricate maneuver under the skin.

“Capito,” he said at last. “Capito. Samson!”

“Capito?” I said.

“Si, capito, capito,” he said. “Bosswail.” He pulled the gate open wide and beckoned us inside. We walked past him beaming and smiling. He waved and I waved.

“Ooo kay,” he said. “Ooo kay.”

“Capito?” I said.

“Si, si,” he said, “capito.”

Margaret said now what, and I said we’re inside aren’t we, and wasn’t that enough for one day, and she said but what was the point, and I said the point was that we got away with it. Margaret didn’t reply to that

I felt a little badly about Margaret’s question. What did we do now? I had no follow through, no real style; it was all the flashy stuff. Sure, how many people could get inside, but then how many people would want just to get inside? Wouldn’t they have ulterior motives? My flaw was I had none. I had only means, no cause to put them to. I was up to here with means; I had means enough for a regiment, but I was at a loss for ends.

When in Los Farronentes with Lano I had bunked with a kid from Milwaukee named Rohnspeece. He wasn’t very bright, I’m afraid, and he must have been very poor, for he used to annoy me with the great pleasure he got from the small comforts. If there were cookies for dessert, before he ate them Rohnspeece would fondle each one as if it were some rare coin. He was also an admirer of Jello, of all flavors of ice cream, and of the dark meat. But the thing he loved most in this world was the blanket on his cot. There were two kinds of blankets; one was contraband from the Argentine army and the other was a stolen shipment of U.S. Army blankets. The U.S. Army blanket was a little thicker than the Argentine one and Rohnspeece, to his unfailing amazement, had been issued one of the former. Sometimes, on the colder nights, he would suddenly become conscience-stricken by his good fortune and would wake me up. “It’s cold again tonight,” he would say. “It isn’t fair that I should always have the U.S. Army blanket. Would you like to trade?”

“No,” I would say. “Go to sleep.”

“Look,” he would say, “I’m from Milwaukee. It gets pretty cold up there sometimes. I’m used to the cold weather. I don’t need this U.S. Army blanket.”

“Rohnspeece, roll yourself up in your god-damned U.S. Army blanket and go to sleep,” I would say.

It was only because he annoyed me so much that I didn’t take his blanket. I knew that by refusing it I was forcing him to lie awake all night with his guilt and his pathetic metaphysical speculations about why some men always seemed to get extra large portions of vanilla ice cream and U.S. Army blankets, while others were issued blankets from Argentina and had to take a banana when the ice cream ran out

Once while we were eating chicken Rohnspeece gave one of his heart-rending sighs and said something I shall never forget. “Gee,” he said, “I got the thigh again. I had it last time, too.” For him it was the capstone of his good fortune.

When Lano blew up Corbonzelos a piece of a building caught Rohnspeece in the stomach, and as he lay dying he told me that he had heard one time that if you had to get it it was best to get it in the stomach because it didn’t hurt so much when it was in the stomach, it only made you a little thirsty.

“Is it true, Rohnspeece?” I asked him.

“You know,” he said, surprised and pleased, “it is,” and he died wondering about his good fortune.

I had never realized it before, but Rohnspeece and I were a lot alike. We both had that surprising humility of expectation that arises, I think, from profound discontent. To be inside when it was raining, warm when it was cold, to be able to sleep, to move your bowels regularly, to throw peanut butter sandwiches at your hunger — this was living. I shuddered, but there is nothing one can do about one’s character except avenge it, and I am always thinking of ways.

Margaret and I walked through the busy lot, strolling past the fantastic sets laid down in a weird contiguity of geography and time, turning from a toy Roman street corner into a jungle, going from the jungle into the courtyard of a medieval palace where we could see a messenger on his knees before a king. He had run from the direction of a small sea, where miniature destroyers and cruisers and battleships pitched eight feet off shore. We crossed the border into Palestine and Margaret pointed out to me the papier-mâché temple which some humiliated Samson would pull down one afternoon.

“Here’s where the policeman thought you belonged,” Margaret said.

“Oh, belonged,” I said.

We crossed a slum where people pretended to be unhappy, a mock Riviera where they pretended to be

gay.

“It’s like a big park,” Margaret said. “I’ve never seen it this way.”

I was thinking about Rohnspeece and I didn’t answer her.

“Did you hear what I said before, Boswell?” she asked after a while.

“That you’d never seen it this way,” I said.

“No,” she said, “earlier. When you were talking to that policeman and I said I might be able to live with you.”

“Oh,” I said, “live.”

We were married in the Palace of the Cavalieri di Malta by the Grand Master of the Order.

The Italian Premier was there and the Agnellis of Fiat and Enrico Mattei, the oil man. The Colonnas came. The Borgheses did. There were four Cardinals from the Curia, one of them the Pope’s special representative. There were film directors and the owners of ski resorts and chairmen of boards and directors of banks. There were ambassadors who had to find seats in the back. There was some royalty, and society so high it made me dizzy,

One old man who came by himself and whom I never got a chance to meet was said to have been the developer of the Bay of Naples, an artist with TNT.

Three prima donnas and four male leads from La Scala sang in the choir.

Inexplicably, though many of the others seemed to know him, Harold Flesh was there. Ah, I thought, the Mafia! The bride’s side!

Someone who said he was Cholly Knickerbocker came up to me and said, “At last we meet.”

I heard a German countess say to an English lord, “Europe needed a wedding like this.”

I had sent invitations to all the famous people I could think of, but only Penner, who was in Europe buying up youth hostels, could come. Finally I’d phoned Nate Lace in New York and asked him to get up a party. He brought a dozen of his actors and comics and recording stars, and, though they looked something like a lost troupe of USO performers, they behaved very well really, and were such a hit with the Europeans that I was proud of them. It was sad, though, to think that after thirteen or fourteen years in the business of meeting people these were all I could muster for my wedding. Where were Stravinski and Adlai Stevenson and the Vice-President? Where were Perlmutter and Gordon Rail and Rockefeller and Faulkner and Bellow and Hemingway? Where was Dr. Salk? Where was Lano? Where were the scientists and governors and university professors? Where were the Gibbenjoys? Where, for that matter, was John Sallow?

After the ceremony we strolled among the guests in the gardens of the Maltese Order.

I introduced Nate to Margaret. “Princess,” he said, and dipped his head smartly, as if all his friends had titles. And so they had, of course: Heavyweight, Batting Champion, Leading Ground Gainer.

When Margaret left us to speak with some of her friends I remained standing with Nate. “Happy, kid?” he said.

“Oh boy,” I said. “Oh boy oh boy.”

“Well, I wish you all the luck,” he said. “All of it. All the luck.”

“Thanks, Nate.”

“And Perry thought you were such a wash-out.”

“Perry’s a prick, Nate.”

“You always felt that,” he said philosophically. “She’s really a princess,” he said.

“A Medici, Nate. A Medici. She’s the whore of the world but she’s very sweet.”

Nate seemed a little shocked. “Say, have you had anything to drink?” he asked.

“A little, Nate, I’ve had a little.”

“Well, where did you get it? I didn’t want to say anything but there’s no liquor.”

“Well, it’s religious, Nate. That’s a religious thing. This is a Jesuit palace. The man who married us is the Grand Master himself. The GM. And you know what they say, Nate — what’s good for the GM is good for the Catholic Church.”

“You’re not Catholic,” Nate said. “I never knew you were Catholic.”

“Sure, I’m Catholic, Nate. I’m very flexible religiouswise.” I winked. “Would I let a little thing like God interfere with this wedding?”

“Say,” Nate said, “that’s really something. Not even Catholic and married by a high priest like that.”

“Oh, the highest, Nate. The highest.” I lowered my voice. “They call him the Black Pope. He tells the White Pope what to do.”

Nate shook his head, amazed.

“Did I ever tell you how we got engaged?” I said. “No, of course not. Well, we were sitting in the Tre Scalini in the Piazza Navona. Margaret was having a little drink and I was eating the tartufo. That’s a world famous ice cream, Nate, and you know how I am.”

Nate looked puzzled.

“Come on, Nate. Toledo blades. Irish linen. Your own arctic lichen tea. Tartufo ice cream. I steer by Betelgeuse and the larger stars. Landmarks, Nate. Milestones. Beware of imitations. The best is barely good enough. Here is not anywhere. (Later, Baron, I’m talking to my friend, Nate Lace.) So there we were. I was eating the world famous tartufo ice cream in full view of the statues by Bernini the Younger, sitting with the last of the Medicis, and — well, it was very heady, Nate, very heady.”

Nate was embarrassed. He would have walked away if I had given him the chance.

“So I figured to msyelf, ‘Boswell, don’t be a fool. It could always be this way. The girl loves you.’ Oh, Nate, I had given her the business; I was at the top of my form.

Wildness. Self-destructiveness. The works, Nate, the very romantic works. I even faked a tic in my left cheek.”

“Hey, hey, hey, hey,” Nate said soothingly.

“No, no, listen to this. Social history. I had taken that girl for the ride of her life. Listen, it wasn’t easy. You think this was some bobby-soxer? This was one of the most sophisticated women in Europe. I mean, there was real unhappiness there. I mean, at first it was the other way around. I was actually convinced I loved her.”

Nate was astonished.

“Whoops,” I said. “Whoops, whoops. If you drink, don’t drive, hey, Nate? A slip of the lip can sink the ship. Well, no matter, right? Entre nous, no?”

I knew, of course, that I was doing irreparable damage, setting a course which it would be impossible to check later. Already it was impossible to check. No selfish man ever kids himself. No really selfish man ever bothers to kid others. The surprising thing was that I wasn’t even that drunk; I’d taken only intermittent sips from the flask in the pocket of my morning coat. “My missal,” I had said to the Grand Master, explaining the slight bulge. “‘The Good Book,’ as we Americans say.” It was my triumph that I was high on, the impossibly glorious conjunction of myself with grand people and great events.

Texture is a quality of the experience of the single man. It is no accident, for example, that I have never worn glasses, or that I am uncomfortable in gloves. Nor was it an accident that I could speak this way to Nate. Loneliness is sentimental. It slaps back and prolongs the handshake and weeps easily, for it always imagines— though it knows it can’t be so — that the sense of juxtaposition is universally felt. Even when I was wrestling, and used to sit in the strange hotel lobbies with the other wrestlers, men with whom I had shared a card in Kansas City or in Maine, I could hardly restrain myself from clapping them on the back and saying, “Well, old horse, we meet again, hey? Here we are in a hotel lobby in Cheyenne, Wyoming, among the ferns and spurs.” Often my companion would look bewildered. He could hardly have known what I meant. Why shouldn’t two men in the same profession, traveling in the same circuit, meet again and again? What was strange? The world, the world itself, the world was strange; recognizing another face was strange; being alive was wondrous strange. But the others had families, pictures in their wallets, letters to write. You had to go it alone for it to mean anything. To share experience with so much as one other person was immediately to halve it. To divide it among three of you was to reduce what was left to yourself by two thirds. It was mathematical. All we could ever get from others, really, was comfort. In the long run it was the deepest wisdom to be a pirate, to plot among the survivors on the beach to kill off the other survivors, and then to scheme how to dispose of whoever remained.

I had regard for Margaret, certainly. I was even fond of her. But love of another always involved at least a small betrayal of the self. It was not impossible to love; the temptation was always there, to give comfort like a small sleep, a sweet forgetting. Too often I had read in books that such and such a person was unable to love. It always came out as if something was wrong with one of his organs — as though a kidney were functioning improperly or a hand couldn’t clench into a fist. It was the cliché of our time. One heard it on buses. I was not incapable of love; no one is. I think I could love anyone. But it has never been enough. It provides only a kind of emotional illusion, as community singing, raising your voice to the bouncing ball, provides the emotional illusion of good fellowship.

“So,” I told Nate, “I asked her. And as you saw for yourself, they were married. I made a match, Nate, I made a match.”

“Well,” Nate said uncomfortably, “I wish you all the luck. She’s beautiful.”

“What am I, Nate, chopped liver?”

“All the luck.”

“Thank you, Nate.” I had no desire to make him any more uncomfortable. “Listen,” I said, “I’d better go find Margaret.”

“Sure.”

I walked away, nodding happily to all the guests— my guests, I thought, my guests. Margaret had dowered me handsomely. It was a different feeling, I saw, to give the party, even if I was giving only nominally.

As I passed the USO troupe I heard Nate say, “It’s an international incident.”

“What I want to know is who gave him the two bucks for the Cardinal?” one of his comics said. “Margaret,” I said. “No offense,” he said shamefacedly. “None taken,” I said.

I continued my happy walks through the gardens, nodding and smiling to everyone. I had a greeting for everybody. “Baron,” I said. “Countess.” I went through the clipped arch of an enormous hedge. “General,” I said. “Premier.” I strolled past a fountain where a group of distinguished-looking people stood somewhat protectively around an infirm old man. “King,” I said, “how are you?”

It was wonderful. I felt the special immunity of my elation. I was a genuinely charming man. I oozed not sophistication so much as a sort of genial novelty. Men could restore themselves in my presence. I went among them like someone bearing a gift; it was life itself I was prepared to show them. I could join any of these people. I had things to tell them all. I could speak to the point about triumphs and about times I thought the game was up; I could bring them my life as a happy lesson in persistence, turning it before them like some bright crystal to catch the sun. Perhaps Margaret even got as good as she gave. It was only a pity that I was taking her away to America before I had the opportunity to prove it. I was the incarnate American-con-artist-adventurer-rustler-Mississippi-river-boat-gambler, a sort of Medici in my own right, or what narrowly passed for right among the breed. Add to this the fact that I was an understander, going the merely compassionate one better, and Margaret came out almost ahead.

Was this what they meant by happiness? Why, it was wonderful to be happy. I would have tried it years ago had I known. Suddenly I felt I had to sit down to think about it. Very carefully I held the crease in my morning trousers and sat down beneath a tree. I placed my top hat beside me.

Margaret came up. “You’ll stain your clothes,” she said.

“Margaret,” I said, “until ten minutes ago I never felt cute. Now I feel it. I feel waves of cuteness. Am I cute, Margaret? I mean really cute? It’s very important.”

“Well, you’re more curious than cute,” she said. She stepped back happily to appraise me. “You know, I never noticed before, but you don’t wear clothes very well. Boswell, you’re a little slobby.”

“But am I cute?”

“No,” she said seriously. “Your real charm is your despair. I married you for it.”

“It’s left me, Margaret,” I said. “I don’t feel it any more.”

“It will come back.”

“I hope so, Margaret.”

“It will come back,” she said. “Just think of death.” I had told Margaret about death.

I contemplated death for a while. At first it seemed difficult, far-fetched among these lovely people in this lovely garden, but by degrees it began to take on its old validity. I pretended it was two years hence. Already the garden seemed not so crowded, a little desolate even, the voices more subdued. The infirm old king was gone, and two or three of the other old people. I projected five years into the future. There was not much change. Some of the younger people had come into their prime and many of the old ones still hung on. I increased the tempo, stepping up the future by ten years, fifteen. Now you could see the difference. The place was half empty. If you didn’t know better you might have thought there had been a war. Nate Lace was gone. Penner, that old saint, had been gathered to his reward. I pushed time ahead another two years. It was child’s play now; I need only leap ahead by months, even by weeks, to empty the garden. In another year Margaret herself would be gone. And I wasn’t feeling too good either.

It was my statistic trick and it always worked. Whenever things got to looking up, whenever the sense of fate seemed to leave me, the old confidence in withering catastrophe, I would think of the future in order to restore order to my life. It’s amazing. You’re sitting in a crowded theater and you think, One of these people will die in an automobile accident this year, eleven will have heart attacks, seven will be stricken by cancer, two will be shot, one will commit suicide, four will die of blood diseases, three of wounds that will not heal. And so on. And so forth.

“You’ll really have to get up,” Margaret said.

“I was getting up,” I said.

“The Grand Master wants to see you. He sent me to look for you.”

“Why?”

“Well, to talk to you. He’s a little angry, I think.”

“Why?”

“I told him about the settlement I made on you,” Margaret said.

“It’s not his business,” I said. “He can tell the White Pope, but he can’t tell me.”

“Of course he can’t, darling, and I’m sure he won’t say very much, but he wants you to explain it.”

At the palace the Grand Master was in his study, a young priest told me. He took me to the huge double doors and knocked for me. A voice answered, and the priest nodded and left me. I pushed the heavy doors and entered a remarkable room. I had expected books, rich carpets, a fat, illuminated globe, but it was empty except for a crucifix and a very long table. The table was familiar from the movies: people drank mead at it. I expected to see it bruised from so many heavy mugs having been thumped against it. There were high casement windows all the way around the room; the effect was somehow like being in a cloister. The shutters on all but one of the windows had been pulled and fight came into the room queerly angled through this single window as though it were a gangplank fixed to a ship, or, perhaps purposefully, some oddly illuminated tunnel that led to heaven. The table had been placed along the wall opposite the door, as if it had been set there to make room for dancing. The arrangement unbalanced the huge room and I didn’t seem to walk so much as pitch forward into it. Ah, the Jesuitical intelligence, I thought.

The Grand Master had placed himself in silhouette in front of the open window at the far side of the long table. He had removed his ceremonial vestments and was dressed now in the plain suit of the ordinary priest. As I stepped toward him I felt like someone in a black and white film. The bright gardens behind him seemed part of a different world.

Despite my boasts to Nate, I had taken the Grand Master for granted. Margaret had explained the tradition of his marrying all the Medicis. It went back five centuries. Until now it hadn’t puzzled me that I had become involved with something that had gone on for five centuries. Well, so what? Nobody ever said man’s traditions were mortal.

Though he had spoken in a firm, clear voice a moment ago, the Grand Master now seemed to be asleep. He was an old man, as old as Herlitz had been. His face, as difficult to see in that dark room as if it had been in a painting in a church, seemed even in repose faintly cruel, used to power. It was no different from the Renaissance faces I had seen in portraits in the Uffizi when I had gone with Margaret to Florence. (Margaret still had rooms there — that was part of the five centuries, too — though her family had given the palace to the state long ago.) It was a pale face with a surprising patch of red on each cheek, faintly like the high spoiled blush painted on dolls. It was undeniably handsome, though drained by its long familiarity with power, as though power were a sort of bad habit like alcohol or narcotics that ultimately ravaged the features. Its expression was what people euphemistically called “aristocratic,” and was at least one part a faint fear and two parts a boredom with the stupidity of others’ responses. Clearly, the Grand Master loved a mystery. To give myself the advantage I tried to imagine him naked, on the toilet, dead. I couldn’t; he had a tenacious dignity and I began, despite myself, to admire him.

“You are not what is called ’a good Catholic,’ are you?” the old man asked suddenly.

Surprise me no surprises, I thought. “I try to be,” I said.

“Do you?” he said. “I watched you before. You fumbled with the rituals.”

“I’m a convert, Grand Master. It’s still somewhat new to me.”

“I hope there has been no mistake in making this marriage.”

“Because I didn’t make the sign of the Cross smoothly?”

“You made it very smoothly,” he said.

Runs deep, I thought. Familiar type. Recognize him from literature. Marvelous when you meet him in life. Grand Master, Grand Inquisitor. Grand. Lee J. Cobb plays him in the picture. Good guy or bad? Hard to tell. But, I thought, that’s it. To be like that. That’s the ideal. Cryptic wisdom. Talk like a double acrostic. Never raise your voice when you shout. Spiritual politics. Run scared. Every day a new election. Move! Manipulate! Mold! Power the still center at the core of motion. That’s it. That’s it. Seen everything, been there before; nothing new under the sun. Past so long you’re already immortal. Never sick a day in your life but always in pain. Anguish in the smell of a rose. Heart, strategies, philosophy. Wisdom, the black art!

So much for you. It boils down to death, statistics. Everybody dies. Death is my argument. Leave me alone.

“My wife”—he would understand the thrust—“ My wife has told me that you are angry about the settlement. I’ll try to explain it to you.”

“The settlement is a matter of indifference to me,” the Grand Master said.

“Of course,” I said. “I understand that. She has made me a wealthy man. That part was her idea, anyway. I know you don’t object to that — you don’t care who has the wealth as long as someone has it. I think perhaps it’s The Club you’re interested in.”

I began to explain about The Club.