Ravelstein

Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it. During the Civil War people complained about Lincoln's funny stories. Perhaps he sensed that strict seriousness was far more dangerous than any joke. But critics said that he was frivolous and his own Secretary of War referred to him as an ape.

Among the debunkers and spoofers who formed the tastes and minds of my generation H. L. Mencken was the most prominent. My high school friends, readers of the _American Mercury__, were up on the Scopes trial as Mencken reported it. Mencken was very hard on William Jennings Bryan and the Bible Belt and Boobus Americanus. Clarence Darrow, who defended Scopes, represented science, modernity, and progress. To Darrow and Mencken, Bryan the Special Creationist was a doomed Farm Belt absurdity. In the language of evolutionary theory Bryan was a dead branch of the life-tree. His Free Silver monetary standard was a joke. So was his old-style congressional oratory. So were the huge Nebraska farm dinners he devoured. His meals, Mencken said, were the death of him. His views on Special Creation were subjected to extreme ridicule at the trial, and Bryan went the way of the pterodactyl-the clumsy version of an idea which later succeeded-the gliding rep tiles becoming warm-blooded birds that flew and sang.

I filled up a scribbler with quotes from Mencken and later added notes from spoofers or self-spoofers like W. C. Fields or Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Huey Long, and Senator Dirksen. There was even a page on Machiavelli's sense of humor. But I'm not about to involve you in my speculations on wit and self-irony in democratic societies. Not to worry. I'm glad my old scribbler has disappeared. I have no wish to see it again. It surfaces briefly as a sort of extended footnote.

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject-shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, _Miekell Jack-sown__. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the _Paris Herald__.

"Terrific, isn't it, having this pop circus?" said Ravelstein. The Professor was very happy this morning. He had leaned on the management to put him into this coveted suite. To be in Paris-at the Crillon. To be here for once with plenty of money. No more of the funky rooms at the Dragon Volant, or whatever they called it, on the rue du Dragon; or in the Hotel de l'Academie on the rue des Saints Peres facing the medical college. Hotels don't come any grander or more luxurious than the Crillon, where the top Ameri can brass had been quartered during the peace negotiations after the First World War.

"Great, isn't it?" said Ravelstein, with one of his rapid gestures.

I confirmed that it was. We had the center of Paris right below us-the place de la Concorde with the obelisk, the Orangerie, the Chambre des Dйputйs, the Seine with its pompous bridges, palaces, gardens. Of course these were great things to see, but they were greater today for being shown from the penthouse by Ravelstein, who only last year had been a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Maybe more. He used to joke with me about his "sinking fund."

He would say, "I'm sinking with it-do you know what the term means in financial circles, Chick?"

"Sinking fund? I have a rough idea."

Nobody in the days before he struck it rich had ever questioned Ravelstein's need for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban cigars, unobtainable in the U. S., for the Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Mont Blanc pens or Baccarat or Lalique crystal to serve wine in-or to have it served. Ravelstein was one of those large men-large, not stout-whose hands shake when there are small chores to perform. The cause was not weakness but a tremendous eager energy that shook him when it was discharged.

Well, his friends, colleagues, pupils, and admirers no longer had to ante up in support of his luxurious habits. Thank God, he could now do without the elaborate trades among his academic pals in Jensen silver, or Spode or Quimper. All of that was a thing of the past. He was now very rich. He had gone public with his ideas. He had written a book-difficult but popular-a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemi spheres and on both sides of the equator. The thing had been done quickly but in real earnest: no cheap concessions, no popularizing, no mental monkey business, no _apologetics__, no patrician airs. He had every right to look as he looked now, while the waiter set up our breakfast. His intellect had made a millionaire of him. It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think-to say it in your own words, without compromise.

This morning Ravelstein wore a blue-and-white kimono. It had been presented to him in Japan when he lectured there last year. He had been asked what would particularly please him and he said he would like a kimono. This one, fit for a shogun, must have been a special order. He was very tall. He was not particularly graceful. The great garment was loosely belted and more than half open. His legs were unusually long, not shapely. His underpants were not securely pulled up.

"The waiter tells me that Michael Jackson won't eat the Crillon's food," he said. "His cook flies everywhere with him in the private jet. Anyhow, the Crillon chef's nose is out of joint. His cookery was good enough for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, he says, and also a whole slew of shahs, kings, generals, and prime ministers. But this little glamour monkey refuses it. Isn't there something in the Bible about crippled kings living under the table of their conqueror-feeding on what falls to the floor?"

"I think there is. I recall that their thumbs had been cut off. But what's that got to do with the Crillon or Michael Jackson?"

Abe laughed and said he wasn't sure. It was only something that went through his head. Up here, the treble voices of the fans, Parisian adolescents-boys and girls shouting in unison-were added to the noises of buses, trucks, and taxis.

This historic show was our background. We were having a good time over our coffee. Ravelstein was in high spirits. Nevertheless, we kept our voices low because Nikki, Abe's companion, was still sleeping. It was Nikki's habit, back in the U. S., to watch kung fu films from his native Singapore until four o'clock in the morning. Here too he was up most of the night. The waiter had rolled shut the sliding doors so that Nikki's silken sleep should not be disturbed. I glanced through the window from time to time at his round arms and the long shifting layers of black hair reaching his glossy shoulders. In his early thirties, handsome Nikki was boyish still.

The waiter had entered with wild strawberries, brioches, jam jars, and small pots of what I had been brought up to call hotel silver. Ravelstein scribbled his name wildly on the check while brin ing a bun to his mouth. I was the neater eater. Ravelstein when he was feeding and speaking made you feel that something biological was going on, that he was stoking his system and nourishing his ideas.

This morning he was again urging me to go more public, to get away from the private life, to take an interest in "public life, in politics," to use his own words. He wanted me to try my hand at biography, and I had agreed to do it. At his request, I had written a short account of J. M. Keynes's description of the arguments over German reparations and the lifting of the Allied blockade in 1919. Ravelstein was pleased with what I had done but not quite satisfied as yet. He thought I had a rhetorical problem. I said that too much emphasis on the literal facts narrowed the wider interest of the enterprise.

I may as well come out with it: I had a high school English teacher named Morford ("Crazy Morford" we called him) who had us reading Macaulay's essay on Boswell's _Johnson__. Whether this was Morford's own idea or an item in the curriculum set by the Board of Education, I can't say. Macaulay's essay, commissioned in the nineteenth century by the _Encyclopedia Britannica__, was published in an American textbook edition by the Riverside Press. Reading it put me into a purple fever. Macaulay exhilarated me with _his__ version of the _Life__, with the "anfractuosity" of Johnson's mind. I have since read many sober criticisms of Macaulay's Victorian excesses. But I have never been cured-I never wanted to be cured of my weakness for Macaulay. Thanks to him I still see poor convulsive Johnson touching every lamppost on the street and eating spoiled meat and rancid puddings.

What line to take in writing a biography became the problem. There was Johnson's own example in the memoir of his friend Richard Savage. There was Plutarch, of course. When I mentioned Plutarch to a Greek scholar, he put him down as "a mere litterateur." But without Plutarch could _Antony and Cleopatra__ have been written?

Next I considered Aubrey's _Brief Lives__.

But I shan't go through the whole list.

I had tried to describe Mr. Morford to Ravelstein: Crazy Morford was never downright drunk in class, but he obviously was a lush-he had a drunkard's red face. He wore the same fire-sale suit every day. He didn't want to know you, he didn't want to be known by you. His blue abstract alcoholic look was never directed at anyone. Under his disorderly brow he fixed his stare only at the walls, through the windows, into the book he was reading. Macaulay's _Johnson__ and Shakespeare's _Hamlet__ were the two works we studied with him that term. Johnson, despite his scrofula, his raggedness, his dropsy, had his friendships, wrote his books just as Morford met his classes, listened to us as we recited from memory the lines "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world." His grim cropped head, his fiery face, his hand clasped behind his back. Altogether flat and unprofitable.

Ravelstein wasn't much interested in my description of him. Why did I invite him to see the Morford I remembered? But Abe was right to put me onto the Keynes essay. Keynes, the powerful economist-statesman whom everybody knows for _The Economic Consequences of the Peace__, sent letters and memoranda to his Blooms-bury friends reporting on his postwar experiences, in particular the reparations debates between the defeated Germans and the Allied leaders-Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and the Americans. Ravel stein, a man not free with his praises, said that this time I had writ ten a first-class account of Keynes's notes to his friends. Ravelstein rated Hayek higher than Keynes as an economist. Keynes, he said, had exaggerated the harshness of the Allies and played into the hands of the German generals and eventually of the Nazis. The Peace of Versailles was far less punitive than it ought to have been. The war aims of Hitler in 1939 were no different from those of the Kaiser in 1914. But setting this serious error aside, Keynes had a great many personal attractions. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he was polished socially and culturally by the Bloomsbury group. The Great Politics of his day had developed and perfected him. I suppose in his personal life he considered himself a Uranian-a British euphemism for homosexual. Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them. So he reminded me that when Uranus was killed by the Titan Cronus, his seed spilled into the sea. And this somehow had to do with reparations, or with the fact that the still blockaded Germans just then were starving.

Ravelstein, who for reasons of his own put me on to Keynes's pa per, best remembered the passages describing the German bankers' inability to meet the demands of France and England. The French were after the Kaiser's gold reserves; they said the gold must be handed over at once. The English said they would settle for hard currencies. One of the German negotiators was a Jew. Lloyd George, losing his temper, turned on this man: he did an astonishing kike number on him, crouching, hunching, limping, spitting, zizzing his esses, sticking out his backside, doing a splayfoot parody of a Jew-walk. All this was described by Keynes to his Bloomsbury friends. Ravelstein didn't think well of the Bloomsbury intellectuals. He disliked their high camp, he disapproved of queer antics and of what he called "faggot behavior." He couldn't and didn't fault them for gossiping. He himself loved gossip too well to do that. But he said they were not thinkers but snobs, and their influence was pernicious. The spies later recruited in England by the GPU or the NKVD in the thirties were nurtured by Bloomsbury.

"But you did that well, Chick, about Lloyd George's nasty _youpin__ parody."

_Youpin__ is the French for "kike."

"Thank you," I said.

"I wouldn't dream of meddling," said Ravelstein. "But I think you'd agree that I'm trying to do you some good."

Of course I understood his motive. He wanted me to write his biography and at the same time he wanted to rescue me from my pernicious habits. He thought I was stuck in privacy and should be restored to community. "Too many years of inwardness!" he used to say. I badly needed to be in touch with politics-not local or ma chine politics, nor even national politics, but politics as Aristotle or Plato understood the term, rooted in our nature. You can't turn your back on your nature. I admitted to Ravelstein that reading those Keynes documents and writing the piece had been something like a holiday. Rejoining humankind, taking a humanity bath. There are times when I need to ride in the subway at rush hour or sit in a crowded movie house-that's what I mean by a humanity bath. As cattle must have salt to lick, I sometimes crave physical contact.

"I have some unclassified notions about Keynes and the World Bank, his Bretton Woods agreement, and also his attack on the Treaty of Versailles. I know just enough about Keynes to fit his name into a crossword puzzle," I said. "I'm glad you brought his private memoranda to my attention. His Bloomsbury friends must have been dying to have his impressions of the Peace Conference. Thanks to him they had world-historical ringside seats. And I sup pose Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf absolutely had to have the inside dope. They represented the higher interests of British society. They had a duty to know-an artist's duty."

"And what about the Jewish side of the thing?" said Ravelstein.

"Keynes didn't like it much. You may remember that the only friendship he made at the Peace Conference was with a Jewish member of the German delegation."

"No, they wouldn't really have cared for a man as common as Lloyd George, those Bloomsburies."

But Ravelstein knew the value of a set. He had a set of his own. Its members were students he had trained in political philosophy and longtime friends. Most of them were trained as Ravelstein himself had been trained, under Professor Davarr and used his esoteric vocabulary. Some of Ravelstein's older pupils now held positions of importance on national newspapers. Quite a number served in the State Department. Some lectured in the War College or worked on the staff of the National Security Adviser. One was a protйgй of Paul Nitze. Another, a maverick, published a column in the _Washington Times__. Some were influential, all were well informed; they were a close group, a community. From them Ravelstein had fre quent reports, and when he was at home he spent hours on the telephone with his disciples. After a fashion, he kept their secrets. At least he didn't quote them by name. Even in the Crillon penthouse today the mobile telephone was held between his bare knees. The Japanese kimono fell away from legs paler than milk. He had the calves of a sedentary man-the shinbone long and the calf muscle abrupt, without roundness. Some years back, after his heart attack, the doctors told him he must exercise, so he bought an expensive sweat suit and elegant gym shoes. He shuffled around the track for several days and then gave it up. Fitness was not his cup of tea. He treated his body like a vehicle-a motorbike that he raced at top speed along the rim of the Grand Canyon.

"I'm not too surprised at Lloyd George," Ravelstein said. "He was a contentious little fucker. He visited Hitler in the thirties and came away with a high opinion of him. Hitler was a dream of political leaders. Whatever he wanted done was done, and quickly. No muss, no fuss. Very different from parliamentary government." It was enjoyable to hear Ravelstein on what he called Great Politics. He speculated often on Roosevelt and Churchill. He had a great respect for de Gaulle. From time to time he got carried away. Today, for instance, he spoke of Lloyd George's "pungency."

"Pungency is good," I said.

"In the matter of language the Brits had it all over us. Especially when their strength began to bleed away and language became one of their important resources."

"Like Hamlet's whore who must unpack her heart with words."

Ravelstein, with his bald powerful head, was at ease with large statements, big issues, and famous men, with decades, eras, centuries. He was, however, just as familiar with entertainers like Mel Brooks as with the classics and could go from Thucydides' huge tragedy to Moses as played by Brooks. "He comes down from Mount Sinai with the commandments. God had handed down twenty but ten fall from Mel Brooks's arms when he sees the children of Israel rioting around the Golden Calf." Ravelstein loved these Catskill entertainments; he had a natural gift for them.

He was very pleased with my Keynes sketch. He remembered that Churchill had called Keynes a man of clairvoyant intelligence-Abe loved Churchill. As an economist, Milton Friedman had it over most others, but Friedman was a free-market fanatic and had no use for culture, whereas Keynes had a cultivated intelligence. He was, however, wrong about the Versailles Treaty and deficient in politics, a subject of which Ravelstein had a very special understanding.

Abe's "people" in Washington kept his telephone line so busy that I said he must be masterminding a shadow government. He accepted this, smiling as though the oddity were not his but mine. He said, "All these students I've trained in the last thirty years still turn to me, and in a way the telephone makes possible an ongoing seminar in which the policy questions they deal with in day-to-day Washington are aligned with the Plato they studied two or three decades ago, or Locke, or Rousseau, or even Nietzsche."

It was very pleasant to win Ravelstein's approval, and his students kept coming back to him-men now in their forties, some of whom had figured significantly in running the Gulf War, spoke to him by the hour. "These special relationships are important to me-top priority." It was as natural that Ravelstein should need to know what went on in Downing Street or the Kremlin as it had been for Virginia Woolf to read Keynes's private report on German reparations. Possibly Ravelstein's views or opinions sometimes worked their way into policy decisions, but that wasn't what mattered. What mattered was that he should remain in charge somehow of the ongoing political education of his old boys. In Paris too he had a following. People who had taken his courses at the Йcole des Hautes Йtudes, just back from a mission to Moscow, also rang him up.

There were sexual friendships and intimate confidences as well. Beside the wide black leather sofa back home where he took the calls was an electronic panel of which he made expert use. I couldn't have operated it. I had no high-tech skills. But Ravelstein, though his hands were unsteady, controlled his instruments like a Prospero.

In any case he didn't have to worry now about the telephone bills.

But we are still atop the Hotel Crillon.

"You have good instincts, Chick," he said. "Too bad you didn't have more nihilism in your makeup. You should have been more like Celine with his nihilistic comedy, or farce. The scorned woman saying to her boyfriend, Robinson, 'Why can't you say "I love you"? What's so special about _you?__ You get a hard-on like anybody else. _Quoil Tu ne bandes pas?__' A hard-on to her is the same as love. But Robinson the nihilist is high-principled about one thing only, not to lie about the very, very few things that really matter. He'll try any kind of obscenity but he draws the line at last, and this tramp woman, deeply insulted, shoots him dead because he won't say 'I love you.'"

"Does Celine mean that this makes him authentic?"

"It means that writers are supposed to make you laugh and cry. That's what mankind is looking for. The situation of this Robinson is a replay of the drama of the Middle Ages in which the most vicious, abandoned criminals turn again to the Blessed Virgin. But there's no disagreement here. I want you to do me as you did Keynes, but on a bigger scale. And also you were too kind to him. I don't want that. Be as hard on me as you like. You aren't the darling doll you seem to be, and by describing me maybe you'll emancipate yourself."

"From what, exactly?"

"Whatever it is that controls you-some sword of Damocles hanging over you."

"No," I said. "It's the sword of Dimwitoclese." The conversation, if it had taken place in a restaurant, would have made the other diners think that we were telling sexy jokes, having a rollicking time. "Dimwitoclese" was Ravelstein's kind of gag, and he laughed like Picasso's wounded horse in _Guernica__, rearing back.

Ravelstein's legacy to me was a subject-he thought he was giving me a subject, perhaps the best one I ever had, perhaps the only really important one. But what such a legacy signified was that he would die before me. If I were to predecease him he would certainly not write a memoir of me. Anything beyond a single page to be read at a memorial service would have been unthinkable. Yet we were close friends, none closer. What we were laughing about was death, and of course death does sharpen the comic sense. But the fact that we laughed together didn't mean that we were laughing for the same reasons. That Ravelstein's most serious ideas, put into his book, should have made him a millionaire certainly was funny. It took the genius of capitalism to make a valuable commodity out of thoughts, opinions, _teachings__. Bear in mind that Ravelstein was a teacher. He was not one of those conservatives who idolize the free market. He had views of his own on political and moral matters. But I am not interested in presenting his ideas. More than anything else, just now, I want to avoid them. I want to be brief, here. He was an educator. Put together in a book his ideas made him absurdly rich. He was spending the dollars almost as fast as they came in. Just now he was considering a new $5 million book contract. He could also command big fees on the lecture circuit. And he was a learned man after all. Nobody disputed that. You have to be learned to capture modernity in its full complexity and to assess its human cost. On social occasions he might be freaky, but on the platform you could see how well grounded his arguments were. It became only too clear what he was talking about. The public saw a higher education as a right. The White House affirmed it. Students were like "the mackerel-crowded seas." Thirty thousand dollars was the average annual college tuition. But what were students learning? The universities were permissive, lax. The Puritanism of an earlier time was gone. Relativism held that what was right in San Domingo was wrong in Pago Pago and that moral standards were therefore anything but absolute.

Now Ravelstein was no enemy of pleasure or opposed to love. On the contrary he saw love as possibly the highest blessing of mankind. A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death. We were offered a biological model that dismissed the soul and stressed the importance of orgiastic relief from tension (biostatics and biodynamics). I don't intend to explain here the erotic teachings of Aristophanes and Socrates or of the Bible. For that you must go to Ravelstein himself. For him Jerusalem and Athens were the twin sources of civilization. Jerusalem and Athens are not my dish. I wish you well with them. But I was too old to become Ravelstein's disciple. All I need to say now is that he was taken very seriously even in the White House and on Downing Street. He was Mrs. Thatcher's weekend guest at Chequers. Nor did the President neglect him. Reagan invited him to dinner, and Ravelstein spent a fortune on formal attire, cummerbund, diamond studs, patent leather shoes. A columnist on the _Daily News__ said that to Ravelstein money was something you threw from the rear platform of speeding trains. Ravelstein with shouts of laughter showed me the clipping. Through it all he was deeply amused. And of course I didn't have the same reasons for amusement. The vast hydraulic forces of the country had not picked me up, as they had him.

Although I was Ravelstein's senior by a good many years, we were close friends. There were sophomoric elements in my character as there were in his, and these leveled the ground and evened things up. A man who knew me well said that I was more innocent than any adult had the right to be. As if I had chosen to be naпve. Besides, the fact is that even extremely naive people know their own interests. Very simple women understand when it's time to draw the line with a difficult husband-when to siphon the money out of their joint back account. I paid no particular attention to self-preservation. But luckily-or perhaps not too luckily-this is cornucopia-time, an era of abundance in all civilized nations. Never, on the material side, have huge populations been better protected from hunger and sickness. And this partial release from the struggle for survival makes people naive. By this I mean their wishful fantasies are unchecked. You begin, in accordance with an unformulated agreement, to accept the terms, invariably falsified, on which others present themselves. You deaden your critical powers. You stifle your shrewdness. Before you know it you are paying a humongous divorce settlement to a woman who had more than once declared that she was an innocent who had no understanding of money matters.

In approaching a man like Ravelstein, a piecemeal method is perhaps best. I had come up to his penthouse luxury suite on this June morning in Paris not so much to discuss the biographical essay I was going to do as to collect some facts about his parents and his early life. I didn't want more detail than I could use and I was by now familiar with the large outlines of his life story. The Ravelsteins were a Dayton, Ohio, family. His mother, a powerhouse, had put herself through Johns Hopkins. His father, not a successful man, was the local representative of a large national organization, banished to Dayton. A fat neurotic little man, a hysterical parent, a disciplinarian. Little Abe, when he was punished, was ordered to strip naked and then he was beaten with the strap that held up his father's pants. Abe admired his mother, hated his father, despised his sister. But Keynes, to glance at him once more, had little to say of Clemenceau's family history. Clemenceau was a seasoned cynic; he loathed and distrusted the Germans; he wore gray kid gloves at the negotiating table. But we'll ignore the gloves-what I mean is that we aren't doing psychobiography here.

This morning, moreover, Ravelstein was in no mood to go into the facts of his early life.

The place de la Concorde was losing its early freshness. The traffic below was thinner but the June heat was thickening, rising. In the sun, our pulse beats were somewhat slower. After the first surge of the feelings, the strong tickle at the heart of a life vindicated by an incomplete victory over many absurdities, everything had come together to place Abe Ravelstein, an academic, a lousy professor of political philosophy, at the very peak of Paris among the oil sheiks at the Crillon, or among CEOs at the Ritz, or playboys at the Hotel Meurice. Under the sun, our conversation pausing, he lapsed or slumped for a while; his hemispheric eyebrows were drawn up ward. His lips, poised to say more, said nothing for the moment. On his bald head you felt that what you were looking at were the finger marks of its shaper. He himself was momentarily elsewhere; he was subject to these intermittences. Though his eyes were open, it was possible that he didn't see you. As he seldom had a night of uninterrupted sleep, it wasn't unusual, especially in warm weather, for him to lapse briefly, to doze, to drop out, two long arms hanging over the sides of his chair and the strange shapes of his mismatched feet. One was three sizes bigger than the other. And it wasn't only the broken sleep, it was the excitement, the wringing, the tension of his pleasures, of his mental life.

His fatigue this morning might have been due to the grand dinner he had given us last night, an extraordinary party on the place de la Madeleine chez Lucas-Carton. Digesting all those courses was bound to take it out of you. The main dish was chicken seasoned with honey and baked in clay. The ancient Greek recipe had recently been found by archaeologists in an Aegean dig. We dined on this delicious dish attended by no fewer than four waiters. The _sommelier__, wearing his badge of office on a chain of keys, supervised the filling of the glasses. For each course there was an appropriate wine, while other waiters working like acrobats reset the china and the silver. Ravelstein had a look of wild happiness, laughing and stammering, as he did when he was on a roll-beginning every clause in his long sentences with "Thee-ah, thee-ah, thee-ah this is the finest cuisine in Europe. Thee-ah, thee-ah Chick is a great skeptic when it comes to the French. He, thee-ah, thinks their cooking is all they have to show for themselves since the disgrace of the thee-ah-thee-ah 1940 when Hitler danced his victory jig. Chick sees _la France pourrie__ in Sartre, in the loathing of the U.S.A. thee-ah and worship of Stalinism and in philosophy and linguistic theory. Thee-ah hermeneutics-he says _harmo__neutics are little sandwiches eaten by musicians during the intermission. But you have to admit that you can't get a meal like this anywhere else. Notice how Rosamund is glowing. Now there's a woman who relishes exquisite food and thee-ah thee-ah thee-ah restaurateur's presentation. Also Nikki, someone who can judge cookery-you wouldn't deny it, Chick."

No, I would not. Nikki was training in a Swiss hotel school. I can't say more than that because I'm not the ideal person to recall the minute particulars but Nikki was an accredited maоtre d'. He was ready to go into fits of laughter when he modeled the cutaway coat of his trade for Ravelstein and me, and put on his professional dignities.

Now tonight's dinner had been laid on for me. It was Ravelstein's way of thanking his friend Chick for the support he had given him in the writing of his bestseller. The idea of the entire project, he said, was mine from the first. It would never have been done if I hadn't urged him to do it. This was always and handsomely acknowledged by Abe-"It was Chick who put me up to it."

There is a parallel between inner-city phenomena and the mental disarray of the U. S., the winner of the Cold War, the only super power remaining. That's one way of boiling it down. This is what Ravelstein's books and articles had to tell us. He took you from antiquity to the Enlightenment, and then-by way of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau onward to Nietzsche, Heidegger-to the present moment, to corporate, high-tech America, its culture and its entertainments, its press, its educational system, its think tanks, its politics. He gave you a picture of this mass democracy and its characteristic-woeful-human product. In his classroom, and the lectures were always packed, he coughed, stammered, he smoked, bawled, laughed, he brought his students to their feet and debated, provoked them to single combat, examined, hammered them. He didn't ask, "Where will you spend eternity?" as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, "With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?"

This tall pin-or chalk-striped dude with his bald head (you always felt there was something dangerous about its whiteness, its white force, its dents) did not step up to the platform to bore you silly with the correct order of the epochs (the Age of Faith, the Age of Reason, the Romantic Revolution), nor did he present himself as an academic, or as a campus rebel encouraging revolutionary behavior. The strikes and campus takeovers of the sixties had set the country back significantly, he said. He did not court students by putting on bull-session airs or try to scandalize them-entertain them actually, as histrionic lecturers do-by shouting "Shit!" or "Fuck!" There was nothing at all of the campus wildman about him. His frailties were visible. He obsessively knew what it was to be sunk by his faults or his errors. But before he went under he would describe Plato's Cave to you. He would tell you about your soul, already thin, and shrinking fast-faster and faster.

He attracted gifted students. His classes were always full up. So it presently occurred to me that he had only to put on the page what he was doing viva voce. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Ravelstein to write a popular book.

Furthermore, to be perfectly frank, I was tired of hearing about his unsatisfactory salary, his Byzantine borrowing habits, and the deals and arrangements he made putting his treasures in hock, his Jensen teapot or his Quimper antique plates. After following with more exasperation than interest the story of his beautiful Jensen teapot five years in the hands of Cecil Moers, one of his own Ph.D.'s, given as security for a $5,000 loan (and finally sold by this Ph.D. for ten thousand to some dealer), I said, "How long can you expect me to put up with this boring dispute, this boring teapot, and all your other boring luxury articles? Look, Abe, if you're living beyond your means, a struggling aristocrat victimized by his need for beautiful objects, why don't you increase those means?"

At this, I recall, Ravelstein brought both hands to both his ears. The hands were finely made, the ears were gross. "What-should I register with an escort service?"

"Well, you're not much of a dancer. You might hire out as a dinner-table conversationalist. Like a thousand bucks a night… No, what I have in mind for you is a book. You could base a popular book on your actual class notes."

"Yah," he said. "Like Fielding's poor Parson Adams who goes to London to have his sermons printed. The parson needed money, and he had nothing to sell except his sermons. He had written them out. I don't even have notes. The advice you're giving me, Chick, is the advice of a much-published author. You remind me of Dwight Macdonald. He said to Venetsky, one of his friends, who was dead broke-absolutely at wit's end for money-'If you're in such a bind, Venetsky, why don't you sell one of your bonds. One can always do that.' It never would have occurred to him that Venetsky _had__ no bonds. The Macdonalds had them. The Venetskys didn't."

"This is Macdonald as Marie Antoinette."

"Yes!" Ravelstein shouted, laughing. "Thee-ah old depression joke about the hobo who pitches a rich old lady and says, 'Ma'am, I haven't swallowed a bite of food in three days.'

'O you poor man, you must force yourself,' she says."

"I don't see how you can miss on this," I told Ravelstein. "All you have to do is prepare a proposal. At the very least you can get a small advance. It couldn't be less than twenty-five hundred dollars. My guess would be nearer to five thousand. Even if you never write a word of this proposed book, you'll pay off some of the debts and re vive your borrowing power. How can you lose?"

He jumped at this. To bilk a publisher out of a few thousand bucks and at the same time free himself to wheel and deal was tremendously appealing. In outlook, he was anything but petty. But he did not expect my Utopian brainstorm to come to anything. He had gotten used to the theater of small-time intrigue where he could ironically, satirically dramatize and assert his exceptional stature and scope. So the outline was prepared and sent, a contract was signed, the advance was paid. The priceless Jensen silver teapot was gone for good, but Ravelstein's credit line was reopened. He wired money to Nikki in Geneva, who bought a new outfit from Gianfranco Ferre. Nikki had the instincts of a prince, he dressed like one-in Nikki, Ravelstein saw a brilliant young man who had every right to assert himself. This was not a matter of style or self-presentation. We are speaking here of a young man's nature and not of his strategies.

To his own surprise, Abe Ravelstein then found himself writing the book he had signed up to do. The surprise was general among his friends and the three or four generations of students he had trained. Some of these disapproved. They opposed what they saw as the popularization, or cheapening, of his ideas. But teaching, even if you are teaching Plato or Lucretius or Machiavelli or Bacon or Hobbes, is a kind of popularization. The products of their great minds have been in print for centuries and accessible to a general public blind to their esoteric significance. For all the great texts had esoteric significance, he believed and taught. This, I think, has to be mentioned, but no more than mentioned. The simplest of human beings is, for that matter, esoteric and radically mysterious.

One more odd bit from that evening at Lucas-Carton. It ended with an after-dinner wine. We had come to the estuary of the feast and were once more facing the gulf of common fare. Ravelstein pulled out his French checkbook. He had never before had a Paris account. For long years he had been a tourist or midlevel worship per of French civilization-but under a budgetary cloud-wanting to be a high-stepper, but broke. On our own side of the Atlantic there was a shadow parallel to this. As a Jew you are also an American, but somehow you are also not. Imagine, however, reaching into your pocket to leave a grand seigneur tip and finding little more than lint along the seam. But Ravelstein, with his shaking hand, wrote tonight's check in an ecstasy. Now the waiter had brought a dish of chocolate truffles with the bill and it broke Ravel stein up to see Rosamund opening her purse and wrapping up the small peaked chocolates covered with cocoa dust. "Take em! Take every last one," said Ravelstein the Jewish comedian. He raised his cracked nightclub voice. "Those are edible souvenirs. Every one you eat will bring this feast back to you. You can write it down in your diary and remember how bold and forward you were, dumping these truffles into your bag."

Ravelstein thought all the better of you for stepping out of line. Later, he would occasionally say to Rosamund, "Don't give me that well-bred-young-lady, lace-paper-doily routine. I saw you swiping those chocolates at Lucas-Carton." The fact is that he liked minor crimes and misdemeanors. Just under the surfaces of his preferences there were always ideas to be found. In this instance the idea was that uniform good conduct was a very bad sign. Ravelstein himself, moreover, had a weakness for goodies-what he called _friandise__. On his way home from the office he often stopped at the grocery store to buy a bag of kid candy. He'd stuff himself with sugared fruit-jellies, preferably lime-flavored half-moons.

What made Rosamund's scooping up of the truffles particularly appealing was that she was a very pretty, well-brought-up, mannerly, intelligent young woman. It pleased him that she had fallen in love with an old guy like me. "There's a class of women who naturally go for old men," he said. As I've already indicated, he was drawn to irregular behavior. Especially where love was the motive. He rated longing very highly. Looking for love, falling in love, you were pining for the other half you had lost, as Aristophanes had said. Only it wasn't Aristophanes at all, but Plato in a speech attributed to Aristophanes. In the beginning men and women were round like the sun and the moon, they were both male and female and had two sets of sexual organs. In some cases both the organs were male. So the myth went. These were proud, self-sufficient beings. They defied the Olympian Gods who punished them by split ting them in half. This is the mutilation that mankind suffered. So that generation after generation we seek the missing half, longing to be whole again.

I was no sort of scholar. Like all, or most, of the students of my generation I had read Plato's _Symposium__. Wonderful entertainment, I thought. But I was sent back to it by Ravelstein. Not literally sent. But if you were continually in his company you had to go back to the _Symposium__ repeatedly. To be human was to be severed, mutilated. Man is incomplete. Zeus is a tyrant. Mount Olympus is a tyranny. The work of humankind in its severed state is to seek the missing half. And after so many generations your true counterpart is simply not to be found. Eros is a compensation granted by Zeus-for possibly political reasons of his own. And the quest for your lost half is hopeless. The sexual embrace gives temporary self-forgetting but the painful knowledge of mutilation is permanent.

Anyway, it was just after midnight when we got up to go. Across the way there was a brilliant display of orchids. We were drawn by the lights and colors of the flower shop and we crossed the empty street. There was a vertical opening in the plate glass-two lines of brass edging-to let the flower odors into the carbon monoxide of the place de la Madeleine. More French seduction. The hookers used to congregate in front of the great church, where all state funerals are held. Ravelstein reminded me of this.

There was Ravelstein for you. If you didn't know this about him, you couldn't know him at all. Without its longings your soul was a used inner tube maybe good for one summer at the beach, nothing more. Spirited men and women, the young above all, were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death. There, in the briefest form possible, you have a sketch of Ravelstein's most important preoccupations.

I feel that I do him an injustice by speaking so simplistically. He was a very complex man. Did he really share the view (attributed by Socrates to Aristophanes) that we were seeking the other that is a part of oneself? Nothing could move him more than a genuine in stance of this quest. Moreover, he was forever looking for signs of it in everyone he knew. Naturally his students were included. Odd, for a professor to be thinking of the kids in his seminars as actors in this staggering eternal drama. His first move when they arrived was to order them to forget about their families. Their fathers were shopkeepers in Crawfordsville, Indiana, or Pontiac, Illinois. The sons thought long and hard about _The Peloponnesian Wars__, about the _Symposium__, and the _Phaedrus__ and didn't consider it at all singular that they were soon more familiar with Nicias and Alcibiades than with the milk train or the ten-cent store. Bit by bit, Ravelstein also got them to confide in him. They told him their stories. They held nothing back. It was amazing how much Ravelstein learned about them. It was partly his passion for gossip that brought in the information he wanted. He not only trained them, he formed them, he distributed them into groups and subgroups and placed them in sexual categories, as he thought appropriate. Some were going to be husbands and fathers, some would be queer-the regular, the irregular, the deep, the entertaining, the gamblers, plungers; the born scholars, those with a gift for philosophy; lovers, plodders, bureaucrats, narcissists, chasers. He gave a good deal of thought to all of this. He had hated and shaken off his own family. He told students that they had come to the university to learn something, and this meant that they must rid themselves of the opinions of their parents. He was going to direct them to a higher life, full of variety and diversity, governed by rationality-anything but the arid kind. If they were lucky, if they were bright and willing, Ravelstein would give them the greatest gift they could hope to receive and lead them through Plato, introduce them to the esoteric secrets of Maimonides, teach them the correct interpretation of Machiavelli, acquaint them with the higher humanity of Shakespeare-up to and beyond Nietzsche. It wasn't an academic program that he offered-it was more freewheeling than that. And on the whole his program was effective. Not one of his students became a Ravelstein in scope. But most of them were highly intelligent and very satisfactorily singular. He wanted them to be singular. He loved the kinkier students-they could never be kinky enough to suit him. But of course they had to know the fundamentals and know them diabolically well. "Isn't _he__ the twisted one?" he'd say about one or another of them. "Were you sent an offprint of his latest article-'Historicism and Philosophy'? I told him to put it in your box."

I had looked at it. It left me feeling like an ant who sets out to cross the Andes.

Ravelstein urged his young men to rid themselves of their parents. But in the community that formed around him his role be came, bit by bit, that of a father. Of course, if they weren't going to make it he didn't hesitate to throw them out. But once they became his intimates he planned their futures. He'd say to me, "Ali is as smart as they come. Do you approve of the Irish girl he's living with?"

"Well, I haven't seen much of her. She does seem bright."

"Bright is only part one. She gave up a career in law to study with me. She's got a very superior set of knockers, also. She and Ali have lived together about five years."

"Then she has a legitimate investment in him."

"I see what you mean. Though you make him sound like a piece of property. And remember he's a Muslim. He's got a regular human pyramid of an Egyptian family… I mean." He wondered whether it was uncommon for Muslims to fall in love. Passionate love was his perennial interest. But in the Middle East, arranged marriages remained the custom. "Still, Edna, in her own right, beats any pyramid." He had studied Edna, too. He gave much thought to student matches. "She's a deep one, obviously, and quite a beauty, too."

As I have said, we had planned today to discuss the memoir I was going to write, but this wasn't a good day for biographical details. "Come to think of it," Abe said, "I don't want to go over early times again-my effective mother educated at Johns Hopkins, top of her class. And my dumbhead father held it against me that I didn't make Phi Beta Kappa. In what mattered I had top grades. For the required courses B's and C's were good enough. Still, no matter how well I did-invited to Yale or Harvard to lecture-my dad to the end threw it in my face that I hadn't made Phi Beta K. His mind was a sort of Georgia swamp-Okefenokee with neurotic lights playing over it. A failure, of course he was, but with some hidden merit-so well buried it could never be found again."

Then Ravelstein stopped and said, "I think I'd rather go along the rue St. Honorй this morning…."

"Or what's left of the morning."

"Rosamund will sleep in. We wore her out with last night's glam our-a beautiful lady at dinner with three desirable men. You'd only be a bother to your wife before one o'clock. I'd like your advice about a sports coat at Lanvin. I told the salesman I'd stop by in the a. m. I'm a little dopey this morning-I was nodding just now. Being torpid is a condition I especially dislike…."

We left the penthouse. The moment was well chosen because several floors below the elevator stopped and Michael Jackson and his people got in. There he was in one of his spangled costumes, gold on black-a tight fit. His curls were fresh and his slim smile was chaste. In spite of yourself you studied him for signs of facial surgery. His air I thought was wistfully transitional. Golden boys coming to dust, like chimney sweepers.

Ravelstein, who was as big as any of the bodyguards-even bigger but certainly not so strong-loved this brief moment of contact. He was like that-the pleasure of a moment consumed him.

On the main floor, the guards cleared a way for Jackson as if they were swimming, doing the breaststroke. There were lots of people in the lobby. The big crowd was outside, in the street beyond the police barrier. But we were pressed together and held back behind braided gilt cords. The star walked out delicately waving to the hundreds of shouting groupies. Abe Ravelstein didn't at all mind being behind the ropes. Paris today was Paris as it should be. The kings who had laid out Versailles directed the architects to build the magnificent public spaces of the capital. These, today, were Ravelstein's setting. He was the grandee in the new order of things, carrying his credit cards and checks, willing to spend his dollars-if there had been a better hotel than the Crillon, Abe would have gone there. These days, Ravelstein was a magnificent man. The bills were paid by credit card and charged to his account at Merrill Lynch. Ravel stein seldom checked his statements. From time to time, Nikki, who wasn't supposed to do it, looked them over. His only aim was to protect Abe. It was thanks to Nikki that a major swindler in Singapore was discovered. Someone there had used Abe's Visa card to run up a $30,000 tab. "The signature was an obvious forgery," said Abe, not too upset. "Visa took care of it. International electronic swindles are the order of the day. The crooks learn to get ahead of high technology like inventive bacteria that outwit the pharmaceuticals, while the brainy researchers in the labs figure out how to stay ahead. Little campus geniuses outsmarting the Pentagon."

On the rue St. Honorй, Ravelstein was perfectly happy. We went from one shop display to the next.

The French term for window shopping is _lиche-vitrines__-licking the plate glass. This requires perfect leisure, and our breakfast had used up most of the morning. Still we did linger over the displays of socks and neckties and made-to-order shirts. Then we walked a little faster. I said to Abe that these luxurious displays made me feel tense. Too many attractions. I couldn't bear to be pulled from all sides.

"I've noticed," said Ravelstein, "that since your marriage your dress standards have dropped. You once were something of a dude."

He said this with regret. From time to time he would buy me a necktie-never one that I would have chosen for myself. These gift-ties were something of a put-down, to remind me that I was becoming dowdy. But there was more in it than that. Ravelstein was a bigger man than me. He was able to make a striking statement. Because of his larger size, he could wear clothes with more dramatic effect. I wouldn't have dreamed of disputing this. To be really handsome a man should be tall. A tragic hero has to be above the average in height. I hadn't read Aristotle in ages but I remembered this much from the _Poetics__.

In the rue St. Honorй, loaded with all the glamour of French history and politics-with all the special claims made for French civilization-what came back to me was that old music-hall number called "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo." There is a _flвneur__ who strolls in the Bois de Boulogne with an independent air. And he is debonair. And of course the people stare.

Things don't happen at all if they don't happen in Paris, or are brought to the attention of Paris. That bursting old furnace, Balzac, established this as a first principle. What Paris hadn't vetted didn't even exist.

Of course Ravelstein knew too much about the modern world to agree with this. Ravelstein was, remember, the man at the private command post of telephones with complex keyboards and flashing lights and state-of-the-art stereo playing Palestrina on the original instruments. France, alas, was no longer the center of judgment, enlightenment. It was not the home of cyberspace. It no longer attracted the world's great intellects and all the rest of that cultural _schtuss__. The French had _had__ it. De Gaulle the human giraffe sniffing down his nostrils. Churchill saying about him that England's offense had been to help _la France__. The lofty military creature gazing on the treetops of the late-modern world could not suffer the thought that his country needed help.

Abe's mind was never short of items to fill out or document the times. '"France without an army is not France'-Churchill again. " My taste in conversation was similar. I couldn't do it but I loved to hear it done. Ravelstein did it infinitely better. He took a special interest in Great Politics. In that line, of course, France today was bankrupt. Only the manner was left, and they made the most of the manner but they were bluffing, they knew they were talking twaddle. What they were still good at were the arts of intimacy. Eats still rated high-e. g., last night's banquet at Lucas-Carton. In every _quartier__, the fresh-produce markets, the good bakeries, the charcuterie with its cold cuts. Also the great displays of intimate garments. The shameless love of fine bedding. "_Viens, viens dans mes bras, je te donne du chocolat. __" It was wonderful to be so public about the private, about the living creature and its needs. Slick magazines in New York imitated this but never got it right…. Yes, and then there was the French street life. "American residential streets are humanly nine-tenths barren. Here humankind is still acting up," said Ravelstein.

Ravelstein the sinner did have a taste for sexy mischief. He relished _louche__ encounters, the fishy and the equivocal. For certain kinds of conduct, or misconduct, Paris was still the best place. If Ravelstein walking, smiling, expounding, stammered, it was not from weakness but from overflow. The famous light of Paris was concentrated on his bald head.

"How far is the joint we're going to?"

"Don't be impatient, Chick. You make me feel you always have something more important to do than what you're doing now."

I didn't defend myself-didn't even try. Our destination, Lanvin, was close by but we were detained en route by various shops. Optometrists always held Ravelstein up. He was familiar with every sort of frame. There he wasn't alone. According to a survey, the average American woman has three pairs of sunglasses. "O, reason not the need!" — poor Lear's defense of superfluities. Abe loved specs; he bought them also as gifts. He gave me the folding kind that go into a small case made for an outer pocket. He swore off contact lenses after he lost one in a spaghetti sauce he was cooking. Rosamund and I had been his dinner guests that evening, and jokes were made about a new kind of hindsight.-Or was a contact lens humanly digestible? As hard iron was said to be, for ostriches.

"What does this Lanvin jacket have that your twenty others haven't?" I wanted to say. But I knew perfectly well that in Abe's head there were all kinds of distinctions having to do with prodigality and illiberality, magnanimity and meanness. The attributes of the great-souled man. I didn't want to get him started. Neither did he want to get started, this morning.

Back in the Middle West, not so long ago, when he was still hard up and complained about his wardrobe, I took him downtown to Gesualdo, my tailor, to get him measured for a suit. In Gesualdo's loft he picked a bold-looking flannel from a good Scotch mill. We had three or four fittings and in my opinion the final product was very handsome. I spent a good piece of change on it. Just then I had a book on the low end of the best-seller list; it never rose past the middle but I was more than satisfied. A child of the Great Depression, I was happy with middling returns. My standards had been set in the meager thirties. Fifteen hundred bucks should have bought us a top-of-the-line suit. Even in my dude days (I had a very short fashion-plate phase) I had never gone beyond five hundred bucks for a suit. This, at the time, was what students who had just passed the bar exam were paying. When they later became partners, they stopped going to Gesualdo's. They found themselves classier tailors, the kind used by surgeons, professional athletes, and racketeers.

Ravelstein and I had it out about Gesualdo's suit. "Listen, Chick," Ravelstein said. "The real value of that suit was not in the cut of it-not the workmanship…"

"You and Nikki made fun of it when you put it on at home. You never wore it but once, to please me…."

"I can't deny that I didn't think it fit for use."

"Use isn't the word. You two wouldn't have dressed a dummy in it."

Ravelstein, a chain smoker lighting another cigarette, twisted his trunk backward, perhaps to avoid the lighter flame, perhaps because he was laughing so hard. When he could speak, he said, "Well, it wasn't Lanvin. You wanted to do something for me. It was generous, Chick, and Nikki was the first to say it. But Gesualdo is way behind the times. He makes mafiosi-type clothes, not for the dons but for the soldiers, the lower-rank gangsters."

"So much for the way _I__ dress."

"You have no interest in fashion. You don't care about name brands. You should have given me the dough you paid Gesualdo and then I would have raised the rest for a decently cut garment."

We were perfectly open with each other. You could speak your mind without offending. On either side there was nothing too personal, too shameful to be said, nothing too nasty or criminal. I did feel at times that he was sparing me his most severe judgments if I wasn't just then ready to stand up under them. I used to spare him, too. But it gave me tremendous relief to be as plain and clear with him as I would be with myself about weak or vicious things. In self-understanding he was well ahead of me. But every personal discussion turned finally into good, clean, nihilistic fun.

"Maybe an unexamined life is not worth living. But a man's examined life can make him wish he was dead" was what I said to him.

Ravelstein was overjoyed. He laughed so hard his eyes turned up to heaven.

But I'm not done yet with Paris in the Spring.

The gorgeous jacket at Lanvin was beautiful flannel, silky as well as substantial. The color was one I associated with Labrador retrievers-golden, with rich lights among the folds. "You see such jackets advertised in _Vanity Fair__ and the other fashion slicks, and they're usually modeled by unshaven toughs with the look of rough trade or of downright rapists who have nothing-but nothing-to do, other than being seen in all the glory of their dirty narcissism." You don't even think of such a garment on an unwieldy intelligent man. A little fat in the chest, maybe, or with lover's handles at the waist. It's actually a pleasant thing to see.

I advised Ravelstein to buy this Lanvin jacket.

The price was $4,500 and he put it on his Visa Gold card because he wasn't sure offhand about his balance at the Crйdit Lyonnais. Visa protects you from gouging; it guarantees you the legal rate of exchange for the day of the transaction.

In the street he asked how the color held up in full daylight. He was deeply satisfied when I said it was gorgeous.

Our next stop was Sulka's, where he looked over the custom-made shirts he had ordered. They were to be delivered to the Crillon, each one in a durable plastic box. We then went to the Lalique showrooms, where he wanted to look at lighting fixtures for his walls and ceilings at home.

"Let's set aside half an hour for Gelot the hatmaker."

At Gelot's I broke down and bought myself a green corduroy fedora. Abe said I had to have it. "I like the look of it on you. You can do with a little assertion. You don't make enough of yourself," he said. "You're too fucking modest, Chick. It's unbecoming because anybody who catches your eye sees that you're an overweening megalomaniac. If you're too stingy to do it I'll put it on my account…."

"My parents had green sofas at home," I said. "Secondhand, but velvet. I'll pay for it myself…. I'm buying this for old times' sake."

"It may be too heavy for June."

"Well, I expect to be still alive in October."

He was wearing his new Lanvin jacket on the rue de Rivoli. The great Louvre and the parks were on our left. The arcades were full of tourists.

"The Palais Royal"-Ravelstein gestured loosely toward it-"was where Diderot walked late every afternoon and where he had his famous conversations with Rameau's nephew." But Ravelstein was by no means like the nephew-that music teacher and sponger. He was above Diderot, too. A much larger and graver person with an extensive training in history, especially the history of moral and political theory. I was always drawn to people who were orderly in a large sense and had mapped out the world and made it coherent. Ravelstein only sounded incoherent with his "thee-ah thee-ah" s. We had a buddy back in the States who liked to tell us, "Order itself is charismatic." Which is another way of saying "Music hath charms" et cetera.

And we happened just then to be talking about this charisma-man whose name is, or was, Rakhmiel Kogon. Rakhmiel was a dead ringer for the actor Edmund Gwenn, who played a Macy's Santa Claus in _Miracle on 34th Street__. But Rakhmiel was a non-benevolent Santa Claus, a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed. He came down the chimney like Santa Claus, but his aim was to make trouble.

Ravelstein and I had no need for lunch-the Lucas-Carton ten-course banquet took away your appetite till dinnertime next day-but we sat down to drink some coffee. Ravelstein was on his second packet of Marlboro cigarettes, and at the Cafй de Flore, which he patronized regularly, he ordered "_un espresso trйs serrй.__" At the Flore they packed it tight for him. But if his big fingers shook when he picked up the cup it was not because he had a case of nerves. What he had was an overflow of excitement. The caffeine was the least of it.

He said, "Rakhmiel was one of my teachers, early on. Then he taught at the London School of Economics. Then at Oxford, where he turned British. Always divided his time between the U. S. and England. He's a serious person, not comfortable with himself. But I do owe him a lot-like my present position. I was in exile in Mi nesota and he got me the appointment I wanted…"

"_Almost__ what you wanted…"

"That's true. I'm the only one with rank who doesn't have a name chair. After all I've done for the university… And the only chair the administration offers me is the electric chair."

But Ravelstein was unusually free from such preoccupations and grievances. And this is not the place for them. I may return to this subject later. I probably won't. Anyway, it isn't what I should be presenting here. I _said__ I'd take a piecemeal approach to Ravelstein.

He was a curious man to watch at the table. His feeding habits needed getting used to. Mrs. Glyph, the wife of the founder of his department, told him once that he must never again expect her to ask him to dinner. She was in her own right a very rich lady, big on high culture and an entertainer of visiting celebrities. She had had R. H. Tawney at her dinner table, and Bertrand Russell, and some big-shot French Thomist whose name escapes me (Maritain?), and lots of literati, especially the French. Abe Ravelstein, then a junior faculty member, was invited to a luncheon to honor T. S. Eliot. Maria Glyph said to Abe Ravelstein as he was leaving, "You drank from your Coke bottle, and T. S. Eliot was watching-with horror."

Ravelstein told this on himself. And on the late Mrs. Glyph. She was born to huge wealth, her husband was a great orientalist. "People who are self-glamorized invent their peculiar significance as they go along," Ravelstein said. "Until they knit together a dazzling fantasy. They turn themselves into something like glorious dragonflies and whiz through an atmosphere of perfect unreality. Then they write essays, poems, whole books about each other…"

"Crude Jewish behavior at a lunch for a nob-a superimportant visitor…," I said.

"And what will T. S. think of us!"

But somehow I can't believe that drinking from a Coke bottle was the whole story. (And what, to begin with, was a Coke bottle doing on the table!) Faculty wives knew that when Ravelstein came to dinner they would face a big cleaning job afterward-the spilling, splashing, crumbling, the nastiness of his napkin after he had used it, the pieces of cooked meat scattered under the table, the wine sprayed out when he laughed at a wisecrack; courses rejected after one bite and pawed to the floor. An experienced hostess would have spread newspapers under his chair. He wouldn't have minded. He didn't pay much attention to such things. Of course each of us has ways of knowing what is going on. Abe _knew__-he knew what to bring to full consciousness and what to brush aside. Objecting to Abe's table manners would be a confession of pettiness.

It amused Ravelstein to say, "She wasn't going to let any kike behave so badly at _her__ table."

Professor Glyph, her husband, had no such prejudices. He was a tall, grave man. His manner was decorous but his real look seemed focused elsewhere, on objects more distant and even more amusing-more amusing than Ravelstein, I mean. His small eyes set wide apart were pleasant and tolerant; his hair, parted in the middle, was the hair of a learned gentleman, famous for his scholarship. His friends were mainly French, and prominent, with names like Bourbon-Sixte-either members of the Academy or short-listed for nomination. Glyph was pampered by his wife and her servants-a laundress, a cook, and a parlor maid. The Glyphs were no ordinary academic couple-they were at home in London as well as in Paris. In Saint-Tropez, or some such place, the Scott Fitzgeralds had been their close neighbors. Glyph and his wife were not your common name-droppers: They had been a rich American Jazz-Age couple. They had known Picasso and Gertrude Stein.

For some reason Ravelstein and I were talking about them at the Cafй de Flore. On especially enjoyable days I suffer an early afternoon drop-fine weather makes it all the worse. The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings-the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair. I'll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant. I had never spoken of this to Ravelstein but he probably sensed it. At times he seemed to be intervening on my behalf.

"Glyph loved the Pont Royal-it was his favorite hotel. Very close by," Ravelstein said. "And I'll tell you-when Mrs. Glyph died, Glyph came to Paris to grieve for her. He brought her papers along. His idea was to publish a collection of her essays. And he sent for Rakhmiel Kogon to help him-Rakhmiel was in Oxford."

"Why did Rakhmiel come?"

"He owed the old man. From way back. Glyph had saved Rakhmiel from being thrown out on his ear. He protected him-gave him sanctuary. This was before Rakhmiel became what academic fuckheads call 'a towering figure.' He came to Paris, anyway, and was also at the Pont Royal, though not in a suite. And every morning he reported to work on Maria Glyph's papers. Every morning Glyph would say, 'I have a cold, and Maria would not have wanted me to work today.' Or else, 'I must have my hair cut. Maria would say I am past due.' Or he would make an appointment with a Rochefoucauld or with a Bourbon-Sixte, while Rakhmiel organized her notes and read her crazy essays. But he was all the time drawn back to her journal. Because he was often mentioned there: _'Again that frightful little Jew, R. Kogon.'__ Or, _'I do my best to tolerate Herbert's repulsive protйgй Kogon, who gets Jewisher and viler and more unbearable by the day-with that brassy tomcat Jewface…__'"

"Kogon told you this himself?" I said.

"You bet he did. He couldn't help but be amused. He said she was such a Verdurin-a relentless social climber. When they're cultivated, such people have something more to exclude Jews from."

"But no serious person could take Mrs. Glyph seriously," I said.

"Did you know her, Chick?"

"I turned up just after she died. Glyph, a good man, unusually generous, would say 'my late wife' and then, for laughs, he'd add that she never was punctual. The second was a charmer-some people choose better as they go along. She turned out to be strong, generous, and clever. Once he invited me to dinner and he asked on the phone in his formal French style whether I objected to _'gens de couleur.'__ The guest was a gorgeous woman from Martinique-the wife of some famous art historian. Was it _the__ Rewald who wrote the book on Cйzanne?"

"You've always been lucky. You seldom make the most of your luck," said Ravelstein.

I was used to this. Ravelstein believed that I was gifted and bright but uneducated, naive and passive-inward. He said that when I was in the right company I was an inspired conversationalist and he told the students that there was no important subject I hadn't thought about.-Yes, but what had I done about all these big topics?

By following my suggestion Ravelstein had become very rich. And Rosamund after last night's celebration had said to me, "It was meant to be a great occasion. All the thanks and affection in Abe went into the Lucas-Carton symposium-dining, drink, and conversation Athenian-style." She had been one of Ravelstein's learned groupies. She was good at Greek. To study with Ravelstein you had to read your Xenophon, Thucydides, and Plato in Greek.

While I laughed at the way she described her teacher, I agreed.

She was unlike most other observant persons in that she also thought clearly. This was one of Rosamund's talents. But she also loved Ravelstein. She was one of his great admirers.

Abe went for his third _espresso serrй__ when the waiter set it down; Ravelstein's big, unskillful hand gripped the little cup as he carried it to his mouth. I would have given big odds on the outcome if a bet had been offered. Brown stains appeared on the lapel of his new coat. It was unpreventable-a fatality. He was still drinking the espresso; his head was far back. I kept my mouth shut, turning away from the large brown blot on the Lanvin coat. Another sort of man might have sensed at once that something had happened-someone, perhaps, who took money more seriously and who would feel somehow the responsibility involved in the wearing of a $4,500 garment. Ravelstein's neckties from Hermes or Ermenegildo Zegna were dotted with cigarette burns. I tried to interest him in bow ties. I said they would be protected under his chin. He saw the point, but he wouldn't buy ready-mades: He had never learned to knot a "papillon" (as he called it). "My fingers are too unsteady," he observed.

"Ah, well," he said, when he at last saw that he had soiled his Lanvin lapel. "I've fucked up again."

I didn't laugh at his remark.

A decision had to be made at this point. The coffee spill was funny, it was pure Ravelstein. He himself had just said so. But I did not treat it as a comic incident. I suggested in a somewhat stifled manner that the stains might be removed. "The valet service at the Crillon probably can do it."

"You think so?"

"If they can't, it can't be done anywhere."

You had to be something of a specialist to follow the movements of his mind. You had to distinguish between what people had been taught that they ought to do and what they deeply desired to do. According to certain thinkers, all men were enemies; they feared and hated one another. There was a war of all against all, in the state of nature. Sartre has told us in one of his plays that hell is "the others"-Abe detested Sartre, by the way, and despised his ideas. Philosophy is not my trade. True, I had studied Machiavelli and Hobbes at school, and I suppose that I could bluff my way through a quiz show. I was, however, a quick study, and I had learned quite a lot from Ravelstein because I was devoted to him. I "cherished" him, as one of my acquaintances had taught me to say.

Obviously, my purpose in mentioning the Crillon's valet service was to comfort Abe for spilling the Flore's strongest coffee on his brand-new jacket. But Abe didn't want me to console him for being what he was. He would have thought better of me for laughing at his sputtering reckless slobbering, his gauche eager tremors. He liked broad comedy, old vaudeville routines, wounding remarks, brashness, and raw fun. So he didn't think well of my weak, liberal, let's-make-it-all-better motive-my foolish kindness.

Abe took no stock in kindness. When students didn't meet his standards he said, "I was wrong about you. This is no place for you. I won't have you around." The feelings of the rejects didn't concern him. "Better for them if they hate me. It'll sharpen their minds. There's too much therapeutic bullshit, altogether."

He said that all kinds of creatures imposed on me and wasted my time. "Read any good book about Abe Lincoln," he advised me, "and see how people bugged him during the Civil War about jobs, about war contracts, franchises, consular appointments, and mad military ideas. As president of all the people he thought he was obliged to talk to all these parasites, creeps, and promoters. All the while he was standing in a river of blood. War measures made him a tyrant-he had to cancel the habeas corpus writ, you know. There was a higher thee-ah thee-ah need. He had to keep Maryland from joining the Confederacy."

Of course my needs were different from Ravelstein's. In my trade you have to make more allowances, taking all sorts of ambiguities into account-to avoid hardedged judgments. All this refraining may resemble naivetй. But it isn't quite that. In art you become familiar with due process. You can't simply write people off or send them to hell.

On the other hand, as Ravelstein saw, I was willing to take risks-abnormally willing. "Humongous risks " was how he put it. "It's hard, all-in-all, to find a less prudent person than you, Chick. When I consider your life, I begin to be tempted to believe in a _fatum__. You have a _fatum__. You really are one for sticking your neck out. And maybe the thee-ah neck is not all that sticks out. But what I want to say is that your guidance system is extremely defective."

But it was just this absurdity that Ravelstein liked. "You never do the safe thing if there's a risky alternative. You're what people would call feckless, in the days when such words were still in use. Of course we're good and fed up with personality profiles, or defects. One reason why violence is so popular may be that psychiatric insights have worn us out and we get satisfaction from seeing them blown away with automatic weapons, or exploding in cars, or being garroted or stuffed by taxidermists. We're so sick of having to think about everybody's problems-Grand Guignol mock-destruction isn't good enough for the bastards."

He liked to raise his long arms over the light gathered on his bald head and give a comic cry.

It occurs to me that this account of mine will lead to charges of misanthropy. Ravelstein was anything but a misanthrope or a cynic. He was as generous as they come-a reservoir, a source of energy for the students he accepted. Many came with the good democratic premise that he should oblige them all and share his ideas with them. Of course he refused to let himself be used, enjoyed-tapped by idlers. "I'm not the pipe at Saratoga Springs, where the Bronx Jews came in summer with cups to drink life-giving water for free-a remedy for constipation or hardening of the arteries. I'm not a free commodity or public giveaway, _am__ I! Incidentally the wonder-working water turned out to be carcinogenic. Bad for the liver. Worse for the pancreas." He laughed at this-not with pleasure.

If these characters hadn't come by bus and train to drink Saratoga water they would have eaten or drunk something just as deadly in Flatbush or Brownsville. How can you tabulate the endless dangers of tobacco, of food preservatives, asbestos, the stuff the crops are sprayed with-the _E. coli__ from raw chicken on the hands of the kitchen employees. "Nothing is more bourgeois than the fear of death," Ravelstein would say. He gave these little anti-sermons in a wacko style. He reminded me of the rag-doll dancers, clowns of the twenties who waved their tattered, nerveless long arms and painted huge smiles on their powdered faces. So that Ravelstein's serious preoccupations "coexisted," to borrow a word from twentieth-century politics, with his buffoonery. Only his friends saw this side of him. He could be correct enough on serious occasions, not as a concession to academic fussbudgets but because there were real issues to be considered-matters related to the purpose of our existence: say, the correct ordering of the human soul-and there he was as stable and earnest as any of the deepest and greatest of teachers. Ravelstein was vigorous and hard. Although even while teaching one of his Platonic dialogues he allowed himself to cut a caper. He sometimes said, "Yes, I play the _pitre__."

"The straight man."

"The buffoon."

We had both lived in France. The French were genuinely educated-or had been so once. They had taken a bad beating in this century. However, they had a real feeling for beautiful objects still, for leisure, for reading and conversation; they didn't despise creaturely needs-the human basics. I keep making this pitch for the French.

On any street you could buy a baguette, a pair of underpants _taille grand patron__, or beer or brandy or coffee or _charcuterie__. Ravelstein was an atheist, but there was no reason why an atheist should not be influenced by the Sainte-Chapelle, should not read Pascal. For a civilized man there was no background, no atmosphere like the Parisian. For my part I had often felt myself hustled and despised by Parisians. I didn't see Vichy solely as a product of the Nazi occupation. I had ideas of my own about collaboration and fascism.

"I don't know whether it's your Jewish edginess or your unnatural need for a friendly welcome," said Ravelstein. "Or maybe you feel the Frenchies are ungrateful. I don't believe it's hard to prove that Paris is a better place than Detroit or Newark or Hartford."

It was a minor disagreement involving no big principles. Abe had excellent friends in Paris. He was well received by the _йcoles__ and _instituts__ where he lectured on French subjects in his own sort of French. He himself had studied in Paris years ago under the famous Hegelian and high official Alexander Kojиve, who had educated a whole generation of influential thinkers and writers. Among these Abe had quite a few buddies, admirers, readers. In the States he was controversial. He had more enemies at home than any normal per son could want, especially among social scientists and philosophers.

But I have only the limited knowledge of these things that a non-specialist can have. Abe Ravelstein and I were close friends. We lived on the same street, and we were in almost daily contact. I was often invited to attend his seminars and to discuss literature with graduate students. In the old days there was still a considerable literary community in our country, and medicine and law were still "the learned professions," but in an American city today you can no longer count on doctors, lawyers, businessmen, journalists, politicians, television personalities, architects, or commodities traders to discuss Stendhal's novels or Thomas Hardy's poems. You occasion ally do come across a reader of Proust or a crank who has memorized whole pages of _Finnegans Wake__. I like to say, when I am asked about Finnegan, that I am saving him for the nursing home. Better to enter eternity with Anna Livia Plurabelle than with the Simpsons jittering on the TV screen.

I wonder what terms to apply to Ravelstein's large, handsome apartment-his Midwestern base. It wouldn't be right to describe it as a sanctuary: Abe was in no sense a fugitive. Nor a solitary. He was actually on good terms with his American surroundings. His windows gave him a huge view of the city. He seldom had to use public transportation in his later years, but he knew his way around, he spoke the language of the city. Young blacks would stop him in the street to ask about his suit or his topcoat, his fedora. They were familiar with high fashion. They talked to him about Ferre, Lanvin, about his Jermyn Street shirtmaker. "These young dudes," he explained, "are lovers of high fashion. Zoot suits and such crudities are things of the past. They're extremely savvy about automobiles, too."

"And maybe about twenty-thousand-dollar wristwatches. And what about handguns?"

Ravelstein laughed. "Even black women stop me in the street to comment on the cut of my suits," he said. "They're intuitively responsive."

His heart warmed toward such connoisseurs-lovers of elegance.

The admiration of black adolescents helped Ravelstein to offset the hatred of his colleagues, the professors. The popular success of his book drove the academics mad. He exposed the failings of the system in which they were schooled, the shallowness of their historicism, their susceptibility to European nihilism. A summary of his argument was that while you could get an excellent technical training in the U.S., liberal education had shrunk to the vanishing point. We were in thrall to the high tech, which had transformed the modern world. The older generation saved toward the education of its children. The cost of a B.A. had risen to $150,000. Parents might as well flush these dollars down the toilet, Ravelstein believed. No real education was possible in American universities except for aeronautical engineers, computerists, and the like. The universities were excellent in biology and the physical sciences, but the liberal arts were a failure. The philosopher Sidney Hook had told Ravelstein that philosophy was finished. "We have to find jobs for our graduates as medical ethicists in hospitals," Hook had admitted.

Ravelstein's book was not at all wild. Had he been a noisy wind bag he would have been easy to dismiss. No, he was sensible and well informed, his arguments were thoroughly documented. All the dunces were united against him (as Swift or maybe Pope ex pressed it long ago). If they had had the powers of the FBI, the professors would have put Ravelstein on "most wanted" posters like those in federal buildings.

He had gone over the heads of the profs and the learned societies to speak directly to the great public. There are, after all, mil lions of people waiting for a sign. Many of them are university graduates.

When Ravelstein's outraged colleagues attacked him, he said he felt like the American general besieged by the Nazis-was it at Remagen? When they demanded his surrender, his answer was "Nuts to you!" Ravelstein was upset, of course; who wouldn't have been? And he couldn't expect to be rescued by some academic Pat-ton. He could rely on his friends, and of course he had generations of graduate students on his side as well as the support of truth and principle. His book was well received in Europe. The Brits were inclined to look down their noses at him. The universities found fault, some of them, with his Greek. But when Margaret Thatcher invited him to Chequers for a weekend, he was _"aux anges"__ (Chequers was heavenly: Abe always preferred French expressions to American ones; he didn't say "a chaser" or "a womanizer" or "ladies' man"-he said _"un homme a femmes."__). Even bright young left-wingers were strongly for him.

At Chequers, Mrs. Thatcher called his attention to a painting by Titian: a rearing lion caught in a net. A mouse was gnawing at the cords to set the lion free. (Is that one of Aesop's fables?) This detail had been lost in the shadows for centuries. One of the greatest men of the century, the statesman Winston Churchill, with his own brushes had restored the mythic mouse.

When he returned from England, Abe told me all about it in his own parlor (a drawing room it was not). He had paintings of his own, done by minor but good French artists. Some were quite handsome. The largest was a Judith with the head of Holofernes, a very bloody picture. She's got Holofernes by the hair. His eyes are upcast, half closed, her look is calm, pure, and saintly. I sometimes think he never knew what hit him. There are worse ways to go. I would now and then ask Ravelstein why he had chosen _this__ painting to dominate the parlor.

"No particular statement is being made," he said.

"Everything we see we translate into Freud's language. Now, which is being trivialized, his vocabulary or our observations?"

"You can always refuse to be co-opted," said Ravelstein. He was not big on what Americans call "the visual arts." The canvases were there because walls were meant for paintings and paintings for walls. His apartment was luxuriously furnished, and the right pictures had to be hung. When the money began to come in he replaced all his "old" things. They weren't old at all. They were earlier, cheaper purchases. Even when he had no more than his university salary to live on he had bought expensive sofas, good Italian leather furniture on money borrowed from his friends. When he rose to the top of the best-seller list, he gave the old stuff away to Ruby Tyson, the black woman who came in twice weekly to wash up and do the dusting. He made the delivery arrangements for her of course, he paid for the trucking. He urgently needed the space and things couldn't be moved out fast enough to suit him.

I would say Ruby's duties were very light. She polished Ravelstein's silver, she washed the blue-and-white Quimper dinner service and the Lalique crystal plate by plate, glass by glass. She didn't do any ironing-his shirts were laundered by American Trustworthy Home-delivery Service. They cleaned his suits as well. He did lots of business with Trustworthy. All but his neckties. Those were sent via air express to a silk specialist in Paris.

New rugs and furniture continually arrived-all the replaced dining-room suites, china cabinets, bedsteads were probably handed on by Ruby to her daughters and grandchildren. She was a religious old woman, very formal Southern-style when she answered the telephone. She was a loyal presence in the household. He was perfectly clear about her and had no illusions about being ad mitted to intimacy, received into the soul of a respectable old black person. Besides she had worked in the university neighborhood for more than half a century and had much to tell him about the closets of academic households. She fed Ravelstein's appetite for gossip. He hated his own family and never tired of weaning his gifted students from their families. His students, as I've said, had to be cured of the disastrous misconceptions, the "standardized unrealities" imposed on them by mindless parents.

Certain difficulties of presentation arise here. You don't want to confuse Ravelstein with the campus "free spirits," common enough in my own student days. The job of such people was to make you aware of the bourgeois upbringing from which your education was supposed to free you. These liberated teachers offered themselves as models, sometimes seeing themselves as revolutionaries. They spoke youth gibberish. They wore ponytails, they grew beards. They were Ph. D. hippies and swingers.

Ravelstein had no such act-nothing you could easily imitate. You couldn't begin to be like him without study, without learning, without performing the esoteric labors of interpretation he had gone through under _his__ late master, the famous, controversial Felix Davarr.

I try at times to put myself into the shoes of a gifted young man from Oklahoma or Utah or Manitoba invited to join a private study group in Ravelstein's apartment, coming up in the elevator, arriving to find the door wide open and getting his first impressions of Ravelstein's habitat-the big antique (sometimes threadbare) Oriental carpets, the wall hangings, classical figurines, mirrors, glass cabi nets, French antique sideboards, the Lalique chandeliers and wall fixtures. The living-room sofa of black leather was deep, wide, low. The glass top of the coffee table in front of it was about four inches thick. On it, Ravelstein sometimes spread his effects-the solid-gold Mont Blanc fountain pen, his $20,000 wrist watch, the golden gadget that cut his smuggled Havanas, the extra-large cigarette box filled with Marlboros, his Dunhill lighters, the heavy square glass ashtrays-the long butts neurotically puffed at once or twice and then broken. A great amount of ashes. Near the wall on a stand, sloping, an elaborate many-keyed piece of telephone apparatus-Abe's command post, expertly operated by himself. It saw heavy use. Paris and London called almost as often as Washington. Some of his very close friends in Paris phoned to talk about intimate matters-sex scandals. Those students who knew him best tactfully withdrew when he signaled with the fingers below his cigarette. He asked keen, low questions, and when he was listening his bald head was often drawn back on the leather cushions, his eyes sometimes upcast, glazed with absorption, mouth falling slightly open-his feet in the loafers coming together sole to sole. At all hours he was playing Rossini CDs at top volume. He had an extraordinary fondness for Rossini and for eighteenth-century opera as well. Baroque Italian music had to be performed on the original ancient instruments. He paid top prices for his hi-fi equipment. Speakers at $10,000 apiece he did not consider too expensive.

Above him and below, three stories of the apartment building, like it or not, had to listen to Frescobaldi, Corelli, Pergolesi, to the "Italian Maiden in Algiers." When neighbors knocked to complain, he smiled and said that without music you couldn't swallow what life offered, and that it would do them good to submit and listen. But he promised to have more insulation blown in between the floors, and indeed he did bring in a soundproofing engineer. "I spent ten thousand on kapok insulation and still the rooms are not _insonoriseйs__." But when the neighbors were listed for him one by one there wasn't a single tenant he was able to care about. He annotated his reasons and was prepared to explain his grounds. He had a line on each of the neighbors-little bourgeois types dominated by secret dreads, each one a shrine of _amour propre__, scheming to persuade everyone else to endorse his image of himself; flat, reckoning personalities (a better term than "souls"-you could deal with personalities but to contemplate the souls of such individuals was a horror you wanted to avoid). Nothing to live for but foolishness, vain glory-no loyalty to your community, no love for your _polis__, devoid of gratitude, with nothing you would lay down your life for. Because, remember, the great passions are antinomian. And the great figures of human heroism looming tremendously over us are very different from the man in the street, our "normal" commonplace contemporary. Ravelstein's appraisal of the people he dealt with daily had this background of great love or of boundless rage. He would remind me that "rage" was in the first line of the _Iliad-menin Achileos__. Here you see the main, bearing beams of Ravelstein's deeply honest belief. The greatest heroes of all, the philosophers, had been and always would be atheists. After the philosophers, in Ravelstein's procession, came poets and statesmen. The tremendous historians like Thucydides. The military geniuses like Caesar-"the greatest man who ever lived within the tides of time"-and, next to Caesar, Marc Antony, briefly his successor, "the triple pillar of the earth" who valued love above imperial politics. Ravelstein went for classical antiquity. He preferred Athens but he respected Jerusalem greatly.

These were some of his fundamental assumptions, and the foundations of his teacher's vocation. If these are left out of my account of his life we'll see only his eccentricities or foibles, his lavish, screwy purchases, his furnishings, his vanities, his gags, his laugh-paroxysms, the _marche militaire__ he did as he crossed the quadrangle in his huge fur-lined coat of luxurious leather-I knew only one other such coat. Gus Alex, a hit man and a hoodlum, wore a long, beautifully tailored mink coat on Lake Shore Drive where he lived and where he walked his little dog.

It used to be said now and then that his favorite students got a "charge" out of Ravelstein-that he was funny, a hoot. The charge, however, was only superficially funny or entertaining-a vital force was transmitted. Whatever the oddities were, they fed his energy, and this energy was spread, disseminated, bestowed.

I am doing what I can with the facts. He lived by his ideas. His knowledge was real, and he could document it, chapter and verse. He was here to give aid, to clarify and _move__, and to make certain if he could that the greatness of humankind would not entirely evaporate in bourgeois well-being, et cetera. There was nothing of the average in Ravelstein's life. He did not accept dullness and boredom. Nor was depression tolerated. He did not put up with low moods. Troubles when he had them were physical. His dental problems at one time were severe. He was persuaded at the university clinic to have implants put in; these went through the gums into the sockets, into the bone of the jaw. This operation was bungled and he suffered agonies at the hands of the surgeon. He walked the floors all night. Then he tried to get the implanted posts pulled out, and this was even more painful than the driving in.

"This is what comes of taking a cabinet maker's approach to the human head," he told me.

"You should have gone to Boston for this. Boston oral surgeons are supposed to be the best."

"Never put yourself in the hands of any lousy specialists. You'll be sacrificed on the altar of their thee-ah _technics__."

He was impatient with hygiene. There was no counting the cigarettes he lit in a day. Most of them he forgot, or broke. They lay like sticks of chalk in his CEO glass ashtrays. But then the organism was imperfect. His biological patchiness was a given-faulty, darkened heart and lungs. But to prolong his life was not one of Ravelstein's aims. Risk, limit, death's blackout were present in every living moment. When he coughed you heard the sump at the bottom of a mine shaft echoing.

I stopped asking Abe about the implants in his jawbone. I assumed that there were pangs now and then, and I thought of them as part of the psychophysical background.

Irregular in his habits and his hours, he seldom had a full night's sleep. Class preparation often kept him up. To lead his Oklahoma, Texas, or Oregon students through a Platonic dialogue, you needed exceptional skills as well as esoteric knowledge. Abe was not a late riser. Nikki on the other hand watched Chinese kung fu thrillers all night long and often slept until 2 p.m. Both Abe and Nikki were basketball fans. They seldom missed the Chicago Bulls on NBC.

When an important game was played, Ravelstein invited his graduate students to his apartment. He ordered pizza. Two delivery boys, carrying stacks of boxes, kicked at his door. The entry hall was filled with the hot smells of oregano, tomatoes, toasted cheese, pepperoni, and anchovies. Nikki presided over the cutting, using a sharp rolling blade. Slices were handed out on paper plates. Rosamund and I ate sandwiches made by Ravelstein with eager, un steady hands and cheerful shouts. There was something like a demonstration of extraordinary skill in the serving of the drinks, as though he had halted in the middle of a high wire with a tray of overfilled glasses. You didn't want to banter with him then.

The portable phone was usually sticking out of Abe's pocket. I can't remember what call he was expecting just then. Maybe one of his sources had inside information about President Bush's final decision to end the war in Iraq. I have an impression somehow of the President-long-faced, lean, and tall-intermittently interrupting the pregame action on the basketball court. Vast banks of spectators, full of light, all brilliantly colored, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant filling the net with warm-up shots. Mr. Bush equally tall but without beauty in his movements. It may not have been Iraq at all, but another crisis. You know how television is: you can't tell the wars from the NBA events-sports, superpower glamour, high-tech military operations; this was keenly felt by Ravelstein. If he spoke of Machiavelli and the best way to deal with a defeated enemy it was because he was a teacher through and through. There were flashes also of General Colin Powell and of Baker, the Secretary of State. And then in the stadium the brief dimming of the vast lights-and after that the dramatic return of full illumination.

All of this put you in mind of the mass displays organized and staged by Hitler's impresario, Albert Speer: sports events and mass fascist rallies borrowed from each other. Ravelstein's young men were well up on basketball. In Michael Jordan, of course, they had a genius to watch. Ravelstein felt himself deeply and vitally connected with Jordan, the artist. He used to say that basketball stood with jazz music as a significant black contribution to the higher life of the country-its specifically American character. No less than bullfighters in Spain or tenors in Ireland or Nijinskys in Russia were the guards and forwards in the U. S. On that evening, in any case, President Bush had given the U. S. a military triumph; and Ravelstein, commenting on the black American servicemen, said what a credit they were to the country and to the U. S. military-how well-spoken they were on TV and how expert technically, how well they knew their jobs. For this he gave the Pentagon high marks.

For reasons of all sorts, Ravelstein was big on soldiers. He spoke with deep feeling about the American pilot shot down over North Vietnam who battered and bruised his own face, who deliberately broke his nose on the wall of his prison cell. This he did when he was told that he would have to appear with other prisoners on Ho Chi Minh's TV in order to denounce U. S. imperialism.

At his basketball parties, Ravelstein passed pizza slices among his graduate-student guests, his bald head swiveling toward the busy, colored TV screen behind him. His lot, his crew, his disciples, his clones who dressed as he did, smoked the same Marlboros, and found in these entertainments a common ground between the fan clubs of childhood and the Promised Land of the intellect toward which Ravelstein, their Moses and their Socrates, led them. Michael Jordan was now an American cult figure-small boys saved his apple cores as relics. A children's crusade might be possible even in the present age. Jordan, the papers said, had "bionic" powers. He could suspend himself in the air out of the reach of blockers, and you could trace his deliberations in his actions, with time enough to change hands while he soared-a man who earned $80 million a year, not a cult figure but a hero who moved the hearts of the masses.

Inevitably Ravelstein was seen by the young men he was training as the intellectual counterpart to Jordan. The man who introduced them to the powers and subtleties of Thucydides and analyzed the role of Alcibiades in the Sicilian campaign as no one else could-a man who expounded the _Gorgias__ to his seminar, literally in sight of the steel mills and the ash heaps and street filth of Gary, its ore boats coming and going across the water-could also hang in the air, levitating just like Jordan. A man of idiosyncrasies and kinks, of gobbling greed for penny candies or illegal Havana cigars, was himself a Homeric prodigy.

Ravelstein the host coming now with a cheese platter, saying, "What about a chunk of this Vermont cheddar…?" ineptly brought the cheese knife, with uncontrollable nervous discharges in his fingers, down on the five-pound round of Cabot's supersharp.

When the cellular telephone in his trouser pocket rang, he drew apart to exchange a word or two with somebody in Hong Kong or Hawaii. One of his informants was calling in a bulletin. There were no security violations. Top secrets he neither heard nor asked to hear. What he loved was to have the men he had trained appointed to important positions; real life confirming his judgments. He'd go aside with his portable phone and then he'd return to tell us, "Colin Powell and Baker have advised the President not to send the troops all the way to Baghdad. Bush will announce it tomorrow. They're afraid of a few casualties. They send out a terrific army and give a demonstration of up-to-date high-tech warfare that flesh and blood can't stand up to. But then they leave the dictatorship in place and steal away…"

It gave Ravelstein the greatest satisfaction to have the inside dope. Like the child in the Lawrence poem sitting under a "great black piano appassionato,"

"in the boom of the tingling strings," while the child's mother plays.

"Well, that's the latest from the Defense Department…"

Most of us knew that his main source was Philip Gorman. Gorman's academic father had strongly objected to the Ravelstein seminars in which Philip was enrolled. Respectable professors of political theory had told old Gorman that Ravelstein was off the wall, that he seduced and corrupted his students. "The paterfamilias was warned against the bugger-familias," Ravelstein said.

Of course old Gorman would be too rigid to be grateful that his son did not go into business administration, Abe said. "Well, Philip is right now one of the Secretary's closest advisers. He has a powerful mind and a real grasp of great politics, this kid, whereas statisticians are as common as minnows."

Young Philip was one of the boys Ravelstein had educated over a span of thirty years. His pupils had turned into historians, teachers, journalists, experts, civil servants, think-tankers. Ravelstein had produced (indoctrinated) three or four generations of graduates. Moreover, his young men were mad for him. They didn't limit themselves to his doctrines, his interpretations, but imitated his manners and tried to walk and talk as he did-freely, wildly, pungently, with a brilliancy as close to his as they could make it. The very young ones-those who could afford the prices-also bought their clothes at Lanvin or Hermes, had their shirts made on Jermyn Street by Turnbull Asser ("Kisser Asser," as I revised it). They smoked with Ravelstein's erratic gestures. They played the same compact discs. He cured them of their taste for rock and they now listened to Mozart, Rossini, or, farther back, Albinoni and Frescobaldi ("on the original instruments"). They sold their collections of the Beatles and the Grateful Dead and listened instead to Maria Callas singing _La Traviata__.

"It's only a matter of time before Phil Gorman has cabinet rank, and a damn good thing for the country." Ravelstein had given his boys a good education, in these degraded times-"the fourth wave of modernity." They could be trusted with classified information, the state secrets they naturally would not pass on to their teacher who had opened their eyes to "Great Politics." You could see the changes their responsibilities had made in them. Their heads looked more firm and mature. They were absolutely right to withhold information. They knew what a gossip he was. But he himself had very important secrets to keep, information of a private, dangerous nature which only a few could be trusted with. Teaching, as Ravel stein understood teaching, was tricky work. You couldn't afford to let the facts be generally known. But unless the facts were known, no real life was possible. So you made your choices with a jeweller's touch. There were two people in Paris who knew him intimately and three on this side of the Atlantic. I was one of them. And when he asked me to write a "Life of Ravelstein," it was up to me to interpret his wishes and to decide just to what extent I was freed by his death to respect the essentials-or the slant given by my temperament and emotions to those essentials, my swirling version of them. I suppose he thought it wouldn't really matter because he'd be gone, and his posthumous reputation couldn't matter less.

Young Gorman, you may be sure, edited the information he gave to Ravelstein. He wouldn't have gone beyond the facts in tomorrow's press release. But he knew what pleasure it gave his old prof to hear the inside dope, so he briefed him out of respect and affection. He also knew that Ravelstein had masses of historical and political information to update and maintain. This went as far back as Plato and Thucydides-perhaps as far back as Moses. All those great designs of statesmanship-going back through Machiavelli via Severus or Caracalla. And it was essential to fit up-to-the-minute decisions in the Gulf War-made by obviously limited pols like Bush and Baker into a true-as-possible picture of the forces at work-into the political history of this civilization. When Ravel stein said that young Gorman had a grasp of Great Politics, something like this was what he had in mind.

At every opportunity, on any reasonable pretext, Ravelstein zipped across the Atlantic to Paris. But that didn't mean he was un happy with the urban Midwest. He was attached to the University, where he had taken his degree under the great Davarr. He was an American through and through.

I had grown up in the city, but Ravelstein's people hadn't arrived from Ohio until the end of the thirties. I never met the father, whom Ravelstein described to me as a toy ogre, a huffy little man, and a neurotic disciplinarian. One of those small-time tyrants who control their children with demented screams, in some crazy nonstop family opera.

The University accepted high school kids who could pass its en trance exams. Ravelstein was admitted when he was fifteen years old and then was free from his father and from a sister he disliked almost as much. As I have said, he was fond of his mother. But at the University he was rid of all the Ravelsteins. "My real mental life began here. For me there was nothing better than the student rooming houses where I bunked. I never could see what was so disgraceful about 'stiffening in a rented house,' as Eliot wrote. Do you croak better on your own property?"

Still, without being envious (I never knew Ravelstein to envy anybody), he had a deep weakness for pleasant surroundings and liked to think of living in one of the tony flat buildings formerly occupied by the exclusively WASP faculty. When he returned to the University as a full professor after two decades on lesser campuses, he wangled a four-room apartment in the most desirable building of all. Most of his windows looked into the dark courtyard, but be yond he could see the campus to the west with its gothic, Indiana limestone spires, labs, dormitories, office buildings. He could stare at the tower of the chapel-a kind of truncated Bismarck Colossus with bells that boomed over and beyond the University compound. When Ravelstein became a national figure (an international one as well-his Japanese royalties alone were, he said with wild pleasure and no modesty, "ferocious"), he moved into one of the best apartments in the place. Now he had views in all directions. The late Madame Glyph, who put him down for drinking from a Coke bottle at her T. S. Eliot luncheon, had not been better situated.

Curiously enough, there was a monastic-retreat tone to his place. You entered under low vaulted ceilings. The lobby was paneled in mahogany. The elevators were like confession boxes. Each apartment had a small flagstone entry hall, and a gothic light fixture overhead. On Ravelstein's landing there was often a piece of furniture on its way out, displaced by some new purchase or other-a chest of drawers, a small armoire, an umbrella stand, a Paris painting about which he was beginning to have doubts. Ravelstein could not compete with the Glyphs' collection of Matisses and Chagalls, begun in the twenties. But in the kitchen he went far beyond them. From a restaurant supply company he had bought an espresso ma chine. It was installed in the kitchen, it dominated the sink, and it steamed and fizzed explosively. I refused to drink his coffee because it was made with chlorinated tap water. The huge commercial ma chine made the sink unusable. But Ravelstein had no use for sinks-it was only the coffee that mattered.

He and Nikki slept on Pratesi linens and under beautifully cured angora skins. He was perfectly aware that all this luxury was funny. Under charges of absurdity he was perfectly steady. He was not going to have a long life. I'm inclined to think he had Homeric ideas about being cut down early. He didn't have to accept confinement in a few dead-end decades, not with his appetite for existence and his exceptional gift for great overviews. It wasn't the money alone-his great best-seller windfall-that made it possible; it was his ability proven in the mental wars-the positions he held, the fights he provoked, his disputes with Oxford don classicists and historians. He was sure of himself, as de Gaulle had said about the Jews. He loved polemics.

Rosamund and I lived just up the street in a building that reminded you of the Maginot Line. Our rooms weren't as splendid as Ravelstein's monastic-luxurious apartment. They were boxy, but I had been looking for shelter just then. I was bombed out-evicted after twelve years of marriage from what had been my uptown home, and I was lucky to find sanctuary in one of the concrete pill boxes down the way from Ravelstein, about fifty yards from his wrought-iron midwestern gothic gate and his uniformed door man.-We had no doorman.

What I had were some fifty years of walking these sun-striped pavements, past buildings once occupied by friends. Now here, where a Japanese theologian was the tenant today, a Miss Abercrombie had lived forty years ago. She was a painter who had married a pleasant hippie burglar whose specialty was to entertain company by re-enacting second-story break-ins. On every one of the surrounding streets there were front rooms where friends had lived-and at the sides, the windows of bedrooms where they died. There were more of those than I cared to think about.

At my age, you don't want to be too tender-minded. It's different if you lead an active life. And I am active, on the whole. But there are gaps, and these gaps tend to fill up with your dead.

Ravelstein credited me with a kind of simpleminded seriousness about the truth. He said, "You don't lie to yourself, Chick. You may put off acknowledgment for a very long time but in the end you do own up. It's not a common virtue."

I am by no means a professor, although I've been around the University community for so many decades that some of the faculty think of me as a longtime colleague. And when I walked out on one of those sun-printed days shortly after I had returned to the University neighborhood, the weather dry, cold, clear, and high, I met an acquaintance named Battle. He was a prof, an Englishman who strode about the freezing streets in an old thin topcoat. A man in his sixties, he was big, ruddy, fleshy, his huge chilled face as thick as sweet red pepper. His hair was dense and long, and he sometimes reminded me of the Quaker on the oatmeal box. He had energy enough to keep two men warm. Only his raised shoulders acknowledged that the temperature was well below freezing-the shoulders up, and the hands thrust down into his coat pockets-all but the thumbs. His feet were set close together. He was not what we used to call "a sport" but he always wore classy shoes.

Battle was said to be a man of immense knowledge. (I had to take people's word for this-how would I know about his command of Sanskrit and Arabic?) He was not an Oxbridge type. He was a product of one of England's redbrick universities.

In a case like his you couldn't simply mention that you had run into a prof named Battle whose long hair made hats superfluous. In World War II, Battle had been a paratrooper, and a pilot as well. He had ferried de Gaulle across the Mediterranean once. Besides which, he had been a notable tennis player in civilian life. He had also taught ballroom dancing in Indochina. He was very quick on his feet, an astonishing runner who had chased and caught a mugger. He punched the mugger so hard in the guts that the cops had to send for an ambulance.

Battle, one of Ravelstein's favorites, was fond of good old Abe. But to say how he, Battle, saw Ravelstein was well-nigh impossible. There were no clues as to what went on behind that powerful fore head. Full of force it came down to the bristling overhang of a superorbital ridge intersecting the straight line of his nose and matching the tight parallels of his lips-the mouth of a Celtic king.

He might have been trained as an Olympic-class weightlifter. This was a very strong man-but to what end was he strong? Battle brushed aside his natural gifts. Subtlety was what he aimed at-hidden, complex, bold, secret Machiavellian moves. His purpose might be to frustrate a departmental chairman by influencing an in different dean to pass a word to the provost, et cetera. No one would ever suspect such conspiracies existed, much less care to discover who was behind them. Ravelstein, who explained all this to me, in coherent with laughter and crying "thee-ah, thee-ah," said, "He comes to discuss all kinds of personal, highly personal thee-ah things with me but never mentions those other operations."

With a little encouragement Ravelstein would reveal Battle's confidences-or anyone else's. He would say, quoting a late friend of ours, "When I do it, it's not gossip, it's social history."

What he really meant was that idiosyncrasies were in the public domain, to be enjoyed like the air and other free commodities. He wasted no time on psychoanalytic speculation or the analysis of everyday life. He had no patience with "this insight bullshit" and preferred wit or even downright cruelty to friendly, well-meant interpretations of the conventional, liberal kind.

In the cold, sunny street-his face all folds in the whipcrack cold-Battle said, "Is Abe receiving visitors, these days?"

"Why not? He's always glad to see you."

"I didn't say it right…. He's always polite to Mary and me.'

Mary was a plump, witty, short, smiling woman. Ravelstein and I were particularly fond of Mary.

"Well, if you are welcome and he's nice to you, what's the question?"

"He's not in the best of health, is he? '

"He's one of those tall, strong, always ailing men."

"But isn't he more ailing than usual?"

Battle was testing me, hoping for hints about Ravelstein's condition. I wasn't about to tell him anything, though I knew he liked Ravelstein-looked up to him, somehow. With odd people I can go along so far and no farther. Each frosty breath through Battle's dramatic nostrils rushed more red into his face. The color went down as far as the accordion pleats under his chin. He seldom wore a hat. His black hair seemed to keep the back of his neck warm enough. He wore a tango dancer's shoes. I sympathized with his eccentricities. It seemed to be a mixture of hold-tight delicacy and flyaway brutality.

The Battles, man and wife, valued Ravelstein highly. They felt for him. You could be certain that they had frequent conversations about him.

"Well," I said, "he has had a series of infections. The shingles hit him hard."

"Herpes zoster. Of course," said Battle. "Inflammation of the nerves. Horribly messy and painful. It often hits the spinal and cranial nerves. I've been around such cases."

His words made me see Ravelstein. I saw him lying silent under his down quilt. His darkened eyes were recessed. His head was set on its pillows. His posture suggested rest. But he wasn't getting any rest.

"Got over that one, did he?" said Battle. "But hasn't he been hit by another? Something new?"

There was another. This next infection was called Guillain-Barrй by the neurologists when they finally identified it. It hadn't yet been diagnosed, just then. Abe had flown back from Paris for a dinner in his honor given by the mayor. Black tie and celebrity speeches-just the kind of occasion that Ravelstein, long starved for recognition, couldn't say no to. In Paris, where he intended to spend his sabbatical year, he had taken an apartment on an avenue of embassies and official residences very close to the Elysйe Palace. The police were always around, and coming home at night presented a problem, since Abe couldn't find the time to waste at the bureaucratic Hotel de Ville applying for a _carte de sйjour__, so that when the cops stopped him for his identity papers he had none to show and there were long midnight discussions. He referred the police to the Marquis of Such and Such, his landlord. There was something to be said for everything that happened in these streets. Even the inconveniences in Paris were on the highest level. Compared to his real troubles, these Corsicans (Ravelstein believed that all _flics__-French cops-came from Corsica, that no matter how close they shaved, their chins still bristled) remained in every respect entertaining.

The long and the short of it was that Ravelstein made a fast flight home to attend the mayors banquet for him and came down with a disease (first discovered by a Frenchman) that sent him to the hospital. The doctors put him in intensive care. They were giving him oxygen. His visitors were let in no more than two at a time. He said hardly anything. Occasionally he gave me a stare of recognition. His big eyes were concentrated in that bald, cranial watchtower of his. His arms, never well developed, quickly lost such muscle as they had had. In the early days of the Barrй virus he wasn't able to use his hands. Still he managed to convey that he needed to smoke.

"Not with an oxygen mask, you won't. You'd blow up the whole joint." Somehow I found myself stuck always in the cautionary role, speaking up for the commonest sort of common sense to people who took pride in brushing off prudence. Was it others who were forever putting me in this position, or was I at bottom exactly like that? I thought of myself, at hyper-self-critical moments, as the bourgeois _porte parole__. Ravelstein was aware of this flaw of mine.

Nikki and I were not unlike, in this respect. Nikki was far more sharp and critical. When Ravelstein bought a costly rug from Sukkumian on the North Side, Nikki shouted, "You paid ten grand for all these holes and loose threads-because the holes prove it's a genuine antique? What did he tell you, that this was the carpet they rolled Cleopatra in naked? You really are one of those guys, as Chick always says, who thinks money is supposed to be thrown from the rear end of an express train. You're on the observation platform of the Twentieth Century scattering hundred-dollar bills."

Nikki had been telephoned and told that Ravelstein was sick again. He was still at his hotel school in Geneva, and we learned that he was returning immediately. Nobody questioned the strength of Nikki's attachment to Abe. Nikki was perfectly direct-direct, by nature, a handsome, smooth-skinned, black-haired, Oriental, graceful, boyish man. He had an exotic conception of himself. I don't mean that he put on airs. He was never anything but natural. This protйgй of Ravelstein's, thought-or used to think-was somewhat spoiled. I was wrong, there, too. Brought up like a prince, yes. Even before the famous book that sold a million copies was written, Nikki was better dressed than the Prince of Wales. He was more intelligent and discerning than many bettereducated people. He had, what is more, the courage to assert his right to be exactly what he seemed to be.

This, as Ravelstein pointed out, was not a posture. There was absolutely nothing in Nikki's appearance that was decorative or theatrical. He doesn't look for trouble, mind you, but "he's always ready for a fight. And his sense of himself is such that… he'll fight. I've often had to hold him back."

He would sometimes lower his voice in speaking of Nikki, to say that there was no intimacy between them. "More father and son."

In matters of sex, I sometimes felt Ravelstein saw me as a throw back, an anachronism. I was his close friend. But I was the child of a traditional European Jewish family, with a vocabulary for inversion going back two millennia or more. The ancestral Jewish terms for it were, first, _Tum-tum__, dating perhaps from the Babylon captivity. Sometimes the word was _andreygenes__, obviously of Alexandrian, Hellenistic origin-the two sexes merged in one erotic and perverse darkness. Mixtures of archaism and modernity were especially appealing to Ravelstein, who could not be contained in modernity and overflowed all the ages. Oddly enough, he was just like that.

He came out of intensive care unable to walk. But he quickly re covered partial use of his hands. He had to have hands because he had to smoke. As soon as he was installed in his hospital room he sent Rosamund out to buy him a pack of Marlboros. She had been his student, and he had taught her all that a student of his was required to understand-the foundations and assumptions of his esoteric system. She understood, of course, that he had only just begun to breathe on his own again and that smoking was damaging, dangerous-it was almost certainly forbidden.

"You needn't tell me that it's a bad idea to smoke now. But it's even worse not to smoke," he said to Rosie, when he saw her hesitate.

Of course she understood, having taken every last course he offered. "So I went down to the vending machine and brought up six packs of Marlboros," she told me.

"If you hadn't done it, ten other messengers would have," I said.

"They sure enough would."

At the hospital his best students-the inner circle-came and went, gathered, chatted in the waiting room.

On the second day after release from intensive care, Ravelstein, who hadn't recovered the use of his legs, was once more on the telephone with friends in Paris, explaining why he would not be coming back just yet. The apartment had to be given up. His aristocratic landlords would have to be approached with tact to return the _dйpфt de garanti__. Ten thousand dollars. Maybe they'd cough it up, maybe not. He could understand their feelings, he said. Those were the most beautiful, the most distinguished rooms he had ever lived in, he said.

Ravelstein didn't count on recovering his deposit, though he was highly connected in French academic circles. He had lots of important connections in France-and in Italy as well. He knew perfectly well that there was no legal way to recover his earnest money. "Especially in this instance, because the tenant is a Jew, and there's a Gobineau in the landlord's family tree. Those Gobineaus were famous Jew-haters. And I'm no mere Jew but, even worse, an American one-all the more dangerous to civilization as they see it. Any way, they will let a Jew live on their street, but he _should__ pay for it."

In an off moment, weakened by the disease, eyes only half open and in a voice in which the words were unclear and the tones had to carry most of the meaning-several days when his speech was like his narrowed gaze-he kept trying to tell me something. What he was trying to say at last became clear-that he was even now arranging for a BMW to be sent over.

"From Germany?"

So it seemed, though he didn't actually say that it was being shipped. I had the impression that it was already on a freighter in mid-Atlantic. Maybe even unloaded and being trucked to the Midwest.

"It's for Nikki," Ravelstein said. "He feels he should have something outstanding and entirely his own. You can see that, can't you, Chick? In addition, he may have to drop out of his Swiss school."

This was not put to me as a question. I could see it well enough. For one thing, if you were dressed-as Nikki was-by Versace, Ultimo, and Gucci, you didn't want to use public transportation. But having satisfied my quirky need for humor with such an observation, I was now able to be real. The reality was that Ravelstein had barely squeaked by, that he was still on what doctors called "life supports," that his lower body was still paralyzed, his legs were not working, and that if and when paralysis was overcome there were still other infections waiting to be reckoned with.

"Now tell me, thee-ah Chick, how do I look to you?"

"The face?"

"Face, head. You have a peculiar eye, Chick. And don't hold back."

"You look like a ripe honeydew melon, on the pillow."

He laughed. His eyes narrowed and glinted; he took a peculiar satisfaction in my mental ways. He saw this kind of remark as a sign of higher faculties in operation. About the car he said, "The agency was trying to sell me on some wine-colored BMW. I prefer the chestnut one. Over there is a chart of the colors-" He pointed, and when I handed it to him he flipped it open. Bar after bar of enamel strips. Soberly studying the samples, I said that the wine color wouldn't do.

"You're never wrong in a matter of taste. Nikki thinks so, too."

"That's nice, but I never thought he was noticing."

"The clothes you wear may not be the latest, but you did have the makings of a dude, Chick-in a former phase, and in a limited way. I remember your Chicago tailor, the one who did a suit for me."

"You hardly wore it."

"I wore it home."

"But then it disappeared."

"Nikki and I laughed ourselves silly over the cut of it. Perfect for Las Vegas or on a politician for the annual Democratic machine gathering at the Bismarck Hotel-don't be hurt, Chick."

"I'm not. I don't invest much sensitivity in my suits."

"Nikki always says your taste in shirts and neckties is perfect. Kisser Asser."

"Of course, Kisser Asser."

"Yes!" said Ravelstein, and closed his eyes with satisfaction.

"I don't want to tire you," I said.

"No, no." Abe's eyes were still shut. "I'm still alive to bandy wise cracks. You do me more good than a dozen intravenous drips."

Yes, and he could rely on me. I was present, too, at the hospital window. _Ad sum__, as you would answer roll call at school-or _ab est__, as we said in unison when a seat was empty.

The city presented mile upon mile of late-autumn bareness-the cold hardening of the ground, the branching boulevards, the painted-desert look of the apartment houses, the paling green of the parks-the temperate zone and its seasons, cranking away. Winter coming.

When the telephone rang again I picked it up; I was going to screen him from callers. But the BMW woman was on the line and he wanted to talk to her. "Let's go through this checklist," he said to her. "You're sure we're going to get the stick-shift…? Automatic transmission won't do."

With extras, the car would cost eighty thousand bucks.

"Of course there'll be safety bags for the passenger's seat as well as the driver's?"

"… Now about the interior color-the kid-leather upholstery. The CD deck set in the trunk should be able to play six discs! Eight! Ten!

"And the door locking and unlocking with an electronic switch? We don't want to fuck around with keys. I can't give you a certified check, I'm in the hospital. I don't care if it is company policy. I have to have delivery no later than Thursday. Nikki-Mr. Tay Ling is arriving from Geneva Wednesday night. So all the paperwork has got to be done. No, as I thought I told you, I'm in my room at the hospital. Thee-ah thee-ah! one thing I can assure you is that it's not a mental hospital. You have my account number at Merrill Lynch. What? You certainly have done a fast credit check on me, Miss Sorabh-is it spelled _bh__ or _hb__?"

There may have been as many as a dozen consultations daily. "Nikki is such a stickler," he said. "And why shouldn't everything be perfect? I want him to be pleased one hundred percent-the engine, the body, all the electronic stuff. Everything in place. Stabilizers equilibrated. It used to be the Harmonious Blacksmith-now it's the harmonious computers. There won't be any baroque operas in the new car. Only Chinese jazz, or whatever."

Nikki, as I well knew, was exacting. This was evident even from his casual relations with people. And it must follow with objects as well.

"I don't want to look as if I were taken in by BMW owing to this illness. I must try to anticipate how Nikki will react. In his quiet way, he's extremely fussy," said Ravelstein. "It's only natural. He shares my prosperity, of course. But not long ago he said how much he'd like a sign from me-some big gesture. It's not just my prosperity, it's _our__ prosperity."

I didn't invite him to go into particulars. Since he and I were close friends, it was up to me to do my own thinking about Nikki's place in his life. I believed that I was alert enough to understand. Though maybe I wasn't. Ravelstein often made me doubt my abilities.

I said, "All the warranties you're getting, it would take a month to read them."

"You make it sound like the Stations of the Cross," Ravelstein said, smiling.

"You and Nikki are safe with this giant German corporation. It's like bourgeois royalty. I wonder, did they use slave labor during the war?"

Because his arms were wasted, Ravelstein's hands looked unnaturally big as he lit one of the cigarettes Rosamund had brought him. Then as he put it down in the ashtray and waved away the smoke, I was aware that someone had entered the room.

It was Dr. Schley-Ravelstein's cardiologist. He was my cardiologist too. Dr. Schley was short and slight, but his slightness was not a sign of weakness. He was stern. He was backed by his seniority in the hospital-its chief heart-man. He didn't say much. He didn't have to.

"Do you realize, Mr. Ravelstein, that you're just out of intensive care? Only hours ago you weren't even able to breathe. And now you're pulling smoke into your weak lungs. This is most serious," Schley said, with a cold side-glance at me. I should not have allowed Ravelstein to light up.

Dr. Schley, too, was entirely bald, white coated, and his stethoscope, sticking out of his pocket, was gripped like a slingshot by his angry hand.

Ravelstein didn't answer. He declined to be intimidated-but he wasn't yet strong enough to fight back. On the whole he cared little for doctors. Doctors were the allies of the death-dreading bourgeoisie. He was not about to change his habits for any doctor, not even for Schley, whom he respected. As Rosamund understood when she went to buy the cigarettes, Abe would do what he had al ways done. He'd never play the valetudinarian.

"I ask you, Mr. Ravelstein, to give up your cigarettes until your lungs are stronger."

Ravelstein answered nothing, he only nodded his head. But not in agreement. He wasn't even looking at Dr. Schley-he looked past him. Schley wasn't his primary physician. The primary was Dr. Abern. But of course Schley was part of the team; more than that, he was one of its leaders. As for me, Schley liked me well enough-in my place. You would never hear Dr. Schley say as much, but if you were any good at mental sonics you got the message soon enough. Ravelstein was a major figure in the highest intellectual circles. It wouldn't be too much to say that Ravelstein was genuinely important. By contrast I was good enough, of my sort. But it was a far from important sort.

Generally Schley talked to me about keeping up the quinine level in my system to control my heartbeat. I was subject to fibrillations and sometimes short of breath. The big doses of Quinaglute he prescribed deafened you, I was to discover down the line. Anyway my minor cardiac complaint was virtually all that connected me to Schley. Ravelstein, on the other hand, fascinated him. He saw Ravel-stein as a great fighter in the cultural and ideological wars. After Abe had given his sensational Harvard speech, telling the audience that they were elitists disguised as egalitarians-"Well!" Dr. Schley said to me. "Who else had the learning, the confidence, the authority to do this! And so easily, so naturally!"

As for Ravelstein, he would never simply have a doctor. He had to know what to think about everyone with whom he had to do. He had a relentless curiosity not only about the students he attracted but also tradespeople or high-fidelity engineers or dentists or investment counselors, barbers and, of course, physicians.

"Schley is the boss doctor here," he said. "The single most influential one. He's the one who makes policy. He polices all the departments and refers patients to his own people-just as he's done for me. But then there's his domestic life…"

"I never thought about his home life."

"Have you ever met his wife?"

"Never."

"Well, by all reports it's a women's kingdom over there. The wife and daughters are absolutely in control. His real life is here in the clinics and labs."

"Is that so? It's often the case with strict people…"

"Like yourself, Chick. You ought to know, you've plenty of experience in that line." I said, "One more case of the son of man having no place to lay his head."

"Well, don't go feeling sorry. You set it up yourself, all of it. Nothing to complain about," said Ravelstein. I couldn't dispute this. All I could say was that the doctor had no friend, no Ravelstein, to set him straight. "Poor Schley becomes more and more medically correct," Ravel stein went on. "His wife is a toughie, and then there are the two unmarried daughters. Activists, all three of them, busy with causes like feminism, environmentalism. So the doctor is a tyrant in the clinic and the odd man out at home."

"I made him furious too," I said. "A real friend would have taken your cigarette away!" I wasn't telling Ravelstein anything he didn't know. He didn't miss much.

The BMW 740 was ready-delivered an hour before Nikki arrived. He came immediately to the hospital. Ravelstein was still un able to walk and had only the partial use of his arms and of his hands. He could smoke, he could dial numbers on the telephone-otherwise he was, in the French expression he preferred, _hors d'usage__. As soon as Nikki arrived, Rosamund and I left and waited outside.

After a time Nikki came out with tears on his face. He very seldom discussed Ravelstein with me or other friends. He accepted us because we had been vetted by Abe. We were the people Abe talked to about matters he, Nikki, was not interested in. Of course, Nikki had his own views of each and every one of us. And Abe had learned to take his judgments seriously. "You have to go down right this minute and take possession of your new car," Rosamund said.

We went below with him and saw Nikki get behind the wheel. The company driver had waited and given him a briefing, Nikki later explained, about all the special features of the glamorous 740. I glanced at the switches and lights of the control panel-it looked like the cockpit of a fighter plane. The whole thing was beyond me-I couldn't have turned on the defroster or released the hood.

Ravelstein of course wanted to divert Nikki from the medical facts with this tremendous toy. He only partially succeeded. There was a certain pleasure in sliding into the driver's seat, but Nikki told me that he wouldn't be going back to Switzerland. All this was now on hold. He'd have to drop the hotel training course.

When the time came to go home, Abe said he didn't want to ride in an ambulance. He said that Nikki would drive him in the new 740. Dr. Schley's position was that since Ravelstein couldn't walk, couldn't sit up, he'd have to be wheeled out on a gurney. Abe said there was no need for gurneys or stretchers or ambulances. Students and friends would transfer him from a wheelchair to the 740.

Schley put his foot down on this. He wouldn't sign Abe out, he said. Abe submitted in the end and they lifted him, bedding and all, onto the gurney. He was silent throughout, but not sullen or rancorous. He didn't have the sullenness or moodiness of the sick.

The 740 was already garaged. A phone call would bring it to the door within minutes. I was re-reading the Keynes memoirs that Ravelstein had recommended as the model I should follow. There was always a book to fill up the hours in the lounge of the intensive care unit, or when the patient was asleep or silently reflecting-seeming to sleep. While waiting for the ambulance I sat in the courtyard of Ravelstein's apartment building with Rosamund, reading J. M. Keynes.

The question at issue in Keynes's memoir was the release of gold by the Germans in 1919 to finance the purchase of food for the blockaded, starved cities. The commission charged with the execution of the Armistice convention had its seat at Spa, the fashionable watering place on the Belgian frontier, which had been the Grand Headquarters of the German Army. Ludendorff's villa was there, and the Kaiser's villa and Hindenburg's-you felt at once that Keynes was writing esoterically for his Bloomsbury intimates, not for the newspaper-reading masses.

The Belgian ground was haunted, he said. "The air was still charged with the emotions of that vast collapse. The spot was melancholy with the theatrical Teutonic melancholy of black pine woods." I was greatly interested to learn that Keynes held Richard Wagner directly responsible for World War I. "Evidently the Kaiser's conception of himself was so molded. And what was Hindenburg but the bass, and Ludendorff but the fat tenor of third-rate Wagnerian opera? "

There was, however, a danger that Germany might drift into Bolshevism. With starvation and disease rising, mortality figures were damaging to the Allies, Lloyd George told the Conference. Clemenceau in answering "saw that he must needs concede a good deal."

"Must needs" was an expression that now had vanished, I told Rosamund.

But the French still objected to the German proposal to pay for their food in gold. Clemenceau claimed German gold for reparations. One of the French ministers, a Jew named Klotz, declared that the starving Germans should be allowed to pay for rations in any other way, but not in gold. It was impossible for him to go further without compromising his country's interests, "which (puffing himself out and attempting an appearance of dignity) had been placed in his charge."

Lloyd George-why am I drawn back to this again and again? I can't explain why I am so affected by it-now turned on M. Klotz with hatred, Keynes writes. "Do you know Klotz by sight? — a short, plump, heavy moustached Jew, but with an unsteady, roving eye, and his shoulders a little bent in an instinctive deprecation. Lloyd George had always hated and despised him. And now saw in a twinkling that he could kill him. Women and children were starving, he cried, and here was M. Klotz prating and prating of his 'gooold.' He leant forward and with a gesture of his hands indicated to everyone the image of a hideous Jew clutching a money bag. His eyes flashed and the words came out with contempt so violent that he seemed almost to be spitting at him. The anti-Semitism, not far below the surface in such an assemblage as that one, was up in the heart of everyone. Everyone looked at Klotz with a momentary contempt and hatred; the poor man was bent over his seat, visibly cowering…. Then, turning, he [Lloyd George] called on Clemenceau to put a stop to these obstructive tactics; otherwise, he cried, M. Klotz would rank with Lenin and Trotsky among those who had spread Bolshevism in Europe. The Prime Minister ceased. All round the room you could see each one grinning and whispering to his neighbor 'Klotsky.'"

Another Jew, this one in the service of the German government, was Dr. Melchior. He was not so well connected with his delegation as Keynes; Keynes was at the side of Lloyd George and against Herbert Hoover whenever breadstuffs, pork products, or financial arrangements were discussed. Melchior seemed to feel as Keynes did. In Keynes's account Melchior is "staring, heavy lidded, helpless looking… like an honorable animal in pain. Couldn't we break down the empty formalities of this Conference, the three-barred gate of triple interpretations, and talk about the truth and the reality like sane and sensible persons?"

Germany was hungry, France had almost bled to death. The English and the Americans really intended to furnish food. There were tons of pork waiting for Herbert Hoover to order delivery to begin. "I allowed that our recent actions had not been such as to lead him to trust in our sincerity; but I begged him [Melchior] to believe that I, at least, at that moment, was sincere and truthful. He was as much moved as I was, and I think he believed me. We both stood all through the interview. In a sort of way I was in love with him…. He would speak with Weimar on the telephone and would urge them to give him some discretion…. He spoke with the passionate pessimism of a Jew."

The place where I sat reading, where Rosamund and I waited for the ambulance to bring Ravelstein home, was a small courtyard inside the wrought-iron gates. A stone pool, shrubs, grass-there were even shade-flowers. Frogs and toads would have done well here, but you'd have had to import them. Where would they have come from? There were no frogs in the miles of rubble that sur rounded this sanctuary. The courtyard was something like a de compressing chamber. For some of the professor-tenants it may have recalled the grotto-retreats built by English gentlemen in the eighteenth century. You wanted some protection from the brute facts. To be fully aware of both the sanctuary and the slum, you had to be a Ravelstein. "Out there," he would say, laughing, "the cops will tell you not to stop at a red light. In no-man's-land, it could be the end of you to stop." You must not be swallowed up by the history of your own time, Ravelstein often would say. He quoted Schiller to the same effect: "Live with your century but do not be its creature."

The architect who put a little Alhambra arcade here, with water pipes and shade plants had much the same idea: "Live in this city but don't belong to it."

Rosamund, who was sitting beside me on the edge of the stone basin, did not feel shut out when I was reading.

It had taken Ravelstein some time to get used to seeing Rosamund and me as a married pair. There was a kind of oddity about that because he took an unusual interest in his students, and Rosamund was one of them. He would have said, if asked about this, that given the sort of education they were getting, with its un usual emphasis "on the affects"-on love, not to beat around the bush-it would have been irresponsible to pretend that the teach ing could be separated from the binding of souls. That was his old-fashioned way of putting it. Naturally there was a Greek word for it, and I can't be expected to remember every Greek word I heard from him. Eros was a _daimon__, one's genius or demon provided by Zeus as a compensation for the cruel breaking up of the original androgynous human whole. I'm sure I've got that part of the Aristophanic sex-myth straight. With the help of Eros we go on, each of us, looking for his missing half. Ravelstein was in real earnest about this quest, driven by longing. Not everyone feels that longing, or acknowledges it if he does feel it. In literature Antony and Cleopatra had it, Romeo and Juliet had it. Closer to our own time Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary had it, Stendhal's Madame de Renal in her simplicity and innocence had it. And of course others, untaught, untouched by open recognition have it in some obscure form. This was what Ravelstein was continually on the watch for, and with such a preoccupation he was only a step from arranging matches. Doing the best that could be done with these powerful but incomplete needs. A good palliative for the not-always-conscious pain of longing had a significant importance of its own. We have to keep life going, one way or another. Marriages must be made. In adultery men and women hope for a brief reprieve from the lifelong pain of privation. What made adultery a venial sin in Ravelstein's judgment was that the pain of our longings drives us so mercilessly. "Souls Without Longing" had been the working title of his famous book. But for most of mankind the longings have, one way or another, been eliminated.

— How have I gotten so far afield?

I am bound as an honest observer to make plain how Ravelstein operated. If he cared about you it was in this perspective that he would sketch you. You wouldn't have believed how much thought he devoted to each and every case, the closeness with which he ob served the students he had accepted for higher or esoteric training, those willing to break with the orthodox social science majority which dominated the profession. If students followed Ravelstein, they would find jobs hard to get. So you had to think how to provide for the young people who were chosen. Professionally speaking, they had made an erratic choice. Ravelstein often asked my opinion. "What if Smith were to pair up with Sarah? He's got some queer tendencies but he'll never be a queer. Now Sarah is a very serious young woman-disciplined, hard-working, loves her books. No genius but she's got a lot going for her. She may have just the touch of masculinity that would make young Smith happy."

He was so accustomed to thinking up arrangements of this sort that he apparently had had something in mind for me after Vela divorced me. My mistakes were so clear that I couldn't be trusted to do anything right. He had accurately prophesied seven or eight years ago, "Vela will soon be through with you. She's off to conferences all over the world. She's never home for as much as a week. Whereas you've got the uxorious tendency, Chick. And all you've got to live with now are her clothes hanging in the closet. It's only to be respectable that she needs a husband. I don't think men are her top preference. But she's an odd case; she's got the makings of a beauty but she's not a beauty, no matter how she dresses and makes up. Now you as an artist, Chick, spotted her as having something to do with beauty. It's a fact that she has beautiful eyes but, closely looked at, she's got some sort of European military correctness about her. And when she inspects you, you just don't make the grade with her. Mentally speaking, she comes toward you but then walks away as fast as her high heels will carry her. She's an odd one, Chick. But you're pretty odd yourself. Artists fall in love, of course, but love isn't their primary gift. They love their high function, the use of their genius, not actual women. They have their own sort of driving force. Now Goethe of course had his _daimon__, he talked about it to Eckermann all the time. And in old age he fell in love with a very beautiful young thing. But of course this falling in love was _dйrisoire__-a pure absurdity…"

This was his way of laying open a subject-not entirely flattering, but then he never flattered anyone, nor did he level with you in order to put you down. He simply believed that a willingness to let the selfesteem-structure be attacked and burned to the ground was a measure of your seriousness. A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

But some time before, in her wonderfully polished but also clumsy not-of-this-world way, Vela had already begun divorce proceedings. It appeared that she had retained a lawyer as much as a year earlier. This lawyer, a woman who belonged to a tremendous downtown law firm, knew to a nickel what my assets were, and Vela's demand was for twenty-five percent of my bank account, tax-exempt. She went downtown regularly to have her hair and her eyebrows done and to shop for dresses and shoes. Often she lunched with a friend-or with her lawyer.

We had no domestic routines at all. What we had was a loose arrangement-a household, not the locus of married love or even affection. When supplies ran low, Vela went to the supermarket and bought up a storm-apples, grapefruits, meats for the freezer, cakes, tapioca puddings for dessert, canned tuna and tomato her rings, onions, rice, dry breakfast cereals, bananas, salad greens, cantaloupes. I tried several times to teach her how to choose a melon by sniffing it at the bottom, but evidently she didn't want to be seen doing anything out of line for a person of beauty and delicacy. She bought bread and rolls, soap powder for the dishwasher, steel wool for the pots. Several hundred dollars' worth of groceries were then delivered in cardboard boxes. After shopping, she didn't return to the apartment but drove on to the university. I took delivery at home and stacked the fridge and the kitchen shelves. I stomped the cartons flat and took them down in the elevator. I was on friendly terms with the super and didn't want to bother him with the trash.

Kerrigan, the poet and translator who lived with his mother-in-law a floor above us, asked me one day why I had to dispose of my own junk and when I explained my relationship to the superintendent he said, "Everybody but you gets respected." My answer was that this might be true but that the super had to be spared and that the man tacitly indicated that he needed his dignity to be acknowledged. And that I would rather lug the flattened cartons be low than have to think about his demand for esteem.

Toward the last, without realizing how near the end-zone was, I was still trying to puzzle out Vela, to get a handle on her motives. She preferred deeds to words, conceding that she couldn't compete with me verbally, and one day when I was reading a book (my regular diet of words) she wandered into the room entirely nude, came to my bedside and rubbed her pubic hair on my cheekbone. When I responded as she must have known that I would, she turned and left me with an air of having made her point. She had won hands down without having to speak a word. Her body spoke for her, and very effectively too, saying that the end was near.

There was nothing in the book I had been reading in bed that was of the slightest use to me. Nor could I go in pursuit of Vela to ask, "What does this behavior mean?" The large apartment was di vided into zones-she had hers, I had mine. I'd have to go looking for her-and she would anyway refuse to discuss the message just delivered.

So I turned to Ravelstein. I phoned to say that I needed to talk to him right away and I drove across the city, a distance of twelve miles. I had worked this out-eight blocks to the mile as laid out by the original planners or founders.

Arriving, I for once accepted Ravelstein's offer of a cup of his coffee. I needed something strong to drink. I knew of course what a passion he had for the kind of incident I was about to describe. The freaky improvisations of creatures under stress-the more bumptious they were, the more he cherished them.

"In the nude, hey? She was making a statement, as they say. And what was your impression? What was she telling you in her untutored way?"

"It's my impression that she was saying she was no longer available."

"The kiss-off, eh? And you weren't expecting it-or were you, in your bones, aware it was coming?"

"Certainly I saw it coming. She and I could never make a go of it."

"But I wonder whether there are facts which might have escaped you, Chick. I don't blame you for demanding that she should behave as a wife ought, according to your lights. But they have lights, too, the women. She has a considerable reputation in her own field. She's a high-grade scientist, they tell me, and she may not feel like cooking your dinner-clocking in at five o'clock to peel the potatoes."

"She grew up in a starving country…"

"In the eyes of the world it's a big deal to be a chaos physicist-I don't know what it's about but it's considered highly prestigious. Only you give her no credit."

"She came to tell me that her body would no longer be available. To communicate any considerable matter she preferred actions to words. When she broke the news of our decision to marry to her mother, she waited until boarding time at the airport the day of Mama's return flight to Europe and at the last possible moment said, 'I've decided to marry Chick.' The old girl hated me. Vela let it be thought that she loved her mama, but in fact she crossed her in every way possible."

"But the opposite is true?" Ravelstein asked.

"I don't know the true answer, nor does anyone else know it. People go to the trouble of organizing a view of themselves and the view gives them the consistency or the appearance of consistency society seems to require. But Vela really has no organized view…."

"Okay, okay," said Ravelstein. "But your idea was that she would come to love you. She'd love you because you are lovable. But this Vela of yours reserves her intellect for physics. The idea of leading a warm family life is her number one antipremise. So from this we pass to the supermarket, where Vela buys a few hundred dollars' worth of chow and has it delivered in boxes by young criminals who have parole officers keeping an eye on them. You can cook this shit yourself, and eat it by your lonesome, and then scrub the pots. Just as your mother did after feeding her family a real meal, cooked with love. You thought that if you could get her to prepare your dinners with love she'd come to love you. So her comment on this is satirical; she sends you the groceries. Just as she belongs to a different universe altogether. And you belong to a third universe, the vanishing one of old-fashioned Jews. The soul of another is a dark forest, as the Russians say… you're fond of Russian sayings."

"Not just now, I'm not."

"Well, I grant you the Russians are not so humane as they want us to think. All those Eastern empires are police controlled."

"And the dark forest is the soul, but you can't expect to take refuge from the GPU there. I'm not in the mood for wit, though."

"I know," said Ravelstein. "She notified you that you have no more access to her body. Your lease has expired. But it was never meant to be permanent. People can't be expected to live without love or the simulacrum of love. A nice friendly sexual connection is what most have to settle for."

I didn't expect Vela to appear in court when the formalities were completed, but turn up she did in a high-buttoned jacket, more like heraldry than feminine dress, brass buttons from the throat to the knees, with the makeup and tight hair of a ballroom dancer. It is probably impossible to convey the messages she was emitting. I had had my chance, given with extraordinary queenly generosity, and it was obvious that I just didn't have what it took.

She had worked out an esoteric rationality which was utterly un knowable but based on eighteen-karat principles. All the same there was a lame side to her queenliness. If you thought you could say where she was coming from, you were mistaken. "It may have seemed that such a man (Chick) could be my husband, but that was an error-Q. E. D." She walked away in her curious stride, each step forward a dig-only the toes were involved. The heels were on their own. This was not in the slightest grotesque. It was curiously expressive, but no one would ever be able to say what it meant.

Rosamund had not been one of Ravelstein's stars but very good in her way. "She does the work as well as anybody. Her Greek is more than adequate, and she doesn't miss a thing, understands the texts perfectly well. Very nervous and unsure about herself. And she's very attractive, isn't she. Not a voluptuary type but genuinely pretty."

He didn't know it, but I had been, for once, ahead of him. wasn't going to have Ravelstein vet Rosamund for me. I couldn't let him arrange my marriage as he did for his students. If he lacked all feeling for you, he didn't give a damn what you did. But if you were one of his friends it was a bad idea, he thought, for you to take things into your own hands. It troubled him greatly to be kept in the dark on any matter by his friends-especially by those he saw daily.

The ambulance bringing Ravelstein home from the hospital came softly to the curb, and Rosamund and I stood up. I closed the book I had been reading on the letter Keynes had written to his mother about his duties as Deputy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. In silence the wheeled stretcher came by quickly and I saw the smooth naked melon of Ravelstein's head preceding us through the Alhambra arches of the arcade and beyond the shade plants and the water trickling in the mossy basin. Nikki came hurrying after the stretcher through the brass-and-glass doors.

Rosamund and I took the passenger elevator to the top of the building. Mischievous kids pressed all the buttons so that often you stopped at every floor. The continual opening and closing of doors made a fifteen-minute trip of it, and when we reached the top Ravelstein was already in bed-but not in his four-poster. A hospital bed had been ordered, and above it a mechanic was installing a large triangle, equilateral, of tubular stainless steel. Ravelstein could use it to shift his weight. When he had to move to a chair for physical therapy, the base of the triangle was slipped under his thighs. As he weakly gripped the steel tubing the bosun's rig was raised very gradually by the small whirring machine at the foot of the bed. Suddenly you saw his wasted legs being drawn up, out of the sheets. And because he couldn't fully open his eyelids, the look of alarm was only half formed.

He might have been musing over matter, over the physical management of life, the innumerable ways there were to be damaged, wounded, even killed-an unusual line of thought for him. A nurse had suddenly appeared and the mechanic (a technician from the hospital) stood by as her backup. Ravelstein was swung over the side of the bed and lowered, very slowly, into the wheelchair. Dr. Schley's aim was to get Abe on his feet to rebuild his muscles. The long, long legs had no calves and on the white inner arms you could see the veins. You couldn't help but think of the contaminated blood in them. While the nurse tried to cover his genitals, he seemed to be musing over a pressing question-perhaps whether it made sense to struggle so hard for existence. It didn't, but he struggled nevertheless. He gripped the steel, which was probably very cold, the two fists were close to his big ears, near the occipital hair that stuck out, below the bald line. There are bald heads that proclaim their strength. Ravelstein's head had been like that. But now it had become the vulnerable kind. I believe he knew what a picture he made, "piped over the side" in a naval sort of rig, wide open to terror-to ridiculous hysteria. By now, however, he was detached from his triangle and already sitting in the wheelchair; the triangle slipped out from under him, and Nikki took him on a tour of the flat. Rosamund and I followed from room to room.

Nothing had been disturbed. Maintaining the apartment were the two ladies-the Polish woman Wadja, who did the real cleaning on Tuesdays, and black Mrs. Ruby Tyson (far too old for real work), who let herself in on Fridays. Mrs. Tyson's function was to keep up the dignity of the households where she worked. To Wadja, Ravelstein was just another loud Jew-her savage imagination had pictured the money he controlled, and he was rowdy, incomprehensible. Ruby understood him better: he was a professor, a mysterious white personage. As nearly as any honky could, he took into account her problems with her prostitute daughter, her jailed criminal son, and with the other son whose HIV troubles and scrambled wives and children were too complicated to describe. On quiet afternoons he, Ravelstein, would sometimes listen, sympathetic, half dreaming, to Ruby Tyson s stories-really beyond his reach or interests. The old woman presented herself as quiet, dignified, and sadly reserved. You can imagine how Ravelstein would have listened; the chaos the life of such people must be. This good old woman had learned the white game from the deans, provosts, and other academic bureaucrats whose beds she made, and whose parlors she dusted. And, of course, their family problems, the esoteric, psychiatric secrets of their wives, she would tell Ravelstein by the hour. In his apartment she did nothing; most of the time for which he was charged she sat on a bar stool in the kitchen. Now and then she climbed down and baked a pie. The stout, strong, aggressive Wadja attended to the scrubbing and scouring. It was Wadja who moved the furniture, cleaned the toilets, ran the vacuum, scoured the pots, washed the crystal. Easily overheated, she took off her dress and her slip. She worked in a giant bra and swelling Zouave bloomers.

At the sight of him in the wheelchair Wadja's face was torn between compassion and irony-a cocked eyebrow. A mass of suspended comment slid down the pug-nosed slope of her face. Well, it was very bad! But then, he was a Jew as well. You sometimes heard her muttering "Moishala" as she wiped or polished objects. Feeble in the earliest days, Ravelstein greeted her with a lifted forefinger, saying to Nikki, "For God's sake, keep her away from the Lalique."

"She swishes the wine glasses under the tap," Ravelstein said to me. "She chips them on the faucet. I showed her the damage. She started to weep. She said she'd buy me new glasses from Woolworth's. I said, 'You know what those Lalique glasses cost?' When I named a figure, she grinned. She said, 'You jokum, Mister.'"

"You told her the price?"

"You can't help thinking these women are just as rough with men's penises," he would say. "Just imagine-if they were glass."

A certain amount of documentation might be offered at this point to show what I was to Ravelstein and Ravelstein to me. This was never altogether clear to either of us-the principals. Ravel stein would have seen no point in talking around this. He said he was more than satisfied that I could follow perfectly well everything that was said. When he was sick, we saw each other daily and we also had long telephone conversations as close friends should. We were close friends-what else needs to be added? In my desk drawers I find folders containing pages and pages about Ravelstein. But these data only seem to go into the subject. There are no acceptable modern terms for the discussion of friendship or other higher forms of interdependence. Man is a creature who has something to say about everything under the sun.

Ravelstein was willing to lay it all out for me. Now why did he bother to tell me such things, this large Jewish man from Dayton, Ohio? Because it very urgently needed to be said. He was HIV-positive, he was dying of complications from it. Weakened, he became the host of an endless list of infections. Still he insisted on telling me over and over again what love was-the neediness, the awareness of incompleteness, the longing for wholeness, and how the pains of Eros were joined to the most ecstatic pleasures.

This is as good a moment as I will ever find to recall that, from my side, I was free to confess to Ravelstein what I couldn't tell anyone else, to describe my weaknesses, my corrupt shameful secrets, and the cover-ups that drain your strength. As often as not he thought my confessions were wildly funny. Funniest of all were the thought-murders. Perhaps I gave them a comic twist, unwittingly. Anyway, he thought they were uproarious and he said, "Did you ever read Dr. Theodore Reik, the famous Kraut psychoanalyst? He said a thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away."

That I was hard on myself, Ravelstein took, however, to be a favorable sign. Self-knowledge called for severity, and I was always willing to go to the mat with that protean monster, the self, so there was hope for me. But I would have liked to go further. My feeling was that you couldn't be known thoroughly unless you found a way to communicate certain "incommunicables"-your private meta physics. My way of approaching this was that before you were born you had never seen the life of this world. To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development. I had waited for millennia to see this. Then when I had learned to walk-in the kitchen-I was sent down into the street to inspect it more closely. One of my first impressions was of the huge utility-pole timbers that lined the street. They were beaver-colored, soft and rotted. On their crosspieces or multiple arms they carried many wires or cables in an endless falling relay, soaring, falling again and soaring. On the fixed sag and flow of the cables the spar rows sat, flew off, came back to rest. Along the sidewalks, the faded bricks revealed their original red at sunset. You rarely saw an auto mobile in those days. What you saw were hansom cabs, ice wagons, beer drays, and the huge horses that pulled them. I knew people by their faces-red, white, wrinkled, spotted, or smooth; smiling or violent or furious-their eyes, mouths, noses, voices, feet, and gestures. How they bent down to amuse or question or tease or affectionately torment a small boy.

God appeared very early to me. His hair was parted down the middle. I understood that we were related because he had made Adam in his own image, breathed life into him. My eldest brother also combed his hair in the same style. Between the senior brother and me there was another brother. Senior to all of us was our sister. Anyway… this was the world. I had never seen it before. Its first gift was the gift of itself. Objects gathered you to themselves and held you by a magnetic imperative that was simply there. It was a privilege to be permitted to see-to see, touch, hear. This would not have been impossible to describe to Ravelstein. But he would have answered dismissively that Rousseau had already covered the same turf in his _Confessions__ or his _Reveries of a Solitary Walker__. I didn't feel like having these first epistemological impressions anticipated or dismissed. For seventy-odd years I had seen reality under these same signs. I had the feeling, too, that I had to wait for thousands of years to see, hear, smell, and touch these mysterious phenomena-to take my turn in life before disappearing again when my time was up. I might have said to Ravelstein, "It was my one turn to live." But he was too close to death to be spoken to in such terms and I had to surrender my wish to make myself fully known to him by describing my intimate metaphysics. Only a small number of special souls have ever found a way to receive such revelations.

Further childish penetrations of the external world: On Roy Street in Montreal a dray horse has fallen down on the icy pavement. The air is as dark as a gray coat-lining. A smaller animal might have found its feet, but this beast with its huge haunches could only work his hoofs in the air. The long-haired Percheron with startled eyes and staring veins will need a giant to save him, but on the corner a crowd of small men can only call out suggestions. They tell the cop he's lucky the horse fell on Roy Street, easier to write in his report than Lagauchettierre. Then there is a strange and endless procession of schoolgirls marching by twos in black uniform dresses. Their faces white enough to be tubercular. The nuns who oversee them keep their hands warm within their sleeves. The puddles in this dirt street are deep and carry a skim of ice.

In children this impression-real reality-is tolerated by adults. Up to a certain age nothing can be done about it. In well-to-do families it lasts longer, perhaps. But Ravelstein might have argued that there was a danger of self-indulgence in it. Either you continue to live in epiphanies or you shake them off and take up trades and tasks, you adopt rational principles and concern yourself with society, or politics. Then the sense of having come from "elsewhere" vanishes. In Platonic theory all you know is recollected from an earlier existence elsewhere. In my case, Ravelstein's opinion was that distinctiveness of observation had gone much further than it should and was being cultivated for its own strange sake. Mankind had first claim on our attention and I indulged my "personal meta physics" too much, he thought. His severity did me good. I didn't have it in me at my time of life to change, but it was an excellent thing, I thought, to have my faults and failings pointed out by someone who cared about me. I had no intention, however, of removing, by critical surgery, the metaphysical lenses I was born with.

This is one of the traps that a liberal society sets for us-it keeps us childish. Abe would probably have said, "It's up to you to make a choice. Either you continue to see as a child, or else."

So once again Ravelstein was recovering from still another sickness and learning for what seemed the tenth time how to sit up. Nikki learned to operate the triangle-lift, and when Ravelstein began to improve Rosamund and I followed Nikki as he guided the wheelchair. Ravelstein with his eyes half shut dropped his head to one side. With Nikki pushing he rolled through the large apartment-meant for happier, more normal souls. But this was his kingdom, with all its possessions.

Rosamund, with tears in her eyes, asked me whether he would ever be himself again.

"Can he fight off the Guillain-Barrй? I'd say the odds are on his side," I said. "Last year, he had the shingles-herpes something-or-other. He fought those shingles off. That one, he won."

"But how many times can you do that?"

"Everything is just as you left it," Nikki was saying to Ravelstein.

The carpets and hangings, Lalique fixtures, pictures, books, and compact discs. He had sold his collection of old phonograph records, a large and choice one, to keep pace with technological advances. He had CD catalogues arriving from London, Paris, Prague, and Moscow offering the latest Baroque recordings. The telephones of what Nikki and I called the "command post" were disconnected. Only the instrument in Nikki's bedroom was, as he said, "operational." In this city of millions there couldn't have been another apartment like this one-with priceless antique carpets everywhere and, on the kitchen sink, a hissing espresso machine of commercial size. But Ravelstein could no longer operate it. Over the mantelpiece Judith was still holding the head of Holofernes by the hair. His mouth open. Her eyes turned to heaven. The painter wanted you to think of Judith as the simple daughter of Zion, a natural chaste beauty, even though she has just cut off a fellow's head. What was Ravelstein's view of all this? There were very few indications in his private quarters of Ravelstein's sexual preferences. One had no reason, in any respect, to suspect him of irregularities of the commoner sort-the outlandish seductive behaviors of old-fashioned gay men. He couldn't bear the fluttering of effeminate men.

On these wheelchair tours of his apartment what he was feeling was stingingly apparent: What will happen to all this when I am gone? There's nothing that I can take with me into the grave. These beautiful objects which I bought in Japan, in Europe, and New York, far and wide, with so many deliberations and discussions with experts and friends…. Yes, Ravelstein was going down. You might not have guessed, seeing him in his rolling chair, tucked into the plaid with a wide stooped back and the honeydew-melon head tipped far to the side, how physically impressive he was, and how little his quirks, tics, and idiosyncrasies, and recent infections counted. Years ago, visiting my country house in New Hampshire, Ravelstein asked whether I had any proprietary feeling for the fieldstone house, the old maples and hickory trees, the gardens. The truthful answer was that though I liked them all well enough, I did not identify myself as the owner of these acres and objects. So that if the worst were to happen and a local armed militia were to descend on me and drive me out as a Jewish alien, their offense mainly would be against the Jew, not against the landowner. And in such a case my concern would be for the U. S. Constitution, not for my investment. The rooms, the rocks, the vegetation had no hold on my vital organs. If I were to lose it, I'd live on elsewhere. But if the Constitution, the legal foundation of it all, were to be destroyed, we would return to the primal chaos, he used to warn me.

On that visit, Ravelstein had come down to see me from Hanover on Interstate 91, risking his life in a rented car. He was far too un coordinated to be safe on the highways-he jittered at the wheel. He had no connection with vehicles except as a passenger, and was too nervous. And he disliked the country.

He said, repeating the opinion of Socrates in the _Phaedrus__, that a tree, so beautiful to look at, never spoke a word and that conversation was possible only in the city, between men. Because he loved to talk, to think while talking, to lean backward while the bath of ideas overflowed-he instructed, examined, debated, put down errors, celebrated first principles, mixing his Greek with a running translation and stammering madly, laughing as he embroidered his expositions with Jewish jokes.

In the country he never set off on his own across a field. He _looked__ the woods and meadows over but had no other business with them. Somehow Rousseau, who was so fond of fields and woods, was at the back of Abe's mind. Rousseau botanized. Plants, however, were not Ravelstein's dish. He'd eat a salad but he couldn't see the point of meditating on it.

He had come to the country to see me, and the visit was a concession to my unaccountable taste for remoteness and solitude. Why did I want to bury myself in the woods? It was a safe assumption that he had examined my motives from more angles than I could ever think up if I brooded over them for an aeon. It is also possible that he was curious about my then-wife Vela-those were the pre-Rosamund days-still trying to understand why I had married such a woman. Now _there__ was a question for you. He had real intelligence, you see, a working, persistent mind, whereas I was only occasionally, fitfully, intelligent. What he thought out, and thought through, sat upon a foundation of tested principles.-How shall I put it?… As birds went he was an eagle, while I was something like a flycatcher.

He knew, however, that I could understand his principles-they didn't even need to be explained to me. If he had a single illusion it was that somehow I was capable of accepting correction, and he was a teacher, you see. That was his vocation-he taught. We are a people of teachers. For millennia, Jews have taught and been taught. Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility. Ravelstein had been a pupil or, if you prefer, a disciple of Davarr. You may not have heard of this formidable philosopher. His admirers say that he is a philosopher in the classical sense of the term. I am no judge of such things. Philosophy is hard work. My own interests lie in a different direction altogether. Within my mental limits I think of the late Davarr with respect. Ravelstein talked so much about him that in the end I was obliged to read some of his books. It had to be done if I was to understand what Abe was all about. I used to run into Davarr on the street, and it was hard to imagine that this slight per son, triply abstracted, mild goggles covering his fiery judgments, was the demon heretic hated by academics everywhere in the U. S. and even abroad. As one of Davarr's chief representatives, Ravel-stein was hated, too. But he didn't at all mind being the enemy. He was anything but faint-hearted. I didn't much care for professors as a class. They haven't had much to offer us in the unbearable century now ending. So I thought, or used to think.

It is pleasant to consider the week of Ravelstein's country visit. Quiet New England in long, narrow frames-sunlight, greenery, the bed of orange-red poppies next to the red-and-white peonies.

Glancing through the Venetian blinds (he separated and widened the slats with shaking fingers) he saw the blossoms-just then the azaleas were coming into bloom-and found it all very well but the drama of the season lacked real interest. Not to be compared to the human drama.

He asked, "Is your wife always like this?"

"Like what?"

"_'What__,' the man says. Fourteen hours a day bolt upright with her books and papers, Vela shut away in her country-cupboard room."

"I see what you mean. Yes. That's the way she is about her chaos physics."

"To sit without budging-without even breathing. You never see her breathe at all. How does she manage not to suffocate?"

"She's preparing her paper. She's supposed to attend a conference to comment on somebody's research."

"She must catch up on her breathing-in snatches. I've watched her," said Ravelstein, "and I don't think she inhales except in an underground way."

Of course he was exaggerating. But there were facts to support him. Moreover, he had maneuvered me into accepting his way of speaking about her. Before I could consider whether to agree or disagree he had already persuaded me. What he was suggesting was that I didn't have to accept Vela's behavior. When we went to the country she locked herself up in her room. Two solitudes were then created. That was what our summers in New England were like: under one sun, on one planet, there were these two separate existences. Vela was especially beautiful when she was silent. Silent, she seemed to be praying to her beauty. Ravelstein may have been aware of this.

He came to New Hampshire to be with me very briefly, and he immediately understood what I had gotten into. He detested the rural scene, but for my sake he put his life on hold. He didn't like leaving his city switchboard command post. To be cut off from his informants in Washington and Paris, from his students, the people he had trained, the band of brothers, the initiates, the happy few made him extremely uncomfortable.

"So this is how you spend your summers?" he said.

As often as possible he went to Paris for a week or, even better, for a month. Paris, he granted, was no longer what it used to be. Nevertheless he often quoted Balzac's statement that no event anywhere in the world was an event until it was observed, judged, and certified by Paris. Still, the good old days were gone. Czarinas and kings no longer imported poets or philosophers from Paris. When foreigners like Ravelstein spoke to a French audience on Rousseau, the lecture hall was packed. One could say that genius was still welcome in France. But very few French intellectuals got high marks from Abe Ravelstein. He did not care for foolish anti-Americanism. He had no need to be loved or pampered by Parisians. On the whole, he liked their wickedness more than their civility.

Paris (this is an important aside) was where Abe Ravelstein and Vela had their first falling out. He was there when she and I flew in to accept a prize given to foreign writers. We were staying at the Pont Royal Hotel. Impatient, in high spirits, keen to see me, Ravel stein called out from the anteroom and without waiting for an answer he rushed in. He intended to hug me-or Vela, if she should happen to be first. But she was in her slip and she wheeled round and ran, slamming the bathroom door. But Abe and I, happy to see each other again after so many months, hardly gave a thought to Vela, or to Ravelstein's impropriety in barging into the bedroom. He should at least have knocked. It was her bedroom, as she was to remind me.

I might have known from the dainty anger of her running that Ravelstein was guilty of an outrage. I was unwilling to take her notions of good conduct into account. She said afterward that she could never forgive him for blundering into her room. Why did he rush in without warning, before she was dressed?

"Well, he's impetuous," I said. "With a man like Ravelstein it's… it's one of his charms that he acts on impulse…."

This didn't soften Vela. Every word I spoke to explain Ravelstein or to defend him went immediately into her retaliation stockpile to be fired back at me. "I didn't come to Paris to see your pals," she said. "Or to have them walk in on me when I'm half naked."

"You show more of yourself at the beach," I said. "In what the fashion minimalists call a bathing suit."

Vela dismissed this, too. "It's a different context and you have a right to make preparations. You talk to me in a very superior way, as if you are putting me down as an ignorant woman. You should please remember that I stand as high in my field as you do in yours."

"Of course you do. And even higher," I said.

I am accustomed to being downgraded by businesspeople, lawyers, engineers, Washington hotshots, various scientists. Even their secretaries, who get their notions of what matters from television, hide their smiles behind their hands and give one another the high sign when I turn up-some incomprehensible goofball.

So I allowed Vela to be as superior as she pleased, while Ravel-stein said I should have more proper pride and that it was phony of me to be so meek. But I wasn't inclined to go out of my way to defer to so many critics. I had a good grasp of reality and of my defects. I permanently kept in mind the approach of Death, who might at any time loom up before you.

Anyway, I should have anticipated that Vela would make a big thing of Ravelstein's "impropriety." She had been preparing to have it out with me over Abe, and his barging into our bedroom at the hotel gave her just the opening she was waiting for.

"I don't want to see him here again," she said. "I ask you also to remember that you promised to take me to Chartres."

"I said that I would. And of course I will take you-I mean, we'll go there together."

"And let's invite the Grielescus. They're old friends. Professor Grielescu will join us. Nanette wouldn't-she stopped taking such trips long ago. She doesn't like to be seen by daylight."

I had noted this myself. Mme. Grielescu had been a glamorous lady in her time one of those _jeunes filles en fleur__ you read about long ago. Grielescu was a famous scholar, not exactly a follower of Jung-but _not__ exactly not a Jungian. He was a hard one to place.

Ravelstein, who didn't bring wild charges against anybody, said that Grielescu was mentioned, by scholars who specialized in such things, as an Iron Guardist connected with the Romanian prewar fascist government. He had been a foreign service cultural official in the Nazi regime in Bucharest. "You don't like to think of such things, Chick," said Ravelstein. "And you're married to a woman who scares you. Of course you'll say she's a political ignoramus."

"About politics she understands very little…."

"Naturally, she believes that a scientist must be above and beyond such stuff. But these are her pals. We may as well look straight at the facts."

I said, "I will admit that Radu Grielescu sets the standards for male conduct in those East European circles."

"You mean the courtly gentleman bullshit."

"Yes, that's more or less it. The considerate man, the only right kind, remembers birthdays, honeymoons, and other tender anniversaries. You have to kiss the ladies' hands, send them roses; you cringe, move back the chairs, you rush to open doors and make arrangements with the maitre d'. In that set, the women expect to be petted, idolized, deferred to, or romanced."

"Those jerks playing _chevalier а votre service__?-Of course it's just a game. But the women get a kick out of it."

The trip from the Montparnasse Station to Chartres was fairly short. If I took Vela to view the cathedral, I'd prefer to do it on a market day in strawberry season. But Vela had no real interest in Chartres except to be taken there. She didn't give a shit about Gothic architecture or stained glass. She only wanted her will to be done.

"Vela sets all kinds of conditions for you to meet, doesn't she?" Ravelstein said. "Didn't she make you bring all her luggage?"

"That's true. I came via London."

"And she couldn't cancel some appointment back home, so you flew separately. And brought her party dresses…"

He didn't admire me for doing such errands. He made this super clear. The picture he had drawn of my marriage was anything but flattering. Writers don't make good husbands. They reserve their Eros for their art. Or maybe they just don't focus. As for Vela, he judged her even more severely. "Maybe I shouldn't have rushed into the bedroom." He granted that, but added, "There wasn't all that much to be seen. Anyway, I wasn't interested. She was far from ex posed. She had on her slip, and all kinds of other stuff under that. So what's all the hue and cry?"

"Protocol," I explained. Ravelstein disagreed. "No, no. Not protocol. It doesn't even look like protocol."

I don't often have a problem with words. What I meant to say was that she was simply not ready to be seen. Unless you had lived with her, you wouldn't know what she did in the morning with her hair, her cheeks, her lips (especially the upper lip)-the phases of her preparations. She had to be seen as a beautiful woman. But it was beauty-parade beauty, and required preparation at a West Point or Hapsburg hussar level. I will be suspected of prejudice. But I assure you that I am confronted with some very real oddities-I happen to be a serial marrier and I had here a problem of self-preservation.

Ravelstein said, "Doesn't Vela come from the Black Sea region?"

"What if she does?"

"The Eastern Danube? The Carpathians?"

"I can't place it, exactly."

"It's not too important," Abe said. "A grande dame on an Eastern European model. No modern Frenchwoman would put on such an act. Often people from Eastern Europe cling to France, they have no life at home, home is disgusting, and they need to see themselves in a French light only. This applies to somebody like Cioran or even our friend-your friend-Grielescu. They hope to turn into Frenchmen. But your wife is even more peculiar…"

I stopped him. It would leave me open to charges of disloyalty if I were to admit that she was indeed the very strange phenomenon he described. I saw her with the eyes of a lover. But not entirely. I also took a naturalist's view of her. She was a very beautiful woman. And I admitted also that certain aspects of her face reminded me of Giorgione. On a small map you could place Vela's origins in Greece or even Egypt. Of course a big-time intellect is a universal phenomenon, and Vela had a major league brain. The scientific part of it de served particular respect. Ravelstein, however, held that examples of great personalities among scientists were scarce. Great philosophers, painters, statesmen, lawyers, yes. But great-souled men or women in the sciences are extremely rare. "It's their sciences that are great, not the persons."

I must drop Paris now and get back to New Hampshire.

A few days in the country led me to conclude that Ravelstein's visit was proof of his affection. He didn't care about the fields, trees, pools, flowers, birds: These wasted the time of a superior man. Why did he give up his bank of telephones, his restaurants, and all the conveniences and erotic attractions of New York or Chicago? Because he wanted to see firsthand what was going on between Vela and me in New Hampshire.

One day was enough. "I've been watching," he said, "and I see she's got you staked out on an anthill," he said. "Don't you ever do anything together? Hiking?"

"No, come to think of it."

"Swimming?"

"At odd times she jumps in the neighbor's pond."

"Barbecues, picnics, visitors, parties?"

"Not her cup of tea."

"She can't talk to you about her central interests…" Ravelstein's big face was now very close. Holding his breath, he silently led me to consider it all from his point of view: Why did I submit to an ordeal of daily tensions which would never end?

All that Vela needed, as she often said, was to sit in a quiet angle with a notepad and draw her diagrams, knees up, breath held, and immobile. But she was all the while also directing negative currents toward me. The beauty of this New Hampshire corner with great maples and centuries-old hickories-the periwinkles and mosses in the shaded corners signified… well, to Vela they signified very little. She concentrated on her great abstractions.

"How do you figure in this?" said Ravelstein. "Do you maybe represent all that any man will ever get from her… So the fascinating question is whether she concentrates on her science or on her witch-work, because in your ignorance that's how it must seem."

That seemed to be a fair way to state the case.

"The regular pattern for her," I said, "is to pack up her things every few weeks, including her party clothes, because there are social gatherings as well as hard sciences. She drives away in her white Jaguar and attends science conferences up and down the Eastern seaboard."

"Would you say that, apart from the hint of rejection, there is also some relief for you when she goes?" Ravelstein could be sympathetic. But more often he speculated on my paradoxical oddities. "What do you get out of this place?" he would say. "This is sup posed to be your quiet green retreat where you think and work. Or at least advance your projects…"

I was generally open with him, and willing to entertain criticism. He took a genuine interest in the lives of his friends, in their characters, their deeper intimacies-their sexual needs or kinks: Often he surprised me by the selflessness of his observations. He did not try to promote himself over you in noting your faults. In a way, I was grateful to be observed by him, and I found myself speaking to him openly about my peculiarities.

I can offer a sample conversation.

"I grant you that this is a beautiful and peaceful place," said Ravelstein. "But can you explain what Nature does for you-a Jewish city type? You're not a Transcendentalist update."

"No. That's not my line."

"And to your country neighbors you're one of the beasts that should have been drowned in the Flood."

"Oh, absolutely. But I don't worry about fitting in or belonging to the community. It's the stillness all around that attracted me."

"We've had this conversation before…."

"Because it's important."

"Life speeding away. Your days fly faster than the weaver's shuttle. Or a stone thrown into the air," he said like an indulgent parent, "and accelerating downward at the rate of thirty-two feet per second squared-a metaphor for the horrifying speed of approaching death. You'd like time to be as slow as it was when you were a child-each day a lifetime."

"Yes, and to do that you need some reserves of stillness in your soul."

"As some Russian puts it," said Ravelstein. "I don't know which one, but you always incline toward the Russians, Chick, when you try to explain what you're really up to. But in addition you have been working for years at the problem of arranging your life-your private life, that is. And that's why you turn out to be the owner of this house and those three-hundred-year-old maple trees, to say nothing of the green carpet meadows and the stone walls. The liberal politics of our country make it possible to be private and free, not molested in your personal life. But your hasting days fly on in full career-while your wife is determined to defeat your plan for peaceful fulfillment. There's got to be a special Russian expression for this thee-ah thee-ah constellation. I can see how she vamped you. She's a really classy looker, when she gets herself up, and she has a most sexy figure…

At first Ravelstein had been extremely careful not to offend Vela. He wanted us, for the sake of our friendship, to get on smoothly, and he was warm, markedly attentive when she spoke. He deferred to her. He did all this with a virtuoso air-like an Itzhak Perlman playing nursery tunes for a small girl. But his deeper judgment had to be set aside. When he rushed into the hotel bedroom in Paris he was still covered by the _entente cordiale__ he had with Vela. He never lied to himself about the observations he made. He kept accurate mental records.

But he and I had become friends-deeply attached-and friend ship would not have been possible if we hadn't spontaneously understood each other. On this occasion he leaned his bald head on the back of his chair. The size of his large, simpatico, creased pale face made me wonder at the power of the supporting muscles in his neck and shoulders because his legs had a minimum of muscle. Just enough to serve his purpose, or to do his will.

"It would have been so easy to make a sane connection. But you need an extreme challenge. So you find yourself trying to please a woman. But she refuses to be pleased-by you, anyway.