These Dreams of You

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What survived Zan’s affair with Jenna, at least for a while, was a friendship with her comrade if not lover Ronnie Jack. Perhaps the fact that neither man was sleeping with Jenna provided a bond. Then Zan got fired from the travel magazine for “insubordination” and being a “disruptive influence,” the last time until lately that he was considered by anyone as volatile, and which he took as a sign to finish what still could be called his most recent novel—“most recent!” Zan laughs to Brown. “That makes it sound, well, fucking recent, doesn’t it?” In the novel was a very small character, a few paragraphs in a single chapter, based on Ronnie. Zan changed a detail or two but not, as it turned out, enough, because when the book was published, someone in the insurance company where Ronnie worked read it and concluded that the black man working in his department was the Stalinist with a militant past in the Sixties — and Ronnie lost his job.