These Dreams of You

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Forty-three years ago, at this same table where Parker eats his sandwich, another Yank passing through town on his way to somewhere else, who feels every minute as old as Zan even as he’s almost twenty years younger, gazes at the front page of a newspaper that someone has handed him in the street.

The newspaper is an unseemly mess of text and image, as anarchic as the sensibility it means to convey. The black ink comes off on his fingers, with streaks of headline-red, and the Yank frowns at its front page, which has the picture of a nun who appears to be at some sort of social occasion. She’s surrounded by people who have the look if not of familiarity, of celebrities, young men and girls with hair longer than his, and caught by the camera from the back, she reveals a bare bottom.