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conclusion was that Sylvie and her friends had deserved each and every one of his denunciations; that, although he was intemperate, he was also correct.
    Bernard identified Enrique’s flammable condition and tried to light a match. He tipped backward in the uncomfortable Sandolino’s pine chair until it hit the wall behind him, and he looked down his nose at Enrique with the same air he adopted at the poker table when he was about to turn over the winning hand. He smiled his version of a smile, a sneering curl of one side of his lip, as if he were a Jewish Elvis Presley. Then he mumbled, “Oh, I’m sure you’re right, Ricky,” he said, the anglicization signaling that Bernard felt secure about the likelihood of triumphing in this dispute. “After all, you’re never wrong about anything.” He glanced at Margaret and said in a confiding tone, “You don’t know this about Ricky, but he’s never ever wrong.”
    “What the hell does that mean?” Enrique shouted before he could remember not to. He tried to convince himself that all he had done was make use of his vocal resources, projecting like any good stage actor, and that was why six heads at the other tables had swung his way to stare at him.
    But when he looked at Margaret, he quailed. Her shimmering blue eyes were drinking him in with a deep look of shock and an even deeper look of calculation. She knows. Enrique’s thoughts collapsed into a black hole of self-loathing. She knows I’m a crazy box of frightened tinder, an assessment that, coming from anyone else, he would have considered a calumny.
    After a moment of terrible suspense, during which he sat up straight and didn’t draw a breath, Margaret said in a pleasant and relaxed tone, “But you have to be wrong.”
    In his turmoil Enrique forgot for a moment what the hell was in dispute. Was it the degradation of imperialism, the open wound of racism, whether the Knicks could win without a true center, or that Faulkner is impenetrable? At that moment he didn’t care. Let the Vietnamese fry in their skins, let blacks languish as economic slaves, let the Celtics win eighteen more championships, let the pretentious insist that to be unreadable is genius. Let the deluge come, just so long as this delectable creature doesn’t turn away from me. Admitting this to himself—that being right didn’t matter compared to making love—managed to calm him down. Of course the dispute was beyond argument. He had attended P.S. 173 for a full six years. He had written 173 on every piece of homework, every test, every science project; as president of the student council he had put 173 on the telegram he sent to Senator Robert Kennedy inviting him to address their class graduation; and it appeared below Enrique Sabas’s name on the return telegram from that glamorous and ultimately tragic political figure, a missive made no less thrilling by the text of its polite decline. P.S. 173, P.S. 173, P.S. 173—say it soft and it’s almost like praying. It was more likely that he hadn’t written his novels than that he had mistaken his elementary school’s elegant name. Nevertheless, to ingratiate himself with this lively, good-humored beauty, he nodded thoughtfully while Margaret said, “New York can’t have two 173s.It would make a mess,” she said, ostensibly to Enrique, but there was a special pleading in her manner and tone, as if she were addressing a higher authority who was always checking on her to make sure her thinking proceeded in an orderly fashion.
    “A mess of what?” Enrique asked.
    “A mess of…” She seemed to come to a complete blank. She stared at Bernard as if he had the answer.
    Bernard, much to Enrique’s dismay, did: “A mess of ordering school supplies.”
    “Right!” Margaret said, delighted. “One of the P.S. 173s would get all the number two pencils, and in the other the poor children would have nothing to write with.”
    Enrique’s mood was lightened by her gaiety. He was happy to