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have also become. Instead I did everything properly. I had good marks. I took care of my books. My clothes were right. Now, looking at him, I am convinced of all I missed. I am envious. Somehow his life seems more truthful than mine, stronger, even able to draw mine to it like the pull of a dark star.
    He quit. It was too easy for him, his sister told me, and so he refused it. He had always been extraordinary in math. He had a scholarship. He knew he was exceptional. Once he took the anthropology final when he hadn’t taken the course. He wrote that at the top of the page. His paper was so brilliant the professor fell in love with him. Dean was disappointed, of course. It only proved how ridiculous everything was. He’d already been given a leave in his freshman year, now he took another. He went to see a psychiatrist. He lived with various friends in New York and began to develop a style. It lasted a whole year, but the university was very understanding. Finally he went back and did another year, but in the end he quit altogether. Then he began educating himself.

[6]
    D EAN AT THE WASHBASIN , shaving. Standing there half-naked, he seems very thin. He has bony shoulders. I am trying to create details. Narrow, white feet. I am trying to make him real, the darling of his father’s friends. He visited their houses. He drove their cars.
    The bathroom is enormous with a window crossed by low shelves bearing Cristina’s bottles, many of them filled with color, bath salts, toilet water, apothecary jars. The razor scrapes like a barber’s, short, even strokes and then a pause. He cleans it with occasional bursts of water. His beard isn’t heavy. It’s mostly around his chin. In the outer room, fully dressed, I sit waiting. He inspects himself hastily in the mirror.
    “You ready?” he asks innocently.
    Those first, early weeks with the cold skies of Europe covering them, weeks that seem now never to have been, that later events washed out of existence, almost out of memory. In October we went–I am taking these from a list–to Châlons-sur-Seine, to Beaune, Dijon (three times), and even to Nancy.
    Over the crown of western hills we sail beneath a brilliant sky of clouds shot through with sunlight and begin the descent to town, the road cutting back and forth in deep, blind turns. And then those great, lineal runs through neighborhoods I knew nothing of, making straight for the perfect square which marked the city like a signet. Nancy. How could I know? Streets that later would become as sacred to me as those of my childhood. Boulevard Georges Clemenceau. We pass it and are gone.
    It’s Saturday. The streets are crowded. Men are roasting chestnuts on the corners. We sit near the window of the Café du Commerce. Four in the afternoon. The blue sky of France flooding with clouds. The last of the year upon us, the cold coming on–one can feel it every day. Dean is studying the guidebook. I stare out the window. Around the square cars turn, slow as oxen. Occasionally a Jaguar or Mercedes goes past, one of those great, ghosting machines and sometimes a lovely face inside. The shops are jammed with shoes, gold ornaments, suedes, beautiful cheeses.
    I see it at dawn now, when the light is chalky and then the palest blue. The streets are absolutely still. The huge portes are silent–Place Carnot, its long regiment of trees. I wander this city like a somnambulist. The blue cigarette smoke is rising, the odor of reminiscences, in the Bar de la Division de Fer. Avenue du XXme Corps. The veterans sit hunched in their sweaters, their blue suit-coats, surrounded by the relics of a glory now spent, gone to rust, the white hand of mould staining it, the smell of dampness. Dawn comes in the flat windows of the cafés. They walk home alone, along the canal, their shoes scuffing the grey sidewalk.
    Autumn nights. We stroll in the early darkness, deciding where to eat, and start for home in the first flurries of snow, bundled up and