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Grand houses occasionally appeared: Halnaby Hall, where the Byrons honeymooned; his apartments in Piccadilly; various mansions in St James’s and Mayfair. My personal knowledge of such historical details is poor, but I assumed he had borrowed them from fact. (As I thought these thoughts the warehouses and factories of Queens, lit from below by street lamps, rushed past, surrounded by tracks.)
    The literary influences were easier to trace. I could imagine most clearly from his life the books on his shelves. Byron, of course. James is prominent, too, especially in the second novel. Jane Austen. One reviewer mentioned the Silver Fork school, which I had never heard of and spent a few days in the British Library looking up: writers like Bulwer-Lytton and Disraeli, and novels like Tremaine: Or the Man of Refinement , many of them published by Henry Colburn, one of the villains in Imposture . But there seemed to me also a distinct American influence: the super-rational prose of Edgar Allan Poe, the clause-addiction of Melville. Of course, the greatest influence on any writer’s work is what I sometimes think of as the IKEA of his imagination, which disassembles the cheap materials of his reading and experience and puts them roughly back together. With some screws loose, others left over. Veneer effects, bad hinge-work, unbalanced feet. A few standard devices for solving the problems of construction.
    This line of thinking suggested to me what his novels really have in common. They both turn on sex-acts involving dubious consent. In the climax of Imposture , Polidori deflowers Eliza, who thinks he’s Lord Byron, at their Brighton hotel. She shrieks at him childishly after he reveals himself: ‘This is not what I wanted at all!’ And he can think of nothing else to do but leave a handful of money on her bed and run away. In A Quiet Adjustment , Annabella gives herself up wholeheartedly to marriage only after Byron has sodomized her in his sister’s house. She realizes that she has become involved in a species of sinfulness that can corrupt even her own cold virtue; there is no way out. And on top of these examples, the unpublished stories. What was darkening into shape was something unhappy in the bedroom. I thought of Peter’s famous reserve, how much it had to do with shyness or arrogance. His silence might have been the silence of the victim or the exploiter; silences sound alike. And I recalled my own sexual discomfort around him. Some instinct had warned me against Peter, but if it was just the stupid, red-faced, heterosexual suspicion of gay friendship, or something sharper, I couldn’t be sure.
    In Manhattan I transferred at 42nd Street for the number 9 train – the same train I would take in the morning up to Riverdale and Horatio Alger. I was staying for a couple nights at an apartment on the Upper West Side. When I lived in New York, I lived east of the Park and rarely had to navigate the platforms, alleys, stairwells and ramps of Times Square. Even at that hour, the station was full of its New York types. Under the sign for the uptown red line, I saw a short, tired man in a suit trying to undo the knot in his tie; his elbow held a briefcase against his ribs. As he tore it loose, I felt suddenly unencumbered worried and unencumbered, and realized I had left the box of manuscripts in the subway car. It was too late to go back for them. The only novels that reached me came in the post several weeks later, from the red-haired schoolteacher. Out of guilt, I looked them over more carefully than I otherwise might have. The first ten pages; a middle chapter; the endings. She was right about her sister’s work. It wasn’t bad or particularly good, and there was nothing I could do for her.
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    Around eleven o’clock the next morning, I made my way up the hill from the subway at Van Cortlandt Park – a broad flat green at the foot of Riverdale, just across the river from the