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status, had greatly aggravated Dubdub’s existential crisis. The more he became a Personality, the less like a person he felt. Finally he had decided on a retreat back into the cloisters of traditional academe. No more of all that globetrotting Magic Christian Derridada! No more performance. Energized by his new resolve, he had flown back to Cambridge with the literary groupie Perry Pincus, an unashamed sexual butterfly, actually believing he could set up house with her and build a stable life around the relationship. That’s how far gone he was.
    Krysztof Waterford-Wajda would survive three further suicide attempts. Then, just one month before Professor Solanka metaphorically took his own life, saying good-bye to everyone and everything he held dear and striking out for America with a spiky-haired doll in his arms a special, early-period limited edition of Little Brain in bad condition, the clothes ripped, the body damaged-Dubdub dropped dead. Three arteries had been badly clogged. A simple bypass operation could have saved him, but he refused it and, like an English elm, fell. Which perhaps, if one were searching for such explanations, helped trigger Professor Solanka’s metamorphosis. Professor Solanka, remembering his dead friend in New York, realized that he had followed Dubdub in so many things: in some of his thinking, yes, but also into le monde mediatigue, into America, into crisis.
    Perry Pincus had been one of the first to intuit the link between them. She had returned to her native San Diego and now taught, in a local college, the work of some of the critics and writers whom she had carnally known. Pincus 101, she called it, brazen as ever, in one of the annual Happy Holidays messages she never failed to send Professor Solanka. “It’s my personal greatest-hits collection, my Top Twenty,” she wrote, adding, a little cuttingly, “You’re not in it, Professor. I can’t walk around in a man’s work if I don’t know which entrance he prefers.” Her season’s greetings were invariably accompanied, incomprehensibly, by the gift of a soft toy-a platypus, a walrus, a polar bear. Eleanor had always been much amused by the annual parcels from California. “Because you wouldn’t fuck her,” Professor Solanka was informed by his wife, “she can’t think of you as a lover. So she’s trying to become your mother instead. How does it feel to be Perry Pinch-ass’s little boy?”
     

3
    In his comfortable Upper West Side sublet, a handsome, high-ceilinged first- and second-floor duplex boasting majestic oak paneling and a library that spoke highly of the owners, Professor Malik Solanka nursed a glass of red Geyserville zinfandel and mourned. The decision to leave had been wholly his; still, he grieved for his old life. Whatever Eleanor said on the phone, the break was almost certainly irreparable. Solanka had never thought of himself as a bolter or quitter, yet he had shed more skins than a snake. Country, family, and not one wife but two had been left in his wake. Also, now, a child. Maybe the mistake was to see his latest exit as unusual. The harsh reality was perhaps that he was acting not against nature but according to its dictates. When he stood naked before the unvarnished mirror of truth, this was what he was really like.
    Yet, like Perry Pincus, he believed himself to be a good person. Women believed it too. Sensing in him a ferocity of commitment that was rarely found in modern men, women had often allowed themselves to fall in love with him, surprising themselves-these wised-up, cautious women!-by the speed with which they charged outward into the really deep emotional water. And he didn’t let them down. He was kind, understanding, generous, clever, funny, grown-up, and the sex was good, it was always good. This is forever, they thought, because they could see him thinking it too; they felt loved, treasured, safe. He told them-each of his women in turn-that friendship was what he had instead of