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people I would see them at five o’clock. When can you bring me that book?”
    “In a couple of days. The thing is spread all over my office and I’ll have to get it organized. But maybe I could bring it to you a couple of chapters at a time. It’s almost seventeen hundred pages long.”
    “Seventeen hundred pages! And you’ve worked on it how long?”
    “For nine years. Since I graduated from college, it’s been my chief occupation. The Greenwich Press is a sideline really. My family’s given me some money that lets me do this.”
    “So you’re just thirty years old.” He looked me up and down. “You look a little older.”
    “I’m thirty-one.”
    “You look a little out of shape. With all this interest in the body, don’t you exercise? You’re thirty pounds too heavy, and the color of your skin’s wrong. Are those liver spots?”
    “Freckles and liver spots both. The doctor says it’s poor circulation.”
    There was silence and I felt myself blushing. “God, you look almost forty,” he said. “It’s time you did something about it. When you’re in that kind of shape you’re bound to have problems. Are you married?”
    “No more. I was divorced in ’67, the year I came here from New York. No, I live alone now.”
    “Maybe you need someone to live with.” He slapped the arm of his chair. “But anyway, I’ve got to go. Leave the book in the box at the landing, and I’ll let you know what I think.”

4
    T HE GUTTERS ON GRANT Avenue were littered with garbage, and boxes by the grocery shops overflowed onto the sidewalk. The street reflected my state—Atabet’s comments as we parted had left me ashamed and depressed. But why had he ended our conversation that way? For whatever reason, he had fended me off completely.
    A heavy fog was rolling in across North Beach, making everything distant and gloomy. What was there about me to make him suspicious? What was it he didn’t trust? I went up the stairs to my office. Leafing through the papers in my files I saw that it would be impossible to give him the entire manuscript without a week of sorting and collation. Maybe it was best to forget it. I could tell him that the thing would take a month to assemble and let the episode pass. There was little chance he would read the book anyway. No one yet had worked their way through all 1,700 pages.
    The thought came with a quiver of pleasure. This was a way to retaliate for his parting comments. The contemptuous son of a bitch!—he had fended me off and had added insult to it. Maybe it was best to let the whole thing rest.
    An image of his face appeared. His irises were almost black, yet in his studio they had subtly changed color. I could see them now, catching the blue and violet shades of his paintings. They were remarkable eyes, full of startling shifts in expression; our meeting had gone by so swiftly that I had missed some of the things they conveyed. His comments about my appearance, for example, had been accompanied by a sympathy and good humor that only now was coming to me.
    More had happened than I thought. That perceptual release his painting had triggered, for example, the Bay breaking off in my vision. The meeting had been filled with sudden turns and with double messages. Had he been giving me hints after all, clues to test my understanding? Was he hiding an interior project related to the events in the church?
    Suddenly, my depression turned into excitement. Underneath our measured conversation a complex meeting had begun. It was up to me to keep it going. But giving him the entire manuscript was not the way. It would be better to give him a working outline of it. If that intrigued him, I would give him the original material section by section. This way we could test one another.
    On the following afternoon I left a hundred-page condensation of my book in his mailbox with a note that asked him to phone me after he read it. If he had any questions, I would be glad to discuss them whenever