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past.”
    “Where would you suggest I live?”
    “In the moment!” he says, to my disgust. “You should be up on current events. You should watch Press the Meat .” I would correct him, but I prefer his version. “And why aren’t you writing something—I mean other than a lecture for the Chautauqua Institution about Lapham and the end of the world? Your last novel—when was it? Ten years ago?”
    “Eight.”
    “And it was nuts. I should have seen all of this coming. A boxer who was so lovesick that he never ate or slept? Couldn’t happen. Impossible.”
    “The boxer was a man.”
    “Oh. Well, I still think it was nuts. Who’d want to read such a thing?”
    “No one, according to the sales reports.”
    “You need help.”
    “What else? What else is wrong with my life?”
    “You mean apart from everything?” he asks. “You mean apart from your diet of ravioli, which you eat cold from the can, and Devil Dogs? Devil Dogs, indeed! There’s a healthy food pyramid for you!”
    I should explain that I eat things like Devil Dogs and cold ravioli because I have never learned to cook, though I used to be a master at takeout. I once received a call from a woman who was compiling a writer’s cookbook—the favorite recipes of authors. I sent her four phone numbers.
    “And your appearance! Everything you’re wearing is ten years old.”
    “Not the bandage on my ear.” He looks away. “And what about your appearance?”
    “I’m perfect,” he says. “I take care of myself.” He curls up and licks his genitals, thinking that proves his case.
    “And your computer,” he goes on. “Why did you bother to get one? You only use it to communicate with your children, and to track your imagined archenemy, Mr. Lapham.”
    “‘Imagined’!” I lunge for him, but he skitters away.
    “And then there’s Chloe, seated forever at the kitchen table.”
    Perhaps I also should explain that the effigy of Chloe is a true work of art. The Hungarian dwarf in New Hampshire bridled when I asked him to put Chloe in shorts; he thought I was making fun of him. But temper aside, he has quite a goodreputation. Not only is his work both accurate and imaginative; it is durable. When he finished the project, he told me, “This baby rules!” I resented the “baby” but was otherwise satisfied.
    “And in the library,” Hector continues. “One book. One book! In a writer’s library! And what is that book? A slim volume of The Vanity of Human Wishes !”
    “Because…” I start to say.
    “Yes, yes. Because Dr. Johnson was always right. I don’t know about that. I’ve never read him.”
    “You’ve never read anything,” I remind him unkindly.
    I suppose I ought to explain this as well, though why The Vanity of Human Wishes should require anyone’s defense is beyond me. When my parents lived in this house, they packed the tall bookcases with the best that ere was thought or felt, as did the Marches before them. The books stretched from floor to ceiling, lined up in rows at the front of the shelves, like lewd and happy whores leaning on the windowsills of a Paris cathouse, their rosy tits spilling out of their housecoats, and calling to me: Come on up. So I did. Starting at the age of three, I climbed those shelves like a second-story man and sniffed and touched, and soon I could read. That continued until a few years ago—the reading, not the climbing.
    But then one morning, not long after Chloe went west, Iregarded the high shelves with a new coolness approaching coldness, and I realized how much excessive activity was going on in those books as I stared at them. Hamlet whining, Anna moaning, Ahab yelling, the nitwit Daisy sobbing over shirts. The din began to get to me. Not that these characters hadn’t a right to their tragedies and melodramas, but why did I have to be subjected to their squalid if well-wrought displays of passion? I had heard their stories once, and in most cases two or three times. Let them make their