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attention,” he observed sadly.
    â€œI’m afraid you did. I was remembering something.”
    â€œI asked if you liked poetry.”
    â€œWhy did you ask me that?”
    â€œBecause you look like you might.”
    I decided to use diversionary tactics.
    â€œHow do people look who like poetry?”
    â€œIf they like lyrical poetry, they sometimes have eyes like yours.”
    â€œAnd if they prefer epic or intellectual poetry?”
    â€œAcademic, perhaps. You never can tell. Take Wallace Stevens, for instance. He was a great lyric poet and also an executive of an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.”
    I thought perhaps I’d succeeded in my tactics as a blank look had appeared on his face, but then I noticed that he was removing a crumpled piece of paper from an inside pocket.
    â€œSometimes I do like poetry, some of it sometimes, under some conditions, but not right now. I don’t want to read it or hear it read to me right now.”
    Then I saw that my alarm was unjustified as it was only a piece of Kleenex that he had removed from his pocket and he wiped his watery eyes with it.
    â€œI began with poetry and I think I might go back to it. It’s cheaper to produce and I think that the current standards are even lower. Of course all forms of self-expression serve the same purpose.”
    I didn’t ask what purpose but he continued as though I had.
    â€œTo get you out of yourself.”
    Then his look turned inward again: I felt released, not from my self but his. I suppose he was sorting through his sixty-odd years of recollection like a pack of old Tarot cards and, looking at him without much interest during his period of introversion, I wondered about his ethnic origin. If he were a Jew, he must have been a Sephardic one, the kind that never wandered but stayed in Spain. Or have I got that backward? But he did seem more like a creature whose parts derived from foreign places and were only assembled in the States. Perhaps he was a kind of Gypsy, and as if he divined my speculations about him, he leaned back dreamily in his chair and said, “Since I left home in my teens I’ve always lived a nomadic sort of existence as if I were looking for something of vital importance to me which I had lost somewhere.”
    â€œAre you giving an interview to me?” I asked him with a touch of asperity.
    â€œDon’t be bitchy, love. You’re Southern like me and we have to be gents.”
    â€œNot when deserted by the second love of your life, a youth who was designed by Praxiteles.”
    â€œAn artist of the world’s first and last democracy. Was he blond as I’ve heard the early Greeks were and was his skin?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œFlawless ivory wedding-gown satin smooth?”
    â€œYou left out warm.”
    â€œOh, that comes with it, the body provides the warmth.”
    â€œEspecially with a fever.”
    â€œAll worthwhile brides, or loves, run a little temperature, baby.”
    â€œFor a little while. They cool off.”
    â€œEven the sun cools off.”
    â€œGradually, not suddenly.”
    He nodded slightly and his look turned inward again.
    â€œThe effort of making a comeback is an inadvisable effort because it exhilarates you at first like a speed shot and then you crash. Sometimes what seems like a trivial thing will do it, like a letter being omitted from your first name on the
Times
drama page. What was, where was? Oh, yes, I love to travel. I had a fellow traveler of my own gender and inclinations till four packs a day and Memorial took him, all but his pride was removed. Stayed till he went away.”
    â€œI think I ought to go now.”
    â€œYes, he went. Dignified and lonely as a comet through space.”
    He smiled as if he’d accomplished the dignified flight with him.
    â€œShouldn’t you call that cab now?”
    â€œOh, and this evening, or some evening this week, I read about an