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place in Brooklyn (where we cooked for John) with elaborate culinary blowouts at Chez Pierre, an expensive new restaurant in the West Village (where John always insisted on picking up the tab). The original program for that night had been to meet at the bar of Chez Pierre at seven-thirty, but John had called earlier in the week to say that something was wrong with his leg and that he would have to cancel. It turned out to be an attack of phlebitis (an inflammation of the vein brought on by the presence of a blood clot), but then John had called back on Friday afternoon to tell us that he was feeling a little better. He wasn’t supposed to walk, he said, but if we didn’t mind coming to his apartment and ordering in Chinese food, maybe we could have our dinner after all. ‘I’d hate to miss seeing you and Gracie,’ he said. ‘Since I have to eat something anyway, why don’t we all do it here together? As long as I keep my leg up, it really doesn’t hurt too much anymore.’ 4

    I had stolen John’s apartment for my story in the blue notebook, and when we got to Barrow Street and he opened the door to let us in, I had the strange, not altogether unpleasant feeling that I was entering an imaginary space, walking into a room that wasn’t there. I had visited Trause’s apartment countless times in the past, but now that I had spent several hours thinking about it in my own apartment in Brooklyn, peopling it with the invented characters of my story, it seemed to belong as much to the world of fiction as to the world of solid objects and flesh-and-blood human beings. Unexpectedly, this feeling didn’t go away. If anything, it grew stronger as the night went on, and by the time the Chinese food arrived at eight-thirty, I was already beginning to settle into what I would have to call (for want of a better term) a state of double consciousness. I was both a part of what was going on around me and cut off from it, drifting freely in my mind as I imagined myself sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, writing about this place in the blue notebook, and sitting in a chair on the top floor of a Manhattan duplex, firmly anchored in my body, listening to what John and Grace were saying to each other and even adding some remarks of my own. It’s not unusual for a person to be so preoccupied as to appear absent – but the point was that I wasn’t absent. I was there, fully engaged in what was happening, and at the same time I wasn’t there – for the there wasn’t an authentic there anymore. It was an illusory place that existed in my head, and that’s where I was as well. In both places at the same time. In the apartment and in the story. In the story in the apartment that I was still writing in my head.
    John appeared to be in a lot more pain than he was willing to admit. He was leaning on a crutch when he opened the door, and as I watched him limp up the stairs and then hobble back to his place on the sofa – a big sagging affair festooned with a pile of pillows and blankets for propping up his leg – he was wincing noticeably, suffering with every step he took. But John wasn’t about to make a big production of it. He had fought in the Pacific as an eighteen-year-old private at the end of World War II, and he belonged to that generation of men who considered it a point of honor never to feel sorry for themselves, who recoiled in disdain whenever anyone tried to fuss over them. Other than making a couple of cracks about Richard Nixon, who had given the word phlebitis a certain comic resonance in the days of his administration, John stubbornly refused to talk about his infirmity. No, that’s not quite correct. After we entered the upstairs room, he allowed Grace to help him onto the sofa and to reposition the pillows and blankets, apologizing for what he called his ‘moronic decrepitude.’ Then, once he had settled into his spot, he turned to me and said, ‘We’re quite a pair, aren’t we, Sid? You with your wobbles and