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office was a suite of rooms in the old German embassy, and all of the rooms had twelve-foot ceilings decorated with plaster molding. Leather couches sat before his long desk and against the wall. A big green Boston fern beside the Bose speakers looked as though it had just taken a vitamin pill. Records were stackedcarelessly on the floor, flattening out the deep pile of the carpet.
     
         'You usually have an answer. Why am I in this shithole? You're here because I'm here, but why am I here? It's just another one of those eternal questions. Do you want to take that record off? I'm sick of it.'
     
         His telephone rang for the sixth time since I had been in his office. He said, 'Christ,' picked up the phone, and said 'Yeah,' and motioned me to put the new record on the turntable.
     
         I tuned out and relaxed into the couch. Sherman ranted. He was a very skillful ranter. He had a law degree. Also he had an ulcer, the nerves of a neurotic cat, and what I assumed was the highest income of anyone from our class. In these days his wardrobe was always very studied, and today he wore a tan bush jacket, aviator glasses tinted yellow, and soft knee-high yellow boots. He clamped the phone under his chin, crossed his arms over his chest, leaned against the window, and gave me a sour grin.
     
         'I'll tell you something,' he said when he had put the phone down. 'Fielding should bless his soul that he never decided to go into the music business. And he had more talent than most of these bozos we manage. Is he still trying to get his Ph.D.?'
     
         I nodded. 'This will sound funny, but when you were leaning against the window like that just now, you reminded me of Lake the Snake.'
     
         'Now I really wish I was out on the Island. Lake the Snake.' He laughed out loud. 'Laker Broome. I better clean up my act. What made you think of that?'
     
         'Just the way you were standing.'
     
         He sat down and put his boots on the long desk. 'That guy should have been locked up. He's not still there, is he?'
     
         'He retired years ago — forced out, really. I wouldn't have worked for him.' I had just quit the school myself, after three years of teaching English there. 'I never asked you this before, or if I did, I forgot the answer. What did Lake the Snake say to you, that first day? When he kept you and Nightingale in his office.'
     
         'The day we registered?' He grinned at me. 'I toldyou, but you forgot, you asshole. That's one of my favorite party bits. Ask me again after dinner on Saturday night, if you're still coming.'
     
         Then I did remember — we had been in his father's 'den' one warm day in late fall, drinking iced tea from tall glasses with Party Time! embossed on their sides. 'I'd come just to hear it,' I said. I was in New York on my way to Europe, and Sherman and Fielding were the only people there I cared to visit. And Sherman was a good cook whose dinner parties had a bachelor's haphazard lavishness.
     
         'Great, great.' He was already a little distant, and I thought he was thinking again of the grievances given him by his twenty-year-old geniuses. 'I saw Tom Flanagan on the street the other day,' he said. 'He looked really strange. He looked about forty years old. That guy's nuts. It doesn't make any sense, what he's doing. He's working some toilet over in Brooklyn called the Red Hat Lounge. Magic is going to come back when Glenn Miller climbs out of the Channel. When Miss America has . . . '
     
         'Bad teeth?'
     
         'A mastectomy,' Sherman said.
     
       
     
      On Saturday night there was as much of a lull in the after-dinner conversation as Sherman ever permitted in the days before he moved to Los Angeles. The famous folksinger seated to my left had wiped food from his beard and described a million-dollar drug deal just concluded by two other famous folk singers; the woman with Bob, a blond with the English