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fiery closeness of her body. He had phoned her in the evening from the city, but she had spoken to him as to an entertainer who has already been paid and who says he hasn’t. Years ago it would have been a pleasure and a joke. He had known a lot of women briefly like that, but for some reason—what reason?—that time had hurt him. Was it because it had shown him the truth, that he was no more than an entertainer, not artist but entertainer, one for whom the door was closed after
the woman had bathed away his odor and his touch. The music from the fingers of that woman on the album cover caused the ache of his mediocrity to flare up and then die down. For that Madrid woman went in everywhere and took him along. The great went in doorways hung across with blankets and they went in the gates of palaces, and everywhere they were welcomed like one of the family, and everywhere they took you along.
    The record went around all night, except for the hours he himself played, and he had more cups of coffee and, along about five o’clock, stale toast with stringy dark apricot jam which he did not taste as he ate and yet which tasted in his memory like a rare delight that he could, paradoxically, put together again easily. His shoes were off, he was more at home than he had ever been in his rented rooms anywhere, and the woman with him was like a woman he had met early in the evening and between himself and her everything had been understood at once. The disc went around until the room was lighted from outside and the globes drew back their light into themselves, and water began to run through the pipes of the house.
    He heated the last of the coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and pushed up the window, and through the clogged screen the foggy breath of morning swept in. What was morning like in Madrid? What was her room like, what was she like with her hair unbound, in what kind of bed did she sleep and in what gown?—this woman he had spent the night with.
    He tipped his chair back against the wall and the thought of David Hagemeister struck him like somebody’s atonal music. Now in the morning, whose silence was like the inner circle of the record,
there returned to him the presence of David, but the discord was not a response anymore from his own being, the discord was in David himself.
    Davy’s mother must be up by now, he thought. One morning he had brought the boy home at six, after a Friday night of played duets here and there, and she was already up in a cotton housecoat, dyed yellow hair in curlers, having tea for breakfast and not a bit worried. She was the kind who would have sent him to Europe at seven by himself because he was the kind who could have done it fine. Carrying his cup to the phone in the living room, he sat on the sofa’s arm, and after he had dialed the number he pulled off his socks, for his feet were smothering from the night-long confinement.
    â€œEdith, this is Hal Berger. Did I wake you?” his voice as thickly strange to himself as it must be to her.
    â€œI was just putting my feet in slippers.” Her voice sailed forth as if all mornings were bright ones. She always spoke on the phone as if her department manager at the Emporium picked up his phone whenever hers rang, a third party on the line listening for signs of age and apathy.
    â€œWhere’s David? Somebody said he’s zooming down to Mexico,” massaging the arch of his pale foot.
    â€œHe’s in Nogales. It’s on the border.”
    â€œWhat’s he on the border for?”
    â€œHe’s waiting for some money from me.”
    â€œWhat about the uncle in Los Angeles?”
    â€œHe gave him supper and twenty-five dollars to come back north on and buy himself a new pair of cords. He went to Nogales, instead, wearing the same pants, and sent me a telegram from there.”

    â€œYou sending him something?”
    â€œYes.”
    He began to subtract several dollars from the