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beer and black spring binders at his elbow, reading, oddly enough, from a book of verse he had published almost ten years earlier, at a time when he had entertained a powerfully unreal conception of his gifts. He read these old poems as if they were examples of youthful aberration. Which is to say that he laughed at what he now considered to be their “boudoir sentiments”—his term. When Joe asked him about New Mexico or Colorado or some other chic wasteland, he said, “I never knew what a long line could be, baby, till I saw those mountains.” You get the idea. Joe and Ed drank from a pint of Dant that Ed had in his raincoat, their faces fixed in a blank, intense look behind which boredom crawled and scuffled. At the intermission, they went across the street to a bar and never got back to the reading.
    Joe began talking to Ed about Hope, his wife, how terrific she was, how lovely, how understanding and intelligent, what a son of a bitch he had been to her, and yet, and yet, what good friends they were now that they were separated. I’m certain that he even did a few time steps to the old tune that goes, “We see more of each other than when we were together.” He could be a master of nausea without half trying. She was doing well, working as a secretary-receptionist-girl Friday in an uptown gallery devoted to the What’s Selling School. She really had great taste, Joe said; she felt useful now, truly involved with the art world she had always just touched the edges of. I can almost see Hope’s lacquered face placid among the wares on display; I can almost hear her telling some broke painter, desperate in his wrinkled tie, to bring in a selection of color slides. They drank some more, silent in the contemplation of Hope’s splendor. Then, just for the ride, and because he was a little drunk, Joe went uptown with Ed to see Helen.
    She had asked Ed up to advise her on the right mat and frame for a small ink drawing that she had been given as a gift, and while Ed and she talked things over, Joe walked around the apartment, looking at her small and somewhat precious collection of pictures and books. He was, one might say, zeroing in on his intentions regarding this attractive woman. She was mature—another word that Joe liked; she was the Sarah Lawrence or Barnard alumna who had been around. Life had used her, as she had used life, and so on. Joe felt as if he were strolling into a relevant movie, all pained faces and swallowed dialogue and blurred focus. He helped himself to another vodka and caught Helen’s eye. She seemed delicately faded to him; there was something irrevocably broken about her. He slouched against the wall, gallant and aristocratic; against the tattered and streaming gray sky of his mind the Stars and Bars cracked in the wind.
    On the way downtown, Ed told him that she was forty-two and undergoing chemotherapy treatments for leukemia. To Joe, this was an unexpected perfection—how could she resist, her tragedy upon her, the gift of himself that he would offer? Joe’s opinion of himself was based solidly on his being a product of that solipsistic aristocracy that clumps itself about the nucleus of art—which latter gives it breath and rationale. He was, in his sham individuality, a dime a dozen. So was Helen.
    Joe didn’t know this about Helen—nor did he know it about himself, certainly. Helen, in fact, qualified for him as representative of that breeding and careless grace with which his fabulous past was suffused, and she took her place in that misty locale where Joe’s father sipped juleps and played croquet on emerald lawns, the sun dazzling off his white flannels and linen cap. There was a patina he felt he could scrape and strip off her very person and place on his own in mellow and lustrous layers. For Helen, Joe was young enough to be interesting, but not so young as to be gauche and trite in his desire. So they became lovers. I don’t know how to say this without seeming either