It was sheer cowardice that prevented me from confronting you, Mr. Brodny. I was afraid of the black bug on your heart. Your bug and mine might have pounced on each other. We would have had to become brothers, like Schwab and me. Even without the clarion fanfare of your voice, I would have recognized God’s angel in you, J. G. And I did not want to wrestle with the angel. Not after what I’d encountered in the past days and nights.

Out of cowardice I have armed myself with irony. The rest was simple and logical. I dropped into a couple of bistros and drank. I did not feel like eating (which you may understand). I even went to the Crillon and asked for Nadine. Luckily, she wasn’t in. A couple of Americans at the bar tempted me to bait them. But they noticed I was drunk and good-naturedly gave me the brush-off. I could have gotten pushy and provoked them into a fistfight, but I didn’t want the bartender to tell Nadine, because then she’d know I was in Paris. This way, he’d take it for granted that I was with her in the Crillon and find it superfluous to talk about me.

I wanted to walk across town again. The fog had lightened, but the golden day underneath had vanished. It was already getting toward evening; I don’t know what time it was. At the Madeleine, I ran into a streetwalker and unloaded my grief on her. I didn’t get home till late at night.

“Home,” as you know, is at present the Hôtel Épicure by the place des Ternes. I owe it to Dawn. This is where I tracked her down in 1963 the first time she disappeared. This is where the scene with the Indian doll (and Schwab) took place, and this is where she became my mistress. This is where I deposited her for good after her mouth had eaten the white rose in the Bois de Boulogne.

Since then, I’ve been returning here regularly: whenever I’m fed up with the true-blue folkloristically preserved greasiness of the deluxe tourist hostels on the Left Bank; whenever the movie piglets won’t foot the bill for the George V; whenever I want to write undisturbed for a couple of days or read Nagel’s latest best-selling novel; sometimes simply because I want to be as alone as I truly am; sometimes, in Gaia’s days, whenever we had fought or I was overcome with a surfeit of my luxury-consumer existence; and over and over again when I have the compulsive thought that I might be pounced on in some hour of grace by the vision of a form for my book (as occurred during my drive here from Reims, as has occurred all too often throughout the last nineteen years; for the IT, which wants to be spoken through this book, constantly prowls after me; I can sense it at the back of my neck—only whenever I try to make a swift grab at it, it evaporates) . . .