He confesses this to me with a moan of beautiful, admiring envy. He calls it the thing about me that’s “healthy as an ox.” A “vitality that is not yet wholly dissipated.” An “existence that has not yet become wholly abstract”—indeed, one with the possibility of acting like a department-store executive with December stirrings and falling in love with the most banal of all love objects, a fashion model!

Yet at times he regards my vacant-eyed and ingenious concordance with life as sheer flimflam. So much the worse! For then, you see, he becomes intrigued by the fact that my flimflam works. This too requires qualities and abilities whose nature and origin are puzzling to him.

He looks for them in my life story. Even though he all but knows it by heart, he listens to me more attentively, investigates more conscientiously, more methodically than ever. I supply him generously. (A Russian proverb says that you can choke a guest with cottage cheese.) He takes secret notes. Thinks I don’t realize. (I take my own notes about him afterward, at home.) But biographical data are not enough for him. He rummages about in my present living circumstances. Paris, he feels, is a trump in my game. He combs the city for the secret nutritive powers with which it presumably nourishes me. He has come as a scientific Hercules, who, before the fight, begins by taking a tiny sample for chemical analysis from the soil from which Antaeus draws his rejuvenating strength. Of course, he also wants to be cradled a bit:

Fais dodo, Colin, mon petit frère,

fais dodo, t’auras du lolo . . .

My brother Schwab. My brother Abel.

Needless to say, I promptly told him about the grotesque way things ended with Dawn. I didn’t spare the details that might excite him (“Il n’y a pas de détail,” says Valéry). Everything very literary, it goes without saying. Just as he expects of me.

First (in a gentlemanly, cultivated, discreet, tastefully allusive way, of course), I gave him a glimpse of my desperate financial situation: more debts than a village dog has fleas. Christa, my divorced spouse, now morally supported by Witte, has found a lawyer who would squeeze alimony for her and our son from my tombstone. Plus trouble galore with the producer-piglets: my latest screenplays are not being accepted. So I ought to have cut down to the bare bones in everything. Yet I live in grand luxe. I reside sumptuously at the George V. I still keep an apartment for my eccentric beloved, even though it has been empty for months now, awaiting her. (I used to go there daily to put fresh flowers in the vases and change the milk, the steaks, the salubrious vegetables, the eggs in the icebox; she eats everything raw; at the Marché Buci, they are ardently sympathetic and treat me like a worried father: “Mademoiselle est votre fille, n’est-elle pas?” Certainly. Humbert Humbert’s the name. And mademoiselle is out of town? Évidemment. And Papa’s watching her apartment for her while she’s gone. Yes, that’s what young people are like nowadays. They want to live independently but they can’t really manage on their own.)