And this side of mine, I tell friend S., did not lose Dawn, can never lose Dawn. And most certainly not if the rubber collar around the other half of my soul was what made her leave me. “You understand what I mean,” I say to him. “The very thing stated by Romano Guardini, whom you so highly esteem: ‘The first step to the other is the movement that takes away the hands and clears the space in which the self-concerned quality of the person can come into action. This motion constitutes the first effect of justice and is the basis of all love.’ ”

He turns crimson. He thinks I’m trying to make fun of him. He regards my quoting (especially from Guardini!), my attack against the middle classes, and my ironical eulogy of the plutocrats Uncle Ferdinand, Sir Agop Garabetian, Bully Olivera, as a venomous personal jibe. “Don’t act more cynical than you are,” he says.

I say, “You misunderstand me. I’m quite serious. I’m talking about something that’s very much on my mind: a sociology of emotional life, which I have been planning to work on for some time now. I maintain that the relative emotional frigidity of the uppermost (and lowermost) strata in any society is paired with a keener sense of reality than the sentimental romanticism of the bloody fucking middle classes. With the realism of a more thorough knowledge of life. Soul (I mean an especially passionate tension in one’s nature that is designed for suffering) seems, as John and Stella always said, to be a prerogative of the middle strata. The bourgeois invents emotions that he can no longer draw from immediate contact with life. Ask Scherping, he knows a thing or two about it. He also knows what thrives especially well in these inner miasmas: a proclivity for the abstract, for the as-if, for the fictive, plus, of course, no shortage of art, especially literary art. Which you might consider an advantage—for a publisher. But interhuman relations are thereby unbearably complicated. I wish I had listened to Dawn’s warnings in time. You know, she used to say, ‘Most people fail because they try too hard.’ It’s really just like writing books, isn’t it? If only we were more lighthearted, we’d be like Nagel and produce novels like cars on an assembly line. Dawn could be very shrewd sometimes.”

Once again, I’m the one who’s talking. But he doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t eat any roses either. His upper lip (a bit long, and sensitive as a feeler, yet resolute above the severely retracted lower lip: the mouth of Paul Klee) trembles, as it usually does when he’s very nervous. A couple of fine little drops of sweat hang above it. (Lately, he’s been drinking oceans of rum and Coca-Cola, and he’s always quite proud when he expertly orders, “Un autre Cuba libre, s’il vous plaît!”) His eyes are bright and blank, like the eyes of a boiled fish.