I’d blabbed out the words without thinking, but I did my best to make sense of them: “Well, you make a judgment one way or the other, because that’s how the mind works. It’s geared toward judgment, presumably because life requires decisions to be made, constantly and rapidly. But in these kinds of situations there’s no solid basis for judgment other than your own assumptions and prejudices. So you’re forced up against yourself, your own mysteries. I like that kind of story.”

We drove in silence for a bit. The wooded mountainsides either side of the state highway were coming into leaf—powdery sprays of pale pink and green. I’d always thought these spring colors, subtler than their fall equivalents but just as varied, weren’t properly appreciated, but I refrained from comment. Marco clearly hadn’t come up to talk about the scenery.

I want to be accurate about the nature of our friendship. It had begun ten years earlier, when I’d recognized him at a party in New York. I still had some vestige of my old teenage sense of him as a heroic figure, which made me deferential, which in turn seemed to make him comfortable. Anyway, we hit it off. The fact that I was no more successful in my sphere than he was in his, probably helped—he could be prickly with people doing obviously better than he was. For my part I was always glad, in my somewhat isolated life, to make a new friend. More positively, I liked his cast of mind, which was detachedly curious and cheerfully unillusioned. That our fathers had both been prominent figures in the London we’d left behind (mine was a well-known architect), gave us plenty to talk about. Also, we’d both been Englishmen-on-the-make in New York at one time, and some of the old fun of that game revived itself when we were together. I began spending Wednesday nights at his house in the fall, when I taught in New York. These weekly stayovers were something I looked forward to, and I think he did, too. In return for his hospitality I’d take him out to his favorite restaurant on Gates Avenue where they kept a taleggio risotto with chicken liver on the menu just for him (or so they told him), and we’d usually be nattering till long after they closed the kitchen. So in that way we were good friends—pals. On the other hand, we’d connected too late in life to form the kind of really deep bonds that transcend all other considerations. There were limits—we hadn’t tested them, but they surely existed—to what either of us might be willing to endure or sacrifice for the other. It wasn’t an elemental relationship, in other words, though in a way this made it more interesting. One gets a taste for impure things, as one gets older.