He didn’t even look up at me. He just stared blank-like at the wall behind his desk.

“What are you writing?” I said in a louder voice.

“I can’t do this paper,” he finally said.

“Why not?”

“Too goddamn many footnotes. I can’t put my own ideas in.”

“Well, what ideas you got?”

Jack sighed. “None,” he said. “But I refuse to use anybody else’s.”

“What does it matter?” I said. “All you want is the grade anyway.”

“It matters,” he said. “It matters to me. And I don’t give a damn about the grade. I just want to do something with my ideas.”

“But you don’t have any ideas!”

“What’s wrong with that?” he snapped.

“It’s weird, that’s what’s wrong.”

“So I’m weird,” he said. He slammed his hand down on the desk, hard. He even turned around in the chair and looked at me, mean.

“And another thing,” he said. “When you see me thinking don’t ever interrupt me.”

I started to tell him just where he could go but then I changed my mind. I had just been in the loft with him three months then and I didn’t want to provoke him because I was thinking that he was a real nut.

“All right,” I said to Jack. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“That’s the way,” Jack said.

And that’s the way it had been for almost two years. I knew when to talk to Jack and when to leave him alone. I learned to leave him alone when he was quiet and wanted to be left alone, and I learned to get him to start talking when he wanted to talk but didn’t want to begin the thing. But seeing him that night, on the floor drinking the second can of beer and looking up at the lovebeads, made me feel responsible because it had been my idea to leave the sawdust at Newport.

“Tell you what,” I said to him. “We’ll do it again.”

“Do what?” said Jack.

“We’ll go back to Newport tomorrow. The Festival’s still on and some new group’ll be in and there’ll always be plenty of girls around.”

“I don’t want to go back,” said Jack. “It bothers me being there.”

“But you dug it tonight?”

“That was tonight. I don’t want to go back. There’ll be new things tomorrow but it’ll be the same place.”

“You want a new place, is that what you want?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I want, a new place.”

I thought about a new scene. I thought very hard about someplace new to go. I almost blew my mind thinking about a new scene. But it was no good. We had been everywhere.