I will not ever blame him for it. He is helping me. But I blame the girls. I blame them for not staying on afterwards, and for letting all the good nice happy love talk cut off automatically after it is over. I need to have them there, after it is over. And he needs it; he needs it much more and much longer than they could ever need what he does for them. He should be able to teach them, as he has taught me. And he should have their appreciation, as he has mine. I blame them. I blame them for letting him try and try and never get just a little of the love there is left in the world.

I can hear him coming back from the cab.

All the Lonely People

Deep, deep down and far away it lies, waiting, dormant, lazily latent and still waiting, confined, measuring the time, conditions and touching circumstances; imprisoned, but marking life and time with its own violent beats against suppressing strictures and rectitudes, and estimating the chances of being reborn.

Sometimes, in the night, it is expectant and therefore eager to be out. It has slept too long and is restless, fighting the force that keeps it patient. Years of internal slumber have drugged it, but not decisively, so that, once slightly touched, it starts and quivers and attempts to announce itself so strongly that, occasionally, a man’s mind will wake in his bed and ask itself: “Who is there?”

“WHY DO THEY ALWAYS FAIL ME, DENNIS?” he said.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said.

“They never pay me back; but they always want to borrow again.”

“You’re too generous, Alfred,” I said. “Save your money.”

“Sometimes they won’t even speak to me on the street. And when I try to speak to them they get mad.”

“That proves they’re not your friends,” I said. “Don’t lend them anything else.”

Alfred looked at me across the table. He spread his bony fingers flat on the plastic surface of the table and looked me full in the face. “You wouldn’t fail me, would you, Dennis?”

I looked again under the dress of a careless girl, at another table across the room, who had now noticed me and was pumping her knees up and down under the table, telling me to forget about the fellow who sat too intellectual and confident across from her.

“Of course not, Alfred,” I said.

“Thank you,” Alfred said.