A few children had come along with their parents and, after being admonished not to fall overboard, fended for themselves. To one boy, rapt beside him at the rail, Don on the homeward swing pointed out a headland and a rosy mansion whose name he knew, beyond the marsh grasses now drinking in darkness as the tide slipped away from their roots. Vanessa, on the drive home, volunteered, “The birthday boy’s father’s wife and I have a number of mutual acquaintances, it turned out. She said an old college roommate of mine, Angela Hart, just had a double mastectomy.” Don thought of confiding in turn how magically strange he had found it to be again among fertile women, with all the excitement that bred. He might in his youthful cruelty have once said something like this to Alissa—anything to get her to respond, to get the blood flowing—but between Vanessa and him there had come to prevail the tact of two cripples, linked victims of time.

SCENES FROM THE FIFTIES

Yes. Time does pass. The other day I read that Harold “Doc” Humes had died. I knew Doc slightly; hundreds of people did. He was a writer and conversationalist famous, or bucking for fame, in the Fifties—a short man with a merry, thin-skinned face and more intellectual energy and love of life than a writer needs, perhaps. He had published a long novel, The Underground City, in 1957, and then, in 1959, a shorter one, Men Die. That title, described by a friend of mine at the time as “bald and bad,” was not untrue, as his own death shows. The last time I saw him he was playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at the party that sealed my departure from New York City.

It was 1959, and my vision of the moment seems now very time-specific—this living relic of High Modernism seated at a chessboard like some surreal raft upon which he had washed up on the breadfruit island of Eisenhower’s America. Around him, dozens of artistic aspirants and operators drank and nibbled and chattered, hungrily circling in search of the immortality Duchamp already enjoyed. Art was big in the Fifties. We were full of peacetime’s rarefied ambitions and uncurtailed egos. I, who have become a silver-haired antique-dealer in Boston, picture that party—held in the high-ceilinged duplex of an art-patronizing couple called Berman—as a display window organized around its most precious ware, the inventor of the descending nude and some other deathless, celebrated trinkets of ironic disaffection. Duchamp was a handsome man, ascetically slender, with an anvil-shaped head. He might have been wearing socks and sandals. There certainly were a pipe, large and hairy ears, and a silk foulard.

I remember wondering if Doc’s chess was up to this. “Howie, hi,” Doc said to me affably. “You probably know Marcel.”