I said no, I was being picked up by a friend, was it O.K. if I waited outside here? My voice sounded boyish and tinny, and I knew I must look queer, in my big-city suit and artistically shaggy hair and with my finger still marking my place in the Everyman’s volume that was still in my hand.

Yes. How young we were, how little it took to stir us up, in 1959. Malcolm came not long afterwards, in his marine-blue MG convertible. Foreign cars were still unusual then—what we now call a statement. I had edged halfway down the hill toward the front of the station, so as not to miss him. Pantingly I described how I had been assaulted and had fled, and he looked at me rather incredulously, there in the half-light, on the steep cold street. He parked in front of the station and went in with me to retrieve my suitcase. The stoop-necked man was gone, but my suitcase was there, in the center of that spread of empty pews, while rusty radiators knocked and hissed along the wainscoted walls. Even the little paper bag with Annie’s toy hairbrush and comb in it was still there.

As we began the ride home, Malcolm did not seem his usual blithe self. “Howard,” he said, in almost a scolding tone, “that kind of man was no threat to you. They are almost never violent. Violence is not the problem, and in any case the problem was his, not yours.”

I felt chastised, and silly for having felt such terror. Everywhere I had gone, on these travels of mine, people had been sending me messages, though my teeth weren’t wired to receive them.

Malcolm didn’t let go of the subject; he seemed to have given it a lot of thought. He cited to me, from a book he had read, statistics in regard to male homosexuals: their unaggressiveness, their low crime rate, their creativity and forbearance. They were the model citizens, it turned out, of the liberated, diverse, depuritanized world to come. His voice, with its exotic New England twang, held something I had not heard before, an earnest edge. With my wife present, he was all flirtatiousness and idle fun.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “That’s all very fine. But why me? Why did he pick on me?”

Malcolm said, “The obvious answer is, because you were there.”