Then, uncharacteristically, he said no more. Was there an unobvious answer? The dim lights of Haverhill sped by; we crossed a river into Groveland. The inside of the convertible was as surprisingly warm as the inside of the station had been, and I relaxed into it. He was wearing a little fuzzy checked hat, perhaps to protect his bald spot. I was touched, and dimly felt my relative youth, my full head of hair, as an advantage, a plume, a source of power. I told him about meeting Duchamp at the party, about Doc Humes having somehow inserted himself at the great man’s chessboard. Malcolm laughed, and pressed me for details; I supplied them, but left out my attraction to Venus, and my visit to her after lunch hour, and the gesture of her long arm that benignly released me from my attraction. Malcolm volunteered that last week he and his sister had been present at a local dinner that included John Marquand, who had been handsome and gracious. Marquand was a big name back then.

Memory fades, but it must be that, after the long cozy drive through the winding wintry dark, over the back roads, through Groveland and Georgetown and Ipswich, Malcolm delivered me safely to my house and my wife. Somehow embarrassed about it, as if the fault had been mine, I didn’t tell her about the man in the train station. It stayed a secret between Malcolm and me. Years went by, in which he continued as a friend of both of us, seductive to us equally, gently exerting the pressure of love against the one of us who would fall. Nothing happens overnight. By the time he and I had moved to Boston together and opened the shop on Charles Street, the Sixties were well advanced.

METAMORPHOSIS