The thrill of recovered memory made his voice boom inappropriately as he read Olive’s tender summing up to Thelma: “It was all, you know, like Snow White’s forest on the path to you.” Decades ago, he remembered, he had vacillated between “path” and “way” and had rejected “way” as a word with too many meanings and too evocative of Proust, but now “way” seemed the more natural expression, though less incidentally evocative of entangling sexual grapples, with leering male faces on the Disneyesque tree trunks.

Gretchen’s poems had wispily trailed down the page, making elliptical jumps that he had taken to be faithful to the way her mind worked, her erratic inner connections. Her orgasms did not come easily either. She had been flustered at first by Bech’s rather burly determination to work on the problem with her. “Slam, bam, thank you ma’am is really often the most satisfying,” she told him.

“What a cop-out,” he said. “Think what an exploitative heel that makes me.”

“But what …? I mean how …?”

How lovely, how adorably alight her wide, avidly intellectual face had been in its girlish confusion, its pre-feminist reluctance to think of her genitals in detail. He had piqued her interest, and they clambered together over the pillars of Pound and Burroughs, Céline and Genet, Anaïs Nin and Djuna Barnes, which spilled like a row of dominoes, the topple reaching the center of the tiny room.

Why had his contacts with Gretchen been so scattered, so infrequent, as willing and, gradually, responsive as she had been? Her writing, perhaps, had offended him: his erotic drive generally steered clear of literary women, who might compete or try to touch the aloof, unspeakable heart of his raison d’être. Also, she was large, not lithe and little as he liked females; he distrusted the luxury of her spilling flesh, the creamy slowness of her laboring, amid the swelling smells of brine and estrus, toward sexual release. If she had lost a little weight, if there had been a little less flesh to move, she might have found the way—the path—easier. His ministrations felt awkwardly close to those of a doctor rather than those of a lover, with a therapeutic focus that diluted his own excitement. Also, descending into the cramped quarters and futile literary ambitions of Bleecker Street struck him—already faintly famous, with all four of his titles, up to 1963, having achieved mention in the New York Times Book Review’s Christmas list of Notable Books—as slumming. And she was Jewish, which wasn’t what he needed at the time. He felt Jewish enough for two. He had something she strongly needed, his sexual patience, and this naked need of hers disgusted, it could have been, his fastidious side. Though he neglected her for weeks at a time, she was never indignant for long when he coasted back into her orbit.