I remember one Thursday, running late. It was the day before my trip to see the folks in Florida. By then, Marco was down with it and I had taken sweet and sour soup by his place. He never really let us in, and therefore it was necessary to wait a while for him to get to the door. Even hauling up the rope had become a godlike chore. I dropped off a magnifying glass at Gideon’s, he was trying to sell his Villon etchings, and wanted to have a lens there to assure some visiting Japanese dealer that the things were authentic. Gideon appeared, birdlike but elegant in a blue satin robe I’d never seen before, he asked me if I could lend him another couple hundred till the end of the week. As an IOU, while I waited, he did a charming little ink drawing, a caricature of me, I think it was meant to be. But it showed an Indian deity with all the arms, one supporting a magnifying glass that had suddenly grown big as Sherlock Holmes’s. Gideon handed over the drawing confidently as Picasso would, that assured of the work’s value and character. I thanked him, I wrote out another uncollectible check. Only Southern gentlemanliness prevents my stating the full final amount.

And so I was, as usual those days, frazzled when I pulled at last into Robert’s room. It was often the last stop, and maybe that was unfair to him. By the time I arrived there, I sometimes yearned to climb right under the covers with him. (What else was new?)

Instead—my duty seemed to fortify my long morning of earnest homely errands into something frothy, a comic meringue worthy of Noel Coward or Cole Porter. I recalled Robert telling me way back that the two of us exerted more charm while flossing our teeth than some poor suckers put forth during their whole honeymoons, and I remember wondering what charm was exactly?

Some willingness to exaggerate? To live in continual innocent relation to the world’s outsized joys and shocks? I had actually looked up the word. Or had I meant to and was I, in my exhaustion, just recalling what I’d expected its meaning to be?

No, wait. Not only had I got to the dictionary, I’d photocopied the definition, had a slide made of it. I’d scattered it among the sundry other images: the head of Brahms, the jewel-like nudity of Madame Bonnard’s floating iridescent in her bath. I recalled more now—in the jumbled fatigued way that only let me move cerebrally in such short staccato lurches like those follow-the-dot games I once loved in my boyhood Jack and Jill magazines.

As usual, I entered Robert’s room talking. I had peeled off my coat, had plucked a dead lilac from Angie’s otherwise still-lovely arrangement, I tugged down one corner of his bedclothes, then slowly registered new retinal evidence, changes in a room that had begun to seem eternal in its sameness.