If we had to leave Robert—and sometimes we did (late nights, we sometimes trusted him to his nurses’ care)—we made sure he had his favorite music clamped over his ears—he could rock through the Mahler Fourth, its culminating soprano solo making such a sweet and surfeited paradise promise. And he’d have the projector rattling through its catalogue—group shots from Ossorio’s, the owner and patrons waving and holding up their fingers in peace signs or devil’s horns behind Ossorio’s head. Some singular dictionary definitions I’d Xeroxed and then got blown up. Pictures of us, mugging at the round marble table under our Lady of Perpetual Help—a failure. Here were street characters we knew by sight though not always by name. Paintings he loved, Bonnards, early Alabamas, a Duchamp urinal called Fountain, corny shots of his own family, plus the composers he loved best. Godlike Schubert, dead at thirty-one, of venereal disease and then typhoid fever, after being weakened by his tendency to drink.

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?)