Then he’d simply be back at our table in Ossorio’s, sitting on the radiator for direct heat. He never explained, he just resumed. “Away. Needed a change. Had to see a man about a bet.” (That was one of his lines I’d copied.) He would either return to us tanned in January or else with a greenish pallor, sooty rings disfiguring his eyes. Once he showed up with his ear pierced but, as he never wore an ornament, it soon grew shut. I told him, “Either you’re IRA, or still in that three-way with Mick and Bianca. Or there’s a li’l opium-eating prob.” The look he gave me was God Viewing a Bug.

Home among friends, within three days he grew lustrous as some nicked road-warrior tomcat, limping to ensure his lady owner will put out real cream. R. grew mainly only gorgeous again, if with a certain growing sense of the mileage still tailing him.

I now told her Robbie had just left two sentences on my answering machine, “Lord Airedale, I don’t feel we’ve been using the word LAD enough. Lovely tartany sort of nappy feel to LAD, so do remind us, love.”

But we did worry about his music. At his jumbled apartment, with Robert seated before the upright piano, he admitted to us he was writing a tone poem based on the launching then the sinking of the Titanic. “Oh?” I asked. It sounded like an idea so good its results’d be pretty terrible. Then Robbie confessed the piece would have two major themes, a sort of Before and After. Maybe we’d like to hear them?

We two sat clumped high on his high bed, riveted by the sight of his outward-tapering chalice of a back. He now played—with old-fashioned Lutheran Sunday school rectitude and flourish: “Bicycle Built for Two,” then “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Robert turned, saw our faces, laughed until he wheezed. “You guys are already too sophisticated for the likes of this simple-simon preacher’s kid.”