Then he whips out his camera like the bank robber that got away: that simple Indiana boy that’s now living in Switzerland among royalty and big business and who has cultivated a foreign accent.

Yesterday I met the young photographer and he had some large prints of the photographs he had taken that night.

‘I took a picture of you,’ he said. ‘I’ll show it to you.’

He showed me through a dozen or so prints and then he turned to the next one and said, ‘See!’ It was the photograph of an old woman drinking a rather silly martini.

‘There you are,’ he said.

‘Where?’ I said. ‘I’m not an old woman.’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘That’s your hand on the table.’

I looked very carefully into the photograph and sure enough, but now I wonder what happened to the seven grubs and the sow bug.

I hope they made out a little better than I did after that feathery crowbar lifted us to the light. Perhaps they have their own television show and are coming out with an LP and are having their novels published by Viking, and Time will ask them about themselves, ‘Just tell us how you got started. In your own words.’

Memory of a Girl

I cannot look at the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company building without thinking of her breasts. The building is at Presidio and California Streets in San Francisco. It is a red brick, blue and glass building that looks like a minor philosophy plopped right down on the site of what was once one of California’s most famous cemeteries:

Laurel Hill Cemetery
1854–1946

Eleven United States Senators were buried there.

They, and everybody else were moved out years ago, but there are still some tall cypress trees standing beside the insurance company.

These trees once cast their shadows over graves. They were a part of daytime weeping and mourning, and night-time silence except for the wind.

I wonder if they ask themselves questions like: Where did everybody go who was dead? Where did they take them? And where are those who came here to visit them? Why were we left behind?

Perhaps these questions are too poetic. Maybe it would be best just to say: There are four trees standing beside an insurance company out in California.

September California

22 September means that she is lying on the beach in a black bathing suit and she is very carefully taking her own temperature.

She is beautiful: long and white and obviously a secretary from Montgomery Street who went to San Jose State College for three years and this is not the first time that she has taken her own temperature in a black bathing suit at the beach.

She seems to be enjoying herself and I cannot take my eyes off her. Beyond the thermometer is a ship passing out of San Francisco Bay, bound for cities on the other side of the world, those places.