If there were parallels between Bodo Heisinger and Jay Wustrin, would there be resemblances also between their wives? Amy anticipated that there might be some. Of course, Heisinger was a millionaire many times over. Jay Wustrin’s father had left some money, but Jay managed it badly. He was clumsy with banks, interest rates, investments. His mother outlived her husband by twenty-five years, and although she kept her expenses down for Jay’s sake, living like a pauper, in the end Jay had had to support her.

I knew the mother well; she didn’t care for me; she believed I was an undesirable friend for Jay, self-serving – the orphan on whom Jay spent his allowance. When we were adolescents and boxed in the alley (the gloves were his), Mrs Wustrin held it against me that I would hit Jay in the face.

‘But I punch Harry just as often …’

She would shake her big brainless head at him. Jay was embarrassed by his mother. With her rich, stupid black eyes, much like her son’s, she was nevertheless a handsome woman. Her family had sold her, more or less, to old Wustrin, many years her senior. He had put her to work in his laundry. She was passive, thick-headed, devoted to Jay, her only child. Maybe it wasn’t stupidity her black eyes showed, but arrested sexuality. An old-country village woman, she mapped careers for her son. He would be a famous lawyer, earning millions and making speeches reported in the papers. Like Clarence Darrow. But Jay was a ladies’ man. Perhaps even his blockhead mother was aware of this.

I see myself taking pleasure in these assorted people, their motives, their behavior. Only one of them do I genuinely care about. I’ve had imaginary meetings and conversations with Amy several times a week for years now. In these mental discussions we have reviewed all the errors I made – scores of them – the worst being my failure to pursue, to compete for, her.

She might have said, ‘Where the hell have you been all our life?’

A good question!

But that’s not exactly what I have in mind just now. It’s the others I’m thinking of: Bodo Heisinger, Madge Heisinger, and, in spite of their vast wealth, the Adletskys. And of Amy’s senile father, the fantasist who had unloaded his own grave on his son-in-law.

Jay had bought his father-in-law’s plot for the fun of it. It gave him an amusing story to tell at his Standard Club lunches.

These were all commonplace persons. I would never have let them think so, but it’s time to admit that I looked down on them. They were lacking in higher motives. They were run-of-the-mill products of our mass democracy, with no distinctive contribution to make to the history of the species, satisfied to pile up money or seduce women, to copulate, thrive in the sack as the degenerate children of Eros, male but not manly, and living, the men and women alike, on threadbare ideas, without beauty, without virtue, without the slightest independence of spirit – privileged in the way of money and goods, the beneficiaries of man’s conquest of nature as the Enlightenment foresaw it and of the high-tech achievements that have transformed the material world. Individually and personally, we are unequal to the scope of these collective achievements.