‘To you, maybe. But not even to you. You didn’t come to court me.’

‘I was married myself just then.’

‘Maybe so. But that didn’t keep your wife from wandering.’

‘No. And I was a strictly faithful husband for a dozen years … I loved you, Amy,’ I said. This had a ponderous sound. I felt, speaking in this way, like a piece of pottery – a large crockery jar. To speak of love made me clumsy. It turned my thoughts toward my mother, whom I disliked. I couldn’t forgive her for putting me in an orphanage while she traveled from spa to spa. She limped, it’s true. The disability was real enough. She walked with a stick. But the difficulties were not wholly physical. On the trains, her rich brothers, my sausage-maker uncles, always reserved a drawing room for her. The trouble was that it bored her to be the wife of a simple working stiff. To top it all, I resemble her, except in point of color. I have a somewhat Mongolian and tawny complexion. She was always very pale. She coiled her hair, wore it high on her head. Her cheeks were large and soft. Her nose looped inward. I inherited her prominent lips. Taken item by item, her features were not attractive, yet she did have an attractive and even a distinguished face – like a very fine Tartar woman with an unusually white complexion. In her generation, women with intellectual interests wore a pince-nez. One dangled from her fragrant neck.

Another characteristic in common: my mother kept her own counsel. It gave me an incomprehensible satisfaction to deny almost everyone access to my thoughts and opinions. People always were willing to confide in me, though I didn’t ever encourage confidences. I said very little of a personal nature. Except to Amy Wustrin.

We had, let’s say, a score of years remaining. One should probably write off the final five – make a reasonable allowance for ailments. That left fifteen fully worth having.

I was prepared by now to make my peace with my species. For most of them, I am aware in hindsight, I generally had a knife within reach.

In the last phase of maturity, one could, one should, be straight with oneself.

‘If you were faithful to a distant, cold woman,’ said Amy, ‘Jay wasn’t at all, to me, when I was doing my best.’

I used to wonder about this. Jay and I were friends from the age of twelve, and he never failed to tell me whose wife he was sleeping with. On New Year’s Eve, he invited all these unfaithful women, past and present, to the annual party the Wustrins gave. While I was chatting with a victim-husband, Jay would pass behind the man, signaling with his eye-brows. That the facts should be known was essential. And they had to be registered by me in particular. My opinion mattered to him, and he even lectured me, tried to teach me his own view – the correct view – of himself. He said I was behind the times in sexual matters. ‘If you don’t go with history, you don’t begin to exist,’ was what he told me. He had to be appreciated, and I became, somehow, the ideal reflector of his sexual deeds. He was ‘real life.’ I was the historian who wrote it up. He said, ‘Why did you choose Walter Lippmann to do a number on? You should take me instead – representing free sexuality.’