‘To do a number on?’

‘Come on, Harry! As an example. A vanguard figure of the emancipated present age.’

It was no secret that I had loved Amy, but that was sophomoric, a high-school crush. No one, of course, had any business to love anybody.

‘Why do you suppose I invited you to join us in the shower at the Palmer House?’ he said.

The correct answer would have been: to cure me of my sentiments. This was typical of his arrangements – his version of cure or correction in accordance with realistic principles.

I’ll say this for my old friend Jay Wustrin: he was stupid about the biggest questions. He approached all the right things for all the wrong reasons, to borrow a turn of phrase from T. S. Elyat, his idol.

Amy, later on that day, when the blizzard crossed the city and fell on the eastern shore of the lake, answered some of my long-unasked questions. What went on at his New Year’s Eve parties had never been hidden from her. ‘He brought all his lady friends to the house, together with their poor wimp husbands,’ she said. ‘It was his big annual production – he loved it. I even accepted phony cocktail dates with those women. I’d meet them in some Near-Northside bar and sit in a booth. Their voices were trembling with guilt and appeasement. Most of them he had by then spun off … He said that he used to tell you about his afternoon parties.’

‘Some. More or less he kept me posted. I didn’t care to hear the blow-by-blow details,’ I said.

Not true. I looked down on his activities, but I never tired of hearing (translating them into my terms) about these seductions. Of the girls by him. Of him by them. More than forty years of it, starting with women who worked in his father’s laundry. On bags of soiled towels and bedding, after five P.M., when his pa put him in charge of locking up for the night.

I remembered his anecdotes when he had long forgotten them.

‘I was on an errand for the print shop,’ he said (one of his side jobs in law school). ‘In the car at Washington and Michigan, about to turn south, I saw a chick who put her thumb out for a lift. So I opened the door and she got in. She was going to South Shore, and I said I could take her as far as Fifty-seventh Street. But she said, “What about all the way?” So I took her up on this and said, If you mean all the way, I’ll drive you there. You live by yourself? “Myself.” So I went upstairs with her.’

‘You could have been mugged and rolled.’

‘I have an instinct for things like this,’ he said. ‘When we undressed, she took my cock in her hand and said, “Now, here’s a real cock for you. Let’s get it inside, and when it’s inside, shoot my heart with it.”’