In the nice weather Aunt Dora went out and sat with the women of the neighborhood in the small park near the Christian Science Reading Center. Her daughter who was now as old as I was had married a traveling salesman. The daughter had one son. There was a photograph on a small table near the wall. It was a photograph of the son, Michael. My family has features which appear in all our faces. We distantly resemble each other. I put the photograph in its silvered frame down. Aunt Dora was watching me anxiously. Michael lived downtown. In some sort of studio. Aunt Dora sighed. Michael, too, wanted to write.

8

I think of the afternoon the boy came to visit me. I see him coming down the corridor toward my suite. He is shaved for the occasion, since he is about to meet his affluent relative, and he resents the fact that he has shaved. The corridor is silent. He moves past the vacuum cleaners abandoned by invisible chambermaids. He can see in some of the suites, the doors of which are open, the bedlinen being changed or the food carts being wheeled out. On the carts are halved eggshells, stained napkins, the rinds of grapefruit. He is playing an ironic game with himself as he comes down the corridor. He is in enemy country. The abandoned vacuum cleaners are a weaponry left on the field of action. Troops are deployed here by elevator. He keeps close to the wall. He is infiltrating the enemy lines.

I was dozing fitfully on the couch when he knocked on the hotel door. His knock interrupted a rather queer dream. I was in an office. A large office. The executive with whom I had an appointment had not appeared. I opened a door in the rear of the office. There was an apartment, strangely, beyond the door. Rather, a large bedroom. It was hung with white gauze. There was a huge bed. In the bed was the executive. His left arm was raised and bound by straps. From the ceiling a bottle of plasma was suspended. A tube ran from the inverted bottle. A needle pierced the executive’s arm. Plasma flowed. He was being given a transfusion. He was a large, pale man. His right hand held a silver microphone. He was dictating, while the plasma flowed, soundlessly into the microphone. Then I saw, in a sort of adjacent alcove, his wife and three children. They were asleep. The wife was dark, the children very blond, the executive himself quite gray. The plasma flowed, the dictation went on, the wife and children slept, I stood there, then the knock on the door interrupted the dream. I got up, not fully awake, and opened the door.

Outside, in the corridor, the boy said: “I am Michael Bey.”

Why did I think of him as a boy? He wasn’t a boy. Rimbaud was a boy. Chatterton was a boy. Michael was twenty-six. He wasn’t a boy. But you simply didn’t think of them as young men. They were boys. And then they were thirty-five.