It was about five o’clock. Dusk, a kind of soot, seeped down from the sky. I remember he looked out of the hotel window at my view of the park. Then at the illuminated clock above one of the great buildings. It was 5:01. He seemed to wait, fascinated, for it to be 5:02. I had already seen the almost surreptitious way in which he had examined my suite. It wasn’t that Neronian. I wasn’t living in that much luxury. And besides: he didn’t take his hands out of the pockets of his overcoat, and he didn’t remove the overcoat, either. He consented to turn the collar down. Then a plane appeared, high up, beneath a bank of cloud. He said, not really to me, I happened to be there in the room:

“Pasternak said it looks like a laundry mark.”

“Who?”

“Pasternak.”

“What did Pasternak say looks like a laundry mark?”

He gestured, but with one of his shoulders, toward the darkening sky.

“The plane.”

So that I was forced to look up, at the sky, over the expanse of the park, at the plane. Height made it seem transfixed to the bank of cloud. The thing did look sort of like a laundry mark. On a sort of vast shirt-tail of sky.

I wouldn’t have minded that so much, except that I idiotically said: “Did he say it in Zhivago?”

“No. In a poem.”

The tone implied, of course, that all I knew of Pasternak was Doctor Zhivago and that I knew that only because they had made a movie of the thing. The fact the boy happened to be right and that I hadn’t read Doctor Zhivago and had seen the movie didn’t help at all. He finally got away from the window and sat down.

“Why don’t you take your overcoat off?”

“I’m all right.”

Well, I wasn’t. I made a Scotch. He held the glass uncomfortably in his hand. The other stayed in his pocket.

“Aunt Dora says you write poetry.”

He just looked at me. That flat guarded brown gaze. Was he sneering? I saw his eyes go to an armchair in a corner of the room. My Japanese kimono was over the back of the chair. His eyes lingered on the silk.

“Where did you buy that?”

“In Kyoto.”

“You been in Japan?”

“Five years ago.”

The eyes went from the silk of the kimono to me and then back to the silk.

“Can I feel it?”

“Of course.”

He got up. He finally took the other hand out of his pocket. He walked across the room to the kimono and he fingered the silk. The silk was a fine gray with a chrysanthemum pattern. I could remember when in the mill in Kyoto I had tried it on. How marvelously light it had felt. The pleasure it gave. One’s texture changed putting it on. He came back and sat down again in the chair. At least he didn’t put the hand back in the overcoat pocket.