Silence.

He was waiting for me, I supposed, to begin. To begin what? Tips on the literary market? Sound advice on work habits? How one got rich? How one got famous? How one triumphed? He and Aunt Dora. How I had done it, and the manual that went with it explaining how it was done. And he could keep all six hands in his pockets and look at me with that flat brown look all he wanted to, this Michael Bey, and quote me Pasternak to put me in my hack’s place all he wanted to, but that’s why he was here, he thought there was a manual, too, this Michael Bey. I looked out of the window. A laundry mark! The bloody Russian looking up at the sky and shouting I’ve got it! It looks like a laundry mark! and running into his dacha or something to file away the priceless, the deathless little image, and then this boy quoting it. A goddam conspiracy. That’s all it was. He wrote. Christ almighty: who didn’t? I shouldn’t have told Aunt Dora to have him come to the hotel at all. The silence deepened. The last light departed. We were in the dark. I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. Some thirty years separated us. And he wore that damn overcoat. As though I were a bus station. Did he remove it only under direct orders from a superior? Superior what? Superior who? His figure had become indistinct. We couldn’t see each other. Now and then there was a minute tinkle of the ice in the highball glass. He was vanishing. I was vanishing. You could hear the city. That much we had in common. The malaria of traffic. The golden minute on the huge illuminated clock. Help? Oh, God: I was more in need of it than he was. He had thirty years to get to where I was: to that cul-de-sac for which there was no manual. What a bore they were: the defiant, the ambitious young. With their flat jeering guarded looks. Their goddam slender wrists. Their half-reluctant knocking on the door. Admit me! Into what? Betrayal. Whorishness. Failure. That’s all the room beyond contained.

There was a stir. I could hear him stand. I couldn’t see him.

“I guess I’ll be going.”

I could hear the contempt in the boy’s voice. But there was nothing I could do. No way I could lift the enormous despairing silence that had settled on me. I heard him open the hotel door and I heard the hotel door close.