And smiled. And hugged his knees. And again the room was silent.

“Michael?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t suppose you have any money?”

“Wha’ dat?”

“Well: I wondered if you’d be interested in a sort of a job.”

“Job?”

“Yes.”

He eyed me. I wouldn’t say with complete trust. What sort of a job? Oh, it wasn’t typing a manuscript. I saw him thinking it might be that. I had, regrettably, no manuscripts to be typed. It was, the thing I had in mind, a simple job.

“Doing what?”

“Walking.”

There were certain houses to be looked at; certain streets to be revisited, corners or restaurants or shops to which my past was attached. They were places I had been young in, or if, on closer examination, I had been less young in them than I thought, still they were the places or the landscapes in which I had been younger than I was now.

“Walking?”

“Yes.”

Actually: through my own past.

“And you want to pay me for that?”

“I’d be taking up your time.”

“My time.”

I was trying to be careful: I didn’t want him thinking I was being charitable. He’d resent the charity. He’d stiffen with pride. Or so I thought. For it was only pride, I thought, the venom of pride, that was behind the cavalier announcement he had made in the Pine Room that he would like to murder someone and any creep would do. The thing was to get past his sullen defenses. To show the boy that, despite what had happened in my hotel, when I had ignored him under the weight of the thing (but less now, curiously less since so absurdly in the Alexandrian Gardens I’d kissed the jeweled belly of Soraya of Istanbul) that had oppressed me, I would do what I could to help him. Of course: help. There was so little one could actually give. Still, money was better than advice.

Perhaps what I wished, not admitting it entirely to myself, was to attach the boy somehow to me. To establish between us (where the non sequitur existed) a connection of a kind. It wasn’t that I felt fatherly to Michael; I couldn’t even honestly say I liked him: it was simply that I felt he had a certain irritating importance for me. I might have been flattering myself, but I felt that, after all, something could be learned, that if I were rich in nothing else I was rich in experience, though perhaps not too rich in it. The generations touched somewhere. It was not as though we had spent a lifetime in some clip joint, and now it was after hours, and time to go. We couldn’t leave like that. Having simply paid the exorbitant prices and sat through a bad show.

I had taken out my wallet. I put fifty dollars on the big office desk. The boy’s eyes shifted from the money to the wallet. I put the wallet away.

He probably turned the electric heater on when they were in bed together. On the colder afternoons. When with her law books she came up the narrow stair.