Well, sitting there, I thought about sex as sex and sex as mythology. Now sex as sex, if I’d been asked, was sex more or less as a ballgame. You singled, you doubled, you tripled to left. You homered or you flied out. Missed the bunt or went down on strikes. Depended. There were times when you were glad to break out of a long slump with a solid hit. If the luck was real good, and you were mysteriously back in shape, wham, that was the day you cleared the bases. Depended. I decided that I did not like sex as mythology and I didn’t like the way the boy’s poems backed me up against a wall. The little bastards. They made you, in spite of yourself, feel like a hypocrite. They filled the national air with a derisive obscenity. The modest deb said all the dirty words and the solemn judge read the disputed passages aloud to packed courtrooms. I put the damn poems away and went to bed.

17

I lied. That is: I decided to be diplomatic. He was waiting downstairs. I was surprised he was so punctual. It didn’t seem like Michael to be conscientious about that. But there he was, shaved, brushed, in one of the big red lobby chairs. It might have been a real job.

“Good morning.”

He managed an alacrity getting out of the chair. It was minutely annoying. He didn’t have to be quite that alert. Nor, among the stout women and the bellhops, that prompt, as though he were punching some huge invisible time-clock. I might have been the boss walking into some resplendent office. The “good morning” he gave me sounded like the greeting of an assembled staff.

We went to breakfast. He ordered chili. My god. I shuddered, and had a soft-boiled egg.

When the coffee came, I said, casually: “I read the poems last night.”

“Oh?”

He had a smear of chili at the corner of his mouth.

“Very interesting.”

And there it was: the politic lie. There was no point in saying I hadn’t exactly been swept away. “Interesting” was a nice, neutral word. It was one of the words one could always use to hide one’s hostility behind.

He gave me one of his sidelong looks, the enigmatic one: but he evidently decided, as I had, against any further discussion of the poems. He even allowed himself to look pleased I thought them interesting. We began to talk about the day’s itinerary.

“I thought maybe we could walk through Harlem.”

“Harlem?”

He sounded astonished.

I said: “Here. Wipe your mouth.”

“Why?”

“There’s chili on it.”

I extended a napkin. He looked at it. Then a long tongue came deliberately out, explored, licked away the smear of chili. I put the napkin down.

“Harlem?” he repeated.

“Lower Harlem. I grew up there.”

“That’s enemy country.”

“It’s only morning. And I’m talking about 106th Street.”

“Is that where you did your growing up?”

“If I’ve grown up.”