Besides, I found myself (possibly because of Michael) touching up my past. Adding, despite my wish not to do so, a few cosmetics to the face of time. I began to realize that what had been, perhaps, not amusing at all, with the boy before me, listening, I tended to make amusing, and what may have had some significance to start with I was making more significant than it had possibly been. It was not only because I had a desire to show Michael, through what I was, what the world had been, but evidently to acquire in his eyes some value. And this disturbed me. Had I come, had I hired him, because I was in need of some judgment? Was I asking a boy, whom, somehow, I didn’t entirely trust, to assess my life for me? Oh, there was a desperation of a kind in me, I could feel that I had been shattered and the essential parts of myself scattered over a vacant lot and that I had to, more or less on my hands and knees, go about picking up or trying to pick up the scattered pieces, that at my age I was in danger of not knowing what I meant, what my own experience meant, what, if anything, the experience of my generation meant. But why should I feel that I had to come with these broken pieces and show them to a boy and ask for his judgment, or approval, or sympathy, or any damn thing at all? It was odd, wasn’t it? Surely, boys weren’t the bar at which we were going to ask to be heard? Boys who might in some family way resemble us. Who might have forgotten features of ours. Who came knocking at our hotel doors. Who sat, their sullen hands in their pockets, in suites we really couldn’t afford any more. Who were not, somehow, to be trusted.

The feeling that Michael was not to be trusted grew on me. Perhaps it was, simply, that I felt something suspect in his careful and polite rejoinders. Perhaps I kept waiting for an enthusiasm, and he wasn’t enthusiastic enough. Perhaps I merely sensed a less than complete sympathy for all the minor golgothas I thought of myself as having lived through. In short, I wasn’t sure he could become a friend, and there were moments when, like Aurora through the flicker of her eyelashes, it occurred to me that he might be an enemy. A camouflaged enemy, an enemy in abeyance, an enemy whom fifty dollars a week (I had paid Michael several weeks now and that, in itself, was quite a performance, my putting the money down as casually as I could and the somewhat protracted moment before he picked it up) seemed to have neutralized, an enemy, to put it so, temporarily in my pay. I began to find myself distrusting the attention with which he seemed to listen to me; was the attention really benevolent? I began to be uneasy about the candor with which I told him about myself: how would he use the revelation? The smile he gave me might try to be a smile of sympathetic understanding, but then why did I have the feeling that it was a smile that hesitated just this side of being a sneer?