He was just a bit too silent, at exactly the wrong moment, for my taste; his responses were just a shade too slow. When he did comment, the comment seemed too deliberate. I couldn’t see any reason why he should want to be my enemy. I had wished to create something between us; the something, I admit, involved his slipping into a category of a kind: that is, a son, or protégé, or a pupil, or simply a younger version of myself, or, in a queer way, a younger version that I hoped to become, that is, to go backward to him and therefore to be able to go forward again; even something less than that, a talent I’d nurtured, a lost or a misdirected boy who through myself was less lost and less misdirected: but he resisted all categories. I waited for something to happen between us: nothing happened. Nothing followed what I thought was the intimate talk. We met; we separated: that was all. So that, after an afternoon with him, I would always feel some peculiar depression. I’d feel flat. He seemed to contain a property that intensified my own uncertainty; that increased my own sense of emptiness. Even before we quarreled, in the Automat, later, I had made up my mind that it was useless to go on with the bogus wayfaring through the city. My past wasn’t going to come back to me, enlarged and coherent, through Michael. The best thing (I’d find another way of helping him, if he wished to be helped, loaning him money, if he asked to be loaned money) would be to end the walks.

27

But I didn’t get to do it gently or by mutual agreement. What it came down to was a quarrel: and with my rather stupidly firing him as though (God help me) I was one of my own despised executives.

One afternoon, late, we’d been on the piers watching the unloading of sheep into the slaughterhouse pens, we were in the Automat not far from my hotel. I felt pleasantly tired. Outside the big plateglass window I watched the crowds going home after the day’s work.

Aurora, of course, had told Michael what I’d said about his poems. I was to discover that nearly everything I had said to her had been relayed back to him. And not only our conversations. He’d insisted on all the details. As though, from the beginning, he’d been collecting a dossier. Anyway, he knew I’d read the poems, that the comment about them I had made earlier, that they were “interesting,” had been a politic lie, and that I really didn’t care much for them. My hostility to the poems, which of course could not help being but a hostility to him, was evident in what I’d said to Aurora.

He didn’t get to it at once. He got to it circuitously.

He began by asking me about my own work.

There wasn’t much of that to talk about.