Well, when I did work, what was it like?

Oh, mechanical, more or less. A job, more or less. The trick was getting one. I hadn’t had one in years.

“Why?”

I shrugged.

Did I consider myself good at it: the stuff I did out there?

“Yes.”

I’d automatically bristled.

“How good?”

“Good enough,” I said. I was beginning to be irritated. The thing, the ability to get work, had vanished on me; I didn’t know why. One got old. Or simply older. The jobs got fewer. The jobs got less than fewer. There were, abruptly, no jobs. You didn’t know why, certainly it was not because you had less of what you had had when you got the jobs, you were sure of that, were you sure of that, yes, you said, you were sure of that, there was no impairment, wasn’t there an impairment, then you were defending yourself, then you were furious because you had to defend yourself, then you were whining, a little, a little more, then you were desperate, a little, a little more, then the pieces started to come apart, you tried to hold yourself together, you tried to prevent the pieces from coming apart, but they came apart, a little piece, a larger piece, you couldn’t cope, you couldn’t cope any more, the work went, the wife went, the house went, the life went. I stopped. I hadn’t meant to start on it, again, to have the whole machinery of it begin to rev up in me, again, and here he was, the little bastard, and he’d started it going in me, again.

He said, now, looking down: “Aurora said you didn’t like my poems.”

“That’s right. I didn’t.”

I hadn’t intended to be that harsh. But to hell with him. He’d started me going.

“Why?”

Measured. Casual. He fiddled with the coffee spoon.

Did I think them bad? he asked. In a most judicial. A most detached voice.

Not exactly.

What, if he might ask, did “not exactly” mean?

I thought them stupid in a peculiar way.

He seemed, at last, astonished. He evidently had expected something else than stupid. He could see me indignant about them. Or outraged. The inexpugnable Philistine about them. But stupid. That intrigued him.

“Stupid,” he repeated. He was actually smiling a little. Coldly, of course. “Stupid didn’t occur to me,” he said. “Bad, yes; stink perhaps. But stupid?” He sounded regretful. He couldn’t quite see the stupid. Of course, he wasn’t the discerning critic I was, so would I mind elucidating?

I elucidated him. He had a fine talent for getting under one’s skin, Michael had. A great talent for getting one’s hackles up.

I said what I’d said to Aurora: the insistence on all the pointless four-letter words.

Is that (he said it almost sweetly) what I meant by stupid?

“Yes.”

“I try to be as clear and as explicit as possible,” he said. “Precise.” He sounded formal now. The lecturer on his platform. “A word brings many connotations to each of us, and not necessarily the same ones.”