“How true,” I said. “Take the word fuck. To each his own connotation.”

“It’s a love word.”

“Hear! Hear!”

“Saying fuck you isn’t an insult.”

“Oh my God!”

“It’s not a hate word,” he said, pale. “It’s not a curse word. It has, when you examine it, its own beauty.”

“Oh, Michael, shut up,” I said. “You’re funnier than Abbott and Costello.”

He wasn’t detached now. Or formal. He was, if one might use the word in its non-beatific sense, plain fucking mad. He’d definitely quit fooling with the coffee spoon.

“Do you know what you sound like?” I said. “You sound like a little prig, inside out.”

“Look who was talking about being a prig.”

“Laying about on your ass all day,” I said.

Which was a mistake. I’ll admit that. Because then he started on his having a job. Yes, sir. A position of consequence. Work of historic importance. Accompanying me. Down Memory Lane. Looking at creepy tenements. Talking about dead May Days. Me, and my city. Me, and my army. Me, and my career. All that crap.

Okay, I said, grimly. He needn’t worry about that crap any more. The job was over.

“Fine.”

“If you need any money, I’ll loan it to you.”

(After all: I’d promised myself I’d do that for him.)

“I can see myself asking you,” he said.

“If you need it, it’s yours.”

“Shit,” he said. “I’d have to show up with the ravages of hunger written all over me. I’d have to stagger into that suite in the advanced stages of acute malnutrition.”

All right. He could look for another job then. A little work wouldn’t kill him. Eliot worked in a bank; Stevens in an insurance office. Unless my memory was faulting me—after all, I was past fifty, I couldn’t be expected to have all my faculties—they were pretty good poets in spite of the fact they hadn’t devoted all their afternoons to admiring the fine tits of Aurora.

Which, of course, was another mistake. I could see him seize on it. It wasn’t the poems at all. Or not entirely. Not enough for me to have gone out of my way about. I didn’t care that much about the purity of the nation’s verse. Or whether it contained all the goddam forbidden monosyllables in the language or not.

Aurora.

The little bastard actually grinned. He thought he’d hooked me.

“Well,” he said, milder now, but much deadlier, “talking about afternoons, how about afternoons spent in a bar? Haunted by celebrities? With or without their hairpieces?”

So she’d told him about Silvio’s.

The reason he bothered at all to mention the bar was that I’d brought up the subject of how to live a useful life. A life of profit. A life of high and invincible goals. Now an afternoon of booze in a bar with a young chick was I holding that up to him as illustrative of a profitable life?

My lips got thin.

Then okay tanked up we taxi to the hotel and after a relaxing bath (he winked at me, an understanding fellow conspirator) we try to slip it to the young chick even if she isn’t our young chick but somebody else’s say a relative’s young chick huh?