“This is Asher,” Michael said to the table. “We’re relatives.”

“Disown him,” one of the friends said to me. He wore a large woolen muffler. “The family’s doomed.”

“Can I speak to you?” I said to Michael.

“Sit down.”

I sat down. There were emptied or half-emptied cups of coffee on the table. Some of the coffee had slopped into the saucers and they had put their cigarettes out in the slopped-over coffee. I looked at the friends. One had a nose, large and violet. One was bald. One was black. One wore the woolen muffler. Michael was smiling. I was about to be entertained.

“Did you hear about the fag chapter of the B’nai Brith?” the bald one said.

I confessed, stiffly, I hadn’t.

“They call it the B’nai Gay,” the bald one said. “Dearie, what fights they have at Purim. Everybody wants to play Queen Esther.”

Laugh.

“Listen,” said the one with the incredible nose. “You want to invest in a good thing? I got it.”

Really?

“Viet Nam Heights. A condominium. So all right it’s got shell-craters. But look at the view. All them rice paddies. Beautiful. I’m putting in a drive-in cat-house.”

“How about drive-in reform temple?”

“With a Chinese rabbi.”

“Why Chinese?”

“What are you, a bigot?”

“Where’s the supermarket?”

“Down the block.”

“Fuck that. Too far.”

One of them, a fifth one, in a suit that hung loosely on him, loped toward the table from somewhere in the rear of the cafeteria.

“Who did you call, Herbert?”

Herbert had been, apparently, on the telephone.

“My broker.”

“How’s the market?”

“Fluctuating.”

“Did you hear the one about the investor who jumped out of the sixteenth floor of a brokerage house the day his stock went down twenty points?”

“No.”

“Before he hit the turf he was a millionaire again.”

I smiled, a little painfully. They were Michael’s friends and this was where he spent his late afternoons.

“Is it raining?”

“Why?”

“I think I’ll get laid if it’s raining.”

“Sheet.” It was the Negro. You could barely hear the Carolina accent. “You know my problem? My problem is I ain’t got a problem.”

“Which one of you bastards dropped ashes in my coffee?”

“That ain’t ashes. That’s the coffee.”

I felt I’d been sufficiently entertained. I had to talk to Michael. Away from the wit. He disengaged himself slowly from the chair and we moved to a more secluded table. I looked back.

“Are they all your friends?”

He considered that.

“I wouldn’t say friends,” he said. “What I’d say is each figures the other is a worthless shit and will never make it. Yes. That would approximate the bonds that bind us.”

“Aurora’s in trouble, Michael.”

Apparently he didn’t hear. Or was pretending not to hear. He was slouched in the chair, in that posture of his I detested, and he was staring past me. A fixed, a fascinated stare. I turned abruptly. There wasn’t anything to see except a man eating soup. At a table. Alone.