The game was interrupted. It was definitely interrupted. The analyst in the checkered vest shrugged. The lady in the flowered wide-legged hostess pajamas looked interested. She was the only one. The girl with the deformed leg looked unhappier.

“Old Asher here hired me,” Michael said, “at a neat little fifty a week to sort of voyage through yesterday with him in good old New York. Shut up, baby, and just listen,” he said to Aurora. He wasn’t going to be interrupted by her. He was going to tell me all. I could see it coming. All was what I had come for. I was going to get all.

“Yes, sir,” Michael said. “Old Asher here loves New York. Her imperial buildings. Her windswept corners. Her conglomerate crowds. He loves her oysters and he loves her rack of lamb. He loves her up and he loves her down. Her in and her out. New York is a vital shot in the ass to old Asher here. So we journeyed, he and I. We trekked. Past her memorable tenements. Her imperishable garbage cans. Yes, sir. Because old Asher’s soul is intertwined with this magnificent city, gentlemen. He is warp of her woof, or something. And ain’t we all. Ain’t we all. Because, old buddies, she isn’t a city at all, she’s an ancestral curse, she’s the haunted castle by the polluted sea, she’s the malarial mother of us all.”

I said, slowly: “I don’t care about the money, Michael, but I do want to know why you hate me. Is it because of Aurora?” Because if it was, he had no cause to. I hadn’t taken her away from him, I couldn’t possibly, and I hadn’t at any time pretended to myself I could. I’d not wronged him. If I’d insulted him, once, I’d sufficiently apologized. If I had not sufficiently admired his poems, surely I’d a right not to admire them. If he felt bitter and deprived, surely I, as much a victim as he thought he was, and an older victim, and surely the recipient of more real blows than he had yet endured, surely the one who’d done the realer bleeding, had at least an equal right to feel bitter and deprived. If he stood, black with anger, outside the edges of his world, I, too, who’d been inside, was being slowly forced out. We shouldn’t be enemies: couldn’t he see that? We should, if anything, be allies. And if not allies, then a détente of some sort, a patched truce, a wary coexistence of a kind, should surely be the thing between us. We were of the same family. Had he forgotten? The same family: cruddy or not, the bond was there.

It was a plea, I suppose: the last I’d make. The poker players looked at their cards. The analyst’s wife smoked her mentholated de-tarred, de-nicotined cigarette in the long holder. Only the girl with the terrible shoe looked as though she could not bear to listen to it. The others waited for their interrupted game to be resumed. They were behind, and wanted to get even: they were ahead, and wanted to retain their winnings.