Understandably?) to the younger married fellows, who act as if the stuff doesn’t affect them in the least, yet who are invariably, whenever we gather socially, the first to make tracks to the mahogany and glass cabinet where it is stored. Whom did they think they were fooling anyway? There they were, those horny bastards over in their corner, Seth and Vidal and Gustavus and Clay, all the usual snickering crowd passing pages and quietly boasting, “I’d do her”—even while their brother the rainforest plant scientist lay semicataleptic, drooling, incontinent, out of his mind not more than twenty feet away. Don’t get me wrong. I do not intend prudery. I like a good erotic illustration, and these are very artfully made pictures, beautiful in the way Hogarth’s Gin Lane engravings are beautiful, which is to say flamboyantly grotesque and therefore fantastically curious to the furtive voyeur—well, I enjoy a good erotic image as much as the next person. But these dressing-room scenes of rickety-legged libertines putting lean penises into corpulent mistresses doubled over atop banister railings or the gilt backs of chairs (the women’s skirts parted behind to reveal poorly delineated genitals, a fleeting glimpse of thigh)—these dressing-room and scullery and opera-box tableaux are far more disturbing (in what they have to say about private life, public health, and the history of European sexual fashion and taste) than erotic. The Age of Enlightenment’s inattention to hygiene is well documented. A certain syphilitic degeneracy lurks in these bookplate etchings of rheumy aristocrats making doggy love with their hats on. Even the paper on which they are reproduced abides in a condition of yellowing decrepitude that only worsens the seeming pallor, the intrinsic sickliness of the figures. Seth, Vidal, Gustavus, and Clay do not appear to be bothered by this death imagery, maybe because they’re married and feel they’ll live forever through progeny. It’s that old bloodline problem. There’s no getting away from the drive to procreation. Celibacy would lead straight to boredom and the aimless waiting that is a precondition of renewed passion for life. What is this red library if not an oppressively furnished waiting room where grown men shift uneasily from foot to foot while launching small harangues about work or sex or their archaic interpersonal grievances, still viable, from our hundred overlapping childhoods? Indeed. Some manner of clamorousness was in progress over by the towering shelves where the National Geographics are stacked—it was Foster getting heated up about his favorite topic, the imperiled cosmos. We’ve all had to sit through Foster’s impromptu rants about mankind’s fate. Andrew was his unlucky prey this evening.

“I’m very serious about these evolving dangers, little brother,” Foster cautioned Andrew. He had Andrew pushed against a magazine rack. Insistence is crucial to Foster’s conversational style. Tonight he was worked up. He leaned forward, glared directly into Andrew’s face, and proclaimed, “The earth changes are coming. Everything points toward massive geophysiological change. I’ve been saying this for years and I’ll say it again. Oceans rising! Plants and mammals becoming extinct! Inner cities dying and genetic calamities of every order sauntering around like it’s Sunday in the park!”