It was the way the evenings in the past had always begun. A few meaningless remarks, then Blake gathering his thoughts, and Adam waiting for them to be stated. Instantly he was back in the large living room in Westwood, with its immense drapes closed, its thousand-volume bookcases, the books with all their jackets off, their titles rubbed two-thirds away (“There’s nothing so degrading to a library than books in ‘mint condition’; one can’t, after all, consume a turkey without damaging its feathers!”), and those mad cats, Aleister and Crowley, crawling over you and dropping hairs; and Max in the big leather chair that sat a little higher than the other chairs and had a thronelike quality so strong that once, when Max had gone to the bathroom, Adam had stolen quickly to it and sat down and felt as daring as Zorro; Max, making his usual inscrutable and surfacely fatuous statement (“It occurs to me that the principal trouble with the world today is that there’s entirely too much love in it!”), then developing the statement with enormous skill and zest, forcing you to argue, and demolishing you with a solitary sentence; and, too, the smells—the coffee perking in the silver pot, the exotically seasoned meats for nine o’clock sandwiches, the special lotion Max wore constantly, a bit like shaving lotion, but not masculine; yet Adam did not really think, as Preston did, that Blake was homosexual—if it were true, he’d certainly have known, for they had been alone together often. Still, it was a little strange, that lotion-smell, the cats, and Blake’s misogynous (“No, that isn’t quite correct; you mean misogamous!”) attitude, which came out strongly in the classroom when some girl would dare a question. “Oh, the hell it’s strange,” Pres said; “the guy’s a fruit, that’s all! I just can’t take him any more. I was impressed at first, like you, and I won’t argue that he’s smart—the word is brilliant, maybe—but here’s the thing: a lot of guys are brilliant. It isn’t such a rare commodity. Look, if he’s such a hot-dog nihilist, how come he isn’t rich, you know what I mean? Just why the hell is he hanging around this lousy university, teaching a course in political theory to future ad-men? Why isn’t he out showing the King of Sardinia how to take over the world? He’s phony, that’s why. And he’s got you snookered, good. And that’s the whole thing. You don’t look a bit upset.” “I’m not upset, Pres,” he had said. “I’m just a little sad, that’s all. The way I look at it, I haven’t lost a friend; I’ve gained an acquaintance.”—Instantly, in that quiet hesitation, Adam lived the time again.

Then he shut out Preston Haller from his mind and said, “You fly?”