A prolific and successful writer of comic novels, he immediately thrust about for droll possibilities. None appeared. He knew only that the separate points of his pain were cleanly pinned down: back-of-head, left buttock, right elbow, and a hand that was skinned and already oozing.

Around him gathered a circle of curious, amiable faces, grave but unalarmed. They drew closer. And coming into focus was his wife Maybelle, squatting at his side. She wore long dangling earrings faced with mirrors, and white Bermuda shorts rucked back to reveal knees and thighs like waxed maple. She was crooning, or should he say keening? He loved her dearly, but had not perceived until now that she was a keening woman. Aieee! On and on; he thought the moment beautiful.

Then he saw it. Turning his head a quarter of an inch away from Maybelle’s polished knees, he glimpsed the object that had brought him down, the agent of his disgrace. It was a piece of common street rubbish, a blackened, stinking, fly-encircled scrap of vegetable matter-a banana peel no less.

Here was something he hadn’t known he feared: the outrageous collision of reality and art, but art in its putrefied form. Even in his earliest novels, those puerile works he no longer bothered to list in Who’s Who (Babylon Babydoll, Schlepping Right Along) he had never fallen so low as to employ a banana peel. True, in his extravagant farce School for Sandals about corruption in the shoemakers’ academy, he had brought the class bully, Jack Boot, down on the playing field with a slice of rotted baloney. But baloney was not bananas. There were limits. The lowest comedy has its first plateau morality.

“Do you think you can stand up?” Maybelle was saying into his ear. “Have you broken anything?”

“Just my spirit,” Meershank actually said, and winced with shame.

Further south, in the city of Lisbon, there were more churches to visit. Meershank lost count, but Maybelle made special claims for every last one. “Gorgeous,” she said again and again, adding her expelled awe to the jumble of gilded relics and saints’ gizzards. In shallow stone niches were dozens of sullen virgins with swords thrust into their chests. “Our Lady of Sorrows,” Maybelle read from her Michelin Guide. Seven swords for the seven sorrows.

Our Lady?-Meershank’s bone marrow liquefied. He is willing enough when required to lower his Hebraic antenna for the sake of art, but rebels at that tetchy pronoun our. And the designation lady with its suggestion of parasol and gloves. And only seven sorrows? Was that all? Such a nice finite number. She should relax, take it easy. Why this grimacing forbearance? It was embarrassing.