She had still been polite then.

Later she told him he hadn’t understood Thoreau. But Walden was his book. It was enough for a whole life. Thoreau’s life in a cabin in the woods sparked a yearning within him. He read of the joy of being in nature. He sometimes saw the city as if it were made of trees and mountains, a landscape of stone and geometry. He could disappear within it. It was big enough.

Lauren asked if he’d read the other American writers and transcendentalists, Emerson and Whitman. He didn’t even know the names. And the word “transcendentalist” confused him.

Thoreau’s words flowed straight into him, without hindrance, and thanks to Thoreau he knew his own mind. That was enough. Most of the time talking about something was just a sign that you didn’t understand it. His favorite line was:

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

But of course there is a lot he could tell them about. That he saw Duke Ellington live at the Cotton Club, that his doctor was named Dr. Weinrebe, that he stopped going to church and not a soul was interested. That he was free, because there were too many people who were all too different for anyone to be able to take anything all that seriously.

He had lived in East Harlem, in one of the less pretty buildings—a plain, squat brick box. Still, he lived on the very top floor; he had no trouble fixing his antenna to the roof. He liked the neighborhood. There was nothing glamorous about it. There, any pressure he might have felt to try to prove something was gone. He walked the streets up and down, again and again. The tall buildings looming overhead no longer seemed to mock him, as they had in the beginning; instead they seemed to watch over him in a paternal way.

His one luxury was his radio equipment, and maybe also Princess. A German shepherd. She waited patiently all day for him to come back from the print shop in the evening.

Every day he took her to a weed-choked vacant lot by the Harlem River, where she did her business between old tires and the overgrown remnants of broken foundations. It always smelled a bit rotten and brackish there, which made Princess all the more excited. She had to sniff everything. Then they went shopping. On the way to Lexington Avenue, they fought their way through the children playing on the sidewalks—hopscotch and jump rope, baseball, marbles. The kids would pet Princess, would call her by her name, and Princess with her mouth open seemed to smile.