“Vampires with such faces?” I responded. “David, that is unfair. There are no men with such faces. There never were. Look at any of Rembrandt’s paintings. Absurd to believe that such people ever existed, let alone that Amsterdam was full of them in Rembrandt’s time, that every man or woman who ever darkened his door was an angel. No, it’s Rembrandt you see in these faces, and Rembrandt is immortal, of course.”

He smiled. “It’s not true what you’re saying. And what a desperate loneliness emanates from you. Don’t you see I can’t accept your gift, and if I did, what would you think of me? Would you still crave my company? Would I crave yours?”

I scarce heard these last words. I was staring at the painting, staring at these men who were indeed like angels. And a quiet anger had come over me, and I didn’t want to linger there anymore. I had forsworn the assault, yet he had defended himself against me. No, I should not have come.

Spy on him, yes, but not linger. And once again, I moved swiftly to go.

He was furious with me for doing it. I heard his voice ring out in the great empty space.

“Unfair of you to go like that! Positively rude of you to do it! Have you no honor? What about manners if there is no honor left?” And then he broke off, for I was nowhere near him, it was as if I’d vanished, and he was a man alone in the huge and cold museum speaking aloud to himself.

I was ashamed but too angry and bruised to go back to him, though why, I didn’t know. What had I done to this being! How Marius would scold me for this.

I wandered about Amsterdam for hours, purloining some thick parchment writing paper of the kind I most like, and a fine-pointed pen of the automatic kind that spews black ink forever, and then I sought a noisy sinister little tavern in the old red-light district with its painted women and drugged vagabond youths, where I could work on a letter to David, unnoticed and undisturbed as long as I kept a mug of beer at my side.

I didn’t know what I meant to write, from one sentence to the next, only that I had to tell him in some way that I was sorry for my behavior, and that something had snapped in my soul when I beheld the men in the Rembrandt portrait, and so I wrote, in a hasty and driven fashion, this narrative of sorts.

You are right. It was despicable the way I left you. Worse, it was cowardly. I promise you that when we meet again, I shall let you say all you have to say.

I myself have this theory about Rembrandt. I have spent many hours studying his paintings everywhere—in Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, or wherever I find them—and I do believe as I told you that so many great souls could not have existed as Rembrandt’s paintings would have us believe.