“No, not really. Not since that party out in the country. He came once to ask me to go to California with him, but I had just been hired and couldn’t do it. It’s terrible to feel that you’re losing all your friends, but this job makes me feel good, it adds some meaning to my life. I’ve been practicing very hard on the violin. Next weekend, I am making a tape to send to my father. He is a fine musician, but I don’t think he will be unhappy with the progress I have made. I have to go back now. Will you promise to come and see me?”

She pushed the slip of paper into my hand and grabbed up her purse. She smiled at me all the way to the door. I smiled and nodded back. I still thought she was ugly.

I stood for a minute making faces into the pink-tinted mirror. Walked out across the carpet, through nets of other people’s conversations and the smell of their food. On the trip home, I stopped at Karafotia’s for my cookies and grape soda. Also bought a can of stew. I hacked it open and put it on the hot plate in my room. Sat under the skylight spooning it up and sipping at the purple soda. Propped a broken copy of Swann’s Way in front of me. A little entertainment. Read the first page a few times and then put it down. Told myself I’d perused enough of Proust for the time being and went to lie down and moan over my tacky mind. Nobody came to relieve me. After a while, I slept.

III

The house almost atop the hill

Now I think of myself in general terms rather than specific. All through the agony of my youth, cruel, raised voices informed me that everyone else felt the way I did, experienced the same things I went through. That I was not unique and original was unbearable. I felt a distinct need to prove at once my individual character; the awareness that others were like me was scalding. Were they also all crouched, hiding, alone, their minds electrified but their grotesque bodies helpless and still? My impulse was to cover my eyes and scream, to trample those voices with matched violence.

So many of the desperate things I did in my youth were to combat belonging to that mass identity. I felt that unless I could establish some particularity I would suffer great pain and die in self-disgust. All that cultivation of fantasy, the wooing of freight trains, the manufacturing of intricate motives for every word or movement, the curiosity for what I called the “phenomenology of the others,” all the pain and the hatred—it kept me afloat.