He attended history lectures at the local college. He lettered placards in crayon at home and took them with him to class. He’d crouch on the floor with his tongue halfway out to scrawl, “Richard III—Teapot Dome—Chapultepec???” in vivid blue on a hunk of yellow cardboard four feet square.

“What is it for?” I asked, the first time, and he grimaced as he answered, slowly, laboriously, “A kind of comment.”

He made various signs. Whatever they said, the question marks were always there at the end.

He was never good at talking. I imagined him sitting in a large classroom somewhere near the back, silently and obstinately holding up his gaudy card, at arm’s length above his head, throughout the hour’s discourse on the vagaries of Tudor economics or the evidence of Italian influence on the architecture of Byelorussia.

But these peculiarities were mild and amusing. I basked in the sensation of his skin. A refuge, it was, from my self. The light came in through the window where he worked in such a way that it made his skin look precisely the way it felt. I could watch him for hours. In the heat of the summer he liked to fling his shirt onto a bench, moving, lifting, showing his broad pollen-colored back to me. The sawdust, flour fine, lay in ridges at the top of his trousers, sifted inside the waistband until I grew anxious that it would rub and give him a rash.

But there he was outside my window in Leda Van Hoerderbroeck’s Jaguar. When I first saw it, was sure finally that he was there with her, I sat very still, trembling in every limb. I would have to be angry when he came in. There was no way in which I could speak or move without conveying the sickness that was in me. I would make it worse. But it was still possible that he could explain it all away, and I would be well again, and I would sleep with my skin against his skin that very night. There could be some reason: she was designating specifications for a guitar for her accompanist; he had discovered she was a long lost sister-cousin-aunt; she had found him unconscious on the street, the victim of a brutal robbery, and was trying to bring him home when he passed out again and she was trying to wake him up so she could help him to the door … I was willing to accept anything, any pretense, any feeble attempt to placate me. The most absurd excuse or blatant invention would be at least an indication that I still had some value, that he might not throw me out, relegate me again to the groaning black at the back of my head. I would accept anything.