I was a fool more often in the old days. There was, in fact, another time when I was left alone and tried to fall back on my own flesh. But I was younger then and couldn’t bear my own company. I lived in a small peaked room in the attic of a rooming house in Portland. There was a skylight, a streaky slit that I propped open with a coat hanger to show off a sooty gable and its chimney. A bare bulb hung from the white ceiling, and the white walls sloped to the floor. I had a narrow bed with one blanket, a small wooden table, a spotted kitchen chair. I kept a cardboard box beneath the bed to store my other pair of socks, my other shirt, my other pair of trousers. The bathroom was across the landing. There was no broom. I never swept. I had no towel. When I bathed I dried myself by jiggling up and down in the bathroom and standing on the toilet to examine my legs in the mirror above the basin. This was not poverty, it was ignorance. I enjoyed it.

I had intentions about the room. It was to be a cell. I promised myself to allow no old lovers to set foot inside. I had an unfortunate habit in those days of dragging things out. I didn’t want to lie in this new place with the skylight propped open so I could hear familiar motors approaching from the street. I didn’t want to wait for anyone in this room. I swore never to sleep with anyone I cared about in this room. It was to be kept pure, free of emotional associations. I paid twenty dollars a month for it.

I also wanted to buy a velvet chaise lounge and run a fin-de-siècle salon there. I pictured myself in a flowing dressing gown dispensing red wine to the literary substrata of Portland, Oregon, while they regaled me with wit and civilization and catered awestruck to my pontifications. I thought I would lie back in the chaise and dispense judgment on obsequious poets with my languid wrists and curling toes. The idea still appeals to me.

I kept an eye on the advertisements in the newspaper. Finally, I found the chaise. Peach-colored velvet, stuffed with goose down, and more comfortable than any bed I’ve known. A little grimy around the upholstery seams, a little dingy on the headrest. A pink-and-gray lady in a pink-and-gray apartment sold it to me. I decided she was a retired mistress casting off the old accoutrements.