AFTER HE WAS EXPELLED from private school he went to public school, where he was encouraged to take part in an extracurricular activity. He chose dramatics and was cast as the hero in the current production. Alec, who had an amusing face and voice and was playing a comic role, took him up. He liked Alec but not in the way Alec liked him. Alec mythicized him, made much of the stories and poems he was writing, and represented him to friends as a genius. He felt that he was being overvalued, but this stimulated his wit, which in turn stimulated Alec’s crush. After high school Alec went to a second-rate college, he to a first-rate college. In a year they both entered the army. Alec was sent to a combat outfit, he to a language school. After the war Alec told him that many times he had almost been killed. Once on the front a sergeant had gone from foxhole to foxhole seeking volunteers for a dangerous mission. Alec refused. The sergeant said he hadn’t expected anything else from a Jew. Alec told the sergeant that he was refusing because he was a coward, not because he was a Jew. After six months of steady combat Alec was removed to a rest area. Alec on his own initiative went to a psychiatrist and said he couldn’t take any more combat. The psychiatrist reassigned Alec to the military police. The psychiatrist was a Jew, and the next day Alec returned to thank the psychiatrist and say that he too was a Jew. The psychiatrist said that had he known this he would have sent Alec back into combat: Our people have a special duty in this war, the psychiatrist said. Alec married a bright, small girl who whispered, wrote poetry, and drew pictures. She often spoke paradoxically, after which she would smile and squint. She and Alec were protective of one another, which made him jealous because his own wife, he felt, was becoming an enemy. One evening when the four of them were together Alec’s wife suggested that they swap mates for the night. Alec, Alec’s wife, and he agreed; his wife refused, saying that she took the marriage vows seriously. As he and his wife were leaving, Alec’s wife whispered to him that perhaps love affairs should be arranged by twos, not fours. A week later, after reserving a room at a motel, he met Alec’s wife in a parking lot near her house. Sitting in her car, he asked her where Alec thought she was. “With you,” she said. He excused himself and went home. Alec at the time was making four times his salary and offered him a job at a good wage. He found it impossible to be friends with Alec after this. His marriage and Alec’s broke up at the same time. They both moved out of their homes, he to a friend’s vacated apartment, Alec to a hotel, where a month later Alec died in a fire that had started in Alec’s room. He began seeing a psychiatrist and in the spirit of therapy invited Alec’s widow to lunch with him at his apartment on Tuesdays. He fed her, gave her wine, and let her talk, interrupting every now and then with advice. He made love to her on two successive Tuesdays; on the third he said that they should not do this any more. “I understand,” she said; “because of Alec.” He nodded. Soon after, the meetings stopped; but she often invited him to lunch or dinner. He was upset by the strangeness of her adolescent children, two pretty girls who affected odd clothes and hair styles and used hallucinogenic drugs. Alec’s widow now has a young lover, with whom she does creative things. She makes videotapes of original musical plays, in which her daughters are actors. Everything she creates deals with the theme of the interchangeability of the concepts of sanity and insanity. Her home will become a refuge for disturbed people, whom she will counsel. She will send him copies of her creations: tapes, Xeroxed drawings, privately printed books. She will inquire about his state of mind, and he will invent troubles to tell her. She will offer to cure him with new methods of meditation, yoga-like exercises, and her special insights into the problems of the human condition. Eventually he will try to avoid her. He will hear from a friend that she and one of her daughters have gone to South America to live. The most that he will be able to make of all this is that life was better to him than to Alec.