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By Root 6002 0

me from Texas and said, “Send me a check for thirty, no, make it forty-five.” I simply wrote the check and mailed it. There were no receipts. Occasionally a contract arrived six months later. Invariably my money was doubled. It pleased him to do this for me, although it also irritated him that I failed to understand the details of these deals and that I didn’t appreciate his business subtlety. As for my profits, they had been entrusted to Zitterbloom, they paid Denise, they subsidized Thaxter, they were taken by the IRS, they kept Renata in the Lake Point Towers, they went to Tomchek and Srole.

“What have you got in mind?” I said.

“A few things,” he said. “You know what bank rates are. I’d be surprised if they didn’t hit eighteen percent before long.” Three different television sets were turned on, adding to the streaming colors of the room. The wallpaper was gold-embossed. The carpet seemed a continuation of the dazzling lawn. Indoors and outdoors fell into each other through a picture window, garden and bedroom mingling. There was a blue Exercycle, and there were trophies on the shelves, for Hortense was a famous golfer. Enormous closets, specially built, were thick with suits and with dozens of pairs of shoes arranged on long racks and with hundreds of neckties and stacks of hatboxes. Showy, proud of his possessions, in matters of taste he was a fastidious critic and he reviewed my appearance as if he were the Douglas Mac-Arthur of dress. “You were always a slob, Chuckie, and now you spend money on clothes and go to a tailor, but you’re still a slob. Who sold you those goddamn shoes? And that horse-blanket overcoat? Hustlers used to sell shoes like that to the greenhorns fifty years ago with a buttonhook for a bonus. Now take this coat.” He threw into my arms a black vicuna with a Chesterfield collar. “Down here it’s too warm to get much use out of it. It’s yours. The boys will take your coat to the stable, where it belongs. Take it off, put this on.” I did as I was ordered. This was the form his affection took. When it was necessary to resist Ulick, I did it silently. He put on a pair of double-knit slacks, beautifully cut, with flaring cuffs, but he couldn’t fasten them over his belly. He shouted to Hortense in the next room that the cleaner had shrunk them.

“Yah, they shrank,” she answered.

This was the style of the house. None of your Ivy League muttering and subdued statement.

I was given a pair of his shoes, too. Our feet were exactly the same. So were the big extruded eyes and the straight noses. I don’t clearly know what these features did for me. His gave him an autocratic look. And now that I was beginning to think of every earthly life as one of a series, I puzzled over Ulick’s spiritual career. What had he been before? Biological evolution and Western History could never create a person like Ulick in sixty-five lousy years. He had brought his deeper qualities here with him. Whatever his earlier form, I was inclined to believe that in this life, as a rich rough American, he had lost some ground. America was a harsh trial to the human spirit. I shouldn’t be surprised if it set everyone back. Certain higher powers seemed to be in abeyance, and the sentient part of the soul had everything its own way, with its material conveniences. Oh the creature comforts, the animal seductions. Now which journalist was it that had written that there were countries in which our garbage would have been delicatessen?

“So you’re going to Europe. Any special reason? Are you on a job? Or just running, as usual? You never go alone, always with some bim. What kind of cunt is taking you this time? ... I can force myself into these slacks, but we’re going to do a lot of driving and I won’t be comfortable.” He pulled them off angrily and threw them on the bed. “I’ll tell you where we’re going. There’s a gorgeous piece of property, forty or fifty acres of a peninsula into the Gulf and it belongs to some Cubans. Some general who was dictator before Batista ripped it off years ago. I’ll tell you what his racket was. When currency wore