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By Root 6053 0

’t she just say so—I took it that in the Z department, and Renata never told me what this was, he was all that I was not. This hurt me very deeply, it made my heart ache. In the old expression, she hit me where I lived. But she might have spared me Flonzaley’s rationalizations for soaking the bereaved. I knew Chicago’s business thinkers, I had heard many a rich Chicagoan philosophizing. I knew all of that would-be Shavian wit you could hear at dinner tables on Lake Shore Drive: they wanted to make an untouchable and a chandala of Flonzaley, a scavenger, but he would take their gold into the gloom with him, and he would be a Prince there—that sort of stuff I could do without. Still, Renata was wonderful. Naturally she wanted to say grand things to me and show how well she had done. I had lost a wonderful woman. I was suffering over Renata. She marched off in boots and plumes, as it were, and left me figuring, in pain, what was what, and how, and what to do. And trying to guess what Z was.

“You always said that the way life happened to you was so different that you weren’t in a position to judge the desires of other people. It’s really true that you don’t know people from inside or understand what they want—like you didn’t understand that I wanted stability—and you never may know. You gave this away when you told me how you tried to feel your way into little Mary’s emotions over the ten-speed bicycle but couldn’t. Well, I’m lending you Roger. Look after him till I can send for him and study his desires. It’s him you need now, not me. Flonzaley and I are going over to North Africa. Sicily hasn’t been as warm as I like it. Let me suggest, as long as you’re going back to fundamentals of feeling, that you give some thought to your friends Szathmar, Swiebel, and Thaxter. Your passion for Von Humboldt Fleisher speeded the deterioration of our relationship.”

She didn’t say just when she’d be sending for the boy.

“If you think you’re on earth for such a very special purpose I don’t know why you cling to the idea of happiness with a woman or a happy family life. This is either dumb innocence or else the last word in kinkiness. You’re really far out and you take up with a person who’s far out in her own way, and then you tell yourself that what you really want is a simple affectionate relationship. Well, you had the warmth and charm to make me think you wanted and needed me. Always your affectionate friend.” She had filled up the paper, and the letter ended.

I couldn’t help crying when I read this. On the night when Renata locked me out George Swiebel had told me how much he respected me for being able to suffer agonies of love at my age. He took off his hat to me for it. But this was the vitalist youth attitude which Ortega, one of the Madrid authors I had been reading, disparaged in The Modern Theme. I agreed with him. However, in the back bedroom of this third-rate pensión I was just the kind of old fool who carried on like an adolescent. I was balder and more wrinkled than ever and the white hairs had begun to grow long and wild from my eyebrows. Now I was a forsaken codger snuffling disgracefully from a beautiful floozy’s abuse. I was forgetting that I might also be a World Historical Individual (of a sort), that perhaps I was supposed to scatter the intellectual nonsense of an age or must do something to help the human spirit burst from its mental coffin. She didn’t think much of these aspirations, did she, if you took her running off with Flonzaley, who dealt in stiffs, as an expression of opinion. And even as I wept I glanced at the clock and realized that Roger would be back from his walk in fifteen minutes. We were supposed to play dominoes. Suddenly life goes into reverse. You’re in first grade again. Approaching sixty you must start from the beginning and see whether you can understand another’s desires. The woman you love is making mature progress in life, advancing independently in Marrakech, or somewhere. She doesn’t need a primrose path. Wherever she treads the primroses start growing.

She was right, of course. In