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By Root 12325 0

For one thing, at that time I was laughably inexperienced and even in the spirit of sexual sport or competition I would never have made a pass at a woman who had so clearly given her heart to another. For another thing, there was the simple matter of what I construed to be Nathan’s overwhelming seniority. And this was not a trivial question. In one’s twenties a few years’ edge counts for much more than it does later on in life; that is, that Nathan was around thirty and I was twenty-two made him substantially the “elder” in a way that those years could not have made in our forties. Also, it must be pointed out now that Sophie, too, was about Nathan’s age. Given these considerations, along with the disinterested manner I affected, I am almost sure that it never crossed either Sophie’s or Nathan’s mind that I might be a serious contender for her affections. A friend, yes. A lover? It would have made them both laugh. It must have been because of all this that Nathan never seemed reluctant to leave me alone with Sophie, and indeed encouraged our companionship whenever he was away. He had every right to be so trusting, at least during those early weeks, since Sophie and I never did more than casually touch fingertips despite all my craving. I became very much a listener, and I’m certain that my archly chaste detachment allowed me eventually to learn as much about Sophie and her past (or more) as Nathan ever learned.

“I admire your courage, kid,” Nathan said to me early one morning in my room. “I really admire what you’re doing, setting out to write something else about the South.”

“What do you mean?” I said with genuine curiosity. “What’s so courageous about writing about the South?” I was pouring the two of us coffee on one of those mornings during the week after our outing to Coney Island. Defying habit, I had for several days risen just past dawn, propelled to my table by the electric urgency I have described, and had written steadily for two hours or more. I had completed one of those (for me) fantastic sprints—a thousand words or thereabouts—which was to characterize this stage of the book’s creation, I felt a bit winded, and therefore Nathan’s knock at my door as he passed on his way to work was a welcome distraction. He had popped in on me like this for several mornings running and I enjoyed the byplay. He was up very early these days, he had explained, leaving for his laboratory at Pfizer because of some very important bacterial cultures that needed his observation. He had attempted to describe his experiment to me in detail—it had to do with amniotic fluid and the fetus of a rabbit, including weird stuff about enzymes and ion transference—but he had given up on me with an understanding laugh when, having taken me beyond my depth, he saw my look of pain and boredom. The failure of any mental connection had been my fault, not Nathan’s, for he had been precise and articulate. It was just that I possessed small wit or patience for scientific abstractions, and this was something I think I deplored in myself as much as I envied the capacious and catholic range of Nathan’s mind. His ability, for example, to switch from enzymes to Quality Lit., as he did now.

“I don’t think it’s any big deal for me to be writing about the South,” I went on, “it’s the place I know the best. Dem ole cotton fields at home.”

“I don’t mean that,” he replied. “It’s simply that you’re at the end of a tradition. You may think I’m ignorant about the South, the way I jumped you last Sunday so unmercifully and, I might add, so unpardonably about Bobby Weed. But I’m talking about something else now—writing. Southern writing as a force is going to be over within a few years. Another genre is going to have to appear to take its place. That’s why I’m saying you’ve got a lot of guts to be writing in a worn-out tradition.”

I was a little irritated, although my irritation lay less in the logic and truth of what he was saying, if indeed logical or true, than in the fact that such an opinionated literary verdict should issue from a research biologist at a