4

I WOKE as suddenly as if a curtain had been drawn back, returning the world like the next act of a play. I never got enough sleep at night, always took a nap after my last class, always woke to a state of bleak clarity—and there I was again, at the same zero point I had been the day before and the day before that, at the same zero point where I would be tomorrow. I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew the location of everything in my room nonetheless, felt the solidity of every object; that knowledge was appalling. I jumped out of bed, pulled on jeans and boots, grabbed my jacket, and ran outside. The alley, stretching between the ugly backsides of buildings trellised with fire escapes, opened to a gap to the sky where I knew I must look. Above was a thick roiling grey from which the rain was falling steadily. If I left here, I thought, it would be just as though I had never been here at all.

I was fully aware of starring in my own melodrama, fully aware of how absurd I would look to anybody with any sense, but I also knew that something was wrong with me—something far more serious than the usual Morgantown mold and all the ordinary absurdities of being a horny virgin halfway through a university degree. There’s only one thing that troubles my mind, I thought—a standard line that floats through a dozen old mountain tunes—and I would have loved to be able to say what that one thing was, but looking inside myself, all I saw was the usual incomprehensible tangle.

I was obviously fooling everyone. My professors took me for a scholar and always gave me A’s, but I was nothing more than an asshole with a big mouth who didn’t have a clue what real academic work was, having never done a lick of it in my life. The handful of people on campus who genuinely cared about folk music might find me authentic, but I was a white kid from a seedy middle-class family in an industrial town in the Northern Panhandle, and the closest I’d ever come to the authentic folk had been getting drunk once with a miner in Moundsville. Cohen, kind as he was, probably considered me a fellow Buddhist and seeker after the truth, but did I meditate, study the Sutras, try to practice Right Action? No, of course not. And, by now, I was sure that everybody saw me as a normal male, but whenever I woke again to that clear bleak zero point, I always knew better.

I needed to talk to Cohen. By the time I saw him walking down the alley toward me, it was all I could do not to start blathering the moment he stepped into voice range. His face was shining with an inner radiance. He was carrying a brown paper shopping bag. I ran forward to meet him, took the bag. He rubbed his hands together and blew on them; his knuckles were red with cold. “All the good things of life,” he said. “Spanish onions, Mexican tomato paste, Italian spaghetti, Greek olive oil, West Virginia ground beef, and vintage 1962 Morgantown cream soda.”

He followed me inside. My mind was still racing, but I was so strangled by my own misery I couldn’t find a single clear thing to say. Cooking was something we didn’t need to talk about; we just did it. Cohen began cutting up onions; I put my cast-iron Dutch oven on the stove, sloshed in some olive oil, and lit the gas. And already that level Cohen called “maintenance” was trapping me in the mundane, but what other level was I waiting for? A clarity I couldn’t simply choose: the power of it would have to enter me from the outside, as it had done with him. But he hadn’t been waiting for anything, had expected nothing; I expected everything, posed the problem to myself in a form as mind-cracking as any Zen koan, and each of my schemes drew the same hermetic “No!” from the master inside my head. No, don’t try to force it. No, don’t try to plan anything. It’s got to be like Cohen throwing knives. No tricks. This is the only way: you are one with the target and the knife is gone.

I couldn’t hold it back any longer. “Listen, Bill,” I said, “there’s all this shit going around in my head. I’m trying to make some sense of it. There are times I could call ‘gathering points.’ Everything leads into them, everything leads out of them. They’re hard to see when they’re happening, but you look back and say, ‘Right. That was it.’ And they’re the points where everything in your life changes.”

His eyes met mine; he scraped the diced onions from the cutting board into the hot oil. I began to crumble in the ground beef. He turned the flame down to medium. “It’s like the time that Lyle and I hitchhiked to St. Stevens,” I told him. “He didn’t say anything different. He just said what he’d always been saying. ‘You’ve got to train hard.’ But somehow that time was different.”

Remembering Lyle, I realized how much I missed that intense all-male world of athletics. We’d seen it as a metaphor even at the time, but it had been a good metaphor. Running was like praying. Heroic effort was the norm—merely something that was expected every day at track practice. It might not have been a Zen monastery, but it was the best we had. Yes, of course, we had to train hard. I saw it now as a ritual of purification.

“That night with Lyle,” I said, “oh, that was such a magical night. I’ll never forget the guy who picked us up . . . the guy with the Isky Roller Cam in his car, driving like a madman. And wandering around that dumb little town, and checking out the girls, and then walking out of town . . . under a sky just blistering with stars. And it all came together and made a gathering point. We hitchhiked back to Raysburg, and I finally did what Lyle told me. I trained hard. And it changed my entire life. I was never the same after that.”

Cohen’s moment of awakening on the beach in Florida must have been, I thought, just such a gathering point for him— although, of course, a far more significant one, on an entirely different level altogether. “Come on,” I said to him, “be straight with me. How’d you do it?”

He knew immediately what I was talking about. The question cracked him up. “John, if I could tell you, I would.”

“Let’s drop down to the bottom level. Were you doing anything that might have contributed to it? Anything you can think of?”

“I really want to tell you,” he said. “I’m not being intentionally obscure.”

“I know you’re not.”

“You knew me then. You know what I was like.”

“Yeah, you were the science-fiction kid. You were trying to be the perfect killer.”

“No, that was just my personal mishigas . . . But I was in good shape. I think that did have something to do with it. The beneficence of the mind-body unity. I was swimming every day, running on the beach . . . I was really light.”

I felt a kick of excitement. “That’s right. I know that’s right. I’ve felt it too. When Lyle and I were running, he used to say, ‘You’ve got to get light. Food just gets in the way.’ And I knew exactly what he was talking about. When I’d push myself to the edge, I’d feel it in the guts, a kind of heaviness like a stomach full of broken glass . . .”

“The withness of the body.”

“Yes. And this is what I’ve got to figure out. Simple daily things so I don’t get lost in all these mental puzzles.”

He handed me the can of tomato paste he’d just opened; I spooned the paste into the meat. He poured in a cup of water. I stirred the sauce, handed him the spoon, and he stirred it. I lit a cigarette. “You’re still doing it,” I said. “That perfect killer business. The throwing knives. What are you doing it for?”

“That’s on another level.”

“OK, so on that other level . . . Yeah, I know we’ve changed topics. But what are you doing?”

I knew by his silence that words had now become no damned good, but I had to persist: “Do you think you could ever throw a knife into somebody?”

“I hope to God I never have to.”

“Yeah, but you could if you had to. OK, Bill, so the Wild West’s long gone. Doesn’t that make it kind of an arcane skill?”

“Certain situations still require certain skills,” he said, smiling. “Let’s say there’s a dark night lit with only the faint sliver of a new moon, and I’m drifting like a shadow across the border into Latvia. I know that I have to be hundreds of miles away when the guards discover my black parachute. A dog barks in a distant farm yard, and then another, and then another . . . I freeze . . . and then I hear the faint, dry, tactful sound of a twig snapping. I feel the hair prickle on the back of my neck. I slip a knife into my hand. What’s required now is absolute silence . . .”

“Cohen. Come on.”

“You know the weird thing, John? It is something like that. It’s just to be ready . . . But that’s not right. The words aren’t right.”

“Ready for what?”

He didn’t answer. I was pushing him, and I knew it, could feel his resistance. “Ready for what?” I said again. “Can you imagine any possible situation in which you’d have to throw a knife into somebody?”

“The highest skill is to have no skill at all. It takes years of work to have no skill at all . . . on that level.”

“You just side-stepped the question.”

He gave me his cat-like grin. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

“Christ, when you’re talking about the color of light on snow, you’ve got millions of words, but when you’re talking about something important, you haven’t got any.”

He laughed. “That’s right.”

“Listen, you’ve got to help me. I can’t just keep on wandering around waiting for elusive mental states that absolutely can’t be forced . . . or even prepared for.”

Yes, words were no damned good; all I had was a feeling—a rasp at my mind, an existential itch. I paced to the far side of my apartment and back again. I put on water to boil for his tea. I opened my first beer of the night.

“There’s an emptiness,” I said, “when everything’s simple. It must be what you’ve been talking about . . . or something like it. Sometimes it happens when I first wake up. Sometimes playing the guitar. And it’s pure, but it’s not a purity you have to work for. It’s like . . . Well, here’s the difference. You can decide to go on a fast . . . or you can just not eat for a while because you’re doing something else . . .”

There was a tap at my door. I was annoyed. I felt that I’d almost arrived at some elusive but essential point. Cohen must have sensed my frustration. I saw him send me a message with his beautiful green eyes. “There is an emptiness,” he said, “when everything is simple.”

I opened the door quickly, bracing myself to see Carol, but it was only Revington with Marge Levine. “Ciao, Marcello,” he said. He was swinging a case of beer which he slapped into my arms. She was carrying her autoharp and a bottle of red wine. She’d outdone herself with the Egyptian makeup, had drawn thick precise black lines around her eyes from tear ducts to lynx-like arches at the outer margins, had painted her eyelids gold and turquoise; that hugely artificial gaze drew the force away from the rest of her face, leaving her skin lemony and Fauvish under the bare hundred-watt bulb in my hallway. She looked as though she should speak in some incomprehensible tongue, but what she said was, “Hey, buddy, how’s it going?”

“About half,” I said, laughing, pleased to see her, ready to let go of my angst for the moment.

Revington was yelling at me, “Help us out, Marcello. You’ve got to shed some gloom on this discussion.” He flung himself down onto the back seat of an old Chevy I’d scavenged from the dump; he held a cigarette compressed between his lips, his eyes narrowed against the smoke.

“Just what is being discussed?” I asked.

Marge was wearing one of her black dresses, this one in a fabric that seemed to absorb all light. When she took the water tumbler of wine I offered her, I saw that a thin gold snake circled her wrist. She’d come to rest against the wall by the window, obviously posed, though apparently at ease, with one hip cocked, her lean body balanced on her usual stiletto heels. “He’s just being an asshole,” she said to me.

“Comrade Levine has been explaining how we are all declining and falling,” Revington said, “while I have been maintaining that the beauty of the process lies in the decline rather than the ultimate fall . . . that we should not go rushing pell-mell into the arms of those grey bureaucrats whom dear Comrade Levine would wish upon us.”

“William,” she said, toasting him. Her eyes sent him a message, but coded. “You still haven’t got the point. It’s possible to have a democratic socialism, one that doesn’t look like the Soviet Union’s.”

“Where is it?” he said, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Cuba? Sweden? Patagonia? Andorra?”

“The trouble with Marxism,” I said, “is that it’s teleological. But history is cyclical.” I didn’t know whether I believed that or not, having just thought of it, but it had a good ring to it that I hoped Revington would appreciate. “When the Confucians were in power,” I said, half to Cohen, “the Taoists retired to the mountains.”

“That’s your solution all right,” Marge said to me. She laughed and then turned to Revington. “He calls me up, right? Says, ‘Hey Marge, you want to go to a flick?’ I say, ‘How can you think about going to a movie at a time like this?’ He says, ‘A time like what?’ And then I remember who I’m talking to. It’s John Dupre . . . I say, ‘Haven’t you heard about the missiles in Cuba?’ He says, ‘What missiles in Cuba?’”

Marge and Revington were laughing at me; I joined them. I was nowhere near the Li’l Abner that I sometimes made myself out to be, but sometimes it was just too good a role to pass up. It was true that I’d missed the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“He doesn’t have to know anything,” Revington said. “He’s a poet.”

I heard another tap at my door, and there was no doubt this time who it would be. Beads of water were trickling down the gleaming red surface of the raincoat I’d grown to love because it was emblematic of her. She rose on tiptoe to kiss me, not, as I’d expected, on the cheek, but, for the barest fraction of a second, on my lips. “Nothing if not obedient,” she said, handing me the lettuce and bread I’d asked her to bring. I hung up her coat for her.

She settled into the only reasonably comfortable chair in my apartment and crossed her ankles like a lady. I brought her a glass of wine. She glanced up at me and smiled. She was wearing one of her outfits that was so demure it could have been a school uniform—a navy jumper with a plain white blouse—and there really was, I thought, something perverse about the way she insisted on dressing like that. She was sitting not three feet from the spot where I’d pressed her against the wall. She’d been wearing a jumper that night too, and I had a sickeningly vivid memory of touching her waist, feeling the rigid boning underneath the tight wool—of her hands pulling on my neck, of her tongue in my mouth, of her leg between mine. And now I was supposed to make polite conversation with her? God help me.

Marge and Revington had barely registered Carol’s arrival. They were still going at each other full tilt. “What the hell did you expect him to do?” Revington was saying in his dry flat voice, “Give up? The bastards already had their goddamned missiles down there.”

“Ours in Turkey don’t count?”

“It’s a matter of realpolitik. He couldn’t let them get away with it.”

“But was it worth blowing up the world over?”

“The world wasn’t blown up, and the missiles are leaving Cuba,” Revington said. “He won.”

“I’ll give you ten to one,” she answered him, “that our missiles won’t be in Turkey a year from now, so it isn’t a one-sided victory. And they could have slipped. It was that close.” She gave him her thin smile over the edge of her wine glass. “Maybe you want to die for the honor of the Kennedy brothers, but I don’t.”

“Oh, do we have to talk politics tonight?” Carol said.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Marge said, “it must be so tedious for you.”

“Lay off, sweet coz. I’m not in the mood.” Carol had been smiling when she’d said it, but I’d heard the cutting edge in her voice.

“Dupre’s got the right idea,” Revington said. “There’s not one fucking thing that any of us can do that’s going to change anything. And isn’t there something obscene about a bunch of privileged little brats like us sitting around discussing the fate of the world as though it might mean something? Isn’t there something rotten about it? What was it you were saying, Marge, about the poor stiffs on the assembly line? That the only reason we’re free to sit around and talk about all this shit . . .”

“Wait a minute,” Marge said, “I didn’t say anything about any poor stiffs on the . . .”

Revington rode right over her: “. . . free to sit around and talk about it because there are thousands of poor bastards out there who aren’t free? Wasn’t that the point you were making? However the hell you said it? Well, that’s right,” and I could hear the rising resonance as he became increasingly fascinated by the sound of his own voice, “but how many times haven’t we envied them . . . those poor bastards who don’t have time to think because they’ve got something to do every fucking day of their lives? They don’t have to read Sartre or Camus or Karl Marx. It’s just off to the plant and then home to the telly, right? Mead can do more than Milton can, right?” and to me, holding up his empty beer bottle, “Landlord, fill the flowing bowl. The bird of time has but a little way to fly . . .”

“William,” Marge said, “I don’t even think you believe yourself half the time.”

“But of course. That’s the magnificent irony of it.”

I picked up the case of beer from the kitchen counter and set it down in the middle of the floor so he could help himself, handed him the church key. “Magnificent irony, my ass,” I said. “Too many movies is more like it.”

“Well, isn’t that it?” he said. “Too many books and too many movies. How can we ever hope for genuineness with those frozen gestures, that toy box of phrases in our heads?”

I wasn’t sure where to aim it, but I was inexplicably angry. “‘Corruption never has been compulsory,’” I said, quoting. “‘There are left the mountains.’”

“Oh, Jeffers,” Carol said with distaste, “he’s not even a poet.” “Why not?” I asked her.

Carol shrugged. “I am not going to get drawn into this. You’re all just playing around.”

“No,” Marge said, “we’re playing around, but we’re not just playing around. I really want to know what you think, Carol. Why isn’t Jeffers a poet?”

“Lay off, Marge. I really mean it.” But she couldn’t help adding, “His subject matter is . . . Well, it’s simply not timeless. And his language is so pedestrian.”

“Oh,” Marge said with mock surprise, “pedestrian language. Oh, I see.”

“Well, how else should we judge poetry? By the language, of course. Magnificent, beautiful, gorgeous language . . . that’s what will last when everything else is gone.”

“‘Time,’” I said, “‘worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives.’” I didn’t believe it for a minute, but I couldn’t help rushing to Carol’s defense.

Carol gave me a grateful smile. “Yes,” she said, “that’s it exactly.”

“What?” Marge said. “Auden’s aestheticism? Poetry makes nothing happen? What kind of escapist crap is that?”

“No,” Carol said, looking directly at Marge, “you’re not going to draw me into this idiotic conversation. None of you mean what you say anyway.”

“Ah, but what if we did?” Revington said. “If each of us turned over the rock of our hearts, what would be crawling beneath?”

“Some of us mean what we say,” Marge said, giving Revington an exasperated look. “OK, Carol . . . this magnificent language. This language that will last forever. What is there about it that will make it last forever? Why is it still relevant? Why don’t you give us a sample?”

“No, I will not give you a sample. Why don’t you just lay off me? You’ve been needling me ever since I walked in here.”

“I was teasing you,” Marge said, “not needling you. But seriously, kid, I really want to know what you think.”

“Come on, Carol,” Revington said, “won’t you come out and play with us? We’re all good company, aren’t we? Despite our lousy manners?”

Carol looked at each of us, her reluctance written all over her face. Then I saw something change in her. She smiled and, with a impudent toss of her head, recited—

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

We applauded her. Revington yelled, “Bravo!”

“Thank you,” Marge said. “Yes, it’s lovely . . .”

“Lovely?” Carol snapped back at her. “It’s one of the finest lyrics in the English language.”

“Oh, all right. I suppose it is. But I can’t help thinking, why is that poor son of a bitch out in the rain anyway? He’s probably a peasant, and he sure isn’t out there in the rain working for his own economic interests.” Everyone laughed but Carol. I couldn’t understand why Marge wouldn’t let it go; then I realized that it must have been an ongoing clash that the girls had brought with them.

“My God,” Carol said to Marge, “I can’t believe you. You take everything as journalism. Exactly like a newspaper story. The world must look really flat to you. Flat and dead and grey.”

“No, honey, I bet my world’s just as colorful as yours . . . Look, I didn’t say it wasn’t pretty, did I? But I guess I want something more than beautiful language.”

“Oh, you make me so mad! Why are you doing this to me?” Carol’s eyes flooded with tears. She took a deep breath and stared down at her penny loafers.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, “I obviously take things too seriously.”

I’d been afraid that the evening would turn out to be a disaster for me; now it appeared to be turning into a disaster for everyone. We were trapped inside a moment of deadly silence. Then Cohen stepped into it. He hadn’t said a word for the last half hour—hadn’t left the kitchen, had appeared to be wholly absorbed in cooking. I didn’t know if he’d been the least bit interested in anything we’d been saying. But now, with the sudden grace of a gunslinger, he was in the room with us, offering Carol his handkerchief. “Thank you,” she said in a prim little voice.

Cohen was looking directly into her Carol’s eyes. “Don’t be sorry,” he told her, “you said what you meant . . . but more than that, you showed us how much you meant it. What could be more beautiful than that?”

“You sound like a character out of a Dostoevsky novel,” Revington said to Cohen.

Cohen was not smiling. “It is like a Dostoevsky novel, William. Sometimes you have to take the clumsy stupid slow words and take a chance with them . . . speak straight from the heart. Because what matters is what happens between people. Because that’s all we’ve got.”

“Touché,” Revington said and saluted him just as though we were back in military school. “Is that ex cathedra, Bill?”

“That’s ex cathedra,” Cohen said.

“Yeah, we are a bunch of black-hearted bastards, aren’t we?” Revington said, “playing our party games.” Then suddenly brightening, “Why don’t we do it then? Just like in a Dostoevsky novel? All right, let’s each of us say what we really believe when it comes down to the crunch. No bullshit now. Just the truth, plain and simple and silly, right?”

No one spoke. “OK, Comrade Levine,” Revington said, “why don’t you start?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, William.”

“It was all right to do it to Carol?” he said. “We just forced her, didn’t we? She might not have intended to, but she told us what mattered. So now let’s all take a turn. Just tell us what you believe in, that’s all. Let’s see how much of a fool you really are.”

“Oh, hell,” Marge said. “All right.”

She looked off into the corner of the room, frowning. “We’re all infinitely precious,” she said slowly. “We all have vast, unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” She was, I knew, echoing the Port Huron Statement. “We have to throw off our alienation, our isolation, create an authentic community. We have to find truly democratic alternatives to the present . . . We will find them. When we do, we’re going to change America from top to bottom.”

“Oh,” Revington said, dragging out the words, “God.”

She gave him her thin smile. “I know you think I’m absurd, but . . . Don’t you understand? You think the ability to hope for even a possibility of change . . . a possibility for anything better . . . You take that as a sign of weakness.”

I saw him absorb that, think about it. He nodded to her. “It is beautiful,” he said. “I’ll admit that. Although a bit on the utopian side, wouldn’t you say? Is that all?”

“Political credos should be short.”

“You see?” he said to Carol. “Isn’t that as every bit as absurd as being in love with magnificent language? . . . All right, Dupre, it’s your turn.”

I’d already been planning what I was going to do. “Can I sing you a little song, judge?” I picked up my Martin and checked the tuning.

“Are we going to let him get away with this?” Revington said.

“Of course we are,” Marge said.

Every guy who’s ever called himself a folk singer must have sung “The Cuckoo” at least once. I tried to make my version distinctive—had worked out a pattern of finger-picking to make my guitar sound something like a banjo, and I sang it in my most raw, authentic, old-time voice:

Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird.
She warbles as she flies.
She brings us glad tidings,
And she tells us little lies.

Gonna build me a log cabin
On the mountain so very high
Just to see Bodhidharma
When he comes walking by.

Cohen smiled as I knew he would, but I saw that no one else had got it. I picked out the melody once and ended on a sepulchral chord that had nothing in it but Ds and As.

“All right,” Carol said, “I know we’re supposed to ask, so I’ll do it. Who’s Bodhidharma?”

“The First Patriarch of Zen Buddhism,” I said. “He walked from India to China. After staring at a wall for nine years, he was instantly enlightened. Then, after his death, he was seen walking back to India with a sandal on his head.”

Everyone laughed just as I’d meant them to. “OK, so Dupre’s answer is Zen lunacy,” Revington said, “the sense of no sense.”

“Oh, it makes perfect sense,” Carol said with a mischievous smile. “You just have to subject the text to close reading.”

“Well, my dear,” Revington said, “would you care to enlighten us?”

“Certainly,” she said. “The first image is that of the cuckoo. The narrator admits that she is a pretty bird. She warbles as she flies, bringing us glad tidings, but the narrator also knows that she tells us little lies. Her glad tidings are false . . . just as we should expect from a bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests . . .”

Her tone was so much like that of a professor in a classroom that we were all laughing. “But the narrator refuses to be taken in by the cuckoo’s blandishments and decides to withdraw to a mountain. Could the cuckoo’s lies, in this context, represent the corruption of the contemporary world? And the narrator knows that corruption has never been compulsory . . .” With that one, Revington was howling like a maniac; I was feeling a growing dismay.

“Mountains in literature frequently represent a purity and return to nature as opposed to the corruption of the cities,” Carol went on, still perfectly imitating the tone of a university lecture; the sparkle in her eyes was saying something like, “See what I can do!”

“The narrator plans to build a cabin on a mountain so very high, and there he will wait for the coming of Bodhidharma. Now what are we to make of this image borrowed from another culture? Whatever significance Bodhidharma might have in his original context, here he clearly represents salvation . . . the countervailing force against the pretty lies of the cuckoo. Now we have reached the heart of the narrative, the key to understanding it. The narrator has no assurance that Bodhidharma will ever walk by his cabin . . .”

I didn’t know if Carol had finished or not, but Revington yelled, “Good Christ,” laughing, pounding on the floor with his fist, “That’s wonderful! Waiting for Bodhidharma, huh?” and then directly to me: “What do you say there, Estragon? Nothing to be done, right?”

It was hard for me to keep laughing with the rest of them. I felt stripped bare. I didn’t know how Carol had managed to do it, but it was as though she’d seen directly into my heart. Yes, I was always waiting, and waiting for what? That mysterious something to enter me from the outside—that force, that clarity, that emptiness, as I’d told Cohen—but I had no assurance that it ever would. And also, on another level, I felt that Carol had betrayed me. How could she have done that? Only a few minutes ago I’d been defending her.

“OK,” Revington was saying, “time to hear from the delegate from Nirvana.”

Smiling, not saying a word, Cohen set salad and bread onto the table, motioned us to come and eat.

“That’s supposed to be your answer?” Revington said. “Well, I’m not going to let you off that easy. Try the English language.”

“I’ll accept that limitation,” Cohen said. He stepped quickly into the room with us. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a man who withdrew to the mountains to wait for Bodhidharma.”

They were laughing again, but Cohen paused, smiling. When he’d gathered up everyone’s attention, he continued, speaking in a compelling storyteller’s voice: “And the man built him a log cabin on a mountain so very high. It was just a rough structure because the man expected Bodhidharma at any moment. But Bodhidharma did not appear, so after a while, the man decided to build the very best cabin he could. He took his time, and eventually he built a wonderful cabin, warm and tight and comfortable. Well, the man had to eat, so he put in a garden, and he hunted the wild game that was abundant on the mountain, and he had a good life there, but he was lonely, and still Bodhidharma did not come.

“Now over on the next mountain was another cabin with a whole family living in it, so the man went to visit them, and he kept going back to visit them because they were really nice people, and he fell in love with the youngest daughter, the one with the golden hair, and he married her and brought her back to his cabin, and they had five children, and still there was no sign of Bodhidharma. And the children grew up, and they married and had children of their own, and they settled throughout all those mountains and valleys. And one day the man was sitting on his porch looking down over the valley, something happened, and he woke as if from a dream, and he realized that Bodhidharma was already there, that he’d been there the entire time.”

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” Carol said.

My eyes were stinging. Surely they must all have felt it: Cohen had been turning the Wheel of the Dharma. “Know, Subhuti,” I said, “that from the very beginning every sentient being has already attained perfect incomparable enlightenment.”

“Yes,” Cohen said.

“Oh, Jesus!” Revington burst out, “I envy you guys. I really do.”

“You’re the only one left, William,” Marge said. “What’s at the bottom of your black heart?”

He flopped back against the old Chevy seat, covered his eyes for a moment. Then he sat up. “OK,” he said, speaking quickly in a low thick voice, “there’s that man in Cohen’s story, and he’s living with his family, and all his good neighbors are living all around him, and one day . . . purely by chance . . . just as a random event . . . a peddler wanders up into the mountains. And he visits everyone. Nobody knows it, but he’s carrying the bubonic plague. So they all get the plague, and most of them die. And who gets spared, and who dies, has nothing to do with the kind of lives they’ve been living. And their deaths have no meaning . . . just as their lives had no meaning.”

He pulled a pen and a scrap of paper out of his pocket. He drew a cross with a loop at the top. “In plague time in the Middle Ages,” he said, “this was inscribed on the doors of the afflicted. It meant: God help us. But it wasn’t a plea or a prayer. There was no expectation that God would help. It was called the Fear Sign, and it stood for ultimate despair. Do you understand,” he said, looking directly at Marge, “that no hope is implied? No hope at all?”

Their eyes met. “I understand,” she said.

• • •

AFTER REVINGTON’S performance (I had to admit that it had been one of his best) our little party could have sunk easily into a funereal slough, but there appeared to be a collective will not to do that, and, in fact, to do just the opposite. I put Pete Seeger on the stereo because I wanted to hear his twelve-string guitar and “The Bells of Rhymney.” We opened more beer. I’d saved a gallon of Paisano Red for just such an occasion, and I brought it out. Cohen had seasoned the spaghetti sauce with oregano, bay leaves, parsley, and garlic powder; it was delicious. We ate and drank and talked about nothing serious. Revington and I even did a few of our moronic comedy routines that went all the way back to the Academy. We’d started by learning “The Arkansas Traveler,” but, over the years, we’d compiled a dozen more, some long, some short; either of us could kick one off, and then the other would respond with the required lines. What we hoped to get, and usually got, was not a laugh but a groan. Like this one:

“Hey, Dupre, do you know my friend Art?”

“Art? Art who?”

“Art Tesian.”

“Oh, yes, I know Artesian well.”

And of course we had to sing. I tuned my guitar to Marge’s autoharp. She looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to pick a tune. Revington might be able to get into her pants, I thought, but I knew her heart in a way he never would. When she heard the chords, her face lit up, and we sang together, perfectly timed:

Every little river must go down to the sea.
All the slaving miners in our union will be free.
Gonna march to Blair Mountain,
Gonna whup the company.
I don’t want you to weep after me.

Everyone sang but Cohen. Like me, Marge tried to sound like someone who’d grown up a few miles back of Mud, West Virginia; Revington had a ringing baritone and Carol a pleasantly girlish soprano. We did more labor songs: “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “Which Side Are You On?” Marge had learned the harmony to “Buddy, Won’t You Roll Down the Line,” and we sounded, I thought, good enough to perform it at the Mountainlair. Of course we did singalongs: “The Sloop John B” and “The Mermaid.” We always had to do at least one of those old lugubrious ballads about murdered girls, usually “The Banks of the Ohio,” and at least one Irish tune, usually “The Leaving of Liverpool.” To show off my guitar picking and my authentic ethnic voice, I did “See See Rider” and “Red Rocking Chair,” and the one about Stewball the racehorse for those lines I loved and could sing with absolute conviction even when I was back in Raysburg:

Oh, the winds they do whistle,
And the waters do moan.
I’m a poor boy in trouble.
I’m a long way from home.

• • •

THE PARTY broke up around ten. The curfew applied to all the girls on campus, even graduate students, and Carol wanted to be home well before curfew—to work on a paper, she said, but knowing her as I did, I guessed that what she really wanted was a long hot bath and bed. Cohen and I offered to walk with her. Marge and Revington volunteered to stay behind and clean up. As we were leaving, he bent to whisper to me: “If you guys could manage to stay away . . . oh, let’s say until after midnight . . . I’d be forever in your debt.”

“You’re forever in my debt as it is, William.”

The rain had stopped, but the temperature had fallen; the thick-skied night had the iron smell of impending snow. “This crazy city,” Carol said. “You never know what to expect. I’m freezing.”

“You’ll get warm as you walk,” I told her.

“Oh, you’re so physical,” she said.

Cohen and I were walking on either side of her. He and I were, as always, in jeans and boots. She reached out and took our hands. “How lovely,” she said, “to have two such handsome cowboys escorting me home.” There was a maidenly coyness in her voice that I’d never heard before; I wanted to smack her. “I’ve never met anyone from Harvard,” she told him.

She asked him what he was studying; he told her about the Amaravati Stupa slab. “That’s so exotic,” she said. “That must be the advantage of a school like Harvard. You can study things that the rest of us can only dream about.”

When we arrived at her apartment, she pushed back the hood of her shiny red raincoat and kissed each of us on the cheek. “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said, still using that irritating, maidenly voice, “I had a lovely time.”

Cohen and I began walking back along Beechurst. “That raincoat kills me,” I said.

“I’ll bet it’s more than the raincoat,” he said.

“Yeah, you’re right . . . She was flirting with you, you know.”

“I noticed.”

“Oh, you did, did you?”

“Of course I noticed. It has happened to me before, believe it or not . . . And I am conversant with the subject . . . from a purely theoretical standpoint. I read a monograph on it just before I left my home planet.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“The funny thing is . . . Whenever it happens, it never seems to have much of anything to do with me.”

We had a good hour and a half to kill, but it wasn’t hard to do. Walking was always good, spinning out those endless words that Cohen didn’t trust. “Are you going to see Natalie again?” he asked me.

I was startled. I’d been thinking obsessively about Carol. “I hope so. Do you think I should?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. What do you think?”

That wasn’t the first time he’d asked me about Natalie. Well, he’d adored her; that had been obvious. And she’d liked him just as much as he’d liked her. It had even crossed my mind a few times that if she hadn’t been my girlfriend, he might have liked her well enough to do something about it—although I couldn’t quite imagine Cohen making a pass at Natalie, or at anyone. Not that he was incapable of it; I just couldn’t imagine how he would go about it. “She was a sweet girl,” I said, and then, after a moment, added, “God, that sounds condescending. She was a hell of a lot more than a sweet girl.”

“Yes, she was.”

“Christ, Bill, I honest to God don’t know how I feel about her.”

“Why don’t you give yourself a chance to find out?”

• • •

WHEN WE got back to my place, Revington was outside waiting for us, lounging against his car, smoking. He glanced at the watch he wasn’t wearing and called, “Hurry up, please, gentlemen, it’s almost time.” Seeing him there—disheveled, lean, magnetic, handsome, dark, and grinning; posed as though for a camera of a New Wave director—I was infuriated. “William,” I said, “you look self-satisfied.”

“One does not require,” he said unctuously, unfolding himself, “that the prisoner does not enjoy his meals.”

We got into the car. Revington began to drive; he circled the campus. It was well after curfew by then, and there was not a girl or woman to be seen anywhere, only guys, dumb jerks like us with their pants on, hurrying through the chilly night. They’d dropped their girls off, at the dorm or at a sorority house, and now there was not a trace of femininity to be seen—not a swinging ponytail, clicking pair of high heels, shining raincoat, swishing skirt. It felt as though all the power lines of the world had been cut. Cohen was explaining something to Revington about Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai: “It’s something you can’t forget,” he was saying, “like keeping kosher.”

“Your family doesn’t keep kosher, does it?” Revington asked him.

“Are you kidding? How many cheeseburgers have you seen me eat? But it’s like keeping kosher . . . or anything else that’s always with you so you don’t even have to think about it.” And he repeated what he’d said a moment before: “A real Samurai wouldn’t get that drunk.” And there were no girls, no women, on the street.

Revington yawned. “Shit, is that what you’re going to do when you get out of Harvard? Hire out as a Samurai?”

Cohen laughed. “That sounds like something my father says . . . So what are you doing, Bill, studying all that Chinese? When you get out of school, are you going to open a laundry?”

“That’s a good one,” Revington said, and then to me, “Where have you got yourself, ace?”

“Thinking how amazing it is what happens to the campus when they lock up all the women.”

“Yeah,” he said, “swept clean. Jesus, how medieval can you get? . . . In loco parentis, which should be translated: the parents are insane. They’d save themselves of a lot of trouble if they’d just lock all the freshmen girls into chastity belts to be removed only upon graduation . . . Oh, God, this is a dismal place, but I’d give my left nut if they let me in.”

“Why the hell don’t you try then?” I said.

“You don’t know what my transcript looks like . . . Shit, let’s talk about something else.” He gave me a toothy skull’s grin. “That little Carol, for instance, who seems to be giving you such a bad case of the hot pants.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t let go of my annoyance. “No?” he asked me.

“No.”

“We can always talk about baseball then . . . But no, we can’t do that either. The season’s over.”

“Oh, you guys.”

“Get off campus,” I said. “Drive along the river.”

“Off to Nighttown,” Revington said and then muttered, “I saw the best minds of my generation driving aimlessly around Morgantown, West Virginia, at one in the morning.”

He hunched over the wheel and began piloting us out of town. “Ah, Margery . . .” He appeared to be addressing the first scattering of snowflakes that were being cleared from the windshield with a slap. “You’re some bitch. You’re sharp as a goddamn tack.”

“Drive over by the tracks,” I said, and I could hear the anger in my voice. “There’s got to be something over there.”

When we found it, our open bar was quite literally a shack, with a flaking sign proclaiming: THE NEW PALACE. Lights shone in the veiled window; we could hear the jukebox. “If that’s the new palace,” Revington said, “I’d sure as hell hate to see the old one.”

“We probably won’t get served,” I said.

“Maybe they’ll have an exotic brand of cream soda I’ve never seen before,” Cohen said. “I keep hoping . . . Maybe at the back of an old shop with a sign on the front that says: WE SELL THIMS . . . Ancient, dusty bottles covered with cobwebs . . . The owner, a bent strange man as ancient as the bottles says, ‘Cream soda, eh? Well, look at this. Bottled in 1842. Never thought I’d find anyone who’d appreciate it.’ Our eyes meet. We exchange the intensely burning glances of true aficionados. He wipes the dust off, opens the first bottle . . .”

“Shit,” Revington said. He banged out of the car and walked away, leaving us to follow.

Above the bar was a crude drawing of a pig with a huge red arrow pointing to its backside just beneath the corkscrew tail. The caption read: CREDIT? We sat in a booth. Instead of walking over to us, the bartender yelled across the room: “What do you want, boys?”

“Three beers,” Revington said.

“Sorry, boys, it’s after midnight.”

The others in the place were all old men; they didn’t pay the least bit of attention to us. Everyone was drinking coffee. Revington unwound himself, sauntered over, and slouched languidly on the bar. “I guess we’ll have what they’re having,” he said.

Without saying a word, the bartender slapped three coffee mugs onto the bar, poured a shot of whiskey into each, added coffee, and said, “A buck eighty.” Revington paid him, carried the mugs to our table.

“I can’t drink this,” Cohen said.

“For Christ’s sake, don’t go up there and buy a cream soda,” Revington hissed.

“Why not?” Cohen walked to the bar and bought himself a cream soda.

Revington sighed. “Sweet Jesus,” he said to me, “it’s hard traveling with a saint.”

We stared at each other across the table. Revington toasted me. I was amazed that we were in, accepted, and drinking. I’d been afraid that our night’s supply would run out before I’d gotten myself as drunk as I needed to be. “Home free,” I said.

Cohen slid into the booth, pointed with his pop bottle. “Look at that poster. It must have been hanging there since the Second World War.” A yellowing young lady, reminiscent of Betty Grable, wearing seamed stockings, platform heels, and a tight skirt, was leaning forward to pick up a tray, presenting us with her plump rear end, grinning over one shoulder, inviting us to HAVE A COKE. “Maybe we’ve gone through a time warp,” Cohen said. “No, we’re about to go through the time warp.” He gestured toward the bar. The youngest man looked about fifty. “We’ll get lost in conversation. Then we’ll look up and see that the poster is no longer faded and yellow. All of the men will be suddenly young . . . ”

“Yeah,” Revington said, “and then we’ll remember that tomorrow morning we’re going to have to hit the beach at Normandy.” He yawned. “Well, at least they had something to do.”

I found myself studying him, once again, as I’d done ever since I’d first met him. Sure, he could have played World War II in a Hollywood version; he had the height, the face, the leanness, the carriage, the arrogance, and it all worked. “Revington,” I said, “you’re milking the existential despair just a bit much.”

“Oh, am I?” he said, his face slackening. “Yes . . . Yes, I suppose I am.”

I couldn’t be content with that but had to keep going. “Sometimes, just for laughs, you ought to try reminding yourself that you’re twenty years old, bright, good-looking, and you’ve got a rich father.”

“Touché, John . . . But shit, don’t you think I don’t know that? It just makes everything . . . fuck . . . even more ridiculous.”

“Isn’t it beautiful to be precisely who we are?” Cohen said.

“Listen to that, will you?” Revington said to me. “Sometimes I think he’s a saint, and other times I think he’s got all the emotional prerequisites of an axe murderer.”

Cohen laughed. “You know what, ace?” Revington snapped at him. “Everything’s just too fucking easy for you.”

I could never understand what Revington thought he had to complain about. I, however, had plenty to complain about, and sometimes things did seem too easy for Cohen. I looked back at that silly Forties Coke ad. The fading little sexpot reminded me of Carol, of course. But time will fade and yellow her like the poster, I thought with a certain gritty satisfaction, will fade and yellow us all—a Renaissance sentiment she’d probably appreciate if she were around to hear it. “William,” Cohen was saying, “I’m always aware of how far I am from where I want to be . . . on one level. Just how stupid and clumsy and slow.”

Revington was staring into his coffee cup. “Fuck, I’m sorry, Bill. I shouldn’t have said that. You guys are the only friends I’ve got. Everybody else has given up on me. Jesus, I’m losing my fucking mind. The whole fucking world’s in school but me.”

I felt the old familiar despair descending on me like poured concrete. Maybe I should play the jukebox, I thought, but I couldn’t move a muscle. Where the hell were we anyway? I looked up and saw that a woman had just walked into the bar. She could have been anything between a ruined forty and a preserved sixty-five. She shed a vast overcoat like a seaman’s (it hung to her knees), revealing enormous breasts sagging in a man’s dirty shirt, huge thighs crammed into a pair of man’s tweed pants held up with a length of rope. A monstrous beefy block of a woman, she had grey hair that was unwinding itself from various incongruous pins and clips and barrettes, tiny red and pink plastic bows like those a child might have worn. Her wrinkled face was stretched into a wide, yellow-toothed grin, and her eyes glittered like frost. To my growing alarm, she walked directly to our booth and dropped a gigantic purse onto the table with a crash. “Well, boys, are you getting any?” she shouted.

“I beg your pardon,” Revington said in his British colonel voice.

“Are you getting your hammer wet, that’s what I want to know. Or are you just going home every night and pulling your puds?”

She rummaged a half-smoked stogie out of her purse, stuffed it into her face, and lit it, shedding sparks of burning tobacco leaf. “Viv’s the name, fun’s the game,” she yelled. “I’m the best-educated drunk you boys will ever meet. Mind if I sit down?” she said, sitting down. “All I want to know is are you getting your dorks dunked?” None of us said anything.

“Aren’t you going to offer the lady a drink?” Wearily, Revington pushed the third coffee cup across to her. She poured it swiftly into the saucer and slurped.

“Shit,” she yelled in a booming, good-humored voice, “I was out there last night, you know what I mean? And there was this old fellow, and damn if he didn’t want to rip it off right there in the field . . . goddamn horny old bugger. And I’d rather be dingled than dangled, if you know what I mean, so I told him to lay to it . . . But shit, he got his pants off and damned if he didn’t have a dork hanging most of the way down to his goddamned socks . . . Goddamn biggest hunk of meat I ever saw short of a butcher shop, you know? Jesus, boys, I tell you, what a goddamn wong he had! And still like a noodle, right? And I thought to myself, now Viv, if that tool ever stands up, it’s going to look like the whole frigging Washington Monument . . . I mean his hammer was hanging down so far he could have skipped rope with it. You’d never know looking at him, he was such a dried-up little fart of a man. But he was a damn good banger all right. Well, boys, what I want to know is: ARE YOU GETTING ANY?”

Revington was staring blankly at her; Cohen was laughing, convulsed in the corner. I gave her the answer I’d always given my father. “We’re getting our share.”

“Shit, that’s good to hear . . . Now, boys, let me tell you . . . looking at me, you’d never know I studied that goddamn Latin at good old Saint Mary’s on the hill, would you? Carpe diem and all that other horseshit, right, boys? And it’s always come in real useful, just the way the nuns said it would. Never know when you might need a few words of that old Latin, stand you in good stead every time. Yep,” she said, laughing, “it’s all horseshit. You know that, don’t you, boys? Every bit of it. From one end to the other, top to bottom. Horseshit . . . Don’t suppose you could pick up something more to warm old Viv’s tummy, do you, boys? It’s a frigging cold night out there, and I’m here to tell you. Freeze your noogies right off you faster than you could say ora pro nobis.”

• • •

WHEN WE got back to my apartment, I heard the phone ringing inside as I was unlocking the door. By the time I rushed in and answered it, the line had gone dead. It didn’t feel right to me. I stood in the middle of the room, my coat still on, drunk and caught by an ominous buzzing inside my head. “Who the hell could have been calling at damn near four in the morning?” I said.

“Three forty-seven,” Cohen said.

“Goddamned foresighted son-of-a-bitch that I am,” Revington was saying, “guess what I managed to hide from us? Come on, Dupre, what’s the word?”

“Thunderbird?”

“Right you are.” He pulled the bottle out of his knapsack, passed it to me.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Why do they always pick us?” Revington said. We’d been laughing about Viv. We’d bought her half a dozen cups of whiskey-laced coffee while she’d told us endless stories, each one more obscene than the last. “Can they see us coming a mile off? Do we have signs around our necks saying: easy mark?”

“Well, she cheered us up,” I said.

“She did that.”

“Oh,” Cohen said, “but couldn’t you see the glory shining around her like a halo?”

“Jesus,” Revington said, “you’re not merely crazy. You’re crazy as a fucking coot.”

The phone began to ring again. I jumped to get it. It was my mother. When I hung up, I saw both of them looking at me. I didn’t want to see it: the waiting. “My father had a stroke,” I told them.

Revington fell onto a kitchen chair as though he’d been punctured. “John,” he said, “I’m terribly sorry.”

I passed him the bottle. I didn’t want to be where I was, drunk and confused, time mixed up and folded in on itself. I couldn’t take it in. Cohen was asking me quietly, “How is he?”

“They don’t know yet. I have to go back tomorrow.”

“This certainly puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?” Revington said. “Shit.”

I sank to the floor, asked Cohen to make coffee. Revington and I stared at each other. “Do you get along with him?” he asked me.

“He’s been around since I was four. We’ve got used to each other.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah.”

I didn’t want to talk about me and my father. I felt a cold edge of panic in my chest—and something in my mind that resembled a prayer: please let him be all right. “Do you get along with your old man?” I asked Revington.

“Not particularly. Shit, when I was in high school,” he said, “I hated his fucking guts, but now . . . Jesus, sometimes I wish he’d just tell me to get lost. But no, here I am driving the car he bought me. And I’ve got his fucking money in my wallet. And he’s so goddamn understanding . . . Well, maybe he’s trying to make up for lost time, I don’t know. But all he says is, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll find out what you want to do.’ Christ, what kind of a father is that? If I had me for a son, I’d fucking disown me.”

Cohen set the percolator on the flame and then sat down between us. “Do you get along with your old man?” I asked him.

“He’s funny,” he said, smiling. “He’s beautiful.”

“Your father told me to take you out and get you laid,” Revington said. “Did you know that?”

Cohen laughed. “Yeah, he’d say something like that,” and then in his father’s accent: “OK, Bill, so you don’t want to go to the Temple. I can understand that. There’s nobody over there but a bunch of Jews. Not one Chinaman would you find in the whole place. Of course you might meet a nice Jewish girl over there, who could tell? You never know who might turn up. Maybe that little Cindy Stein might be there, who could tell? Like a flower opening, that girl, and bright too . . . Not Chinese of course . . . But don’t get me wrong, it’s your mishigas.”

I needed to laugh, and I did. We sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. I don’t know what I thought it was going to do for me. “I’m terribly sorry,” Revington said again. “Christ, I get so fucking sick of myself. And then something happens like this . . . If there’s anything I can do, John.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He stood and walked to the window, spoke with his back to us. “I just wish the hell I could be of some use to somebody.”

• • •

IN THE morning, Revington drove Cohen and me out of town. We’d slept only a couple hours, had risen just before dawn, Cohen waking us by singing in the dark, in that wholly tuneless voice of his: “Wake up, wake up, the dawn is breaking.” I’d showered, turning the water colder and colder, until I’d been braced against it and shivering, teeth chattering: antidote to hangover and lack of sleep. Then I’d cooked pancakes and sausages. We’d been on the road just as the horizon had begun to lighten in the east to a dirty stripe of grey. I’d asked Cohen to come to Raysburg with me, but he’d said that his parents would worry about him if they knew he wasn’t at Harvard, and he didn’t want to lie to them, even indirectly, by passing through town and not calling them.

Revington pulled over at the junction. To the left, the road ran north to Little Washington and then on to Raysburg; to the right, it ran east to Maryland and then, in a way that was mysterious to me—but not, I hoped, to Cohen—northeast through Pennsylvania and on to New York and Boston. “When will we three meet again?” Cohen said.

Revington laughed. “I knew you were going to say that.” He shut off the engine. We climbed out of the car. It was country, fields on all sides, beginning to show dun-stubble and beige in the spreading grey morning. There was no traffic yet, not much sound but that of an improbable winter bird singing. Our breath steamed. Revington lit a cigarette, looked toward the west where the sky was still black. A scattering of snowflakes had begun to drift down on us.

“Hope the snow doesn’t get bad,” he said, his voice somber.

“Sure you don’t want to keep on going?” I asked him. “You’ve got your choice of two significant destinations.”

“Shit, not back to Raysburg . . . but Boston . . .” He scowled. “Christ, I’m tempted. But no, I’m finally getting my horns knocked off. Can’t pass it up.”

“All right, ace,” I said, “don’t burn down my apartment.”

He snapped his cigarette away. “Let’s not make this into a big production.”

Cohen hugged him. “It’ll be soon, William.”

I took Revington’s hand; our eyes met. He was so tall that I had to look up. “The hero sustains himself,” I said. He smiled. We stepped into a brief embrace—the first and last that I remember with him. To the touch he was amazingly thin.

“You fucker,” he said.

He climbed into his car, started the engine, made a squealing U-turn, leaned out the window to say, “Hey, Dupre, plank Cassy Markapolous for me.”

Cohen and I watched until we saw the last of the red taillights swinging around and vanishing at a curve in the road. “It’s funny how sad I feel,” I said. “We’ll all be together again at Christmas.”

“But it could always be the last time,” Cohen said, “and we always know it.” His face, with its slight smile, was as composed and beautiful as a cat’s. “Would we want it any other way? Anything but the simply human? It wouldn’t be anywhere near as beautiful.”

We squeezed each other. I thought he’d crack my ribs. “I love you, John.”

Back in those days boys did not say things like that to each other, and, for a moment, I was too startled to reply. Then I said the only possible thing I could, the truth: “I love you too.”

He walked away to the road branching to the right, set his sign up in front of his knapsack: NEW YORK. I remained where I was, set up my sign: RAYSBURG. We were both stamping our feet against the cold. “Write when you get back,” I yelled at him. “Send me a card. I worry about you.” His laugh rang clearly through the morning air.

Cohen got the first ride.