Outside the door I paused; my hands were trembling.
I took her to the Esmerelda, thinking to impress her, but she paid no heed whatever to the mournful rococo splendours of the place, the red plush walls and sparkling crystal, the napkins of rich damask, the heavy antique cutlery. She hardly ate, only stabbed with her fork at the food on her plate without looking at it, pushing it this way and that. She had changed into a dull-coloured dress without sleeves that gave her, disconcertingly, the stark look of a recent and very young widow. She sat before me, straight-backed, her tall, narrow neck extended in a birdlike, swanlike, fashion, and although we were level eye to eye I had the curious feeling that she was somehow set above me, looking down. She had done something to her hair, had tied it back, or perhaps had just brushed it in some different way, exposing her broad, flat cheeks and the too-large flanges of her ears; the effect, I am not sure how, was of a not quite concentrated state of desperation. I had no appetite, but a great thirst, as always. I drank first a bottle of red wine thick as blood and afterwards repeated jolts of grappa, each one driven home with a thimbleful of tarry coffee that made my nerve-ends twitch and fizz. She sipped a glass of water. The smoke of my many cigarettes formed a rank cocoon around us and set her coughing. We were seated at a window looking on to a narrow, deserted street, with a crumbling church opposite. So many times in my long and infamous career have I sat like this across from some girl in a restaurant, cigaretted, sinisterly smiling, an arm negligently thrown over the back of my chair, holding myself up before her awed and admiring gaze like a gobletful of the rarest fine old vintage. Now here I was, doing it again, even in my senescence. I was telling her about the first winter when I lived in New York, sequestered in that basement room on Perry Street where in the summer I had feared I would die of the heat and now thought I would never be warm again. Magda showed me how to roll up newspapers to make fuel for the stove. I was working all day and half the night, no let-up, giddy with excitement and fatigue. "I knew what the thing would be called before I had put down a word," I said. "The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. I could already see the dust jacket, with the title in big bold lettering above my name in more modest twenty-four point." I chuckled, and drank my grappa, and felt with masochistic satisfaction the sulphurous, oily liquor lifting another layer of membrane from my tongue; surprising, the semblance of assuagement such tiny pains, willingly suffered, can bring to one's sense of self-loathing… Ah, but how cold it was in that room. I would sit wrapped in a blanket with only my face and my writing hand free, my brain buzzing from the barbiturates I ate by the hour. The wind coming in from the river keened in the window frame and tiny balls of soot rolled across the page where I was writing. I had tried to work in the public library, for the warmth, but had been driven out by the presence around me of so many other mendicants who were too much like myself, haggard and sighing, picking their noses and surreptitiously eating sandwiches out of brown-paper bags. Then the thing was published, and at once, as in a fairy-tale, like Cinderella in her pumpkin carriage, I arrived. "Such things were possible," I said, "in those days. One book could do it. Of course, everyone read it" – I waved a hand lazily – "and everyone thought I was speaking directly to him. Or her." I caught her eye and smiled disparagingly. Do you know those smiles, that make the flesh of your face seem to crackle like cellophane from the effort?
She watched me, motionless, her knife and fork suspended; her suddenly going still like this brought a small shock to the air between us, as when the refrigerator, that has been throbbing to itself unnoticed, all at once falls silent, with a lurch. "You convinced them," she said. I shrugged. "It was the times," I said. "Identity was the general obsession, then; identity, and authenticity, all that; the existential predicament, ha ha." Yes, yes, I convinced them. Most of them. Shiftiness: which one of them was it said that moral shiftiness was the most striking characteristic of every line that I wrote? I did not know the word, and had to look it up. "After that everything changed," I said.Yes, everything. Magda and I left that freezing basement and moved to an apartment in a big old town-house up in the West Seventies, a rackety place where mysterious smart people lived, theatre types, and studiedly mournful girls who wrote poetry, and a famous black trumpet player. Success was large and loud and ludicrous. Such euphoria! And the parties, the endless string of parties, where I rubbed shoulders with living legends, all those Edmunds and Lionels and Marys, and was rubbed up against in return. In their brilliant and never quite sober company I learned a new language, one of nuance and nod, of the ambiguous smile, the insider's wink. The comrades, of course, whom I saw now as so unpolished, so gauche – bon mot! – I quickly put behind me. I imagined them, the jeaned and crew-cutted young militants and their attendant, solemn handmaidens in their plaid skirts and white ankle-socks, standing in a huddle on the empty sidewalk, bereft and sullen, blinking in the dust from my departing heels.
Cass Cleave put down her knife and looked at me. I shrugged again, smiling my most candid, my most winning smile. "My dear," I said, "I have turned my coat so often it has grown threadbare."
It was only then that I realized how angry I was, how angry I had been all along, ever since I had opened her letter, and before that, long before that, in the expectation of it, for I had always known it would come, from someone, sooner or later. Cass Cleave had turned her face aside now and was looking out at the street. How much did she know? Beadily I studied her. Yes, I recognized the type: driven, clever, cunning and helpless, prey to secret hungers, nameless distresses, looking for rescue in all the wrong directions. Her nails were gnawed past the quick. I shut my eyes for a moment. Could it really be that the intricate exploit that was my life, this hard-won triumph of risk and daring and mendacity, would at the end be brought to nothing by the yearnings for attention of a half-demented girl? The afternoon sunlight had angled itself down past the high roofs into the street, and something from outside kept flashing through the window into my eyes, some reflection from glass or metal. I was well on the way to being drunk. Without thinking to do it I reached out and took one of Cass Cleave's hands in both of mine and smiled my compelling smile again, showing my teeth. What a spectacle we must have been for the other lunchers in the place, the rank old roué pawing this pale girl and grinning like a horse. "Come with me," I said, gallant and jocular, "I want to show you the place where an old friend used to live." She was looking at her hand resting in mine, her head tilted to one side, with an expression of puzzlement, as if no one had ever held her hand before. I brushed my fingertips along her palm; it was warm and unexpectedly hard. When she lowered her eyes the lids, mauve-tinted, slightly glossy, were so rounded and taut they seemed almost transparent.
I looked about and the waiter came, a spry cadaver nearly as old as myself, bringing the bill, his moist fish-eye not quite looking at the girl's hand and mine where they lay together on the wine-stained tablecloth amid the empty coffee cups and the greasy glasses and the bristling ashtray. Cass Cleave had turned aside again to gaze at nothing, expressionless now. What was she thinking, what could she be thinking? Her hard hand, bird-warm, beat softly in mine, as if it contained a tiny heart of its own. Its serious weight was a sudden, shocking reminder of how much of my life was gone. I was wearing out, I, and my world as well. A wave of bitterness and anger washed over me, taking my breath away. So many of the tilings were blunted now that in my youth would have pierced me like… like what? I did not know, I had lost the thread of the thought. I let go of the girl's hand and stood up quickly, knocking over my chair, and this time she did reach out to help me, and it was as well she did, for otherwise I am sure I would have fallen down. I leaned on her arm, swearing, and beat at my dead leg furiously with my fist. The ancient waiter shuffled forward to assist me, clucking as at a misbehaving child. I shoved past him and staggered to the door. Outside, in the sun, I walked a few steps and had to halt and lean with my back against a wall. I looked up at the sky; it seemed to be throbbing, slowly, hugely. I felt dizzy, and had again that sense of displacement, of shifting and separation, that I had experienced the previous day before the mirror in the hotel bathroom, but more strongly now. I wondered without alarm if I were undergoing a heart attack, or suffering a stroke. Cass Cleave was trying to take my arm again. "It's nothing!" I cried. I vented gas from my rear end without restraint, not caring if she heard, or smelt. I was laughing, laughing and coughing, in a euphoria of drunkenness and dizziness and rage. There sleeps in me another self who at moments such as this will start awake in amazement at all that is happening, all this life, the unlikeliness of it. The girl stood before me, frowning on my disarray. I swore at her. Another flash of light struck my eyes – was it coming from inside the doorway of that church? Ave, Deus caecans! I fumbled and let fall my walking stick, it made a rattling as of bones. She crouched to pick it up and I would have kicked her had I not been afraid that if I did so I would lose my balance and fall headlong on the pavement. My heart was clenching like a fist. I snatched the stick from her hand and turned and poled myself off along the pavement, cursing.