PAUL The last time I saw Mitchell before school started was in September. As usual, we were laying on my bed and it was early, perhaps twelve. I reached over him and lit a cigarette. The people next door were fighting. There was too much traffic on Jane Street, it was either that or something else that was making Mitchell so tense, clutching his wine glass. So much attention paid, so much detail studied, worked over so hard that he loses it all. What was I doing there, I kept wondering. My father worked with his father in Chicago and though their relationship depended more on what was happening over on Wall Street and what table the other could command at Le Français or The Ritz-Carlton, it still gave us the opportunity to meet each other. In New York we would meet at the apartment I lived in last summer. We could never meet at his place because of “roommate trouble,” he would gravely tell me. We would meet usually at night, usually after a movie or some bad off-off-off-Broadway play one of Mitchell’s endless supply of N.Y.U. Drama friends landed a part in, usually drunk or high, which seemed Mitchell’s constant state those last months, when I was breaking it off with someone else. Mitchell knew and didn’t care. Usually wild bouts of sex, clothed, early drink at Boy Bar, don’t ask.