Pravda or Izvestia and his wife — I wish they’d shot this guy. And you really could have been shot by either of the secret services for running up on them — you knew that, didn’t you?” “I knew but didn’t think. My boss was hot on my getting beats and I guess I liked the little notoreity that went with it. But listen, Mickey, and excuse me,” to his wife, “but I found the film so moving I still really can’t speak. I’m going to sit another minute.” “Sure, the movie? — I can understand,” and said they’d wait for him in the lobby for coffee if he was only going to be a few minutes, and he got up in a minute when the movie started but they weren’t there. Takes the woman he’s engaged to to the film a few months later. Doesn’t say what it did to him, just that it was a movie he remembers liking very much, thinks she’ll enjoy it and he wouldn’t mind seeing it again. At the end he’s sobbing so hard his shirt’s wet from where the tears dropped and she says “What are you crying like that for? It was sad but not that sad and it certainly wasn’t that convincing or great a film. Fact is, it was kind of schmalzty, if I can use that ugly word, and which hasn’t almost applied to any movie I’ve seen in years till this. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to belittle honest and open emotion, and I think it’s wonderful the way you let it flow so freely, but that overgrown boy and girl with those half-witted innocent expressions and twinklings of what we know will never be consummated love? And the mother — holy Horace, get me a double vodka straight.” “It just affected me, what can I tell you — maybe the music most of all.” “Leave it to the Russians: mother patriotism with no faults.” Calls his mother up every year on his sister’s birthday, never says why he’s calling, just “Hello, how are vou, what’ve you been doing?” and she always says “Fine, I guess; you know me: not doing much. Today’s Vera’s birthday, but you probably knew that,” and he says “I was thinking of it today too,” and she usually says “What age would she have been?” and he gives the age and she usually says “It’s hard to believe she would have been that old — she was twenty-six but so small and such a child,” and by then he’s feeling like crying and she usually starts in too till she tells him she can’t speak anymore and she’ll call him back later tonight if she can remember by the time it’s not too late, or tomorrow, does he mind? and he says no, not at all and puts the receiver down and sobs where he’s sitting till he can’t anymore. Sobs when he comes over to her apartment and says he might have the same thing Vera had, or at least the doctors think so. First tells her to sit, they drink coffee, she says “Like me to toast you a bagel? — I just took them out of the freezer,” and he says no, she says “What’s on your mind, you look so worried,” he says he has some bad news, she says “You and Dora breaking up again?” and he says “No, everything’s fine between us, or as good as it’s going to get, which ain’t hot and not the way I want it but that’s OK, we still have something and lots of good moments and I love her little girl and maybe it’ll get better, anyway she’s been wonderful about this,” and she says “What?” and he says “I think — the doctors think — I’ve seen two surgeons already about it, one of them Dora’s father-in-law — she still has a nice relationship with him even if she’s divorcing Lewis — anyway — she insisted I go to him when she saw the lump on my leg that wouldn’t go away — they think I could have the same thing Vera did, a neurofibroma, though in all probability — at least it’s as good a chance — it’s a synovial cyst—” “A Baker’s cyst?” she says. “Yes, and they’re going to operate — he is — as soon as — not Dora’s father-in-law but the other surgeon — he sent me to him, a neurosurgeon specializing in limbs — Dr. Michaels isn’t; he’s strictly brains — but as soon as this Dr. Vinskint gets a bed for me in the hospital he’s associated with, which is Memorial, I’m afraid, Vera’s old place,” and that’s when he starts sobbing, not for himself he later tells her and believes, but for Vera, “the poor kid, because what she went through, nobody should. Me, I’ll be all right, and I’ve lived past forty so, you know, I’ve at least had a shot at things. Though Vinskint did say — and don’t get worried; chances of it are slight — that if it’s what he hopes and generally thinks it isn’t and it’s really spread and is malignant, which it was with Vera but in most people it’s benign, he might have to take off the leg below the knee, which is where the cyst or fibroma is, behind it, though not then and there. He’d want me to wake up and think about it a while but I’d have to make my decision soon.” Vinskint wakes him during the operation and says “The biopsy report was just wired down from that window up there — you can’t see it — and the pathologist said it’s the cyst, which is what I thought and hoped it was, but we had to make sure, and I’m taking the rest of it out as long as I’ve got you opened up. You should feel very fortunate and relieved, Mr. Tetch, which I’m sure you are,” and he says “Thank you, I do, I am,” and they put him out. After, people say — a doctor cousin especially who berates him for not coming to him for a third opinion—“I could have told you over the phone what it was by your description of it and it could have been drained with a needle in any doctor’s office for two hundred bucks”—that he should complain to the hospital and its medical board and some even say he should sue the doctors for malpractice — the one who first diagnosed it and referred him and the one who operated on him — but he doesn’t like to sue and hates getting involved with lawyers and it’s Dora’s father-in-law and Gretchen’s grandpapa and he doesn’t want to hurt their relationship with the man and his own with them. Is dropped by a number of women over a period of about three years after Dora. Some in a week or two, some in a few months, and it hurts a little sometimes but no stronger reaction than that. But with the one months before he meets his future wife — the last woman he slept with regularly before her — he sobs when she tells him it isn’t working out between them anymore and she’s calling it quits. She asked him to meet her at a bar near her job after she gets off from work and he starts sobbing in one of the front booths. She looks around, seems alarmed, tells him to stop, please, this is a place she comes to almost every day for lunch or a beer and it’s a good place to read and draw — the lighting and they don’t bother her after they clear away her plate or glass — and now they might think she’s afraid to think what, and what’s all his blubbering for anyway? They never were that close. It was an affair of convenience — affair’s even too weighty a word for what they had. He was coming from someone, she from someone else, they both had been given the ole heave-ho so felt good meeting up with someone nice so soon and someone who didn’t give them each a hard time and want to spend all his hours with her or she with him, like the last one with her did before he kicked her out, and they had some fun, were companions, helpmates, bedmates, had similar interests — of course still do — and were even helpful in other ways like when she took care of his mail for two weeks when he was away and he helping her move into her new apartment and also helping her paint it with her — but now she feels it’s gone about as far as it could or should, that it’s sort of reached a point where it has to develop or just stop — he’s still sobbing — and since it never can go any further — they both know that — and please stop crying, stop it, people are looking, it’s too damn embarrassing and uncalled-for and unfair, because he couldn’t have felt anything more for her up till now than a slight attachment, and look at their ages, he’s almost twice hers and should want someone closer to his own, at the most ten years younger, just as she does with a man but the opposite way around, so please, cut the blubbering or will he at least just spit what it is out? and he says he was thinking he’d like to marry her and have a baby, so maybe that’s why he’s so sad and disappointed — says this when he knows it’s out of desperation and a lie and he wouldn’t know what to say or do if she said yes or give her time to think about it — but she says what? he crazy? Where’s that come from? This some sick stupid joke on his part? It’s a lie, she knows it, blubbering didn’t work so now he’s offering-suggesting — bullshitting to her about marriage and kiddies just to get her back for a week, maybe even just to fuck tonight, and let’s face it, before he drops her dead flat because he’d be so frightened and perplexed if she ever said yes. For how can he think marriage and babies? How can he? — tell her, tell her. He says nothing, just looks at the table, and she says sure one day she’ll want a baby, but when she’s ready, which she’s not and won’t be for years — five, six-she has her education to finish, her art to develop and think about, some other experiences including other men to go through — just as sure one day she’ll want a young husband as her children’s or child’s father — but also when she’s ready, which she of course right now isn’t. And why a much younger husband than he when she is ready? She’ll tell him. He unloaded that bomb about marriage and babies on her, she’ll unload this on him. Because of the personal energy-level thing, for one reason. Between him and someone much younger. And because she wants someone with the same or close-to-it cultural attitudes or values and interests rather than differences and different frames of reference or frame of references or frames of references or whatever the hell he called them — what he liked to talk about a lot, she should say: culture, morals, values. And just someone to look at who’s younger and less line-ier in the face and who’s hairier in the head and less on the body and not so gray there and firmer, solider, more athletic, less serious, less done in by life, less seen-it-all in life, just less a lot, she’ll say, plus more juvenile in humor and spirits even. So anyhow, don’t tell her it’s the marriage-baby thing why he said he blubbered, because it’s not, they both know it, so come up with something better or nothing, for all she cares now, and he says, wiping his face, maybe it’s because so many women — he thinks this is it, because he’d like to get at it himself — women young and older but none younger than she even when it first started, have dumped him in the last few years that it secretly took its toll and culminated in that dumb what she called blubbering before. But OK, no marriage, forget babies, though he does eventually want to have them before he gets too old and weak to pick them up and carry them — maybe that’