— Why are you afraid of fires. I’ve seen you do this before.
— The hell you have. You know too much. Anybody’d think you spent your time shadowing me. Good God, Bill, a fire in a steamheated apartment is an affectation anyway. But to go back to the key—
— Yes, the key. You’ve been stalling long enough.
— Oh, go crawl up a gum tree. The key — yes, the key. Let me see. Just how did it happen. I can’t seem to remember. Oh, yes, oh, yes. Now I remember. You see, I was a little tight, just a little vague, you know, and I got out of the elevator at the wrong floor. The floor above. And they all look just alike. And so I went to the door of Tom’s flat and opened it and walked in: and what do you think. It wasn’t Tom’s flat at all. No. It was a different one, or else everything in it had been changed. Very puzzling. I stood there and stared at it, there was a picture of a clipper ship right opposite the door, where it had never been before, and a banjo clock beside it and an umbrella stand with a red umbrella in it. You can imagine my surprise. I stood and goggled at them. Funny — I thought — what the hell has Tom been doing. Then I walked into the sitting room, and the piano was gone, everything else was changed, and where the table ought to be was a terrible green plush sofa, under the window, and on the green plush sofa was Ann. And I stood there with the key in my hand — you see, the key had fitted the lock — and stared at Ann, and Ann stared at me. You can imagine my surprise. And Ann said, “Well, who let you in.” And I said, “My little key let me in. Isn’t it funny? What floor is this, anyway?” And Ann said, the sixth, and began to laugh at me. So I laughed too, just to be agreeable, and we laughed together, and then she said that as I was already in, I might as well stay, so I stayed. In no time at all we were talking about God and life and death and love and marriage and babies and birth control and the morals of the new generation and the difference between the East and the West and the difference between the sexes and whether pure friendship is possible between them and what a young girl should do in a big city if she’s a stranger there and what drinks we liked and whether it was better to marry or not and at what age and if one didn’t marry whether one should remain a virgin (you see, she meant herself) and if you didn’t remain a virgin whether you should tell your husband when you did marry. Just like that. Bang, bang, bang. Everything opened with a zipper. We had some drinks, and then we made some coffee, and she played the phonograph, a lot of jazz, and we had some more drinks, and we told the stories of our lives, every damned detail, and she cried and said she was terribly lonely in Cambridge, where she didn’t know a soul, and she was bored with the art school and hated everybody there, they were all so cold and superior and so unlike the Westerners and she couldn’t make friends of them. It was terribly sad, terribly. You have no idea. I was overcome. I told her I would give her a good time, take her to dances, dinners, shows, prize fights, introduce her to lots of people, and she cried some more and kissed me very, very nicely. About three o’clock, when I suggested that we go to bed, why not, she looked archly at me and said, “Be yourself!” That was her favorite remark: be yourself. She must have learned it from Socrates. So we talked some more, and kissed some more. Now and then she would draw back very coyly and bat her long golden eyelashes at me and tidy her beyootiful curls and say, “Too much kissing spoils a friendship!” Isn’t that wonderful? By gosh, Bill, isn’t it wonderful? Too much kissing spoils a friendship. A whole new philosophy of life, presumably from the Middle West. What a light it sheds. What a light. I gather that in the Middle West, where the heart beats warmer and there aren’t all these God-damned Eastern superiorities and conventions, everybody kisses everybody. I could hear Ann saying it to countless men, old and young, in back seats, at movies, at dances, in canoes, on beaches, at Sunday-school picnics and bean suppers and burgoos and corn-huskings — No, too much kissing spoils a friendship. Be yourself!.. I learned a lot.
— Well, and what was the upshot.
— The voice of the scoptophile. Aren’t you ashamed? You want to know whether I slept with her.
— Of course I do! Don’t be an idiot.
— Well, I did. Innocently.
— Says you?
— Says me. At five o’clock we went to bed, worn out, and slept side by side with our clothes on, like babes in the wood. Pretty as a picture. When I came to, I didn’t know where the hell I was. There was Ann’s little white face, close beside me, one hand under her cheek, with the damp golden curls beside the temple, and her little poached knees drawn up and protruding charmingly from under her dress. The most innocent-looking thing you ever saw in your life. Yes.… But why did I start to tell you this.
— I believe it was supposed to be significant of changing morals.
— Oh, was it? Well, I guess it is.
— Have you seen her since?
— Oh, sure, several times. I like her. She’s a nice kid. Lots of fun. Absolutely direct and honest — no hesitations or ridiculous modesties — if she decided to make an affair of it — which she hasn’t yet done — she’d say so. Very generous, very simple. Absolutely lost here. Why don’t you go and see her. She’d do you good. She has a nice skin, too. When you put your hand under her dress, she smiles and says, “Why, no! That’s my naked skin!” and giggles, and waits for you to take the hand away, which you do.… Was that a pistol shot?
— Backfire.
— Backfire. In this street once, I ran up behind a taxi and put my chin over the back of it, it was an open one, and screamed. The two old ladies in it nearly died. It was after my initiation — Good God.
— What.
— How can you bear to sit there, Bill, and watch my entrails being wound out of me on a winch.
— Oh, it’s lots of fun.
— It would be. Damn all you intellectuals anyway, you cold fellows who — who—
— Who what.
— Live in your brains. I’m sick of it. I want to die.
— Need for punishment.
— Oh, sure. Nirvana principle and everything. I’m all for it. Step up, ladies and gents—
— Why not try a different formula, in dramatizing yourself, for a change.
— Are you trying to be nasty?
— I am nasty.
— So you are. And may you fry in hell for it. A lot of help you are! Why don’t you go to bed.
— I’m seriously thinking of it. You seem to have come to a kind of stop. Unless you really want to get down to something—
— Of course I do, dammit! I’m trying to. I want to. I stand here, perfectly still, don’t I, except that I rock a little — I stand here before you perfectly still — but inside I’m rushing from one end of the world to the other. Speed. I’m everywhere at once. There and back. Torrents of things rushing with me. All the dead men. All the living women. What stopping place is there — where can I rest for a moment and pick up one bright single detail and begin? I’m afraid, precisely because I can’t stop, because there’s no one thing that I want to hold on to more than anything else. Can I hold on to you? No. The truth is, there’s not a damned thing or person or idea in the world you can trust, not one. You’re alone. You run about falling in love with people, with things, with flowers, with surfaces, with weather, with ids and quods and quids, and what the blazes do you get in return? Nothing: or only a fleeting reflection of your own putrid little face flung back at you crookedly from a broken mirror. Isn’t that it? Have I lost my self-love? Has it been devoured by the totem-animal? I think I’ll be a pansexualist, and become a child again.