The Nation and New Leader, which don’t pay much but they bring in something, she private-tutors a couple of times a month, which pays very well, and her fellowship money is pretty good. “Is it Andrew Mellon the fellowship’s named after, or Paul?” and she said “Who’s Paul Mellon?” “Maybe it’s ‘Walter’ I’m thinking of — the financier-philanthropist who helped found the National Gallery of Art in D.C. and gave it some of its most priceless art.” “Andrew,” and he said “Anyway, very impressive.” “Not if you know I had a well-connected faculty advisor who backed me unstintingly. Without him it’s unlikely I would have got a Mellon,” and he said “I’m sure that’s not true.” Like him, she likes to doodle on the phone. “What do you like to doodle most?” and she said “Nothing specifically. Whatever comes out of the pencil or pen. Doodles are like dreams to me: I only see what I’ve doodled, and start interpreting it, after I hang up. And you? What do you doodle?” and he said “Cubes upon cubes. Pedestals upon pedestals with a Giacometti-like figure on top. And self-portraits, with eyeglasses, less hair than I have, so I’m partly doodling my father, and always in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a pen in the shirt pocket, and a tie, though if I wear my one tie twice a year, it’s a lot.” He said “Hanukkah’s coming up, has passed, or we’re in the beginning, middle or end of it. Do you light candles for it? Obviously, I don’t,” and she said “My father always tells me when the first night is and gives me a box of menorah candies every year and sometimes a new menorah. It’s not that he thinks I don’t have one. It’s because he knows how hard it is scraping off the wax from previous years. If what’s holding you back from lighting candles is not having a menorah, you can have one of mine. They’re piling up and I might be breaking some Jewish law if I throw them out. But to answer your question, I light candles two or three nights out of the eight and usually dispense with reciting the candle-lighting prayer off the box and I never leave the apartment when they’re lit. The candles are so thin and unsturdy and often broken in the middle, that I’m afraid they’ll fall.” She said “What are you working on these days?” and he said “Didn’t I tell you? Just another story. You? Besides school work — scholarly paper or poetry or maybe a book review?” “My ex-husband also writes poetry,” she said. “He gets his in literary journals and last year he had a chapbook published by a small press, or maybe I told you. He’s much more aggressive than I in sending it out and competitive about writing it. He once called my poems sentimental shit, when they weren’t. He could get vicious when it came to poetry. He thought that’s what made his work strong.” “‘Desultory,’” she said. “I forget what it means,” and he told her. “Then I never knew what it meant. Or just assumed it was something else—‘lazy,’ for instance,” and he said “I should have said ‘random.’ So pretentious of me,” and she said “Not really. I like words like that. Not to use but to know them. Excuse me; I didn’t mean you. And you can be my one-new-word-a-day man. I’ll call you up at a designated time each day and you can give it. ‘The word for Tuesday is…’” and she laughed. She said “After you finish your beer — I don’t mean to rush you, but it must be fairly flat by now; it’s long stopped bubbling. But we should think about dinner.” He said “You don’t smoke, do you? Oh, I asked you that, and I remember you didn’t particularly agree with my reasons for not liking women who smoked, no matter how great they were in every other way,” and she said “No, I didn’t mind.” They both had something to do with Hubert H. Humphrey. She, when she was a guide in a USIA exhibit in Lyon and he was vice president and stopped at her booth and they chatted awhile; he, when he was a reporter in Washington and Humphrey was a senator and he used to call him off the Senate floor to interview him for the two biggest radio stations in Minnesota. Talking about Maine again, he said three of the things she seemed to like most about it, other than the scenery and cooler and drier air, he unfortunately doesn’t care for much: blueberries; sailing, because he gets seasick easily; and lobster, because he’s a vegetarian and he hates the brutal way they’re cooked. She said “The last two I can understand, but how can you not like blueberries?” and he said “Because I’ve heard the sprayed ones never quite get rid of their spray and unsprayed ones have little dead worms in them because they’re not sprayed.” “Nonsense,” she said. “I mostly eat the organic ones and I’ve never seen a worm. If I did, the one in a thousand blueberries, I’d just spit it out.” “Well,” he said, “I’m willing to give them a try.” Her ex-husband, who also went to City College, graduated ten years after him. “It would have been eleven,” he said, “but because I went to night school half the time — I worked full-time during the day — it took me five years instead of four.” He asked “Do you sing? I say that because you have such a beautiful speaking voice,” and she said “That’s nice of you to say, but I have a perfectly terrible singing voice. When I do sing, it’s only in a large group, such as Christmas caroling around Columbia, so my voice doesn’t stand out. I do play unaccompanied pieces on the piano and take lessons from a world-class pianist. She says I’m not bad for a nonprofessional. She’s Austrian, lives here permanently now, and should have won the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. But that year the Soviet authorities, to improve cultural relations between our two countries, or something, decided an American should get it.” “Who was it?” and she told him and said “Oh, yeah, of course. And your teacher?” and she told him and he said “I have two of her Schubert recordings.” She asked which ones and then said “What a coincidence; I have the same two. I bet we have lots of the same things like that, especially books. That’s the way it was with my ex-husband when he was still my boyfriend and moved into my apartment. We must have had fifty of the same books, and he wasn’t a French scholar and didn’t even like French fiction and poetry of any era. Theory was okay.” “Who could not like Camus?” and she said “There are essays of his I don’t particularly admire,” and he said “It’s been a long time since I read any of them, but I think I recall feeling the same way. As for books, I don’t have many. I either get them out of the library or give away or leave on the street most of the ones I buy. I have this thing about keeping my possessions to a minimum. Two plates, two forks, maybe three glasses, one change of linen. A bit nutty, huh? And I never reread. The only book — no, I’ve reread Kafka and the stories of Hemingway and Joyce and the Beckett biography, so I’ll forget what I was going to say.” “What book was it, though?” and he said “