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By Root 22805 0

’m afraid, craven thing then. Having risen fully upright, I was on the absolute verge (I could feel the impulse in me like a powerful vibration) of leaning forward and grasping Nathan by the collar, pulling him to his feet for an eye-to-eye confrontation, as Bogart had done so many times in Bogart’s and my entwined past. I could not suffer what Nathan was doing to her a second more. But having risen, having been galvanized by the impulse, I was with mysterious speed transformed into a triumphant paradigm of chickenshit. I felt a quaking in the knees, my parched mouth gave forth a string of senseless vocables, and then I found myself lurching toward the men’s room, blessed sanctuary from a spectacle of hatred and cruelty such as I had never conceived I would witness firsthand. I’ll only be here for a minute, I thought, leaning over the urinal. I’ve got to collect my senses before I go out and deal with Nathan. In a somnambulist’s stupor I clutched at the handle of the urinal’s valve, an icy dagger in my palm, pumping over and over again sluggish jets of water while the faggot graffiti—Marvin sucks!... Call ULster 1-2316 for dream blowjob—registered for the hundredth time in my brain like demented cuneiform. Since my mother’s death I had not wept, and I knew I would not now, even though the pining lovelorn scrawls against the tiles, blurring into smudge, signaled that I might now come close to weeping. I spent perhaps three or four minutes in this chilly, miserable, indecisive stance. Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being. But when I threw open the door again, I saw that Sophie and Nathan were gone.

I was groggy with worry and despair. Nor did I have any idea how to deal with the situation as it now stood, with its overtone of irreconcilable strife. Obviously I had to ponder what to do, had to figure out how to try to set things straight—somehow calm Nathan down and in the process remove Sophie from the target area of his blind and baleful rage—but I was so completely rattled that my brain had become almost amnesic; I was virtually unable to think. In order to collect my senses I decided to stay there at the Maple Court for a while, during which time I hoped to lay out a bright and rational plan of action. I knew that when my father arrived at Penn Station and did not see me, he would go straight to the hotel—the McAlpin on Broadway at Thirty-fourth Street. (In those days everyone from the Tidewater of my father’s middle social station stayed either at the McAlpin or the Taft; the very few who were more affluent always frequented the Waldorf-Astoria.) I called the McAlpin and left a message saying I would see him there late in the evening. Then I returned to the table (it was another evil sign, I thought, that in their swift exit either Nathan or Sophie had overturned the bottle of Chablis, which, though unbroken, lay on its side dripping its dregs onto the floor) and sat for two full hours brooding over the way in which I must collect and put back together the shards of our fragmented friendship. I suspected it would be no easy task, given the colossal dimensions of Nathan’s fury.

On the other hand, recalling how on that Sunday following a similar “tempest” he had made overtures of friendship so warm and eager as to be almost embarrassing, and had actually apologized to me for his misbehavior, it occurred to me that he might welcome any gestures of pacification I would make. God knows, I thought, it was something I hated to do; scenes such as I had just been a participant in fractured my spirit, exhausted me; all I really wanted to do was to curl up and take a nap. Confronting Nathan again this soon was an idea intimidating and fraught with potential menace; queasy, I felt myself perspiring as Nathan had done. To screw up courage I took my time and drank four or five or, maybe, six medium-sized glasses of Rheingold. Visions of Sophie’s pathetic and disheveled agony, her total disarray, kept flashing on and off in my mind, causing my stomach to heave. Finally, though, as dark fell over Flatbush, I wandered a little drunkenly back through the sultry dusk to the Pink Palace, gazing up with tangled apprehension and hope at the soft glow, the color of rose wine, that blossomed out from beneath Sophie