A few weeks after their arrival in the camp, when their straw mattresses had flattened out and their rifles were beginning to speckle with rust from the dew, there was a funny incident in one of the squad tents. A buck sergeant named Myron Phelps, who was thirty-three but looked much older, and who had been a soft-coal miner in civilian life, delicately tapped the ash from a big PX cigar and said, “Ah, I wish you kids’d quit talking about Germany. I’m tired of all this Germany, Germany, Germany.” Then he stretched out on his back, causing his flimsy cot to wobble on the uneven earth. He folded one arm under his head to suggest a world of peace, using the other to gesture lazily with the cigar. “I mean what the hell would you be doing if you was in Germany? Huh? Well, you’d be out getting laid and getting the clap and getting the syphilis and getting the blue balls, that’s all, and you’d be drinking up all that schnapps and beer and getting soft and getting out of shape. Right? Right? Well, if you ask me, this here is a whole lot better. We got fresh air, we got shelter, we got food, we got discipline. This is a man’s life.”

Captain Widdoes had been awarded the Silver Star for leading an attack through knee-deep snow last winter; the attack had gained him an excellent tactical advantage and lost him nearly half a platoon. Even now, many of the men in the company were afraid of him.

If it came through there might be ten days of excessive politeness and artificial laughter and awkward silences, while they all tried to pretend he wasn’t a stranger. There might be slow sight-seeing tours of London in order to kill whole afternoons; they might want to show him “typically English” things to do, like nibbling fish and chips out of twisted newspaper, or whatever the hell else it was that typically English people did, and there would be repeated expressions of how nice everything was while they all counted the days until it was over.

If it didn’t come through he might never see them again; but then he had resigned himself to that many years ago, when it had mattered a great deal more—when it had, in fact, amounted to an almost unendurable loss.

And the next thing, they decided, was to get rid of the cigarettes. It was easy. A few blocks away they met a small, tight-faced boy of about fourteen who led them upstairs to a triple-locked room that was packed to the ceiling with American cigarettes. He was so intimidating in his silence and so impatient to conclude the deal, paying them off from a huge roll of lovely French banknotes, as to suggest that in three or four more years he might be an important figure in the European underworld.

Late in the day he discovered white wine. It salved and dispelled his hangover; it softened the rasp of his anger into an almost pleasant melancholy. It was very nice and dry and mild and he drank a great deal of it, slowly, in one quietly obliging café after another. He found various ways to compose himself at the different tables, and soon he began to wonder how he must look to casual observers; that, for as long as he could remember, had been one of his most secret, most besetting, least admirable habits of mind. He imagined, as the white wine wore on and on, that he probably looked like a sensitive young man in wry contemplation of youth and love and death—an “interesting” young man—and on that high wave of self-regard he floated home and hit the sack again.

The final day was one of stunted thought and shriveled hope, of depression so thick that all of Paris lay awash and sinking in it while his time ran out.

Back in the Place Pigalle at midnight and drunk again—or more likely feigning drunkenness to himself—he found he was almost broke. He couldn’t afford even the most raucous of middle-aged whores now, and he knew he had probably arranged in his secret heart for this to be so. There was nothing left to do but make his way to the dark part of the city where the Army trucks were parked.

You weren’t really expected to make the first truck; you could even miss the last truck, and nobody would care very much. But those unspoken rules of conduct no longer applied to Paul Colby: he was very likely the only soldier in Europe ever to have spent three days in Paris without getting laid. And he had learned beyond question now that he could no longer attribute his trouble to shyness or awkwardness: it was fear. It was worse than fear: it was cowardice.

And it was whatever he wished for the rest of that rapidly darkening afternoon, even after her husband had come home—a drained-looking man in middle age whose hat left a neat ridge around the crown of his flat, well-combed hair, and who ventured almost no conversational openings—and their little boy, who seemed far from dying to meet him as he peered from hiding and stuck out his tongue.

Would Paul like another bread-and-butter sandwich with his tea? Good. Would he like a drink? Oh, good. And was he sure he wouldn’t stay a while longer and have some sort of scrappy little supper with them—baked beans on toast sort of thing—and spend the night? Because really, there was plenty of room. It was whatever he wished.

He could hardly wait to get out of the house, though he kept assuring himself, on the train back into town, that he hadn’t been rude.

Dan took up cigars that summer, always carrying a cluster of them in his shirt pocket, chewing and smoking them all day as he bent over his work. It seemed to me that he didn’t really enjoy them much—they sometimes drove him into coughing fits—but it was as if they were a necessary part of his preparation for the thick, premature middle age he had assigned himself at twenty-five.

“You know this guy in the office I’ve told you about?” I said to Eileen one night. “The artist? Dan Rosenthal? I think he’s getting into practice for being an old man.”

“Oh? How do you mean?”

“Well, he’s getting so—ah, I can’t explain it. I’m not even sure if I’ve got it right.”

She could seldom explain anything to me about people in her office, either. Our conversations often dissolved into admissions that we weren’t even sure if we had it right, and then there would be silence until a quarrel broke out over something else.

Even so, when I brought Dan Rosenthal into the house and upstairs that afternoon, I found I was doing my best to slouch and mumble and squint for him. And Eileen couldn’t have been more helpful if she’d tried: we discovered her reclining on the big studio couch, wearing her black turtleneck sweater and black slacks. I had always loved that outfit because it was vastly becoming, with her long red hair, and also because it seemed to loosen all her joints. She had worn it to the acting class sometimes, and she nearly always wore it on evenings when we’d sit quietly for hours in the San Remo or some other locally famous bar, trying to conquer our uneasiness among young men who slouched and mumbled and squinted with their pale, long-haired girls, whole crowds of them erupting now and then into roars of laughter over matters we were fairly sure we would never understand.

If you’re young enough, there can be exhilaration in pretending to be something you’re not. And if I’d been nimble in vaulting the fence, if I’d been a little hip on the stairs, it was time to be rugged now. Crouching, and with a good deal more force than necessary, I smashed and split those boards over the ringing iron knob of an andiron hauled from the fireplace; then, when they’d been reduced to manageable sticks, I broke each stick in half, or into thirds, one after another, against one straining knee. Some of the lumber had held rows of rusty nails, and Dan said, “Watch those nails,” but I told him without words that I could look out for myself. Hadn’t I done stuff like this all my life? Hadn’t I been a rifleman in the Army? Did he think I’d always been some indoor kind of business-office guy in a white shirt? Hell, there wasn’t much you couldn’t learn in knocking around the world; how else did he think I had won this stunning girl, from whom he seemed almost wholly unable to take his eyes?

This tense gathering was what I’d heard Eileen describe on the phone a few times as “our little shipboard soignée”—I didn’t think that word was right but didn’t know enough French to correct her. There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother’s throat. She wore a nice spring suit, with a rich little feathered hat that had probably been bought for the occasion.

“… Well, but you see we’re the only national organization in the country; our membership is up in the thousands how, and of course each member has to submit proof of professional standing as an artist before we’ll even consider their application, so we’re really a very…” And the deeper she settled into her monologue the farther she allowed her knees to move apart, with a forearm on each one, until the shadowy pouch of her underpants was visible to all guests seated across from her. That was an old failing: she never seemed to realize that if people could see her underpants they might not care what kind of hat she was wearing.

JACK FIELDS’S FIRST novel took him five years to write, and it left him feeling reasonably proud but exhausted almost to the point of illness. He was thirty-four then, and still living in a dark, wretchedly cheap Greenwich Village cellar that had seemed good enough for holing-up to get his work done after his marriage fell apart. He assumed he’d be able to find a better place and perhaps even a better life when his book came out, but he was mistaken: though it won general praise, the novel sold so poorly that only a scant, brief trickle of money came in during the whole of its first year in print. By that time Jack had taken to drinking heavily and not writing much—not even doing much of the anonymous, badly paid hackwork that had provided his income for years, though he still managed to do enough of that to meet his alimony payments—and he had begun to see himself, not without a certain literary satisfaction, as a tragic figure.