That summer I relocated lawyers from Mount Vernon to Fells Point; hippies from pretty Charles Village to boring Towson; a professor’s desk from the graduate poli sci department to the undergraduate poli sci department across the street. I abetted gentrification, such as it was; the invisible hand of the market, redistributing the choicest properties as they became more choice and pushing those who couldn’t hack it to the peripheries, was actually my hand, my two strong hands, carrying the antique armchairs of the upwardly mobile and the heavy fold-out couches of those who were falling behind. I moved a doctor couple to their new house in burgeoning—Clarksville! I moved a group of beautiful undergraduates, with long soft sleek hair, from an off-campus apartment on Calvert Street to one on St. Paul. We had some friends in common but somehow the conversation stalled; it was a hot day and I was sweating through my baseball hat and even through my weight belt, which I wore to protect my back while carrying people’s stuff. At the end of such days I’d sneak into the Hopkins gym to work out and shower. Afterward I’d sit in the lobby and try to read the unread books that had piled up during the semester, as well as, more often, copies of the New American and Debate. It was a nice time, though the work was hard and the money was bad, and I had no idea, really no idea, what would become of me in the years ahead. My college career had been, so far, disappointing; I was still drinking too much and giving up on people too quickly; I kept waiting for someone to tell me what they thought I should do, should be, what particular fate I, in particular, was fated for. It was the last summer that I hung out with my high school friends, and it was the last time I’d ever feel that strange, expectant, hopeful, pleading way.

Most of these places had declined or changed—they were not for me, just then—but Morris Binkel’s articles in the New American were a different story. His mind was ablaze. It was his belief that American culture was corrupt; that it was filled with phonies, charlatans, morons, and rich people. Also their dupes. Binkel called for a renewal of an adversary culture—the young writers of today, said Binkel, were social climbers, timid and weak; they stood around at parties in New York waiting to be noticed, waiting to be liked. He reserved his especial scorn for his own people, for young Jewish writers, who had once been the bravest and the most outrageous, and now were the most timid, the most polished, kowtowing to their elders’ ideas of orthodoxy and demeanor. (None of them, I read between the furious lines of Binkel, could lift a couch in a Mount Vernon apartment and toss it in the back of a U-Haul truck.) No one spoke anymore from the heart, said Binkel, and it was a shame.

Walking over to the subway—Morris told me to take a cab but I wanted to ride the subway—I passed through Chelsea. I had never seen so many beautiful people. I was sweating, tired, gruesome, and these people had left their houses looking like movie stars— perhaps they were movie stars? One fell behind on such things in college, or anyway I did—and, oh God, what would it take to live in such a place? What reserves of strength? What reserves of cash? And yet I thought that I could do it. These people looked soft, for all their movie-star hard bodies. They looked like they were unsure of what they wanted in life but that they suspected they’d gotten it. They hoped anyway that this was it.

What did I want from Morris Binkel? The man was practically a sociopath. He had been in New York so long, had ingested there so many values that he at heart despised, that he knew to be false and cruel, that, in angrily rejecting them, he felt also the extent to which he was beholden to them, and grew angrier still. He could no longer read five pages of anything without losing his temper, without clutching his chair in rage. Surely he’d be dead by forty. And yet the great ones were like this. And Morris, I think, had greatness in him, even if he squandered it. His anger at his era rose like vomit to his throat.

I was twenty years old. When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four, what you want from people is that they tell you about you. When you are twenty, and twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, you watch the world for the way it watches you. Do people laugh when you make a joke, do they kiss you when you lean into them at a party? Yes? Aha—so that’s who you are. But these people themselves, laughing and not-laughing, kissing and not-kissing, they themselves are young, and so then you begin to think, if you’re twenty or twenty-one, when you are young, that these people are not to be trusted, your contemporaries, your screwed-up friends and girlfriends—that it’s not because of you that they kissed you, but because of them, something about them, those narcissists, whereas you were asking about you, what did they think of you? Now you have no idea. This is why it’s so important to meet your heroes while you are young, so they can tell you. When I met Morris Binkel I wanted merely for him to say: Yes. I see it in you. You can do with it what you will, but you’ve got it. You can be like me, if that’s what you want.

That was the turning point in the evening. Pretty soon Morris took both me and Emily home in a cab, and they set me up nicely on the couch, and they did not make too much noise in Morris’s room, which was considerate, and in the morning they made me eggs, and I sight-translated some passages from Babel’s story “Guy de Maupassant,” about a young man, like me a little, who helps a rich man’s beautiful wife translate some stories by Maupassant and then seduces her. I had not seduced anyone, but I had seen something, or I had begun to see something, there was a glimmer that I saw, of how things worked—and that was what the story was about. I explained this to Morris and Emily, though leaving myself out of it, of course, and they were pleased, Emily especially. “Keith’s a lot smarter than I was when I was twenty,” she said. It had turned out that Emily was closer to thirty than to twenty. “Is he smarter than you were, Morris?”

I nodded gratefully, and that was that. In between sips of coffee Morris had concluded that I was a mediocrity—or a genius. I happened to know already that I was neither—that if I applied myself, I’d be fine, more than fine, and if I didn’t, I would probably fall through the cracks. I knew that. What I hadn’t known was something else. Looking at Morris looking out the window across the Hudson, I suddenly wanted very badly to cry. Not for myself, for the first time, maybe, in my life—I had managed just by sitting here quietly to get the better of Morris, to cause him to falter into rudeness—but for myself in ten years, because the other thing I suddenly knew was that Morris’s life was a very likely life, the sort of life one could end up having, if one was not very careful, and I knew, already, in addition to knowing that I was neither mediocrity nor genius, that I was not very careful at all.

In 1936 Gorky died. “No one will protect me now,” Babel told his wife. Three years later, he was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and shot. He was forty years old.

I still remember—how well I remember—looking out the window of that train. We were blazing down the final stretch of rail before Baltimore, toward the roads and multitudinous lacrosse fields and the late-night ice cream shop of my youth; Ali was going to meet me at the train station in exchange for a six-pack of beer. No one would ever arrest me at my house, take me to the basement of Lubyanka, and shoot me in the back of the head. Nonetheless I knew what Morris’s book was telling me, what the book he never finished was telling me. In that train, on those rails, some premonition of the truth brushed against my side.