The beginning of June was hot. I took a journey, and of course, immediately everything was new. When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist. The phlox bloomed in its faded purples; on the hillside, phallic pines. Foreigners under the arcades, in the basket shops. A steamy haze blurred the lines of the hills. A dirty, exhausting sky. Already the summer seemed to be passing away. Soon the boats would be gathered in, ferries roped to the dock.

Kentucky: that is certainly part of it. My mother lived as a girl in so many North Carolina towns they are confused in my memory. Raleigh and Charlotte. She hardly knew her own parents; they died quickly as people did then, of whatever was in the air—pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis. I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was. She had brothers and sisters and was raised by them, passing their names down to us.

Her face, my mother’s, is not clear to me. A boneless, soft prettiness, with small brown eyes and the scarcest of eyebrows, darkened with a lead pencil.

“Shame is inventive,” Nietzsche said. And that is scarcely the half of it. From shame I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech. The men on the train are wearing clothes which, made for no season, are therefore always unseasonable and contradictory. They are harsh and flimsy, loud and yet lightweight, fashioned with the inappropriateness that is the ruling idea of the year-round. Pastels blue as the sea and green as the land; jackets lined with paisley and plaid; seams outlined with wide stitches of another color; revers and pockets outsize; predominance of chilly blue and two-tones; nylon and Dacron in the as-smooth-as-glass finish of the permanently pressed. On the other hand, the porters from Trinidad are traditional, dressed like princes. Black trousers, red cotton jacket, white shirt, black bow tie and black, luminous, aristocratic, tropical faces.

The apotheosis of a local teaching certificate, a celestial and long-delayed reward for girls.

To become a sacerdotal offering, very much like those pale schoolteachers in Latin America, men from the poor villages, sweating in their black suits and white shirts, receiving and giving a peculiar list of punishments in their visionary calling.

There was a man who brought me my first pair of reading glasses, which I did not need. He was a romantic figure, mostly because he had studied French and adored the difficult r’s of that language. He was tall and good-looking and not very truthful. He was corrupted by an uncertain nature and no one understood his fits of self-expansion or his disappearances into torpor and melancholy. And yet a vanity and rather pleasant carelessness seemed to survive in all his moods.

My mother’s femaleness was absolute, ancient, and there was a peculiar, helpless assertiveness about it. Not the assertiveness of opinion, for she seemed to have no opinion about it and would, even when she was past seventy, merely shrug and looked perplexed when the subject of her own childbearing was raised. Or sometimes she might say: It did not make me miserable, if that’s what you want to know

The assertiveness was merely the old, profound acceptance of the things of life. It was modest, smooth and soft as a handful of cotton. Without plan, without provision. All of that comes later as the body and even the soul go about the daily caring for the results of this seemingly natural acceptance.

These people, and some had been there for years, lived as if in a house recently burglarized, wires cut, their world vandalized, their memory a lament of peculiar losses. It was as if they had robbed themselves, and that gave a certain cheerfulness. Do not imagine that in the reduction to the rented room they received nothing in return. They got a lot, I tell you. They were lifted by insolence above their forgotten loans, their surly arrears, their misspent matrimonies, their many debts which seemed to fall with relief into the wastebaskets where they would be picked up by the night men.

This is what I heard in the evening. At the party everyone was intelligent and agreeable, but not particularly good-looking. No person of talent had brought along a new, beautiful, young girl, who being new and not knowing all the names would seem rude and superior, thus sending arrows of pain into the flesh of the older people who were known for something. Eyeglasses glimmered. Academics, like old barons of the Empire, coughed out their titles and universities and yet quickly the badges dimmed and their faces returned to the resignation brought on from too many lectures, and the docile, not-quite-interested smiles of students.

The host and hostess were of high intelligence and thus were, in turns, anxious, bored, and pleased. Their apartment in the West 80’s was typical of the city—the home of a bright young couple, where the man is paying alimony. Young children visited on the weekends, sleeping in the workroom of either the wife or husband, whichever labored at home. Books and records and pictures, a few pieces of old furniture well cared for, a number of handsome rugs and pillows, large plants in the southern window. Copper pans, some old silver, glazed casseroles in the neat square of kitchen.

How pleasant the rooms were, how comforting the distresses of New Yorkers, their insomnias filled with words, their patient exegesis of surprising terrors.

It is almost seven. Should Alex walk in the door as a type, a genre? Perhaps that effort is a mistake. What is wanted is history, the man in the raincoat, wearing the loops of his ideas, the buttons of his period. Some men define themselves by women although they appear to believe it is quite the opposite; to believe that it is she, rather than themselves, who is being filed away, tagged, named at last like a quivering cell under a microscope.

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we. Years, decades even, passed. Then one is out of the commonest of plurals, out of the strange partnership that begins as a flat, empty plain and soon turns into a town of rooms and garages, little grocery stores in the pantry, dress shops in the closets, and a bank with your names printed together for the transaction of business.

What he held in abeyance, what the legal bachelorhood represented, was his grail, his lingering, halfhearted vision of self-realization.

I was honored when he allowed me to go to bed with him and dishonored when I felt my imaginative, anxious, exhausting efforts were not what he wanted. His handsomeness created anxiety in me; his snobbery was detailed and full of quirks, like that of people living in provincial capitals, or foreigners living in Florence or Cairo. Worst of all was my ambivalence over what I took to be the inauthenticity of his Marxism. In my heart I was weasel-like, hungry, hunting with blazing eyes for innocent contradictions, given to predatory chewings on the difference between theory and practice. That is what I had brought from home in Kentucky to New York, this large bounty of polemicism, stored away behind light, limp Southern hair and not-quite-blue eyes.

In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me—a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discolored blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicion and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet.

The man whose wife died, died just as they were making a new life, setting themselves in order. They had planned to go from the good to the better; they had retired to the loved summer house. With an improvident madness quite unlike their usual way, this couple, not knowing death was in the garden, raced after perfection. I would rather cook looking toward the south, she said, and so the kitchen was moved from the north. He fell in love with porches in the summer and determined that his heart’s wish was to sit on the porch all winter, and so foundations were laid, great glass windows lay glistening on the lawn and were finally set in place, long evenings over catalogues produced a beautiful Swedish stove, and the splendid new porch changed the shape of the old house, making it and the couple new and daring and full of light.

They were not alone. All the retired people labored and labored for perfection. Additions, new wings, roofs sliced off, stairways turned around, bedrooms on the first floor, trees cut down, trees planted. Profoundly difficult renovations undertaken to make life easier. The children’s inheritance was used up, but one day there would be the house, reshaped often out of childhood dreams and wounds of six decades ago.

And then the wife died, just when all was ready and in harmony.

The large, lonely house in the lovely, lonely northern town. The cold nights and the copper bottoms of the pans slowly losing their sheen. Nothing to smile about in the afternoons on the improvident sun porch. Bachelors again, in their depopulated settings, like large animals in their cages in the zoo, with the name of their species on the door.

Mason at least knew one pure, perfect joy. That was to go to the polling station near the courthouse and to write in the names of Communist Party candidates on election day.

in your cloudy eyes there is the same misty defense against apostasy that recalls to me Mason in his stubborn cigarette clouds

Sometimes when I am up in Maine and the men come to fix things—handsome, attractive people that they are, coming to fix a pipe, to measure, to take apart a motor, to drag a car to the garage—often then I find myself falling into a flirtatiousness, a sort of love for their look, their sunburned faces, their fine oiled workshoes, their way at the wheel of a truck, their jokes about the bill, their ways with other men, down-town drinking coffee, or inside a house under construction, or at the ravaged shed of the boatbuilder, their strong fingers yellowed from nicotine.

Then I think of my father, of Papa, and wonder what it would be like to be married to such a man, to see him coming out of the shower, to sit at dinner at six o’clock, turn off the lights at nine, embrace, make love frequently in honor of a long day of working, get up at five, visit with the relations on Sunday, never leave town.

Love affairs with their energy and hope do not arrive again and again, forever. So, you no longer play tennis, no longer move from place to place in the summer, no longer understand what use you can make of the sight of the Andes or the columns of Luxor.

We sat in a dark booth and Madame Z. ordered a martini. An American martini, she said twice. The doctor crumpled and sagged over a beer, a Heineken. Supporting home industries, his wife said.

A brilliant night outside in New York City. It is Saturday and people with debts are going to restaurants, jumping in taxicabs, careening from West to East by way of the underpass through the Park. What difference does it make to be here alone? Even now, just after eight in the evening, the trucks are starting their delivery of the Sunday Times.