And, indeed, when I think of it, I think this: that they would probably have approved of everything I’ve done—particularly my decision to quit writing and get on to something they would think of as more practical. They would feel about it the way I do: that things sometimes happen for the best. Thinking that way has given me a chance for an interesting if not particularly simple adulthood.

By 9:30 I have nearly finished the few odds-and-ends details remaining before picking up Vicki and heading for the airport. Usually this would include a cup of coffee with Bosobolo, my boarder from the seminary in town, a custom I enjoy, but not today. We have had some good give-and-takes on such subjects as whether the bliss of the redeemed is heightened by the sufferings of the damned—something he feels Catholic about, but I don’t. He is forty-two and from the country of Gabon, and a stern-faced apologist for limitless faith. I usually argue for works, but without any illusions about where it’ll get me.

Why take a boarder? To ward off awful loneliness. Why else? The consolation in the disinterested footfalls of another human in an otherwise empty house, especially a six-foot-five-inch Negro from Africa living in your attic, can be considerable. This morning, though, he is away early on his own business and I see him from the window larruping up Hoving Road like a Bible salesman, heading for school—white shirt, black trousers and truck-tread sandals. He has told me that he is a prince in his tribe—the Nwambes—but I have never known an African who wasn’t. Like me, he has a wife and two children. We’re both Presbyterians, though I am not a good one.

My other duties require the usual phone calls from my desk: first to the magazine, for business with Rhonda Matuzak, my editor, who has dug into the rumors that all is not roses on the Detroit team, which could be a problem. The general feeling at the editors’ meeting is I should do the story and take what I get. Sports thrives on this kind of turmoil and patented misinformation, though I am not much interested in it.

Rhonda is divorced and lives alone with two cats in a large dark-walled, high-ceilinged floor-thru in the West Eighties, and is always trying to get me to meet her at Victor’s for dinner, or to haul off to some evening’s activity after work. Though except for one painful night after my divorce I’ve always managed just to have a drink at Grand Central, put her in a cab, then hurry off to Penn Station and home.

Rhonda is a tall raw-boned, ash-blond girl in her late thirties with an old-fashioned, chorus-line figure, but with a face like a racehorse and a loud voice I don’t like. (Illusion would be well-nigh impossible even with the lights off.) For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples’ worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better. Rhonda helped me out of all that by continuing to invite me to dinner and leaving notes on my desk which said “all loss is relative, Jack,” “nobody ever died of a broken heart,” and “only the young die good.” On the one night I agreed to have dinner with her—at Mallory’s on West 70th Street—we ended up in her apartment sitting in facing Bauhaus chairs, with me unhappily coming down with a case of the dreads so thick they seemed to whistle out the heating ducts and swarm the room like a dark mistral. I needed to take a walk in the street for air, I said, and she was considerate enough to believe I was still having trouble getting adjusted to being single again, and not that I was for some reason scared out of my wits to be alone with her. She walked me downstairs and out into the dark and windy canyons of West End Avenue, where we stood at the curb and talked about her favorite subject, American furniture history, and after a while I thanked her, clambered into a cab like a refugee and beat it down to 33rd Street and my safe train to New Jersey.

What I didn’t tell Rhonda and what is still true, is that I cannot stand being alone in New York after dark. Gotham takes on a flashing nighttime character I just can’t bear. The lights of bars demoralize me, the showy glow of taxi cabs whiz-banging down Fifth Avenue or careening out of the Park Avenue tunnel make me somehow heartsick and turmoiled and endangered. I feel adrift and badly so when the editors and the agents stroll out of their midtown offices in their silly garb, headed for assignations, idiot softball games or cocktails on the cuff. I can’t bear all the complications, and long for something that is façades-only and non-literate—the cozy pseudo-colonial Square here in conventional Haddam; the nicotine clouds of New Jersey as seen from a high office building like mine at dusk; the poignancy of a nighttime train ride back down the long line home. It was bad enough that one night to have Rhonda “walk me” down West End three blocks to a good cross street, but it was worse afterwards to ride in that bouncing, clanging cab clear to the station and then to dart—my feet feeling frozen—in and down the escalator from Seventh before the whole city reached out and clutched me like the pale hand of a dead limo driver.

“Why stay out there like a hermit, Bascombe?” Rhonda is louder than usual on the phone this morning. As an equalizer she refers to men by our last names, as if we were all in the Army.