What’re you thinking? What’s made you so quiet? You seem suddenly different. What’s the matter? Love me is what this means, of course. Or at least, second best: surrender. Or at the very least, take some time regaling me with why you won’t, and maybe by the end you will.

Outside a wind makes a sharp oceanic woo around the corner of the hotel, then off into the cold, paltry Detroit afternoon. By five it could as easily turn to rain, by six the stars could be out and by nighttime Vicki and I could be strolling down Larned for a steak or a chop. You can never completely count on things out here. Life is counterpoised against a mean wind that could suddenly cease.

“Well,” Vicki says, and turns over to face me out of a grotto of pillows and sheets. “When I went downstairs, you know, when you were gone? I just went to be a part of something. I didn’t need anything. And I went in the little newsstand down there, and I picked up this paperback. How To Take On The World, by Doctor Barton. Because I felt like I was starting over in one way, like I said. You and me. So I stood there at the rack and read one chapter called ‘Our New-Agers.’ Which was about these people who won’t eat potato chips and who join these self-discovery groups, and drink mineral water and have literary discussions every day. People that think it oughta be easy to express their feelings and be how you seem. And I just started cryin, cause I realized that that was you, and I was someplace way off the beam. Back with the potato chips and people who aren’t inner-looking. Here we’d come all the way out here, and all I could do was eat shrimp and watch TV and cry. And it wasn’t working out. So I thought maybe we could be friends if you wanted to. I called up Everett because I knew I could bring it off with him and quit crying. I knew I was better off than him.” A big handsome tear leaves her eye, goes off her nose and vanishes into the pillow. I have managed to make two different people cry inside of two hours. I am doing something wrong. Though what?

Cynicism.

I have become more cynical than old Iago, since there is no cynicism like lifelong self-love and the tunnel vision in which you yourself are all that’s visible at the tunnel’s end. It’s embarrassing. Likewise, there’s nothing guaranteed to make people feel more worthless than to think someone is trying to help them—even if you’re not. A cynical “New-Ager” is exactly me, a sad introspecter and potato chip avoider with a queasy heart-to-heart mentality—though I would give the crown jewels not to be, or at least not be thought to be.

My only hope now is to deny everything—friendship, disillusionment, embarrassment, the future, the past—and make my stand for the present.