Once outside I took Jenny by the hand, and she walked along obediently without removing her hand, although she was in fact leading the way, not I. As a resident of the Upper West Side, I didn't know very much about their wealthy East. After we had looked into several small restaurants, our attention was drawn, I remember, to a crowded out-of-the-way place paneled in old wood where, however, a famous old harpist performed. We took our seats next to the stage, from which die harpist, who had a good figure but also the look of an outright lesbian and sadist, gazed amiably at the sisters from time to time. It was then that I learned of the existence of the drink called "tequila sunrise," which the sisters ordered, while I drank my customary J & B, a habit I'll probably keep until the end of my days. You have to have something to fall back on when people say, "What will you have?" and you're supposed to have a favorite drink. Well, I drink J & B.

Naturally the harpist started talking to the girls during the intermission, while a lanky, though suspiciously cultivated and considerate waiter addressed a few silly remarks to me I don't remember anymore. We eventually drank a fair amount there, and after Jenny and I had sufficiently stroked and squeezed each other's hands, and nudged each other with our knees under the table, and exchanged other displays of affection of the sort that are appropriate in public places, and the harpist had started to cover her harp with its case, Debby announced that it was time to leave, as indeed it was, and we tumbled out onto the street. I had enough money; the sisters didn't want to eat, thank God — or thanks to them, since maybe they just pretended not to.

For some reason we all laughed a lot on the way home, and Jenny ran away from me down the street, her cardigan flying behind her, and when I caught her, the little knitted balls on the strings were all rapidly swinging. I tried to kiss her, but she moved away from me, yelling something about Russians and how shameless her Polish grandmother said they all were, but she didn't move away very far. Debby, who was following behind, smiled a grown-up smile at all the commotion we were making.

After we got back to the house, Debby immediately went off to bed, while I sat with Jenny for another hour or so, kissing her again and putting my hands under her dress and taking hold of her legs, her belly, and her panties…

She wouldn't let me. She wouldn't give in. I wasn't very insistent. I realized with Jenny it was better not to hurry; it would all happen in time. Of course, I would have preferred to fuck her then — I really wanted to — but I was afraid of pressuring her even a little; she might get scared and not want to see me anymore. But I left in excellent spirits, happy and exhilarated — the adventurer after a successfully concluded operation.

I called her the next day. Not too early, though I woke up very early myself and wanted to call her at once. I didn't have anything else to do anyway. My sole occupation then was to get up at eight after sleeping badly, collect my things — books and notebooks — in a plastic bag, and set off for Central Park to lie in the sun and read, given the fact that the park was only a few short blocks away. Lying there on the grass in my underpants among people as unlucky or crazy as I was, I tortured myself with books, teaching and coaching myself by reading my first English books with a dictionary. The selection was very strange: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which had just come out in paperback, and a book with a green cover by Che Guevara called Episodes of the Revolutionary War, which I'd swiped from somebody. I still have those books, and when I leaf through them on occasion, I unfailingly find tufts of dried grass between the pages, since I didn't lie quietly but turned over, presenting first my chest to the sun and then my back, while dreaming of my future, of my brave and glorious future, and of the ways I might bring it about.

I had been lying in Central Park since March and the loneliness was beginning to make me a little crazy. I usually went back to my hotel around five or six and cooked dinner on a hotplate — something quick, macaroni with hot dogs or chicken soup — and then after eating it, and maybe a brief nap, I rolled out onto the streets again.

As you see, it was a bleak and soldierly life, and its diversions were pretty much reduced to grass, which I regularly bought then for thirty-five dollars an ounce, obtaining another portion as soon as I'd smoked up the first, and one-night stands, which usually took place in a state of extreme intoxication from grass and alcohol.

I didn't attach much importance to the one-night stands, my drunken imagination easily endowing my partners with their merit, although as a rule not one of them survived the test of morning, or turned out in the light of day to be of any value to my life. But in the period I'm describing here, even those affairs had virtually ceased. The longest to hold out was Rena, an extremely ugly but incredibly horny middle-aged Rumanian Jew who lived near the Museum of Natural History and who taught ballet, I believe. I would always remember her unexpectedly somewhere on the street in the middle of the night, call her up, go over to her place, walk in, and start fucking her right in the doorway. I would simply step over the threshold, lift up her skirt, and, since her cunt was always moist and ready, brutally fuck her.

It was necessary to end that illicit affair, however, since she had unfortunately fallen in love with me. I was beginning to catch adoring looks in my direction, and I realized I'd better get out before it was too late. Vile aesthete and conceited animal that I was, aspiring to the best women in the world, how could I allow myself to go out with an ugly little hawk-nosed Rumanian Jew? Even granting that she was much better, more noble, and more spiritual than I, as in fact was probably the case, I still preferred in that time of extreme need to suffer without a cunt rather than suffer from an inferiority complex at showing myself in broad daylight with Rena. The last straw was her obsessive desire to meet Lodyzhnikov after I had carelessly let slip that I knew him.

So you can imagine how great was my need for Jenny. She of course had no idea of the role I had prepared for her, that I expected her to be my woman, my friend, my language teacher, and to support me, and that I had also decided to move in with her in time, since I still didn't realize, dolt, who she was.

But when I finally called on that May morning, having as a precaution first turned myself for three hours or so on the grass in Central Park, she told me to my surprise that she was busy and that we couldn't see each other. The "music teacher" Steven's sister from California was staying at the millionaire's house at the time. Imagine how disappointed I was. Who wouldn't have been? An annoying obstacle on my way to the top. I was in a hurry; I needed to prove to everybody just what sort of person it was they were neglecting. The rich Jenny and her house were substantial evidence.

She has guests, I thought bitterly. The cunt. As if there were anybody more important to her than me. Guests. I would have gone over and joined her guests, but Jenny didn't invite me. Maybe she's afraid to be alone with me. She wants to but is afraid; that happens sometimes, I reflected.

I went back to my hotel earlier than usual that day. I didn't feel much like reading. A black neighbor from my floor named Ken was sitting on a bench with a group of alcoholic friends, all black, in the dusty strip of greenery that separates the two opposing streams of Broadway traffic and drinking something. When he saw me, he jumped happily to his feet and shouted "Baby!" and beckoned to me. But I didn't go; I only waved to him from a distance and strode into the hotel's stinking maw.