Doheny saw me that afternoon. His waiting room had a large collection of magazines but the ashtrays were clean, the cushions were unrumpled and I had the feeling that perhaps I was his first customer in a long time. Was he, I wondered, an unemployed psychiatrist, an unsuccessful psychiatrist, an unpopular psychiatrist, did he while away the time in an empty office like an idle lawyer, barber or antique dealer? He presently appeared and led me into a consultation room that was furnished with antiques. I wondered then if some part of a psychiatrist's education was the furnishing of his consultation room. Did they do it themselves? Did their wives do it? Was it done by a professional? Doheny had large brown eyes in a long face. When I sat in the patient's chair he turned the beam of his brown eye onto me exactly as a dentist turns on the light above his drills and for the next fifty minutes I basked in his gaze and returned his looks earnestly to prove that I was truthful and manly. He seemed, like some illusion of drunkenness, to have two faces and I found it fascinating to watch one swallow up the other. He charged a dollar a minute.

After our fourth or fifth consultation he asked me to masturbate when I got home and report my reactions to him. I did as he asked and reported that I had felt ashamed of myself. He was delighted with this news and said that it proved that sexual guilt was the source of my cafard. I was a repressed.transvestite homosexual. I had told him about Daddy posing for Fledspar and he told me that this image of a naked man supporting hotels, palaces of justice and opera houses had intimidated me and forced me into an unnatural way of life. I told him to go to hell and said that I was through. I said that he was a charlatan and that I was going to report him to the American Psychiatric Society. If he wasn't a charlatan why didn't he have diplomas hung on his wall like other doctors? He got very angry at this, threw open his desk drawer and pulled out a pile of diplomas. He had diplomas from Yale, Columbia and the Neurological Hospital. Then I noticed that all these documents were made out to a man named Howard Shitz and I asked if he hadn't picked them up in a secondhand bookstore. He said he had changed his name when he went into practice for reasons that any dunce would understand. I left.

I was no better after Doheny-I was worse-and I began to wonder seriously if the ubiquity of my father's head and shoulders carved in limestone had not been crippling; but if it had been what could I do? The opera house in Malsburg and the Prinz-Regenten had been demolished but I couldn't remove him from his position on upper Broadway and he was still holding up the Mercedes in Frankfurt. I went on drinking-more than a quart a day-and my hands had begun to shake terribly. When I went into a bar I would wait until the bartender turned his back before I tried to get the glass up to my mouth. I sometimes spilled gin all over the bar. This amused the other customers. I went out to Pennsylvania one weekend with some heavy-drinking friends and came back on a social train that got me into Penn Station at about eleven Sunday night. The station was then being razed and reconstructed and it was such a complex of ruins that it seemed like a frightening projection of my own confusions and I stepped out into the street, looking for a bar. The bars around the station were too brightly lighted for a man whose hands were shaking and I started walking east, looking for some dark saloon where my infirmity would not be so noticeable. Walking down a side street I saw two lighted windows and a room with yellow walls. The windows were uncurtained. All I could see were the yellow walls. I put down my suitcase to stare at the windows. I was convinced that whoever lived there lived a useful and illustrious life. It would be a single man like myself but a man with a continent nature, a ruling intelligence, an efficient disposition. The pair of windows filled me with shame. I wanted my life to be not merely decent but exemplary. I wanted to be useful, continent and at peace. If I could not change my habits I could at least change my environment and I thought that if I found such a room with yellow walls I would cure my cafard and my drunkenness.

The next afternoon I packed a bag and took a cab across town to the Hotel Milton, looking for that room where I could begin my illustrious life. They gave me a room on the second floor, looking out onto an airshaft. The room had not been made up. There was an empty whiskey bottle and two glasses on the bureau and only one of the two beds had been used. I called the desk to complain and they said the only other vacancy they had was a suite on the tenth floor. I then moved to this. I found a parlor, a double bedroom and a large collection of flower pictures. I ordered some gin, vermouth and a bucket of ice and got stoned. This was not what I intended to do and in the morning I moved to the Hotel Madison.

My room at the Madison was furnished with the kind of antiques Doheny had had in his consultation room. It only lacked the colored photographs of his three children. The desk, or some part of it, had once been a spinet. The coffee table was covered with leather that had been tooled, gilded and burned by many cigarettes. There were mirrors on all the walls so that I could not escape my own image. I saw myself smoking, drinking, dressing and undressing and when I woke in the morning the first thing I saw was myself. I left the next day for the Waldorf, where I was given a pleasant, high-ceilinged room. There was a broad view. I could see the dome of St. Bartholomew's, the Seagram Building and one of those yellow bifurcated buildings that has a terraced and windowed front and a flat, yellow-brick backside with no sign of life but a rain gutter. It seemed to have been sliced with a knife. Almost anywhere in New York above the fifteenth floor your view includes a few caryatids, naiads, homely water tanks and Florentine arches and I was admiring these when it occurred to me how easy it would be to escape the cafard by jumping into the street and I checked out of the Waldorf and took a plane to Chicago.

In Chicago I took a room at the Palmer House. This was on the sixteenth floor. The furniture seemed to be of some discernible period but the more I examined it the more it seemed to be an inoffensive improvisation and then I realized that it was the same furniture I had seen in my room at the Waldorf. I flipped open the Venetian blinds. My window looked out into an enclosure where I could see upwards, downwards and sidewise, a hundred, hundred windows exactly like mine. The fact that my room had no uniqueness seemed seriously to threaten my own uniqueness. I suffered an intense emotional vertigo. The fear was not of falling but of vanishing. If there was nothing in my room to distinguish it from a hundred, hundred others there might be nothing about me to set me apart from other men, and I snapped the Venetian blinds shut and went out of the room. Waiting for the elevator a man gave me that bland, hopeful gaze of a faggot on the make and I thought that he might have been driven by the sameness of the hotel windows to authenticate his identity by unnatural sexual practices. I lowered my eyes chastely to the floor. Downstairs I drank three martinis and went to a movie. I stayed in Chicago two days and took the Zephyr to San Francisco. I thought a train compartment might be the environment where I could begin my new life but it was not. In San Francisco I stayed two nights at the Palace and two nights at the St. Francis and then flew down the coast and checked in at the Los Angeles Biltmore. This was the furthest from what I wanted and I moved from there to the Chateau Marmont. I moved from there to the Beverly Hills and a day later took a plane to London on the northerly route. I tried to get a room at the Con-naught but they were full and so I went instead to the Dorchester where I lasted two days. I then flew to Rome and checked in at the Eden. My cafard had followed me around the world and I was still drinking heavily. Lying in bed in the Eden one morning with a pillow over my face I summoned up Kilimanjaro and its ancient village, the Elysian Fields and the fortified town. It occurred to me then that I had thought the town might be Orvieto. I rented a Fiat from the concierge and started north.