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so cruelly put to death by his own people, and I quote, “To know nothing is the first condition of all knowledge.” From the wisdom of that great Greek Philosopher may we not draw our own conclusions concerning these problems? Creativeness is the ability to see relationships where none exist.

5
    While Birdie stayed in bed digging at his toenails, Frances went down for the mail. Except when she was at work Birdie more or less lived in her room, his own having got out of hand during the period when he was writing his essay. It was not a sexual relationship, though a couple of times, just to be friendly, Frances had offered and Birdie’d accepted a blow-job, but it had been a chore for both of them.
    What did bring them together, besides sharing a bathroom, was the sad, immovable fact that Frances’s Regents score was an absolute 20. Because of some disease she had. Aside from one kid at P.S. 141 who’d been a kind of dwarf and almost an idiot, Frances was Birdie’s first personal acquaintance who’d scored lower than he had. Her own 20 didn’t bother her, or she knew enough not to let it, but for the whole two months Birdie was working on “Problems of Creativeness” she’d listened to every draft of every paragraph. If it hadn’t been for her constant praise and her getting behind him and pushing whenever he got depressed and hopeless, he’d never have seen his way out the other end. It seemed unfair in a way that, now that he was through, he’d be going back to Milly. But Frances had said she didn’t mind about that either. Birdie had never known anyone so completely unselfish, but she said no, it wasn’t that. Helping him had been her way of fighting the system.
    “Well?” he asked, when she came back.
    “Nope. Just this.” She tossed a postcard onto the bed. A sunset somewhere with palm trees. For her.
    “I didn’t think they could write, these guys.”
    “Jock? Oh, he’s always sending me stuff. This—” she grabbed a handful of her heavy, glittering bathrobe “—came from Japan.”
    Birdie snorted. He’d meant to buy Frances a present himself, as a token of his appreciation, but his money was gone. He was living, till his letter came, on what he could borrow from her. “He doesn’t have much to say for himself.”
    “No, I suppose not.” She sounded down. Before she’d gone to get the mail, she’d been happy as an ad. The postcard must have meant more than she’d let on. Maybe she was in love with this Jock. Though back in June, on the night of their first heart-to-heart drunk, after he’d told her about Milly, she’d said that she was still waiting for the real thing to come along.
    Whatever it was, he decided, he wasn’t going to let it bring him down too. He plugged himself into the idea of getting dressed. He’d get out his sky-blues and a green scarf and then he’d stroll in his clean bare feet to the river. Then uptown. Not as far as 11th Street, no. In any case it was Thursday, and Milly wouldn’t be home on a Thursday afternoon. In any case he wasn’t going to see her until he could rub her pretty nose in the story of his success.
    “It’s bound to come tomorrow.”
    “I suppose so.” Frances was sitting cross-legged on the floor, combing her wispy, dull-brown hair down across her face.
    “It’s been two weeks. Almost.”
    “Birdie?”
    “That’s my name.”
    “Yesterday when I was in Stuyvesant Town, the market, you know?” She found her part and pulled half the veil to one side. “I bought two pills.”
    “Great.”
    “Not that kind. The pills you take for … you know, so you can have babies again? They change the stuff that’s in the water. I thought maybe if we each took one… .”
    “You can’t just go and do it like that, Frances. For Christ’s sake! They’d make you have an abortion before you could say Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp.”
    It was her pet joke that she’d made up herself, but Frances not so much as smiled. “Why would they