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the world that way, particularly not when he was young. But a beautiful young woman could get away with it. Could get away with practically anything.
    Adam wasn't sure why this young man had wanted to meet him. They had been corresponding for a few weeks, but Jeffrey's purposes were still unclear. Jeffrey was an assistant professor at Rutgers, nervously compiling credentials for his bid for tenure. His area of specialization was Jewish American fiction, so his getting in touch with Adam was understandable, but after one e-mail expressing his admiration for Adam's novels and another asking some quietly show-offy questions, questions designed to demonstrate his intimate acquaintance with Adam's work, he had stayed in touch, and Adam hadn't quite figured out why. At first Adam had thought that Jeffrey wanted to write something about him, but Jeffrey hadn't said anything to that effect.
    They talked aimlessly for a few minutes—New York intellectuals, New York restaurants, New York hotels.
    "Are you working on a book?" Adam said. "If you're trying to get tenure you probably have to publish something, don't you?"
    "I haven't actually started writing, but I am considering something." A small smile, an odd one: Jeffrey seemed to be reaching for modesty but he couldn't quite suppress a hint of a smirk. "Actually, that has something to do with why I looked you up in the first place. I was on leave last semester, and I spent a lot of time in the archives at Brandeis."
    As soon as he said this, Adam's mood turned gray. He knew what was coming.
    "You want to write a biography of Izzy Cantor," Adam said.
    "How did you know?" Jeffrey said.
    As if there could be any other fucking reason, Adam thought, for him to be nosing around the archives at Brandeis.
    "Izzy Cantor?" Thea said. "Another of your desiccated friends from days gone by?"
    Because Adam's mood had changed, he no longer found Thea's manner amusing. In fact, he wouldn't have minded crushing a grapefruit into her face. He should have saved Ellie's grapefruit and used it on Thea. And then Thea could have used it to attack someone else. The grapefruit could travel all over town.
    "You don't know of him?" Jeffrey said, gaping, as if she'd said she'd never heard of Chaucer. He looked quickly at Adam, with an expression that seemed to say that it was hard for him to believe that Adam could be seeing a woman who had never heard of Izzy Cantor. Which irritated Adam all the more. You could say that one of the things that Adam looked for in a mistress was that she
hadn't
heard of Izzy.
    Jeffrey addressed Thea. "Isidore Cantor was…" He turned toward Adam. "But I should let you talk."
    "No, no," Adam said. "I'd like to hear what a bright young English professor has to say about the man."
    "Isidore Cantor was a writer. Between 1965 and 1992 he wrote five of the strangest, most unclassifiable novels that American literature has ever produced. In an essay he wrote for
Esquire
in the eighties he said—I think I can get this right—that Adam Weller, my oldest friend, is my conscience, literary as well as political. If I didn't know him my fiction would be flabby and my opinions ill informed.' The section about the two of you growing up in the Bronx was one of the most moving things he ever wrote."
    "It was a nice article," Adam said.
    "How did you become friends? He was a lot older."
    "Our mothers were best friends. We were in each other's apartments all the time. He was like an older brother. I worshipped him. He was the first person who ever mentioned Walt Whitman in my presence. Also the first person who ever mentioned Joe DiMaggio."
    "And you remained close friends until the end of his life," Jeffrey said, half as a statement, half as a question.
    "We did," Adam said quietly. "I was with him the night before he died."
    "And, if you don't mind my saying so, the fact that someone like you hasn't heard of him"—Jeffrey turned to Thea as he said this—"is proof of why we need a biography.