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might need the helmet. "Victor, I don't necessarily read that as a reference to you."
    "Russell, my dear boy, every literary intellectual in America scans that sentence and says, 'For "rococo goldsmiths," read "Victor Propp."
    "Not to worry, Victor. There are only three or four literary intellectuals left in the whole goddamn country." It wasn't that Victor didn't have his detractors; just that he nicely illustrated Delmore Schwartz's maxim that even paranoids have enemies.
    "Despite your considerable intelligence, Russell, you are remarkably naive. Do you suppose it has anything to do with coming from the Midwest? Not that it's an unattractive quality. It's very American. The thing about real Americans ..."
    Russell looked at his watch as Victor started sermonizing about the land of the freaks and home of the slaves. Eleven-forty. He wet his finger with saliva and polished the crystal. Scanning a report on his desk, he was pleased to discover that Scavengers and Birds of Prey, a selected edition of the Audubon plates, was going into another printing. He had guessed correctly that the fiercer birds would be popular in the current climate. He tuned in on a rising interrogatory note in the great man's voice, though Victor's questions were usually rhetorical.
    "... doesn't he? That is to say, Jeff has this very granitic, Yankee quality in his prose which I quite like, the natural thing that Salinger had to work at so obsessively, being a Jew—believe me, I know. But I wonder how to account for all the press on his book?"
    Russell tried to remember if he'd ever told Victor that Corrine once had lunch with Salinger, but decided to leave well enough alone.
    "I like Jeff's prose quite a bit, its wonderful loopy vitality, but I'm wondering if we shouldn't be working on getting me more press at this point in my career."
    "Victor, you don't have a book, number one, and number two, you don't exactly write for the People magazine crowd. Don't worry about this shit. Remember what Bob Dylan said, 'He's got everything he needs, he's an artist, he don't look back.' "
    Victor probably was an artist, one of the few in Russell's wide and arty acquaintance, but he didn't seem to have anything he needed and he was constantly looking back, down, around—as if in a maze or a conspiracy. Not trusting the evidence of his senses, he wasn't about to take reality for granted.
    "What I'm saying, Russell, is that I think we ought to work on raising my visibility."
    "Let's have lunch and talk about it..." Russell found an opening in his datebook ten days away and was able to hang up just a few minutes later.
    Donna slouched in with the mail, her haircut reminiscent of a Punic War-era Roman helmet. Clad in black spandex, wearing an "Eat the Rich" button, Donna was a token punk here in a landscape of tartan and tweed. She had a streetwise sense of humor and a hard-boiled telephone manner, which usefully intimidated importunate authors and agents and infuriated Russell's colleagues. She occasionally irritated even her admiring boss with third-hand anarchist posturing. Punk was already a historical fashion, a reified sensibility—the safety pin through the earlobe only slightly less dated than love beads, and now even love beads seemed on the verge of a comeback. Russell was sometimes tempted to tell her the whole scene was middle-aged by the time he arrived in Manhattan about a hundred years before, in 1980, tell her the meaning and origin of épater la bourgeoisie. But nothing very interesting had come along in the way of a counterculture since then, unless you counted a recent infestation of titled Europeans, and having Donna around made him feel in touch with the tonsorial practices and the music around St. Mark's Place.
    "What do the rich taste like, do you suppose," he asked her.
    "Huh?" Donna stopped in the doorway of the office to consider the question. She shrugged, a chronic gesture. "The ladies taste like tuna fish, I guess. The gentlemen taste