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father’s wisest move is to trick another man into raising his child while he—my father!—distributes his likeness among other women. So bleak, so loveless. We’re alone then, all of us, even me, each treading a deserted highway, toting in a bundle on a shouldered stick the schemes, the flow charts, for unconscious advancement.
    Too much to bear, too grim to be true. Why would the world configure itself so harshly? Among much else, people are sociable and kind. Ripeness isn’t everything. My mother is more than my landlord. My father longs not for the widest dissemination of his selfhood, but for his wife and, surely, his only son. I don’t believe the sages of the life sciences. He must love me, wants to move back in, will care for me—given the chance. And she’s never caused me to miss a meal, and until this afternoon has decently refused a third glass on my account. It’s not her love that’s failing. It’s mine. It’s my resentment that falls between us. I refuse to say I hate her. But to abandon a poet, any poet, for Claude!
    That’s hard, and what’s also hard is that the poet is so soft. John Cairncross, ousted from his family home, his grandfather’s purchase, for a philosophy of “personal growth”—a phrase as paradoxical as “easy listening.” To be apart so they can be together, turn their backs so they might embrace, stop loving so they can fall in love. He bought it. What a sap! Between his weakness and her deceit was the fetid crack that spontaneously generated a maggot-uncle. And I squat here sealed in my private life, in a lingering, sultry dusk, impatiently dreaming.
    What I could do if instead I was at my peak. Let’s say twenty-eight years from now. Jeans faded and tight, abs tight and ridged, moving sleekly like a panther, temporarily immortal. Fetching my ancient father in a taxi from Shoreditch to install him, deaf to Trudy’s matronly protests, in his library, in his bed. Catching old Uncle Maggot by the neck to toss him into the leafy gutter of Hamilton Terrace. Hushing my mother with a careless kiss to her nape.
    But here’s life’s most limiting truth—it’s always now, always here, never then and there. And now we are frying in a London heatwave, here on an unsound balcony. I listen to her refill the glass, the plop of plastic cubes, her soft sigh, more anxious than content. A fourth glass then. She must think I’m old enough to take it. And I am. We’re getting drunk because even now her lover is conferring with his brother in the windowless office of the Cairncross Press.
    To divert myself I send my thoughts ahead to spy on them. Purely an exercise of the imagination. Nothing here is real.
    The soft loan is laid out on the crowded desk.
    “John, she truly loves you but she’s asked me as trusted family member to ask you to stay away for just a little while. Best hope for your marriage. Erm. It’ll come out right in the end. I should’ve guessed your rent was in arrears. But. Please say yes, take the cash, let her have her space.”
    It sits between them on the desk, five thousand pounds in filthy fifties, five odorous heaps of red scrip. To each side are poetry books and typescripts loosely piled, sharpened pencils, and two glass ashtrays, well filled, a bottle of Scotch, a gentle Tomintoul with an inch remaining, a crystal tumbler, a dead fly on its back inside, several aspirins lying on an unused tissue. Squalid marks of honest toil.
    My guess is this. My father has never understood his younger brother. Never thought it worth the sweat. And John doesn’t like a confrontation. His gaze won’t meet the money on the desk. It wouldn’t occur to him to explain that returning home to be with wife and child is all he wants.
    Instead he says, “This came in yesterday. Would you like to hear a poem about an owl?”
    Just the kind of irrelevant whimsy that Claude hated as a child. He shakes his head,
no please spare me
, but it’s too late.
    My father has a single