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how’d you get in?” I asked him. “Didn’t you have to submit a sample of work?”
    “I had talent,” he said, extinguishing the match with an insouciant shake. “One story’s worth. But it’s all right. I’m not planning to be a writer.” He paused a moment after he said that, to let it sink in, and I got the feeling that he’d been waiting to have this conversation for a very long time. I imagined him at home, blowing sophisticated plumes of smoke at the reflection in his bedroom mirror, tying and retying his cashmere scarf. “I’m taking this class to learn about writers as much as writing.” He sat back in his seat and coil by coil unwrapped the scarf from his neck. “I intend to be the Max Perkins of our generation.”
    His expression was grave and earnest but there was still a slight wrinkling of mockery at the corners of his eyes, as though he were daring me to admit that I didn’t know who Maxwell Perkins was.
    “Oh, yeah?” I said, determined to match his grandiosity and arrogance with my own. I had spent plenty of time impressing my own mirror with bons mots and intrepid writerly gazes. I had a Greek fisherman’s sweater that I used to put on and flatter myself for having Hemingway’s brow. “Well, then, I intend to be the Bill Faulkner.”
    He smiled. “You have a lot farther to go than I do,” he said.
    “Fuck you,” I said, taking a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt.
    As we drank our espressos I told him about myself and my wanderings over the past few years, embellishing my account with shameless references to wild if vague sexual encounters. I sensed a certain awkwardness on his part around the subject of girls and I asked if he was seeing anyone, but he grew monosyllabic and I quickly backed off. Instead I told him the story of Albert Vetch, and I could see, when I had finished, that it moved him.
    “So,” he said, looking solemn. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a slim hardback book in a buff-colored dust jacket. He passed it to me across the table, two-handed, as though it were an overflowing cup. “You must have seen this,”
    It was a collection, published by Arkham House, of twenty short stories by August Van Zorn.
    “The Abominations of Plunkettsburg and Other Tales ,” I said. “When did this come out?”
    “A couple of years ago. They’re a specialty house. You have to go looking for it.”
    I turned the deckled pages of the book Albert Vetch hadn’t lived to hold. There was a laudatory text printed on the jacket flaps, and a startling photograph of the plain, high-browed, bespectacled man who had struggled for years, in his room in the turret of the McClelland Hotel, with unnameable regret, with the emptiness of his external life, with the ravages of the midnight disease. You certainly couldn’t see any of that in the picture. He looked relaxed, even handsome, and his hair was just a bit unkempt, as befitting a scholar of Blake.
    “Keep it,” said Crabtree. “Seeing as how you knew him.”
    “Thanks, Crabtree,” I said, flush once more with a sudden unreasonable affection for this small, skinny person with his scarf and his awkwardness and his studied displays of arrogance and scorn. Later they lost that quality of studiedness, of course, and hardened into automatic mannerisms not universally admired. “Maybe someday you’ll be my editor, huh?”
    “Maybe,” he said. “You need one, that’s for sure.”
    We smiled at each other and shook hands on it, and then the young woman I’d been avoiding came up from behind and poured a pitcher of ice water onto my head, drenching not only me but the book by August Van Zorn, ruining it beyond repair; or at least that’s the way I remember it happening.

T HE WINDSHIELD WIPERS played their endless game of tag as we sat parked on Smithfield Street, smoking a little piece of Humboldt County and waiting for my third wife, Emily, to emerge from the lobby of the Baxter Building, where she