scenes. Not an angel, never, no matter how coifed, how trimmed, though sometimes one is crueler than one ought be in the night, absent the presence of friends, with whom, as I’ve said—written, Stokowski— before, one can dare to be alone and share that unembarrassed silence which is the mark of true friendship. O, it was late and we’d all wandered uptown a block or two and had a bite to eat amid the cabbies, the porters and the prostitutes: salty squares of the socalled Sicilian pizza the crew craved, all of us (me most) led there by a true angel, this wonderful girl of Monsaingeon’s, Irish with a sweet large ass and warm hands who, jesus lord almost alone in fifty years, saw how cold they really were, kind you’d call in the night to understand or silence at a distance, cross a continent in a Continental for, “but when I hold your hand, I know you couldn’t be/the way you used to be” as Petula had it, and I was cold and lonely even under the thick cheese, the sweaters and the parka, literally shivering when we came back into the 30th street lights and begun to settle in for heaven knows what take, my hands barely warming, the slab of curds and salt sitting there at the center of me, hands already bloating like a drowned man in the ocean, and just as we’re settling in for another go at it, this sweet lug comes near, best boy or key grip or some such stringing cable, looking frightened in the way men are with men, and sweetly asks (as if put up to it), “you know this one?” and, lord knows, hums! can you imagine!, like some anglican choirboy, the Polonaise Militaire (PAHM-papap-ah-pa-pa-pa-pa... PAHMpa-ahpa...) a big guy sounding for all the world like a television commercial for the world’s best loved classics and so I tell him, “No,” just that—of course not, lord knows, he or anyone should know how I feel about the polack fop—and he says, never missing a beat if you like, “Well that’s too bad then, I would have liked you to play it for us,” so sweetly, dear jesus, as if shall we gather, not by the river, but by the parlour pee-annie, or the taproom spinet, so sweetly that I think well, that’s it exactly, isn’t it? how exactly you’d play the Polish General’s languorous cantilenas and noodling parade songs, of corze: just draw him out into the taproom and make him dance like Brahms, turn the militaire to Siegfried’s barracks tenderness, and so when Monty says “shall we have a take?” I just start with the Polonaise instead, letting the river flow, very chromatic and sicilian salty harmonic sweet and manly, “I’ll never understand the way you treated me, but when I hold your hand, I know you couldn’t be...” ladadadadah... playing with the idea for twenty minutes or so and ending in a laughing flourish, the best boy smiling, everybody laughing, O late night laughing, and when I ask Bruno if he’s taped it, he says “Jesus! no...” and we laugh all the harder, a dying race of women with warm hands and laughing men