Show me, then, I almost said. Show me a thing like that, a pleasure to count on when the other pleasures fade, when the candle goes out. But I couldn’t. To begin with, what educated person would actually believe such an offer? It sounded too much like the advertisements on talk radio—for investments in gold, arthritis creams, jobs that paid you eight thousand dollars a month for working a few hours a day at home. Second, I could not open myself to him at that point, to anyone in that way. I paid him back then for his silences and just studied the water rushing below us, muddied in its frenzy:
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