His grandmother was asking for him as she lay dying, they had written, and even though his mother’s side of the family were strangers, he drove out to see the old woman in Plain- field, New Jersey, on a Saturday afternoon in August that fell in the middle of an oppressive heat wave. He, Goodman, took a girl, Libby, having always decorated himself with womanly trinkets on occasions that required solemnity; he felt more comfortable in the company of a woman and realized that the importance he gave to her aesthetic acceptability reflected his own disquietude at any prospect of going it alone. The prettier the womanly trinket, he understood, the stronger he thought he appeared.

In the garden, standing alone, he found the young woman who was a friend of the writer William Hedges, then unknown but even Kafka had lived in obscurity, she said, and so moreover had Mendel, perhaps she meant Mendeleyev. They were staying in a little hotel across the Rhine. No one could seem to find it, she said.

This afternoon I went to the Beach to see a new hotel, the Brissy St. Jouin. It has been described as the “Naples ultra” of Miami splendor. 

Occasionally, if there was nothing of interest on television, Harry and Louise Overton played “featured actor.” They would call back and forth the names of supporting players from films of the thirties and early forties.

Marie stands by the elevator door, waiting for me. She takes my hat and coat, my handbag, and lays them by the table. She hangs my coat up. She turns to me and says “I have not seen you in a long time.” She emphasizes “a long time.” 

The ridiculous “taxi” swerved clownishly into the drive way of number 29, neatly clipping a (no doubt) cherished bough of white freesia from its parent bush, the blanched and waxen bells evoking with their split perfume momentarily—but just momentarily—the sunlit riverbank of my childhood, with its cool ferns (mist, borscht, mother, midges) and rescuing from their lunatic perambulations my disordered thoughts, which, like so many crazed sheep, had been straying far from their comfy ancien regime fold ever since I set foot on this ridiculous continent.

It happened just the other day. I can’t sleep. The whole thing makes me sick and throws me into a fever. I work in the park. Pick up papers and various articles with a stick. 

This morning the snow is falling again. It has already filled in the ruts in the drive. The snow makes me happy. Under it tired landscapes concede, errors disappear, and sin is bone under, the whiteness an absolute of infinite possible beginnings.

Barry Wingate walked out of the tunnel. He stopped in front of the barn across the lawn and took his windbreaker off. He began feeding dried com ears into a machine. Kernels of com spewed into a pail, making clattery noises. 

From Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, a paradisal coast bears the permanent exhaust of the automobile: shack towns, oil pumps, drive-ins, Tastee-Freeze bars, motels, service stations. At Ventura, the coast turns a comer which sends the Santa Ynez mountains east-west and lets the sun hang full on the beaches for its long day.