An eye, the earth, the rings of a tree, everything is a circle, and all circles, Walter said, have a centre. It was crazy for Anna to say what had happened was his own doing. If there was anything wrong with him really, then it had been made so by circumstances beyond his control, by, say, his churchy mother, or his father, an insurance official in Hartford, or his older sister, Cecile, who’d married a man forty years her senior. “I just wanted to get out of the house.” That was her excuse, and, to tell the truth, Walter had thought it reasonable enough.

But he did not know where to begin thinking about himself, did not know where to find the centre. The first telephone call? No, that had only been three days ago and, properly speaking, was the end, not the beginning. Well, he could start with Irving, for Irving was the first person he’d known in New York.

Now Irving was a sweet little Jewish boy with a remarkable talent for chess and not much else: he had silky hair, and pink baby cheeks, and looked about sixteen. Actually he was twenty-three, Walter’s age, and they’d met at a bar in the Village. Walter was alone and very lonesome in New York, and so when this sweet little Irving was friendly he decided maybe it would be a good a idea to be friendly, too – because you never can tell.