There are three important furnishings in my den (which sometimes serves as a second office). One is a big black desk where I read and, now and then, brood over my life. Across from the desk, hanging in the center of an otherwise empty white wall, is a small oil painting, Alienated Man, done by the genius Paul Klee. I'd been given the painting, quite recently, by a young woman who taught me, better than my Communist father ever could, that wealth was mostly just a trick of the mind.

Under the window sits a daybed that can also be used as a couch. I sat there for a while, looking over a dark swath that I knew was the mighty Hudson River.

Sitting in darkness, I experienced a re-revelation: I didn't want the life I was living; I never had. Home-schooled on Hegel, Marx, and Bakunin until the age of twelve, I-from then on a ward of the state-had gone, continuously, downhill.

I spent no more than three minutes feeling sorry for my lot. One hundred eighty seconds isn't bad in the wee hours when no one can see you, or hear.

I thought for a while about the women who populated my night: Katrina, who believed that adult love was either beauty and wealth or else an act of will; Lucy, who was more willing than I had ever been; Wanda Soa was dead; and a woman named Tara wasn't there-or maybe she was Wanda and dead two times. That should be enough for any man. But I wasn't interested in them. All I cared about was Aura Ullman with her Aryan eyes and Ethiopian skin, her natural and deep understanding of what it meant to live under a lawless star.