And you’d take your leave with your 0 so charming smile, and a butterfly kiss on the back of my neck… the kind you used to plant there when I was very small in the chest and very large in the jealous-of-mama department, whose face I can’t even remember any more.

I was browsing through Blake’s “Songs of Experience” after dinner hunting up old friends, when “A Poison Tree” renewed our acquaintance:

I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water d it in fears Night and morning with my tears, And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night, Till it bore an apple bright, And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole When the night had veil’d the pole;

In the morning, glad, I see My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.

I hadn’t read it in years. It’s rather awful, I think, although once I doted on it. But it does about sum me up just now, I mean what’s been going on away down inside where the heat’s unbearable. The San Virginia Fault. Guaranteed to give anybody’s seismograph the hotfoot when least expected.

Anyway.

Peter and I had an argument (“I was angry with my friend”) about where to meet. For some reason it seemed terribly vital to both of us. He was in as bad a case as I was, but oppositely oriented. He was in his Goddam Nino Mood, during which he usually threatens to shove Nino’s teeth down his throat. This time he wanted to climb up on the 43rd Street marquee of the Biltmore with a bullhorn, where everyone coming out of Grand Central on Vander-bilt and walking along Madison in the other direction could hear him proclaim our star-crossed love-everyone, including any passing newspaper reporter.