“When I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and there she was stuck up there, naked, on a bookcase.”

The two old men met early each afternoon on the pleasant wide porch and waited for the postman. The porch faced the park, the water and the afternoon sun. There were glass jalousie windows which could be rolled shut when the winter wind came up across the Tampa Bay.

Last year I was invited to give a walking tour and lecture to UNC students in a summer abroad program. I was to take them to St. Germain, St. Sulpice, and the Luxembourg to show them where the writers of the 1950s had hung out. I hoped to make them feel how exciting it was to walk up any street near St. Sulpice and maybe see the now great poet Christopher Logue, even his hair raging, elaborating to Trocchi, or to turn the corner at the Luxembourg and run into the ever busy Robert Silvers maybe with Jack Fisher from Harper’s in tow talking about writers waiting to be published. Or to start down the rue de Tournon and see, on the terrace of the café, Eugene Walters and Pati Hill, Blair Fuller, Alfred Chester, or even Evan Connell on one of his rare daytime visits there.