All night the sleeper sleeps close to a board, irons rattle, a violin played aft vibrates along the side, the body of the ship rises and falls, the engines beat on through seven hundred sleeps. The first day, yellow cliffs, blue coasts, next day, the steep green island south; a new world. Homeward bound on that ship in 1928, a Lithuanian woman in grey knitted skullcap, fifty five, short, sour, salty; a tall English woman, eighty-four in black, small hat and scarf, who stands for hours by the lounge wall waiting for the Great Bezu to rise; a missionary woman, thirty-nine invalided home, worn by tropical disease, her soft dark skin like old chamois; she is going back to the town, street, church she left eighteen years before, because of a painful love-affair with the pastor: his wife now dead, he has just married a girl from the choir, “Just as I was then,” she says.

George Paul came to see the Deans, man and wife, soon after dinner. Tall, ample, muscular, blue eyes in a red boyish face, thick bronze hair in a brush cut, he was fifty years old; but walking like a young man from the exercises he did to keep fit; and energetic, a restless worker. He looked tired and anxious.

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.

“The trouble with me, if you want to know, Mr. Winter doll, do find a match for me. Must I beg, for God’s sake? Thank you. I don’t really look like this. Christ, there I go. Stop it, Maggie. The trouble with me is that I’m not worldly. Find me another drink.

Brandauer had Tuna Fish for lunch every day of the nine years I knew him. Sometimes on rye toast, sometimes on white bread, sometimes with a Coke, sometimes with a small glass of milk. Not a full size

Constitutionally, temperamentally, against the grain of his better intentions, his background and even many of his actions, Wendell Spear, the film critic and historian, was avaricious.

I’d come expecting to detest Tao Thinh, I left detesting him, but for a strange moment in between, a moment that was of hours’, perhaps days’, duration, I experienced with him a kind of devilish sympathy that made for an intimacy closer, and, in its way, more disarming, even incantatory, than would have been possible had our natures harmonized.

An odd town, Venice has always drawn oddities to itself. Feel displaced, unwanted, unappreciated, come to Venice. Too contemptuous, indolent or poor to wash, shave 

Ah, Bixby, Mettro, Manishin and Marx. Sitting here in my high-ceilinged under-priced West End Avenue Co-op, waiting for my wife to come by and leave the keys for the last time, I am giving a party in my head.

It was the long bad time after the long good time. Stocks a puzzle, real estate stalled, the bond market iffy, Wall Street firms down to half their size. Two of his former associates under indictment: