The amusing thing that happened was that I did like the "ex," did like Joe, really liked him considerably better than I did Louie, for all of my moving in with Louie, having a hectic three or four months before we decided to do our drinking and shopping for groceries and other things separately. A funny business, but Joe and I-while all of this was happening-were able to talk together. He was from Brooklyn, but more British than some of the birds of passage who spent little interludes in Brooklyn Heights. We talked about books and records and cats and politics and interior decorating-the mainstays of Third Avenue bar conversation-and I remember a wry dissatisfaction on Louie's part when he discovered how well Joe and I were getting along. We talked about a helluva lot of things, were able to talk about almost everything except my relationship with Louie.

It wasn't long before Louie and I were fighting up and down Third Avenue, with and without Joe, and looking, in the process, for partisans and father-confessors and people to share the sadness and excitement of a relationship clearly destined to do nothing except fall apart but good. Rather naively, I thought Joe might be helpful, in terms of his experience with Louie: someone to talk to, someone to ask for advice. And that was where I hit the wall. Joe and I continued to talk about books and cats and records and politics. We drank together, lent one another money, and compared observations about the shifting clientele of this Third Avenue bar and that one. It remained impossible for me to discuss Louie with Joe, impossible to discover how he had moved out of his relationship with Louie, impossible to discover what meaning the break might have had, might still continue to have. Joe wasn't talking. didn't want to listen. On this frontier. Joe was about as impassive as a wooden cigar-store Indian, and about as helpful. Utterly impossible, I found, for me to get whatever I thought I wanted from Joe. So I moved out, solved my own problem, went my own way. I became rather pleased at my success at avoiding entangling alliances. Gradually, I became less concerned about my failure to get along with Louie, my inability to talk with Joe about Louie. Probably. I wouldn't be thinking about walls, about Louie, about Joe, about any of this, if I hadn't scribbled the drunken note to myself.

The real key. I now know, is Tommy. who became my successor with Louie. who made an "ex" of me in a somewhat officially recognized Third Avenue fashion. There was a parallel, latter-day ritual, almost everything except printed announcements. Tommy met me, as I had met Joe, with Louie presiding over the introductions, with my knowing who Tommy was, with his knowing who I was. with the ghost of Joe somewhere in the offing, enjoying the fun. No pulling of punches. Louie was enjoying the dramatic possibilities of the new situation as much as he had enjoyed the older one. Honestly speaking, I wasn't jealous. I wish I could have been. Basically, instead. I was rather glad that Louie had Tommy. Tommy was necessary, if I was to feel emancipated. I was curious to see how Tommy would operate when it came to diverting the thunder and lightning. when it came to playing his part in the production. I was glad that Louie had someone else to try to make a go of things with.

So time went on, and I became fairly adroit and cagey about avoiding bars where I was likely to run into Louie and Tommy. Louie and I were likely to become bitchy, likely to argue about the way we had mismanaged house-money, failed to keep this cat from getting knocked up. Joe, who had always been a wise and sensible guy, simply moved away. Was doing his drinking uptown the last I heard, as unwilling as I to be part of a quartet.

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