The Heat of the Sun

more bourgeois?’
    Aunt Toolie pulled my nose and I howled.
    Dutifully, I sidled off to look for Miss Day. I ended up in the annexe at the back of the apartment, a sort of boxroom on a grand scale, with paper peeling from the walls in strips and clutter
heaped precariously in cobwebbed piles. My quarry, outlined by the moon through an open window, squatted on the fire escape. Awkwardly, ashplant slipping, I clambered out to join her. No rain fell
any more, but the tiles and chimneys and well-like yard below were black mirrors, sleek with wetness.
    I should have liked to sit with Miss Day, but my leg made it impossible. Sadly, I looked down at her. She was beautiful. That night she wore chunky costume jewellery and a yellow beret, beneath
which she had swept up her long black hair. Her face was silvery in the pale light. And what did she see? A prim bookworm with a bad leg. I wore a spotted bow tie, a tweed jacket with
leather-patched elbows, cord trousers, and argyle socks. There were cuts on my neck where my razor had slipped while negotiating the territory around my Adam’s apple.
    My position with Miss Day was a peculiar one. We seldom spoke – I was shy around her – but Aunt Toolie had told me so much that I felt I knew her intimately. Her employment disasters
formed a never-ending saga. Miss Day had adopted many careers while awaiting her Broadway break: stenographer, waitress, swimming-pool attendant, factory girl, bakery assistant. Each career ended
ignominiously. The library at Columbia fired her for reading the novels she should have been putting on shelves. St Vincent’s Hospital let her go for talking to patients instead of mopping
out the wards. Her days as an usherette at the Shubert Theatre ended when she was discovered in a compromising position with an audience member in the back row. Defensively, she had pointed out
that the fellow was an old flame. Only yesterday a theatrical booking agency had fired her; it seemed she had got two of the acts mixed up. ‘A children’s pantomime,’ Aunt Toolie
told me, ‘and a burlesque show. Dear Agnes! Was there ever such a girl?’
    I was about to venture a remark on Arnold Blitzstein, and whether Miss Day thought he was the saviour of Western music, when a voice startled me: ‘Sharpless! It is you, isn’t
it?’
    At the end of the balcony, hunched over the balustrade, was a small man in evening dress with long, pale hair. A cigarette glowed in his hand. He had turned to me, and his eyes glittered.
    Of course, I knew him at once.
    Not since the night he knocked out Eddie Scranway had I seen Trouble. That victory had seemed at the time a new start, a marvellous beginning. In truth, it was an end. Next term, Trouble was
gone from Blaze. Scranway’s father, the head of the Board of Trustees, had taken up the matter, demanding expulsion. Trouble was sent to a day school on Long Island. It’s ever so
progressive , he wrote to me. Boys and girls are mixed, and we have swimming lessons in the nude. For a few months we exchanged letters, but, as is the way with prep school boys, neither
of us kept it up. But I thought of Trouble often and wondered what had become of him.
    Eagerly, I moved forward to shake his hand. How diminutive he was! He had barely grown since Blaze. Next to him I felt lumbering, absurd. When he asked me why I was at this party, I explained
that the hostess was my aunt. ‘Don’t tell me you know Aunt Toolie too.’
    ‘Oh, I came up with some fellows from the place downstairs. Not sure where they’ve gone. That apparition’s your aunt? Quite a legend, it seems.’
    ‘I didn’t know you were in New York,’ I said.
    ‘I’ve been abroad. I’ve been all over. I’m just back from Europe.’
    Only after some moments did I realize that Agnes Day had gone. She must have slipped back inside while Trouble and I were talking.
    Our old intimacy might never have been broken. He suggested we needed a drink. That night, in an apartment swirling with smoke and chatter and squawking jazz, huddled on one of my aunt’s
shabby sofas, we learned about our lives since we had last seen each other. Swiftly, I passed over my days at Yale – my scholarly career had been less than glorious – and announced,
with a firmness that surprised me, my ambitions as a poet. Did I reveal, that night, that it had been Trouble, and the strange magic he created around him at Blaze, that first had stirred me to
write? I suppose not. I was more