He spent his first two hours in New York wearing an expression of riveted horror. This expression of riveted horror was not a response to American violence or vulgarity, to the disposition of American wealth, the quality of American politicians, the condition of American schooling or the standard of American book reviewing (hopelessly variable but often chasteningly high, he would later conclude). No. This expression of riveted horror Richard came to know well. He looked horrified and riveted, and he knew he looked horrified and riveted, because he was staring into the riveted horror of his own face.

In the bathroom, at the hotel. It was a shaving mirror, on a retractable arm, supplementing the broad background of the regular mirror (itself implacable enough). The shaving mirror had a light above it; it also had a light inside it. He thought there must be a lot of people who imagined they looked okay, who fancied they could pass for normal, until they met a shaving mirror in an American hotel. Then the jig was up. Presumably, with the human face, the worst possible representation will always be the truest. This was the best mirror, and it was the worst mirror. All other mirrors were in public relations. After an audience with such a mirror, only two places to go (and maybe the hotel took its cut): the cosmetic surgery, or the church. Richard tried to tell himself that he had looked terrible in London too. And memorably terrible. A week before departure he found that his passport, disused for some while, had quietly gone out of print, or been remaindered. So he breezed along to Woolworth's in Portobello Road and slipped into the booth, expeditiously, without even pausing to arrange his hair. Three minutes later he was shredding the strip of photographs with his fingernails-photographs in which he looked, at once, incredibly old, incredibly mad and incredibly ill. He returned to the beauty parlor of Calchalk Street, and then tried again; and he spent another six quid before he came up with anything he could seriously present at Petty France . . . The mirror had the power to hold him in position, like a vise. His face, it was nothing. It was scorched earth.

Next door on the bed there lay a bundle of early reviews and a copy of the schedule and some bright new hardbacks and even a spray of flowers, all sent by the publisher. By Gwyn's publisher, that is to say: to help him with his piece-his piece about Gwyn. There was nothing from BoldAgenda, no message, no word and no meaningful reply to the calls he kept making from the bathroom telephone, with his nose an inch from the glass. Richard's requests to speak to Leslie Eviy got bounced round the office until they seemed to evaporate or else were pounded into submission and silence by a background cacophony of impulsive home improvement, complete with pummeled nailheads and creaking bucket handles and one-liners tossed back and forth by guys with names like Tug and Tiff and Heft. In twenty minutes he was due upstairs: to listen in on Gwyn being interviewed. Then, when that was over, he was going to arrange to interview the interviewer about what Gwyn was like to interview. Richard left the bathroom and went and sat on the bed and calmly smoked his way through a panic attack. He wanted his boys with him, Marius on this side, Marco on that side. Marius here, Marco there. The mirror was telling him that his body was close to death but his mind felt six months old.

Gwyn's suite seemed as crowded as Coach: waiters, the hotel assistant manager, two interviewers, one incoming, one outgoing, two photographers ditto, two lady high-ups from Gwyn's publishers or its parent corporation and one publicity boy. The room was additionally infested with bouquets and bowls of fruit, presumably real but impressively fake-looking, and, at some unguessable level of authenticity, the excitement of increase, of reputable profit, the kind you get when commerce meets art and finds it good. Richard sat down near the publicity boy, who, he saw, was not only on the telephone but was physically attached to it: he had a thick wire circling his chin like a pilot's mouth-mike, freeing both his hands to cope with his laptop E-mail and all the other light-speed technologies they had wired him into. He was plumply handsome, the publicity boy, his backswept hair as darkly super-lustrous as an oil stain on a blacktop.

"I really do feel," Gwyn was saying, angling his head to accommodate the photographer who crouched at his feet, "that the novelist has to find a new simplicity."

"How, Gwyn, how?"

"By evolving into simplicity. By deciding on the new direction and heading for it."

"To where, Gwyn, where?"

"How about if we loop the Post guy," called the publicity boy, "and he can just watch you do the radio spot?"

"To fresh fields. Okay: the guy from EF can listen to me do the TV spot-from the audio booth. And pastures new."

"So have the signing after the reading but before the meeting.?

"Have the meeting during the signing. And I can get photographed while I'm getting photographed. Phyllis Widener. Richard Tull."

Richard knew from his Amelior Regained publicity pack that Phyllis Widener had a bold-print twice-weekly column in one of the New York tabloids: personalities, arts, local politics. Wry seniority was her thing; she was meant to be twinkly and unfoolable. That's what you got when you were old: experience. And maturity too. In person, Phyllis seemed to be the kind of American woman who had taken a couple of American ideas (niceness, warmth) and then turned up some dreadful dial, as if these qualities, like the yield of a hydrogen bomb, had no upper limit- the range had no top to it-and just went on getting bigger and better as you lashed them toward infinity. Only her colleagues and superiors knew that the pieces she wrote, over many hours and many cups of strong coffee in her small and memento-strewn apartment on Thirteenth Street, often and increasingly turned out to be unusably vicious . . . Richard found a bit of hotel notepaper and a hotel biro and dragged up a chair. He was immediately rewarded with a good bit for his piece: Gwyn pausing mid-word, actually mid-syllable (halfway through "unsophisticated"), like a machine himself, when Phyllis's tape clicked off at the end of its spool; he sat there with his mouth open, on pause, while she replaced it. Meanwhile too it became clear that the energies of the publicity boy were directed not to the further accrual of publicity opportunities but to their radical attenuation.

"Unsophisticated approach, then that's their opinion. I prefer to liken it to carpentry."

"Are you a carpenter, Gwyn?"

"With wood, a poor one, Phyllis. With words, well, I have my molds and templates, my spirit level, my trusty saw."

"I think it's so beautiful the way you say that."

"You know. Pottering away."

The interview ended, and the room thinned out, and Gwyn, who looked fresh enough to Richard, went to freshen up next door. So he was left alone with Phyllis; he sat there, rinsed in her entirely embarrassing gaze, and duly began to interview Phyllis about her interview with Gwyn. After a minute and a half he had no more questions.

Preceded by the publicity boy, Gwyn passed through the room. He was expected downstairs in the restaurant, to be interviewed.

"I have been busy," he said to Richard, "on your behalf. How's your

schedule? There's a press interview in Miami and a big radio slot in Chicago. And a reading-signing in Boston. I was wondering if you could work them in.?

"Why's this?"

"I'm double-dated all over the place. I offered them you. It's all fixed."

Gwyn's was a non-smoking suite, on a non-smoking floor. Over half the hotel was non-smoking. Whereas Richard had dedicated his life to the cause of non-non-smoking. He had laid it down, his life. They sat in silence until Phyllis said,