“Oh stop it!”
“I’m ambulatory, let’s agree on that much. And now might I ask you something?”
“Go on.”
“Why are you and I always talking about me?”
“It must be our favorite subject.”
“It’s not my favorite subject.”
“‘Mankind is not a subject of fiction; he is the only subject.’ You said that the first day of class. Remember?”
“Forster. And he said ‘man’, not mankind. For sure he didn’t say Stewart Detweiler.”
“Stewart Detweiler’s a man.”
“Stewart Detweiler’s a bore. Let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about you. Tell me something I don’t know about you. Anything.”
“When I was little, I used to be an aural Tom.”
“A what?”
“A Peeping Tom, only instead of my eyes I used my ears.”
“An eavesdropper, you mean?”
“No, I mean an aural Tom. That’s what I called it. It started the first
