It creaked with newness. I have another copy of Steppenwolf somewhere, I said. It’s battered beyond belief. Scratching and scrawling in the margins, in the line-spacing. What else would you expect of a novel, a holdall, that is the guide for a young girl to teach an old man to dance again?—to start dancing, in fact! To live and laugh and cry among the little corners of life. Those corners that can expand in genuine diametric enormity to themselves. Forget the ideas that present as big. You know, both my ex-wives, nothing against them, God bless their cotton socks, were married to grandiose ideals. I’ve never been in love with a woman who knew how to trivialise life to the point of letting go. Really letting go. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do—let go. You should shut up now, she said. In fact, don’t talk again tonight. Perhaps ever. You’re really full of the most god-awful hubristic wind, well-disguised as it is.  Listen to this, she said, and she got up and produced an album from her satchel, popped it in on the turntable, set it in motion. You know, I began… Shhtschhh! She brusquely cut me off, her index finger held hard to her pursed lips. The music was all Latin-America, all rhythm. She began to sweep herself across the floor and around the room as if led by the strongest of dance partners. The smile on her face was the most giddily infectious thing I have ever borne witness to. I held my tongue and internalised a cosmogony of arousal; arousal that had nothing to do with her physical being. I then held aloft an old paint rag doused in turpentine and set it alight with nothing more than the incendiary abrasiveness of my bad breath. And, you know, I’ve tried that trick at many a party since, with nought success. I’ve even copped a few beatings because of bets I’ve made around it, lost. Hard lessons are learned about the ones that set us on fire for a certain purpose, and the ones who do not set us alight at all. At least that’s what I’ve discovered.

I think.