As we climb the three flights to his apartment, Meiselman leans against me. This is the apartment in which he had grown up, the apartment he lived in with his parents and shared with his father after his mother's death. Walking into it I feel I am returning to the early 1960s. A lime-coloured green shag rug, wall-to-wall, covers the floor. A white couch is against one wall, under a painting of a girl in profile with a large tear falling from her eye and holding a pet rabbit. A glass coffee table sits before the couch, with a bowl filled with hard candies upon it. A large ornate lamp is on a table between two red velour chairs at the front window. On the mantle over the sealed-up fireplace is a shadow box, in whose many inserts are different kinds of tea cups and saucers, a collection doubtless of Meiselman's long-dead mother. 

This living room is not so different from the one I had grown up in, though Meiselman's is, from age, shabbier. I note lots of dust everywhere. Another difference is that every flat surface in the room is covered by papers or books and magazines, a mark of the bachelor intellectual, even, as in Meiselman's case, the failed one. 

Meiselman flops on the white couch, without bothering to take off his New Balance running shoes. "If my mother saw me like this on her couch," he says, "she would have three conniptions and four heart attacks."

"Mine, too," I say, "except our white couch had plastic covers. You and I are the children of the white-couch brigade."

Meiselman's eyes are closed. He doesn't hear me. He is falling asleep.

"Excuse me if I'm not more sociable," he says.   

"Don't worry about it, Irwin," I say. It strikes me that I have not before now called him by his first name. "I'll pick you same time, same place, on Wednesday."

"Thanks, Ed," I hear him mutter, as I close the front door behind me. 

Driving back to Evanston I think about what it was that had given Meiselman first his artistic and now his scholarly aspirations. How does it come about that a guy like Meiselman can think he is able to write poems that anyone in the world is likely to care in the least about? In his sleep right now, it occurs to me, he may well be dreaming of the acclaim his book on immigration will earn. 

My own case, was it all that different? I wrote novels. A firm in New York agreed to publish five of them, though I couldn't be sure how many more they might want. The novels were respectfully reviewed, but sold in modest numbers. The small advances I got for them supplemented    the income from my teaching job at Northeastern Illinois and lent me cachet as a teacher of creative writing. They also allowed me to think of myself as a writer.