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small personal lives.

CONNAISSANCE DES ARTS
    M ISS H OGENTOGLER WAS A WAITRESS at the Huddle, where I ate a late breakfast after composition class, before I went to my drama class at noon. We had a half hour alone three days a week.
    At first I told Miss Hogentogler all the clever things I’d heard when I was in college. She was enchanted by the East—by the East she meant Boston and New York. She wished to be thin, beautiful, and wicked. Later that year she did become beautiful.
    She had fine brown hair, a high broad forehead, a large mouth, but with enough bone in her chin and cheeks to carry it off. But it was wishing that changed her. Or perhaps she was always beautiful and I finally saw it.
    During the fall I thought she was foolish and cute. She loved to have long talks. She prepared for them—but not in order to dominate them. Toward the end she would droop with submissive yearning: “Oh, Mr. Hendricks, I had no idea it was so complicated.”
    Miss Hogentogler loved to hear stories of elegant meanness, stories in which people’s feelings were crushed by a single word. I quickly ran through the famous lines: Whistler to Oscar Wilde; George Bernard Shaw about his American publisher; John Wilkes’s famous zeugma (Mr. Interlocutor to Mr. Wilkes: You, sir, will die either on the gallows or of a horrible venereal disease. Mr. Wilkes: That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your political principles—or your mistress). I think I remembered some Rochefoucauld and some Voltaire.
    I tried a few jokes of my own. She laughed politely. She had a beautiful polite laugh—as she sensed a punch line coming she would store up her polite laugh behind her large white teeth and then slowly unbite it.
    I told her that on a poem of mine that I had submitted to a poet-teacher I admired, she had written, “A gracefully minted coin—of small denomination.”
    Honorée opened her teeth. “Oh, that’s
wonderful!
”
    I tried to think of
bons mots
of which I had not been the butt. A friend of mine—at least someone I knew—said of Mary McCarthy’s oeuvre, “All her
romans
have feet of
clé
.” I had to explain this to Honorée, while she wrote it down on a napkin.
    I told her that I’d heard someone say (I knew someone who’d heard someone say)
à propos
of a philosophy grad student who stayed married to a shrew because she was typing his thesis, “That’s putting Descartes before divorce.”
    “Oh, Mr. Hendricks,” Honorée said, “did you really hear that?”
    I said, “Yes.”
    “Well, tell me, Mr. Hendricks, was this because—I mean, tell me honestly—is this because it was just men talking to each other? Are men wittier than women?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “Was the person who said this in college or graduate school? I mean, did they get that way by trying? Can you get that way by trying?”
    I cleared my throat. I said, “Don’t you think, Miss Hogentogler, that the phrase ‘natural sophistication’ is suspect? And in any event this sort of thing isn’t of the essence. Why are you so concerned about …”
    “Oh, Mr. Hendricks, I don’t
know
why.”
    It was a silly question on my part. An unfair question. I knew she had a crush on me. I was lonely. I was still finishing my thesis and worked long hours—not hard, but long. Something about me irritated my new colleagues. I had the coiled shyness of an only child who had gone to a large boarding school and a large university and who had learned to observe critically at a very early age. If others observed me as I observed them, I had every reason to be wary.
    I was born of handsome parents who lived a careful—or doI mean carefree?—life and who didn’t discover I was very little trouble until I was thirteen. At that point—during vacations—there came a sudden vault into grown-up worlds. My mother said to her cousin Josie (a woman I adored), “You know, Oliver’s manners are so good I can take him