 By July 1964, having left Paris behind, my mind cleared like an old painting found in a corner and dusted off. Enduring the hideous heat of a New York summer (for the fourth and last time in my life) in the little walk-up apartment in the East Village, I regained my health by force feeding into my face endless bananas, orange and V-8 juice, buttermilk, and bowls of wheat germ cereal laced with milk and raisins. Late that month my old friend from Indiana and her new husband came to town, and we rented a storefront together in the same neighborhood. Felix arrived from Europe in mid-August and decided to get his own apartment nearby. He got a job at an art gallery uptown and a scholarship to Brooklyn Museum Art School and told me he was no longer in love. I was sad, but the bond between us was not yet broken and I decided to stay on in New York, finding work that fall in an office in downtown Manhattan proofreading for a typing service for $75/week.
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