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undisturbed—I'd gone down to the Strand, the venerable used-book store south of Union Square, and for under a hundred dollars I'd been able to purchase original editions of the six volumes of E. I. Lonoff's short stories. The books happened also to be in my library at home, but I'd bought them anyway and carried them back to the hotel in order to skip chronologically through the various volumes during the hours I would have to remain in New York.
    When you undertake an experiment like this after spending twenty or thirty years away from a writer's work, you can't be sure what you're going to turn up, about either the datedness of the once admired writer or the naivete of the enthusiast you once were. But by midnight I was no less convinced than I was in the 1950s that the narrow range of Lonoff's prose and the restricted scope of his interests and the unyielding restraint he employed, rather than collapsing inward a story's implications and diminishing its impact, produced instead the enigmatic reverberations of a gong, reverberations that left one marveling at how so much gravity and so much levity could be joined, in so small a space, to a skepticism so far-reaching. It was precisely the limitation of means that made of each little story not something stultifying but a feat of magic, as if a folk tale or a fairy tale or a Mother Goose rhyme were inwardly illuminated by the mind of Pascal.
    He was as good as I had thought. He was better. It was as though there were some color previously missing or withheld from our literary spectrum and Lonoff alone had it. Lonoff
was
that color, a twentieth-century American writer unlike any other, and he had been out of print for decades. I wondered if his achievement would have been so completely forgotten if he had finished his novel and lived to see it published. I wondered if he
had
been working on a novel at the end of his life. If not, how was one to understand the silence preceding his death, those five years that coincided with the breakup of his marriage to Hope and the new life undertaken alongside Amy Bellette? I could still remember the mordant, uncomplaining way he had described to me, a worshipful young acolyte eager to emulate him, the monotony of an existence that was composed of painstakingly writing his stories throughout the day, reading studiously, with a notebook at his side, in the evening, and, nearly mute from mental fatigue, sharing meals and a bed with a loyal, wretchedly lonely wife of thirty-five years. (For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.) One might have imagined a regeneration of intensity—and, with it, of productivity—in an original writer of such imposing fortitude, still not quite into his sixties, who had arranged finally to escape this imprisoning regimen (or whose wife had forced him, by her angry, precipitate departure) and to take as his mate a charming, intelligent, adoring young woman half his age. One might have imagined that after tearing himself away from the rural landscape and the married life that together held him in check—that made the artistic enterprise for him so ruthlessly rock-bottom a sacrifice—E. I. Lonoff wouldn't have had to be quite so severely punished for his waywardness, needn't have had to be reduced to so annihilating a silence just for daring to believe that he might be permitted to rewrite fifty times over his paragraph a day while living in something other than a cage.
    What
was
the story of those five years? Once something did happen to that sedate, reclusive writer who—assisted by the forlorn irony that pervaded his view of the world—had bravely resigned himself to nothing's ever happening
to him, what then ensued? Amy Bellette would know—
she
was what had happened to him. If somewhere there was the manuscript of a Lonoff novel, finished or unfinished, she'd know about that, too. Unless the entire estate had passed on to Hope and the three