Monday morning I was waiting for my breakfast date at the bar at Bubby’s, and a guy came by, and he said: “Must be a good book you’re reading.”

“Yes,” I said. “Peter Carey.”

“Never hearda him.”

I held up the book so he could see.

He squinted at the cover, then he said: “Never hearda him.”

I suppose, now, there are other things one could say to identify Peter Carey, but the first that came to mind was: “He’s Australian.”

“Never hearda—”

“But I think he lives in New York now.”

“Never hearda him.”

He wouldn’t stop talking, then, this guy, Ralph, who is trying to get his cleaning business up and running, and he was the sort of fella who refers to himself in the third person. “I tell myself,” he said, “‘Ralph, what am I doing wrong?’”

He was a blinker, Ralph, he’d roll his eyes and blink in between sentences, sometimes in between words. A tattoo on the lower part of his right arm read, in uneven uppercase letters: NEZ + MARY.

I phoned my breakfast date, now half an hour late, and found out I was twenty-four hours early. I excused myself from Ralph, then, and sat down to one sour cream pancake, a turkey-apple sausage, and Peter Carey.