AFTER HER HUSBAND LEFT HER FOR SOME FLOOZIE WHO was supposed to be an executive secretary at the crummy half-assed company he’d worked at for years without a raise or even so much as a bottle of cheap whiskey at Christmas, she packed up a few things, took the girl, and moved in with her cousin Janet on Gerritsen Avenue. She’d get the rest of her things after her father had spoken with the rat about his plans for taking his clothes out of the house: she didn’t ever want to see his face again. She should have known that something was going on when he took to wearing a ridiculous homburg instead of his usual fedora. She’d laughed at the hat and he’d blushed and then got angry. Now that she thought back on this she realized that the tramp must have said something about how distinguished he’d look in a homburg, and the damn fool went to the haberdashery, probably the Owl Men’s Shop, where the kike told him he could be a banker in a hat like that. Happy as a clam. After a couple of weeks, she went back to the house to pack a suitcase with some of her toiletries, and found a note from him on the kitchen table, pinned under a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. “Dear Sweetheart, I’ve made a great mistake but I love you only, you, can you forgive me? Please call me at Ralph’s or leave a message with him for a time I can talk to you. I love you, and want our marriage to last more than you can know.” She put the letter in her handbag, went upstairs to their bedroom, and opened a drawer in her dresser. In among her lingerie and stockings she found his white silk scarf, the one with the blue polka dots that she’d always liked so much. She startled herself by laughing convulsively, then threw the scarf on the floor and stepped on it. The son of a bitch bastard son of a bitch.

AT THE WHITE-WINE BOOK PARTY, AN EVENT HIS NERVOUS publisher had never even begun to conceive of as a portent of his memoir’s surprising and modest but somewhat hysterical celebrity, he bumped into Napoleon, a “bro,” as the cant of the day momentarily had it, who had been one of his drug suppliers in his high school days. Napoleon was quite different now, dressed in a dark, conservatively cut suit, and an elegant tie against a gleaming white shirt. He thought to say how far they’d come from the old days, but realized how jejune such a remark would be and kept still. Napoleon’s card announced him as an Entertainment Consultant, and listed addresses in both Chelsea and Williamsburg. They laughed and postured, the usual half-true stories were hauled out, and Napoleon’s wife, Claire, smiled brilliantly in her role as ignorant but pleased outsider. She was an arrestingly beautiful young woman, whom the memoirist immediately decided to pursue; his pursuit of her led to a sexual encounter some weeks later, then another, and soon they were lovers. According to Claire, Napoleon was not interested in her comings and goings, and had other girls. This fact, true or not, somewhat tarnished the exoticism of the affair for the memoirist, and he felt on the cusp of boredom. One day, Claire, pale and nervous and chain-smoking the execrable Gitanes that sex had instructed him to tolerate, told him that she’d been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He comforted her with assorted clichés, held her tenderly, fucked her with what he was certain was sensitive caring, and sent her home with a stricken yet deeply compassionate look on his face: sadness beyond words, of course. That was that! He had, after all, literary responsibilities, publicity tasks to honor, people to talk to and cultivate, too many things to do to permit this exhausted intrigue to continue. She might want sympathy or understanding or whatever it is that the incurably sick want. Well, she was married. He stopped calling her, and did not acknowledge the messages she left on his answering machine. That, indeed, was that. She died less than a year later, while he was in Los Angeles, where he had moved to further his romantically stalled career, as he probably liked to think of it.

CLAUDIA, AS SHE HAD TAKEN TO CALLING HERSELF THESE past five years, came in from her supper at the Parisian diner at about six o’clock, as usual. She’d had a hot brisket sandwich and a small salad and they’d refilled her iced tea free of charge; she was a good customer. She double-locked the door and slid the chain on, then hung up her coat. She took off her dress and slip and laid them carefully over the back of a chair, put on her pink chenille bathrobe, placed her flats in the back of the closet and slipped her feet into worn corduroy slippers. The apartment was silent, save for the thin clanking of the two radiators that warmed the small rooms. The letter from Warren that had come a week before lay on the kitchen table. She hadn’t opened it, nor would she, of course, and in a week or two, or maybe a month or even longer, she’d throw it away unread. There was something satisfyingly insulting and contemptuous about ignoring the letter. It would be, she knew, just like the others from the pig — those that she, like a fool, bothered to read — maudlin and self-pitying, filled with regrets and sentimental clichés about the sacredness of marriage and love and the gift of children from a loving God; about being together through thick and thin, about, God help us, their honeymoon even, which had become sacred. He’d have the gall, certainly he would, to mention their daughter, her daughter, pretending bitter guilt and deep remorse and talking about Jesus and salvation and being born again: enough goddamned sanctimonious evangelical Christian bullshit and broken glass, as her grandfather would say, to make a decent human being blush. She had never thought, never, that she’d hate anyone as much as she hated Warren, and she often smiled sourly to herself when she acknowledged the fact that she had permitted her hatred to ruin, utterly, what was left of her life. And Warren, with his disgusting Jesus this and Jesus that, his whining, falsely joyous Christian idiocies, had arranged his putrid life so that his past, if not virtually obliterated, was — even better — redeemed. He was the fake grateful recipient of a fake grace. Claudia thought that any God worth a nickel — even Warren’s loathsome creeping Jesus — should have mercilessly destroyed him with disease and agony and poverty. Should have killed him! It was dark in the apartment now, and she rose, quite abruptly, to walk to her small dresser and open the bottom drawer, where she kept the lingerie that she’d never wear again, not that it would fit her now. She had hidden there, although hidden from what she had no idea, an old tattered book, wrapped in the white chemise she’d worn on her wedding day, her sad and dark wedding day. She opened the book at random, and read: “For a moment Bomba was so taken aback by the sight of the jaguar that he did not stir.” She closed the book and wrapped the chemise around it, then stood staring at the window, black with night. One of these evenings she’d read the whole book through, as she hadn’t done in at least twenty years, more like twenty-five, and allow her heart to break completely. Then it would be the right time to take the pills she’d been hoarding. Maybe she’d bump into Jesus and tell him what she thought of him and give him a good one on his other goddamned cheek.

FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS NOW I’VE KNOWN A WOMAN whose husband, almost that many years ago, was utterly crazy about — the phrase, I realize, dates me — a younger friend of hers, whom he thought unimpeachably beautiful; often, upon meeting her, he would quote Marlowe’s lines on Helen in Doctor Faustus, throwing wide his arms and declaiming the famous words in a graceless parody of ham acting that was neither funny, nor, to my mind, appropriate, and that embarrassed his wife, the young woman, and anyone else unlucky enough to be awkwardly present. Even more embarrassing was the obvious fact that this rote performance was a transparent attempt to conceal his deep feelings for Clara, I believe her name was. Clara had a younger brother, who, early one morning, was, astonishingly, shot to death from a passing car while standing outside a Bay Ridge diner. She never really recovered from this stupid and abrupt death, and the husband, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, took immediate advantage of her rickety emotional state, to seduce her. Clara became pregnant, which led, or so I believe, to the breakup of the marriage, although the man’s wife, my woman friend, even after all these years, has never so much as suggested that this was the case; she has never even suggested that the two were intimate. Clara must have had an abortion or suffered a miscarriage, because no child was, to my knowledge, ever born. Clara’s Uncle Ray, so the rumor went, came looking for what he called her boyfriend, soon after the latter, filled with self-pity, had moved out of the apartment, and beat him up badly, breaking his nose, jaw, and two teeth. Clara was married, about six months later, to a young black man who was involved in the music business, or maybe it was the real-estate business. Given the time and the place and Clara’s yahoo relatives, they moved away. Quite recently, my woman friend told me that Clara had died just a few years into her marriage. It took me a moment to realize that this had happened some thirty-five years ago, perhaps because my friend seemed so pleased — delighted even — about her death, and spoke of it as a recent event. We’re both alone, as you may have surmised, and since we get along fairly well, I’ve decided to ask her if she’d consider living with me. Marriage is out of the question, since she is still married to the man she has, for many years, called the lover.

HE CALLED A MAN WHO HAD BEEN A FRIEND OF HIS youth, but to whom he had not spoken for forty-one years. They had simply lost touch, as the smartly descriptive phrase has it. He didn’t know it, but he called because he needed to make a story for himself, since the always changing story that he had held in his mind for all those forty-one years was his friend’s story, not his. So he called, getting the number from Los Angeles information. The old friend sounded the same as he’d always sounded, slightly drunk and bored, but he became irritable when he realized who was calling. Why the hell are you calling me after all this time? is, essentially, what he said. This angered the caller, and the story that he had prepared to release, is perhaps the word, became another story. He called, he lied, because of the considerable amount of money he owed the old friend, you remember that loan you gave me when I stayed with you and Jenny in San Francisco? The story was emerging into the eternal present of all stories, an insubstantial present, a chimera. The old friend remembered the loan, of course! It’s about time, he said, Jesus Christ, it’s been thirty-five years or more. He was taking the place assigned him in the rising fantasy edifice. And, the caller said, as well as the debt, I also came across that old copy of your Bomba the Jungle Boy that we used to have such laughs over, but, he said, he’d decided to keep that — for old times’ sake: nice touch, the boys’ book. It hardly needs to be said that the man owed his old friend nothing, nor did the old friend ever give or lend him a copy of any book that was not what he considered serious. Yet and yet, the old friend said that he wanted Bomber or whatever it was called back, and the money, too. He was doing very well in the role. The caller said that he’d just remembered the day he left the apartment on, what was it, Baker Street? Dolores? and said good-bye to him and Jenny, and how the old friend had insisted that he come up with two hundred, or was it three hundred dollars? For the food he’d eaten, and the other things that he’d used, during his two-week stay with them. Apparently, the old friend had completely forgotten that the caller had bought all the booze and cigarettes, put gas in the car, picked up the check at the restaurants they’d gone to, apparently, he’d, sure, just forgotten all that on the day he’d packed up and left the apartment. The story was getting very clear now, and sharply delineated, and he hauled it rapidly up into the light. He reminded the old friend of the day that he and Jenny had gone shopping for a birthday present for him, a suede jacket was it? From Emporium Capwell? He remembered that day, didn’t he? Of course. That was the day that he and Jenny had gone to a motel in Belmont where they’d spent the better part of the afternoon. The old friend made some kind of a noise and then told him to go and fuck himself the son of a bitch that he was. To which the caller replied with a question having to do with the old friend’s alcoholism, was he still a drunk? Or had he found temperance, joy, and Jesus? There was a click on the other end of the line, the same sound that is present in many stories as well as films, a reassuring click that all is moving along as it should, a click that tells us where we are. He wondered if the old friend and Jenny were still together, she’s an old woman now, of course. She’d been really sweet, if a little naive, always just a step behind the then-current drivel and fashions and notions and truths. But he’d been touched that she’d gone to the trouble of faking an orgasm in the motel, as if she thought he’d care one way or another. So had he gone to a motel with her? He’d wanted to, standing there on Post Street, with the old friend’s suede jacket in its gleaming box.

HE GOT OFF THE SUBWAY AT A STOP HE HADN’T EVEN seen for more than forty years, walked up the stairs to the street and then down the block. The Alpine was still there, but now it was a multiplex, showing all the latest blow-’em-up, imbecile-comedy, fake-sex movies. The saloon that had been next door was now a mosque: the drunks and laughter, assignations and fistfights, gropings and jukebox hits now dead and displaced by benevolent and peaceful Islam and its benevolent and peaceful teachings. He would have gone in to see any movie at all, but that would have spoiled the effect of the cheap booze, of the fictitious and romanticized past that he’d decided to swallow, to breathe in, to anoint himself with. What he wanted to see was Tarzan and Laurel and Hardy; Robert Benchley and a Pete Smith Specialty; Red Dust and Beau Geste; something with Rondo Hatton or Bruce Cabot or Jack Lambert or Barton MacLane or Binnie Barnes or Gail Patrick or Claire Trevor or the sublime Jack Carson. He wanted to sprawl in a broken seat and eat Neccos and Jujubes, Black Crows and Nibs and Walnettos. This was not true. What he wanted was to be alive somewhere else, in some other time, to tell his mother things that she didn’t want to hear. To watch a playground softball game with his father, who would go home with him to a supper his mother had never made, a small-town, happy American supper, lavish with steaming gravy boats, bright vegetables, creamy mashed potatoes, a supper with homemade pies cooling on the windowsill for Pete the Tramp and Hans and Fritz to pinch. He wanted to eat Charms lollipops in all their strange, unearthly reds and greens and yellows and purples. He wanted his father to pick him up and carry him all the way home, and not to be the weak skirt-chaser that he had been and that had finally wrecked his idyllic marriage to his patient, loving, devoted wife. So his mother had always said, and so he had always believed, even though it was a perfect lie, smooth and lustrous from much-contented calibrations and adjustments. He believed it even now, standing in the breezy shade. Oh, not really, but he believed it even now. Men and women passed by, people who had not yet been born when he’d refined his pity for his mother and his loathing for his father — and vice versa — to a fine consistency, one of alienation and bitterness and inadequacy. Do they still make Nibs? They don’t make Walnettos. He wished that he could chafe his barely breathing nostalgia into a delicious, a self-satisfied sadness, but he was not only too old to dupe himself, he was too old to pretend that he could. Maybe he’d go in anyway and see a movie that starred some young actor who looked like a crazed frog irresistible to women.

HE HELD A PAIR OF DEUCES, A KING OF DIAMONDS, A four of spades, and a seven of clubs. He drew three cards and waited to look to see if he’d got the third deuce. If he had drawn it, what? What would happen? What did he want to happen? Warren and Ray and Blackie were arranging their cards as best they could: Warren, shaking with palsy, Blackie, Jesus, Blackie had almost forgotten how to play the game, thought he was playing rummy half the time, and Ray, half-blind, who’d opened and drawn one card, looked irritated, so it was clear that the two low pair he’d probably been dealt had not miraculously become a full house. Even though he’d probably prayed to St. Anselm or St. Jude or the Blessed Virgin, or maybe the Infant Jesus of Prague. He’d Infant Jesus of Prague him right up his ass if he’d got his third deuce. And if he had, a big black Packard would appear on the lawn where they walked the pitiful Alzheimer’s patients around and around. He’d find his beautiful Borsalino on his shelf next to the idiotic baseball caps his daughter-in-law brought him; he’d make sure to lose them, but she brought more. They all had those logos or dim-witted messages on them. The one he liked best matter-of-factly stated: BORN TO LOVE TRAINED TO KILL. What an impossibly stupid woman she was. Well, he didn’t have to live with her. So, he’d have his Borsalino on, maybe that powder-blue tropical worsted suit he’d babied for years and years with the beautiful drape to the pants. He’d step into his Packard. That sweet young girl he’d got half-drunk with about three lifetimes ago in a bar off Gun Hill Road would be on the seat next to him in a little sun dress, a white sun dress. They’d finish what they started, oh the hell with it. What he really wanted to happen was for Warren and Blackie and Ray to disappear, for the Ridge Meadow Manor to disappear, and for himself to be as if he had never been: not to disappear, but to have never existed. Three deuces would do the trick. He looked at his cards, pushing the tight little booklet open with his thumb, card by card. The card that should have been his third deuce was a four of clubs. Ray, squinting as he laid his cards down, won, of course, with his lousy two pair. Well, all right. Tomorrow he’d try another magical route to oblivion.

HE SITS ON A COUCH IN WHAT SEEMS TO BE A BORROWED or leased apartment, and a woman who, he thinks, is his wife, although she looks like a girl he knew in high school, sits next to him; a boy of six or seven sits next to her, reading Bomba the Jungle Boy. They are, he understands, in Brooklyn. The door opens and a tall and handsome young black man enters. He is wearing a dark suit, starched white shirt, small-patterned navy blue tie, and a navy blue polo coat. He carries a glistening black briefcase. He has what he says is real-estate business to discuss with the woman, and although the two speak in normal, conversational voices, and neither mutter nor whisper, nothing that they say is intelligible. The young black man leaves, smiling faintly, lewdly, and he watches him through the street-floor window, next to which is a floor-model Philco radio. The young black man pauses on the steps leading to the sidewalk, then, pulling on a pair of gray suede gloves, descends quickly and is lost to sight. He and his wife and the child rise from the couch and stand on the sidewalk. They are going to dinner, a decision made wordlessly. They are going to Manhattan to have dinner, and find themselves amid a large crowd of people heading for the subway station. He reaches into his pocket to count his change, and notices that his wife has removed her suit jacket and walks next to him in a white brassiere. He says, “You’re a real sport to do that.” The child has disappeared, a good thing, or so he thinks, but he is relieved to see that she is carrying his book, which, he now sees, is Pierre. He would like to touch her breasts, but many women in the crowd angrily warn him not to. He has ninety-nine cents, surely more than enough for the subway. He nods at his wife, who is being ogled by passing black men, and they head toward a change booth, curiously situated on the street, and, even more curiously, one that has a green-and-black Art Deco facade, as do, he well knows, most bakeries. As they approach, the change booth, he sees, is a store with an open front, much like a greengrocery. Inside the store are three Jewish men, one of whom is sitting in the shadows in the rear of the room. He has a black blanket over his legs, which appear to end at his knees. “The Holocaust,” he says, and laughs. Another man stands to the side of the room, leaning arrogantly against the wall, and the third greets him with a nod, and pulls a black watch cap over his red kinky hair. The men are disheveled, dirty, and unkempt, and the store smells of fish. He holds out his hand, the change on his palm, and asks for two tokens. He tells the man, in what he knows is a badly disguised hysteria, that he and his wife want to dine in Manhattan. The man smiles, as does the other man, still leaning against the wall. “Wife?” the man says, and he sees that his wife has returned to the apartment, although he holds her jacket in his hand. The man takes the change and puts it in his watch cap. “Your name is Charles, is that correct?” He writes on a pad and shows it to him, but the name that he has written is “Claire.” “No, I want to eat.” “Eat?” the man says. “Fifty-six twenty-five Parkcrest West is your apartment?” The man nods, and thinks that he will never be able to find his way back to the apartment, to which he is now certain that his wife has not returned, but, instead, is having sex with two men in a hallway. The redheaded man reaches into his pocket and gives him two ten-dollar bills and three singles. “Here! Interest on the five hundred dollars your uncle told you about.” He cannot remember what uncle the man is referring to. “What?” he says. “I don’t want to get involved. Where is my wife?” But the men have left the store and where the wall against which the man slouched had been there now stands a high wooden fence, on the other side of which he can hear the three men laughing and commenting on his wife’s breasts in exaggerated Yiddish accents. He shouts, hoping that he can be heard on the other side of the fence, and the voices suddenly stop. He sees that the fence has, some four feet above the ground, a glassless window, behind which there is a kind of corral. The redheaded man is in the center of this corral, speaking to a woman dressed in a white shirt, fashionably faded and tattered jeans, and highly polished boots. The redheaded man has an expression of stupid and besotted lust on his face, a look of idiotic fascination. “I so admire Meryl Streep,” he says, “she is such a great thespianess.” The woman looks like Meryl Streep, but is a whore. He knows, now, that the redheaded man will not tell him anything about the subway that took his wife to the hallway, that he has completely forgotten him, that he is hypnotized by this whore. She smiles lasciviously at the redheaded man and suddenly, almost comically, falls on her back onto the muddy ground where she lies, supine, at his feet. Her arms are rigid at her sides and, naked below the waist save for her boots, she has spread her legs. The redheaded man is going to mount her. “Twenty-three dollars,” she says. His wife strolls into the corral and says, “What a cheap lay.” The young black man, who has been sitting on a folding chair, opens his briefcase. “I got the money,” he says, “I got the money, you fucking Jew bastard.”

HE WAS A SENIOR CREDIT INVESTIGATOR NOW FOR Textile Banking, a man to whom the younger men came for advice. He had his own cubicle and a pool secretary. Even though he himself was comparatively young, he was, he felt, entitled to wear an oxford gray suit and a homburg. She’d laughed at him when he first bought the hat, and her deadbeat summer friends from the beaches and bars of Coney Island and the Rockaways laughed, too, though they didn’t know him, didn’t even know his name. All they knew was that this boring office slave had managed to land Estelle. She was some piece of ass. They figured he’d been married before, because Estelle occasionally talked about some whining bitch and her brat who wanted more money, more money, always more money. And he’d just, finally, gotten a raise, for God’s sake. He emerged from the rooftop cupola and there they were, five tanned young jerks, sitting under an awning they’d rigged out of blankets and sheets they’d tied to and draped over clotheslines and poles. Estelle looked up and moved away, slightly, from some redheaded slob with his arm around her shoulders, but only slightly. She called out to him to come on over and have a cold beer in the shade. “You won’t even need a hat!” she yelled, the cunt. She laughed delightedly, and the slobs laughed even more delightedly. They were drinking his beer, they were eating his food, they were spending his money, they were, maybe, of course they were, fucking his wife. His wife. Jesus Christ Almighty, what a horse’s ass he’d turned out to be. He stood in the brutal sun, sweating in his oxford gray suit and gray homburg and black wing-tip shoes; in his black silk socks and black garters and white shirt; in his dark-blue tie and gold tie clasp. He smiled cheerfully and waved at the wonderful gang of carefree youths. He couldn’t wait to join the fun! Off came his homburg as he started toward them. It would be a cinch to throw her off the roof, but not today. Not today.

IF HE SHOULD OCCASIONALLY GO INTO A SALOON ON THE way home from work, he’d often see her at the bar or at a table, in a purple velvet dress or a black gabardine suit. On the subway, she’d be standing, holding onto a pole, reading The Sacred Fount. She’d turn up on the street, in shorts, or in a suede jacket over a long flowered skirt. She’d be everywhere, although, as you may guess, she was but existent in his imagination. That’s the wrong word, one that is often used when the uncanny must be brought to heel. Perhaps madness, brief and flickering, is the word that covers these phenomena more accurately. Perhaps not. When he’d arrive home, there she really, as they say, really would be, in her actual, solid flesh. He would not look at her, but would change his clothes prior to making drinks for both of them. And although she had possessed, in the ruckus of their lives together, a purple velvet dress, a black gabardine suit, and a suede jacket, as well as more than one long flowered skirt, and many pairs of shorts, he would refuse to remember this fact, refuse to remember her owning or wearing these clothes. And the next day or week or month he’d find her again as he always found her, in a saloon, on the subway, turning into him as she rounded some corner, both of them far from home.

IN THE DINER, THE THREE YOUNG MEN EAT — STUFF THEIR faces, is an apt phrase — and patronize the waitress with happily disingenuous compliments on her pink polyester uniform, her hairdo and the net that covers it, her white crepesoled shoes. They ask her opinions on pop stars, hip-hop artists and grunge bands, her thoughts on music and clubs of which this exhausted fifty-three-year-old woman has never heard. And so she stands dumb before them, smiling the smile of the impotent insulted everywhere. These remarks and questions are delivered with a ponderous seriousness tempered by candid grins and occasional unsuccessfully stifled bursts of laughter. When they finish, they walk outside into the night and their interesting and valuable lives, and as one steps off the curb to look for a cab, he is, for somebody’s reason, or on somebody’s whim, or by somebody’s mistake, shot to death from the rear window of a car that is slowly moving down the street. His two friends, terrified, look at him sprawled in the wet, bloody gutter, his head half shot away. One says, “Jesus, Ray, Jesus,” over and over. The waitress picks up a paper napkin at their vacated table and finds beneath it her quarter tip. A nice touch for the morrow’s story in the Daily News.

IN THE PARLANCE OF THE ANONYMOUS YOUNG MEN WHO hung out, for years and wasted years, on the corner in front of the candy store, he’s the sort who thinks who the devil he is. He was born of Anglo-Saxon stock into an old exhausted and corrupted family with its roots in New England since before Napoleon was a cadet — another quaint locution much bruited about on the corner. He went to excellent prep schools, from which he was never in the least danger of being expelled, although for the rest of his life he obliquely suggested that he had been a wild student. From these he went on to Yale. Many of these years were spent ingesting drugs, if he is to be believed, the sly rogue. He was almost like the young men on the corner, for he understood them so well; he might as well have been one of them — tough, flexible, and distrustful of crude irony. Ah yes. This moment of adventure, as he later wryly called this period, served as the rough bona fides to remove him from the privilege that was and would always be his. Then he began to write fiction. His short stories and then his first two novels possessed the nice ability to tell readers, with subtle ironies meticulously sprinkled among suburban motifs, what they were certain they already knew: and did, a bright comfort. Touches of incest helped the prose considerably. So his career went well. Soon he became, if he is to be believed, an alcoholic, a lucky break, as the cynics on the corner might have said. For his alcoholism was prelude to his drying out, getting straight, choosing love and life, and realizing that simply being alive is, after all, good. This new venture into his psyche served as the entrée to ore, as he called it, for a “harrowing, courageous, and, finally, sadly redemptive” memoir, written in “fiercely intelligent prose,” in which he confesses to numerous flaws, failings, weaknesses, and sins, and implies that he does not, ever, expect to be forgiven for the things that he has done to friends, family, and loved ones. His forgiveness nonetheless ensues, and to the merry tune, as the guys might say, of more than reputable sales. He had unspoken fantasies of winning the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or both, but settled for a week on the Times’s “And Bear In Mind” list and a respectable film option. He hoped that John Cusack would play him in the movie that would surely be made, one that would be, he hoped, harrowing, courageous, and, finally, sadly redemptive. He might have said, however, film, the word favored by the young fellows in front of the candy store.

MY FIRST WIFE MET A WOMAN WHOSE NAME, AS I recall, was Claire. Met is perhaps the wrong word, since Claire was abruptly in my first wife’s life, or circle, as she liked to call it, and, in some vaguely peripheral way, in my own. My first wife knew many people whom I did not, nor did I want to. This arrangement, if that’s what it was, worked fairly well, or so I choose to believe: it was a long time ago. Claire, however, was someone I did get to know, slightly, but I can’t remember having a conversation with her about anything of a personal nature. What I do remember was her beauty. She was amazingly beautiful, possessed of a kind of innate, profound womanliness, a deep feminine actuality. The semi-idiotic pout that marks commercialized and marketable eroticism was foreign to Claire; she simply stunned people into silence, a silence that was, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavy with resentment. She neither adorned nor exploited this beauty, but was as Helen, Helen at that magical instant when she made Paris stupid with desire. Just before she died at twenty-three of ovarian cancer, I found out that she’d had a child at the age of twelve, a child who was the issue, it seems, of coterminous incestuous relationships that she’d carried on with her father and his younger brother, Uncle Ray. She called these entanglements romances. She wasn’t sure which of the two had fathered the child, whom she had drowned in the kitchen sink and left in a trash basket, snugly wrapped in the World Telegram, in Sunset Park. Odd that I should think of her after all these years, a memory occasioned by watching an old Irene Dunne movie on television. I don’t believe that her name was Claire after all.

NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1949. THE YOUNG MAN IS SITTING IN A booth in a Bronx saloon with a young woman. He doesn’t care for her but she is pretty. They had stopped off for a quick drink on the way to somewhere, a party, a Fifty-second Street club, a movie. Now it is 11:30 and they are still in the saloon, half-drunk. He is dramatically suggesting that he is falling in love with her, but this is a lie, and she, of course, knows it, despite her youth. She is, however, flattered that he should lie. She is seventeen, and wearing a black velour dress with silver stitching on the bodice, and the dress accents the soft contours of her breasts. Perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, or perhaps it’s her breasts or her dress he cares for. Midnight. He leans across the table and kisses the girl, then gets up and sits next to her, puts an arm around her shoulders and a hand under her skirt. He strokes her thigh where the flesh meets the tops of her stockings. She doesn’t try to stop him but she keeps her thighs pressed tightly together. He kisses her again; perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, or perhaps it’s her thighs or her stockings he cares for. He is nineteen. He’s saying vapid things to her and then suddenly says that he’ll meet her, no matter what, in five years, at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, where people look down at the rink, by the statue of Prometheus. What? she says. Who? The glamorous ice, he says. You know. He looks at her very closely. I could say bella bella, he says. You know that Saroyan story? She does not. About 1:15 A.M. They kiss in windless cold on the roof of her apartment building and manage a sex act that neither of them is much good at. Still and all, still and all. Five years pass, he is married. He actually goes to Rockefeller Center on New Year’s Eve, as dumb as they come. Another bad movie on a moronic theme. The wind is strong and bitterly cold, and his wife will be very angry yet hatefully silent that he has not shown up at the quiet little boring fucking party that her boring fucking friends in her circle, as she calls it, give each year. Suddenly, he can smell the girl, a light perfume, or soap, an ingenuous smell, and he turns around, but she is not there. She will not be there. He circles the block, looking at faces. Perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, but he doesn’t. What is it, then, that he does care for? She will not be there. I could say bella bella, he says in a whisper. He heads for the subway and his wife and the little boring party. Better late than never. Maybe.

RAY AND HIS OLDER BROTHER, WARREN, SHARED EVERYthing. That’s the kind of hairpins they were, as Warren liked to say, using an expression employed by Jimmy Cagney in Strawberry Blonde, a quiet, oddly dark movie, in which he plays a dentist, or perhaps a barber. Although the movie is intended to be sunny, there is a persistent sadness to its story. The great Jack Carson is Jimmy’s nemesis, and, oddly enough, both Ray and Warren reminded me of him in many of the roles he inhabited. They both flaunted a blustery, friendly, yet oily charm, a kind of nervous, blunt manliness that is endemic among American men. Both brothers married fairly late in life and both had children: Warren, a daughter, whose name I forget, a beautiful child who became a beautiful woman. Ray had two children, a daughter, who died in an automobile accident in Sheepshead Bay at the age of twenty-three; and a son who joined the Marine Corps and simply cut off all connections with his family, such as it was, to live, as Ray took absurd and wistful pleasure in calling “a real life for a real man.” Warren was a greengrocer and earned a good living, although his wife complained that he “worked like a nigger,” and Ray became a credit investigator for Dun & Bradstreet, invested wisely, as they say, became a Republican as soon as he had established a modest portfolio (and how Warren loved to edge that phrase with venom whenever he spoke of his “tycoon” brother). They had, of course, stopped sharing. Warren was relieved when his wife died, for she had begun to scorn him, hate him, really, for reasons that she never disclosed to anyone. He decided to stay in the same small apartment in which the family had lived for years, and he kept a bedroom ready for his daughter should she decide to stop living what he called her wild life; but she never came home to live with him, nor, for that matter, did she ever visit or even call him. Ray once mentioned that she’d become pregnant by some guinea bastard truck driver, but, thank God, miscarried, no doubt because of her drinking and carrying on with any son of a bitch with a phony smile, a few bucks, and a car. Her father seemed to agree with him, although the brothers had grown distant, to say the least, over the years, and when Warren died, some six months after his daughter’s premature death, Ray sent a floral spray to the funeral home, but attended neither the wake nor the burial. The sateen sash across the arrangement read, in glistening gold letters on a dark red field, OLD HAIRPIN, bewildering the mourners, who were few indeed. Ray, a widower soon after Warren’s death, was found one day dead in his shabby apartment, sitting in a battered, sprung easy chair in his pajamas and overcoat, a stained homburg on his head and an unopened pack of Lucky Strikes on his lap. He had died intestate, and after probate settlement and taxes and surrogate’s court fees, his son, Warren, a gunnery sergeant with almost thirty years in the Corps, got about $240,000. Warren had never married, so this money and his military pension most probably assured him a comfortable retirement in Oldsmar, Florida, a Tampa suburb which, or so I understand, is a pleasant enough town.

SHE DECIDED TO LEAVE THE LITTLE PARTY AND HER husband and a lot of friends she’d known for years to their drinking and flirting and groping and give herself over to this unkempt man whose kinky red hair was dull with dirt and oil. She’d seen him many times in downtown bars, always seedy, always with a superior, slightly mocking smile on his face, always with a battered black spring binder, crammed with tattered papers, held closely against his side. He smelled faintly of fish. When they got off the elevator and reached the street, he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled once, the sound producing, from a small areaway across the street, a young black man with the face of a regularly battered prize fighter. He was dressed in an expensive dark suit that needed cleaning and pressing, and the collar of his white shirt was black with filth. The men nodded at each other and she smiled and said “hello” to the black man in an absurdly cheery tone. The men flanked her and they walked quickly down the block, then abruptly turned into the hallway of an old walk-up, where she was decisively steered up three cracked and stained marble steps and through an unlocked door into a little airless vestibule lit by one amber lightbulb that revealed a crusted and worn maroon carpet, on which were centered a wicker table with a smudged and sticky glass top and two matching chairs. The men stepped back and looked at her, and the black man made an impatient gesture toward her belly, while the white man put his spring binder on the table. She looked away from them, then carefully, modestly, reached under her skirt and pulled her panties down and then off, easing them past her high heels. She put them on top of the spring binder, turned her back on the men, and bent over the table, complaisant, settling her forearms on its surface. She closed her eyes as she felt hands pushing up her skirt and slip to her waist. It struck her suddenly as strange that this building should be so shabby and uncared for on this very nice block so close to the park. One of the men was in her and she gasped.

SOME STRANGE MAN WAS GIVING IT TO HER FROM BEHIND and anybody could walk into the hallway and see them there. She was too drunk and drugged to understand much, and maybe they were in a bathroom. The black-and-white tile floor appeared to slide and shift on either side of her shoes; they were clean tiles. Her husband was with some slut half his age at the party, maybe, and turnabout is only something. Baby, baby, oh baby, the man whispered, and she could feel him coming. Here, he said, a long time later, handing her a wad of tissues. But what was her husband doing here and where was the man? Clean yourself, he said, and let me fix your face, Christ almighty, you are a wreck. What was her husband doing here and where was the man? She told her husband that the man said he was only trying to help her. He said. She thought she was going to be sick and he said he’d help her here, to the bathroom, and she was sorry. She was sorry. He looked carefully at her face, wiping smeared lipstick from the corners of her mouth and upper lip, blotting gently the half-dried tears on her cheeks. He shook his head and smiled a little. He had no idea what man she was talking about, but he was sure that writer bastard gave her something more than a drink. She realized that she wasn’t wearing any underwear, but she had her hat and scarf on. What was her husband doing here and where was the man? Maybe he hadn’t even seen the man, please, please, maybe that’s it, he hadn’t even seen the man! She’d just keep her mouth shut, yes. She suddenly half turned and, bent slightly from the waist, threw up into the bathtub. She was terribly ashamed.

THE BOY WAS IN THE BACKYARD, PLAYING AIMLESSLY IN the thin snow that covered the packed soil in which nothing had ever been planted. She looked out of one of the panes in the back door window at him, waiting. There he goes. He bent down and untied first one shoelace, then the other, straightened up, and headed toward the wooden stairs that led to the little back porch. She stepped away from the door, feeling a cold and gray sadness, near despair. He opened the door and stood there, a little dull animal, the wet March air coming into the kitchen. My shoes came open, Mama. She knelt down and tied them and he went out again, closing the door. The sky was turning livid as the pale, silvery sun went down. She put a bottle of Worcestershire sauce on the table, poured the sweet, orange, bottled dressing on the lettuce, tomato, and cucumber salad, and tossed it, then set the table for three. It was about time for him to get home but she knew that he wouldn’t be home till midnight. Or maybe not till the morning. She arranged sliced roast fresh ham, bologna, spiced ham, and Swiss cheese on a plate, next to which she placed a jar of mayonnaise and one of mustard, and a loaf of Silvercup. She put the Worcestershire back in the cupboard, took down an almost full quart of Wilson’s, and poured herself a water glass full, drinking it in three long swallows. She gagged and her eyes teared, but she stood still and held her arms rigid at her sides and was all right. Then she went upstairs to their bedroom, that’s a laugh. He hadn’t done it with her in more than a month and a half, and that last time his undershirt smelled of Evening in Paris. She pulled off her housecoat and brushed her hair, washed her face, then put in a pair of onyx-and-gold earrings. She undressed and put on her best underwear and silk stockings, gartering them carefully so that they’d be taut, without those dowdy little wrinkles at the ankles. She applied pale-red lipstick and just a touch of rouge, then a little powder. She stepped into a tight black dress that had faint gold threads running vertically from just beneath the bodice to the hem of the skirt, and put on a black felt hat with a small snap brim. Not bad. She pulled her remodeled gray Persian lamb coat over her shoulders, slipped on her new black pumps, then danced around the room, humming “Poor Butterfly.” She abruptly stopped, took her handbag, and went downstairs. She could feel the whiskey, her lips slightly numb, her belly warm, a vague prickling in her loins. She couldn’t do it any more, she could not do it any any any more. She’d have another drink. She looked out at the backyard in time to see the boy plodding toward the house, his shoelaces dragging. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus Mary and Joseph. She drank off the whiskey and felt it blaze into her head in a rush. The kitchen looked bright, clear, the weird orange dressing on the salad cheery, everything looked wonderful. That’s good. That would be very good. She took twenty-three dollars in fives and singles from Joy of Cooking that her battle-ax mother-in-law had given her as a hint, the old bitch, and put the money in her bag, then locked the back door just as the boy was turning the knob. She looked out at him, standing in the near-darkness, mucus running down his upper lip from both nostrils, his face blank and stupid, yet resolute, determined. He tried the knob again and again, a robot. She couldn’t do this any more. She walked through the house, knocking the black teapot with the disgusting dragon on it to the floor: a bad-luck gift, an evil-eye gift from her mother on their first anniversary. She heard it break and smiled, then staggered and almost lost her balance. She opened the front door to walk, very carefully, down the three brick steps to the street, those wonderful brick steps. She could go anywhere, she’d get another drink in someplace respectable where ladies were not allowed at the bar but were welcome in the tap room, in the restaurant. She still looked good at thirty-two, and she could do whatever she wanted to do. She was free, white, and twenty-one, and had always been full of fun. Everybody said so.

THE OLD MAN WEARS A PEARL GRAY HOMBURG, BRAND new from the looks of it. He opens the apartment door and enters the long dim hallway, then leans heavily against the wall and bangs the door shut. He sighs deeply, the sigh, in a practiced glissando, becoming a pathetic moan, which, however, ceases abruptly. For he remembers, as he remembers every night, although he tries not to remember, that there is nobody in the apartment to hear his sighs and moans, to ask him if he is all right. His goddamned wife is dead, his brothers are dead, his daughter is dead, his son is somewhere at sea or in the Army, who cares where he is, and Claire, his niece Claire, has been dead for so long that he hardly thinks of her any longer. But her beautiful face does come to him on occasion, in dreams, as they say, or daydreams. He takes off his homburg. Pearl gray is the only proper shade for a homburg. He walks down the hallway, the old floor creaking under the worn runner. Claire would be about sixty-five had she not died. Whore that she was, he has nothing to reproach himself for, never did. His pearl gray homburg is the proof of that. His oxford gray shadow-stripe suit is the proof of that.

HERE IS A GROUND-FLOOR APARTMENT, THE CYNOSURE of which is a Philco floor-model radio, circa 1935. It sits between two closed windows, which look out on an empty urban street. Each window is half-covered by a dark-green roller shade, whose pulls cords move, almost imperceptibly, in a current of air that may come from underneath the door to the outer hallway. There is a studio couch in one corner of the room, covered, somewhat carelessly, with a multicolored crocheted afghan. Against the wall directly across from the radio a gleaming back-lacquered table holds the bronze figure of a lioness, her mouth open in a roar or snarl. She is looking at a black teapot, its surface covered by a gold dragon in basrelief. There is no other furniture in the room save for a floor lamp near the studio couch, its torn shade askew. At its base is a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its label smeared with what appears to be dried blood, and a pink two-way-stretch girdle. Through a door to one side of the table can be seen a small room in which an unmade single bed takes up the floor space not occupied by a small, badly worn dresser and a battered cardboard carton, sides bulging with its unknown contents. Another door, to the other side of the table, opens onto a kitchen, on whose flower-motif linoleum lies a woman of perhaps thirty, supine in a flower-print housecoat and black high-heeled pumps. She is probably drunk, but she may be dead. The radio, it is clear, has been on all the time, albeit very softly, and at the moment is broadcasting Russ Colombo’s 1931 hit, “Prisoner of Love.” On the stoop to the right and just below one of the apartment’s front windows, a woman, dressed in a flower-print housecoat and black high-heeled pumps identical to the dress, or, perhaps, costume of the woman on the kitchen floor, is smoking a cigarette and drinking from a quart cardboard container of beer. She seems to have not a care in the world, as the phrase has it, but this is far from true.

THERE WAS LITTLE SENSE IN HIS CALLING HIS DAUGHTER, because he knew that after her first exclamations of surprise, perhaps even falsely delighted surprise, she would list her various illnesses, those that she had suffered for the past twenty-five years, those that were recent or current, those that were as old pals, and those that were arcane and malign invaders who would never be understood by any doctor on the face of the earth, including her brilliant yet wanting specialists; but all, without doubt, were his responsibility if not his doing; she would whine about her teenaged son, his grandson, a boy whom he had never seen, a boy who had, just once, called him and said, “I’ll write you a long letter, Grandpa"; and with the regularity of death, she would ask for a loan, a small loan, one to drive off or placate her bitch of a guinea landlady, who lived, it seemed, to collect her unjust money from his daughter, her ill and hapless victim. And there was no sense in calling his son, who would be, surely, according to the curt words of Tracy or Dawn or Steph or Donya, the latest modern dancer-schoolteacher-addict with whom he was, at last! happily, even joyously, living, asleep, after a hard night of hard work at his hard yet mysterious and fulfilling and creative job. So he would sit and sit, looking at his shelves of books, wondering, for hour after hour, which one he should read, or reread, or whether he’d be better off just looking at their familiar spines. Was there any reason to read anything, ever again? So he would sit, occasionally laughing, not at himself, precisely, but at the fact of himself, that he should be so ludicrously and persistently alive. He would sit and smoke and think of old friends and old enemies, either dead or scattered across the smug, benighted, self-pitying republic. In a sense, they had all disappeared in one way or another, and just as well, just as well. And he wondered if a few of those who were alive were absurdly thinking of calling their children, tentatively and hopelessly thinking of this simple act. Because he had to believe that they, too, were alienated from their children and unknown to their grandchildren; otherwise, the touch of normalcy that would inform their lives, were the opposite true, would destroy him completely. They had to be as strangers to the strange and thankless adults who were their children and who, it had to be, hated them, or, more exactly, held them in disinterested contempt. He sat, smoking, as the sun faded, clouds slowly covered the dimming sky, and it began to rain on the cold Saturday streets.

THE TARZAN MOVIE ON TELEVISION VAGUELY LOCATED some fugitive emotion that he couldn’t sharpen or clarify. He took a swallow of the Majorska over ice and was suddenly snapped from the Hollywood jungles and their symmetrical trees to what appeared to be a female robot that was singing a deafening and machined jingle, thrusting its smoothly contoured and metallic mons veneris, packed neatly into the crotch of what appeared to be aluminum jeans, at the viewer with a maniacal regularity. In the animated corpse’s hand was a can of some soft drink, O.K.! It was swinging its long blond hair from side to side, still singing, its smile fixed in uncontrollable electronic ecstasy, O.K.! It was, sure it was, essentially, a mobile cunt, perfectly engineered and animated to sell things: to Christian fundamentalists, professors of biochemistry, terrorists and plumbers and bus drivers, housewives and attorneys, to the salt of the earth, to the world, to him. They all understood. So did he. He took another swallow of the cheap vodka and was back with Johnny and Maureen and the chimp and the stampeding elephants in the grainy background. What did this remind him of? Why did he feel so bad? Couldn’t he get into the campy spirit of the aluminum people who had been responsible for scheduling this petrifying movie? Couldn’t he obey the robot and her metallic pudendum and buy her soda? He started to sob and thought that he was really going crazy, or drinking too much, or both. A man of fifty-six crying over a movie that was set in a cardboard jungle.

THE TUNNEL IN THE SNOW LEADS TO A WARM KITCHEN, vinegary salad, ham and baloney and American cheese, white bread from Bohack’s and tomato-rice soup and bottles of ketchup and Worcestershire sauce, coffee. It leads to heaven. Who is the strange and beautiful man at the far end of the tunnel he has just dug from the black Packard sedan to the white door of the little frame house? And who is the woman, who smells of winter and wool and perfume, of spearmint and whiskey and love? He gets out of the car and the woman holds his arm as he starts down the thrilling tunnel, through the snow banked above him on both sides, to the man in the navy blue overcoat and pearl gray homburg who waits, down on one knee, his arms held out to him. This will never happen again, nothing like it will ever happen again. The child begins to laugh joyously in the crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing in the middle of the knifing cold of the January day, laughing since he does not know, nor do his mother and father, in their youth and beauty and strength, that this will never happen again, and that the family is almost finished and done with. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.

“WE ARE THE DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE,” THE young man says, gesturing behind him toward a shadowy group of people, “and Rockefeller Center is a place of meeting for us and all other prisoners of love. We are Catholics.” They all stand in front of an elevator that is, although dark and grimy, much like the elevators in what he recalls is named the Our Lady of Angels Building at 165 West Forty-sixth Street. It’s raining very hard as they step off the elevator and he is permitted to join them as they move quickly down the street. “I’m having a Charms myself,” the young man says affably. He is not quite the same young man who was on the elevator but he is the same in certain ways that are something, something, he can’t think of the word — intransigent? “Catholic,” the young man says, and puts his palms together in mock prayer. Mickey! “Mickey?” he asks, but the young man ignores him. They walk out of the rain into a crowded street and stop, he and Mickey, in front of the Three Deuces. “The Deuces” he says, and turns to Mickey, who is gone, along with all the others. Charlie Parker is inside the club, right now, and he’ll get to hear him play again. He walks into the long room, at the end of which is the little bandstand, empty. There’s nobody at the bar, either, or the tables. A woman arrives on the bandstand from backstage. She’s in a black-and-silver evening dress that needs cleaning. She starts to sing “Prisoner of Love,” and he calls out “Bird!” He’s on the street, the rain soaking him through. He’ll go home to his wife if he can find the subway, where the hell is the subway, it used to be right there on Forty-ninth Street. “The Catholics are down there,” a man rushing by says, “over on Father Duffy Square.” He wants a smoke and puts his hand into his pocket but his cigarettes are a soggy mess. “Wings?” he says. He hasn’t smoked Wings since he was a boy. His wing-tip shoes are oozing black dye or polish, no, they’re dissolving. How will he get home without shoes?

WHEN LITTLE CHILDREN WERE TAKEN TO THE ALPINE by their fathers on Saturday afternoons, they were expected to be frightened by Tarzan and his wild treetop screams, his sinister humanoid ape friend, his somehow bewildered yet attentive half-naked companion, Jane; by the faceless Spider and his clubfooted shuffle and clump, forever out of the reach of Dick Tracy; by the grinning foreign fiends who were the perverted enemies of the Daredevils of the Red Circle. They were expected to cry, to drool, to drop from their sticky mouths their Charms lollipops onto their bright candid scarves, to know that they and their fathers were soon to be assaulted by the huge black-and-white monstrosities that jerked and shifted and rumbled and glared out at the dark from the glitter of the screen that ordered and dominated all of life above the passive and awestruck and terrified audience. These children were expected to become hysterical, to have their Charms decorate, as sweet multicolored jewels, their clothes, to present faces that were flushed red and wet with tears. And then their fathers would hoist them to their chests and carry them out to the cold, brilliant afternoon streets, and home. These fathers often began, sooner or later, to carry on, as they used to say, with other women, and were then, suddenly, nowhere to be found: not in the Alpine, nor the jungles of Africa; not in the dark streets of the threatening metropolis, nor in the secret lairs beneath those streets, lairs favored by the depraved Orientals who worshiped evil gods. They were gone, these fathers, and warm memories of their presence, invented or elaborated tales of doting words murmured to calm endearing childish terrors, and the hopeful deluded beliefs of the sad and bitter women who did their best and then did their best again would not serve, ever, to return these men from the delicious sexual folly that they had expectantly embraced, and were, as often as not, crushingly betrayed by.

WHEN SHE HEARD FROM A FRIEND THAT HE’D DIED IN the Whitehall Street subway station of a massive, as they liked to put it, heart attack, she decided to go to DeRosa’s Funeral Home in the old neighborhood to pay her respects, as they liked to put it. Then she decided that she wouldn’t. His first wife, knowing her, would surely be there, wronged, cold, and distant, but civil in that perfectly vulgar way that she’d learned from Christ knows how many carefully smoothed movies. And she’d no doubt have one of her young deadbeat boyfriends along, some twenty-five-year-old two-bit grifter with a habit and a ponytail, in a curiously ill-fitting Hugo Boss or Armani suit that had exhausted another one of her credit cards. But then, who had known him longer than she? So she would go, after all. She’d see the old neighborhood anyway, the restaurants that had been saloons, the cocktail lounges that had been diners, the Burger Kings that were once pizzerias with breezy summer gardens in back. Why let the vengeful, adulterous, grasping shrew play her part in comfort? She could wear her purple velvet dress with a black silk jacket, black pumps and stockings, or the black gabardine suit that was almost like the one he’d always liked, or said he liked. She’d knock the eyes out of her head, whatever she wore. Here I am, you bitch, looking better now than you looked when you walked all over him and fucked everything in sight. But she really wasn’t going to go. Let the dead bury the dead. As they liked to put it.

MAUREEN HAD BEEN SLEEPING WITH HER BOSS, PIERRE, for six months. Everybody called him Blackie, even the stock boys. He was such a good sport about everything that he didn’t mind at all. He’d told her that he was going to leave Janet, it was only his daughter that kept him from walking out on her right now, she’d turned into such a nag — nothing that he did was ever good enough for her. Surprisingly, out of the blue, as Maureen put it, he showed up at her apartment one Friday night about nine o’clock, carrying a suitcase. “I did it,” he said. “That’s that.” They made love all night long and it was just wonderful, although she made him leave very early in the morning because of her nosy neighbors — all she needed was gossip reaching the Swede landlord. The next day when he came over for lunch he told her that he and Janet had been fighting like cats and dogs all week long; she’d found a book of matches from the Parisian Casino, and although he did his best to lie — he hated to lie, even to Janet — about what he was doing in a Union City roadhouse, it wouldn’t wash. She said that she knew all about roadhouses and what went on there and what went on after people left them, and she knew what sort of women men took to those places. And then she said, and Blackie was struck dumb by it, that she knew damn well what woman he’d taken there and did he think she was a complete fool that she didn’t know what was going on all these weeks and with that scarf that Maureen — she said that woman—gave him for Christmas? A silk scarf, and a potted plant for the dumb little wife? Did he really take her for a complete fool? The fight went on from there, and on and on, and then it would simmer down, but start up all over again. That’s why he hadn’t been able to see his sweetie all week. He didn’t tell Maureen that he and Janet had made love before and after all the episodes of their serial quarrel, and that their lovemaking was better than it had ever been in their eleven years together, it was hot and kind of dirty. It looked as if maybe things were going to blow over for a while so that he could talk to Janet, choose his own time to leave, explain things to little Clara — but then yesterday she woke up ready for battle, started in all over again with the scarf business. She must have been lying in bed stewing about it. That scarf had really gotten under her skin and there was the old song and dance about it, silk, made in Italy, B. Altman’s, the works! And how he never gave her anything nice, he never took her anywhere, when was the last time they went out to dinner in a nice restaurant, oh Jesus God! And then she mentioned, the bitch, that maybe Maureen had also bought him his hat, that makes him look like an ambulance-chasing shyster. Blackie went upstairs, without a word, packed a bag, and came down to tell her that he wasn’t coming back, he’d call her. Janet yelled at him, actually she screamed at him that she didn’t want him to call her ever ever again and that he’d never see Clara again and that she hoped he’d die and burn in hell along with his whore. Blackie sat back on Maureen’s sofa and she patted his leg, shaking her head. She got up and brought him a cup of coffee. She was wearing a tight skirt and he reached out and touched her leg. She looked at him and smiled. “Why didn’t you wear your scarf, darling?” she said. He looked up at her and smiled back, his hands under her skirt, caressing her thighs. He’d looked for the scarf high and low and it hadn’t been in his closet or dresser drawers, or anywhere, and he figured that maybe Janet, she could be very mean, had thrown it out. “Thrown it out?” Maureen said, pushing at his hands and stepping back from him. “You let her throw it out?” Her expression was cold, her face closed and pinched. Blackie looked out the window at the cold Saturday streets, trying to think of an answer to the envenomed question. Christ, she made a really lousy cup of coffee.

DOCTOR NAPOLEON GETS OFF THE ELEVATOR AND TELLS her that he knew that she’d come to the office, despite what he’d heard. She doesn’t know what he’d heard. “I’m Claire,” she says. “Of course,” he says, “there’s always a chance that a regimen of internal crosswords might arrest the disease. They’ve made such great advances in so many years of medicine.” He looks at The Memoir, which he has taken out of his pocket, and smiles. “Where’s your friend, the high-school boy writer? Isn’t he a little young for you?” He turns and opens a stainless steel door marked CAUTION HAZARD ENTERTAINMENT, and walks through it. She is mildly surprised to find that she is wearing nothing but her slip and a pair of paper slippers, one of which says MICKEY and the other MINNIE. Doctor Napoleon stands in front of her, his arms folded, and asks her about her offensive smoking at the party, “and by the buffet! That’s not a good idea with multiple myeloma. Why aren’t you in a hospital gown?” He is at the nurses’ station, talking to two nurses and shaking his head resignedly. She goes back to her room and the good-looking but boyish entertainment coordinator is sitting on the bed, smoking her last cigarette. “Oh, oh,” he says. “Caught red-handed. I surrender.” She takes her slip off because of the strict instructions she memorized while still at home, and stands at the side of the bed, in another slip, her arms held straight at her sides. He gets up and looks out the window. “They all ought to go back to Chelsea, and what the hell happened to that neighborhood? You too!” She gets into bed and lights a cigarette from a pack that she finds under the counterpane. He and Doctor Napoleon speak in whispers in the little bathroom, the door to which is only half-closed. “Have the other women finally left for Los Angeles?” the doctor asks. “In their New York clothes? They were supposed to wear their hospital gowns!” She puts her cigarette out and lights another, then offers the pack to Doctor Napoleon and the entertainment coordinator, who, she realizes, is a young black man whose name is Ferlon Grevette. This surprises her for she knows that young black men never get sick enough to go to the hospital. “You’re very bald,” she says to him. She gets off the bed, straightens and smooths her skirt, tucks in her blouse, and steps into her new pumps. But she can’t open the door, even though it has no lock. She turns, in tears, to Doctor Napoleon. Her blouse has fallen open and her breasts are exposed. “The door,” she says. “I’m dying and the door’s closed. Am I?” “It’s time for some entertainment,” Doctor Napoleon says, but Ferlon Grevette has left. “Let’s get into that gown now, Claire, shall we?” Doctor Napoleon says, smiling foolishly. “Your breasts are beautiful, but multiple myeloma doesn’t care.” He begins to eat his stethoscope. “Licorice,” he says. “One of my little jokes to lighten things up a bit.” “That’s in The Memoir,” Claire says, pulling her slip on.

DEAR CLARA,

I’M SENDING YOU THIS CARE OF KATY, HOPING YOU’LL GET IT and read it and think about the terrible step you took. Walking out. I couldn’t believe it when I got home that night from my sales trip, to find you gone with all your clothes and things gone and not to let me explain or talk to you was also a slap in the face, believe you me. And not to even let me see little Maureen before you left if you thought you had to leave, what can she be thinking in her innocent mind? I know you’ll be mad as you are usually when I mention your mother but, I blame her for this and your father too had a hand in it, since he does as he’s told, and they were always jealous of our happiness. I know I made a mistake with Janet but it was one mistake, and, no matter what you may believe or were told, it was only one. And to just throw away our marriage for this, do you think it’s right? I’m sure you were hurt or, I should say I know you were hurt because it was adding insult to injury that Janet, was a guest in our house many times and adored Maureen. I know it was wrong of her and she also knows this. And it was wrong of me of course, but it was that one time and I thought you and I had settled it about the motel that was completely innocent and was about business if you remember. I can’t be any sorryer than I was after the mistake I made as I told you when I got down on my hands and knees and begged for your forgiveness. But why did you just leave while I was away so that we did not have a chance to sit down and talk things over for as long as you liked. It was a complete surprise and the kind of behavior that is not like you at all, if you take my meaning.

Now I hear from Ralph that you’ve gone to see Connie Moran and I can only think that the only reason you’d go and see that ambulance chaser is about a legal separation? When I think about how you and I laughed and laughed about that time he rushed over to Lutheran Hospital and it turned out he spent an hour talking to the wrong accident victim. Well that was in the past, now, I guess you think about him differently. If it is about a separation I wonder who will be paying his fee or retainer? As if I didn’t know! Your mother never liked me from the start and hated that we were making a go of it, no thanks to her and your father. She must have been happy as a clam to find out that we were having our ups and downs which, I know you told her about, although I begged you not to tell her our private marittal business. For instance, Clara, there was no need for your mother to know about that little slip of mine. I know it won’t cut any ice if I tell you that Janet is not my secretary any more, but has left and is working for another firm. And anyway I have never had a word to say to her since that one mistake, that was not in the line of business, for six months. That important company shindig that I was supposed to go to a couple of months ago that might well have led to a raise and promotion I didn’t go to, as you know. I remember you even argued with me about my refusal to go, you said it would be good for my future with the company. Now the reason I didn’t go can now be told. It was because I knew that Janet would probably be there with Jack Walsh, who was her boss before she left the firm for the other job I just mentioned. The long and the short of it was that

I did not want

to jepoardize our marriage that looked like it was getting back on its feet especially, after that weekend we spent in the Poconos, that was like a second honeymoon. Do you remember your mother and father did everything they could to keep us from going? Including not being able to mind Maureen because of your father’s sudden attack of a bilious headache that just came out of the blue? I never knew your father to suffer from anything except maybe too many boilermakers, as you yourself have agreed with me about many a time. But that’s all water under the bridge and I don’t want to point fingers.

Ralph also mentioned that you’ve been getting advice from Pastor Ingebretsen, who is, for my money, a regular creeping Jesus, along with that skeleton of a wife of his and her knitting club, spelled GOSSIP. For God’s sake, Clara, call me or call Ralph or Anna. I know that I’ll never get you if I leave a message with your mother or father. Maybe we can meet and have lunch or a cup of coffee even, and talk everything out. I look in your empty closet and my heart feels as if it’s going to break, can you really throw away eleven years of marriage because I made a stupid mistake just once and never did again, as God is my Judge. And that, as I told you, happened because I had a little too much to drink at the salesman of the year party for Bill Greenleaf, and in a way I have to take all the blame and I cannot in all honesty even blame Janet who I really took advantage of. Though you think she is loose or even a little tramp, she is just a kid who had one too many too that evening and I lost my head. So please call me, or Ralph. I know it’s not important since I know how hurt and angry you must be, but I brought home from Chicago a little present for you that I thought you would really like, something you’ve wanted for a long time. And for my darling Maureen, a doll with three complete outfits that cries and wets, she will love it. I would love to give it to her.

Please, please call. I love you and do not want to lose you. I will even talk to your mother and father if you want me to and if they will let me, although our marriage is none of their business. Do you remember that’s why we moved out to Rego Park so that we could live our lives without having them drop in on us whenever they felt like it, and being hurt and angry if we so much as hinted that we wanted to be by ourselves for a change. You were even more fed up with it than I was. But I will talk to them if you wish it, my dearest wife, I will crawl if that’s what they want.

Please get in touch with me, and please believe me that I have had nothing to do with Janet for months, actually, I never did except for that one terrible mistake that I made by giving in to temptation, that was only human.

I’VE KNOWN IRENE GREENLEAF FOR A LONG TIME, SINCE the year that she and Bill were engaged, in fact. After they separated and then divorced over Bill’s affair with Charlotte, his secretary — whom he married soon after — Irene and I had a brief romance, if one can call it that, but we’ve been no more than friends for almost thirty-five years now. As if having an unfaithful husband wasn’t enough, her brother, a true deadbeat, who gambled away every penny he got his hands on, was beaten to death outside Papa Joe’s, a real bucket of blood, patronized by drunk lowlifes like the brother, whose name I forget, a small blessing. It would have been poetic justice had he been killed over a bad debt, but the fight apparently began with a shouting argument as to the relative merits of Rocky Graziano and Tony Zale. Perfect. In any event, Irene has lately become depressed, very obviously so, about Bill and Charlotte, which seems absolutely crazy, considering the lifetime that has elapsed since their initial dalliance. I don’t ever bring it up, nor does Irene, but it’s been clear to me for years — it was clear to me at the time — that our long-ago sexual fling, an expression, I grant you, even more stupid than “brief romance,” was simply Irene’s reaction to Bill’s infidelity, his cold and sudden abandonment of her. As far as I know, Bill was the only man that Irene had ever gone to bed with, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the first time was on their wedding night. I flatter myself that I may be the only other man she favored. At any rate, what I’m trying to get at is that Irene’s thoughts have never been far from Bill, and over the years she has shown an obsessive interest in him and Charlotte, an unhealthy interest, as they say, although I’ve never used that expression with her. This interest has become much more pronounced in recent months. The whole thing has not been helped by the fact that Bill and Charlotte live in a house in the old neighborhood, a house that Bill bought soon after their marriage. Irene still has many friends, gossips all, in the neighborhood, who have been and still are more than happy to report on Bill, Charlotte, and their three children: Irene and Bill, you may have guessed, had no children together. As I’ve said, Irene has seemed increasingly depressed, more stagnant, may be the word, and shows very little interest in anything, including her monthly trips to Atlantic City, sometimes with me, sometimes with one or another of her gossipy friends, to play the slots, drink Margaritas, and eat steaks. I knew that something was really wrong one night when we were sitting on her couch watching a television show, one of those in which actors who resembled large pieces of lumber moved spastically about to surges of hysterical laughter — this is the sort of show Irene watches lately, her face frozen. I suddenly felt her breath on my cheek, then her tongue in my ear, and at the same moment, she caressed me between my legs. I pulled my head away, turned and looked at her, and said something, God knows what, and she began to cry, but stopped almost immediately. We finished watching the manic show, watched another, and then I went home. We had said nothing about the brief aberration. A couple of weeks later, Irene, still quite low, but now on antidepressants that safely maintained her unhappiness, told me, over whiskey sours in a quiet new bar a few blocks from her apartment, that she had almost committed suicide a month earlier; she’d bought a bottle of a hundred Advils, a bottle of Nytol, and a liter of vodka, but changed her mind. Maybe that’s why, she said, that I, you know, that night on the couch? I nodded, then started to say something vapidly positive, life is sweet, is precious, is worth living, is a bowl of cherries, but she touched my hand and looked at me and I knew enough to shut up. She had gone, she said, to Our Lady of Perpetual Help at least twice a week for the past five years, to light a candle each time and to pray for the agonizing deaths of Bill and his whore and their three rotten children. I thought, idiotically, that she didn’t even know the children, and stared at her glass as she took a sip of her whiskey sour. Five years, she said, five fucking years, and nothing happened. Her face was flushed and distorted with anger and pain. Five years and they’re all fine, they’re all hale and hearty! I was smiling irreverently. Can you, she said, lighting a cigarette, get a goddamn ashtray for Christ’s sweet sake in this bar?

JENNY WAS STANDING IN THE CORNER OF THE MOTEL ROOM in front of a little black-and-white television set, on which a soap opera’s distraught characters were silently moving through their problems. She had unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it free of her skirt. Her hands were clasped in front of her and she seemed to be blushing, although the light in the room was dim. Ralph stood at the other side of the double bed, a picture of a rustic bridge in forest mist at his right shoulder. He took off his T-shirt and looked at Jenny, he wanted her out of her clothes.

JACK GOT HOME ABOUT 8:30, WELL AFTER DARK. ANNA WAS sitting at the kitchen table, reading another drugstorelibrary novel by Fanny Hurst or Faith Baldwin, some ladies’ hogwash. Was that all she did all day? His place was set and his supper was on the kitchen counter, all of it cold. Is that my delicious supper? he said, and she looked up from her book as if suddenly aware of him, and then at her watch. Oh, I get it, he said. Let’s see, a cardboard pork chop sitting in fat, Ann Page carrots and peas, mmm, and what’s this? plaster? oh, mashed potatoes à la skins and lumps, a gravy boat full of, uh-huh, grease! And, of course, a luscious salad with a bright orange gourmet dressing. I can’t wait. The kid’s in bed, I suppose, God forbid you should keep him up a few minutes so he can see his father. Anna looked up again from her book and asked him where he’d been, he said he’d be home for supper, my God, you can’t spare an hour for your son on a Saturday? He sat down at the table and tapped his finger on the edge of his dinner plate, wise and patient and tolerant. He’d been watching a softball game at the playground between Fritz’s Bar and Grill and Papa Joe’s, the kid hates softball, he said. He said that then he went to the movies, the kid is scared of the movies, for God’s sake. Her mouth was twisted in the bitter smile that enraged him. And you saw? she said. Oh, he said, you want to know what I saw? Well, I saw Three Men on a Horse and If You Could Only Cook and Come and Get It and Red Dust and Dawn Patrol and how can I forget Tarzan of the Apes? Starring Edward Everett Horton, Edward Arnold, Edward G. Robinson, Edward Brophy, Edgar Buchanan, Edgar Kennedy, Eduardo Ciannelli, and — Akim Tamiroff! I think Jean Harlow was in one of them, too. What a movie — passion, action, betrayal, temptation, fury, danger! She put a paper napkin in her book and closed it, then stood up. She was pale, then she suddenly reddened and paled again. Charlie thought you’d have a catch with him in back or take him for a walk down to the shore through the park, it’s Saturday. She was shaking with anger. You’re a mean, rotten father! Oh, he said, it wasn’t that she cared about herself, not a bit, just about the son he ignored, not, oh no, not herself! She was a martyr, a selfless wife, a saint who put up with his neglect of her with a smile on her face, her nose in a book, her hair in snarls, and her body in an old stained housecoat with tattered stockings rolled down to her knees like the super’s wife from Bulgaria, Jesus. I can smell her on you, Anna said, her five-and-ten perfume and her sweaty, dirty dress, you don’t have, you’ve got, you haven’t one iota of self-respect or shame coming home smelling of that tramp, my mother was right about you, she was always right about you, you dirty guinea! She turned and started out of the room, her novel under her arm, and he picked up the gravy boat and threw it against the wall, cold gravy and shards of china everywhere. The other movie I saw, he shouted after her, was fuck you and your drunken mother! He saw blood on his shirt and realized he’d somehow cut his hand. He’d never said, never, he was sure, that he was going to have a catch, the kid couldn’t catch a ball with a basket with his cockeye. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of Philip Morris. Irene’s cigarettes, he’d taken them and left his Luckies by mistake. You better get them off the night table, honey, before the old man gets home, he muttered.

THE OLD MAN HAD BEEN SAVING PILLS FOR THREE YEARS, Percodans mostly, although there were some others. He thought of them as his medical Mickey Finn. He had a good handful of them and would use them as soon as he’d dealt himself the winning hand, or, perhaps more precisely, the hand that would finally beat life. He had determined, a couple of years before, when it became apparent to him that to die would be a more reasonable choice than to live, that each day he would shuffle a deck of cards, a poker deck from which the Jokers had been removed, and allow himself eight cuts, playing for a flush. He had also determined that eight cuts would be fair, this based on the draw poker he’d played all his life, the classic game, one he thought of as old-fashioned, that permitted players to discard and draw up to three cards after the hand was opened. He also made it a rule that he would play but three hands a day, one in the morning with his second cup of coffee; one around noon; and one in the evening after he’d made himself a bourbon and water. He had often drawn four of the same suit, and, even more often, three, but he was certain that four hearts, for instance, were no closer to a flush the next time than one; or, as he thought of it, close but no cigar did not mean cigar next time. So he did not torment himself with the anguish suffered by those who believe that luck and chance are incremental and progressive and fair, that is, that luck must, of necessity, change. But it was, indeed, interesting, nonetheless, when he had drawn, perhaps, four clubs on his first four cuts with four cuts to go. The odds would seem to be with him in such instances, but he’d never yet, of course, drawn that fifth club. He invariably thought, at such times, how pleasant it would be to believe in a God to whom he could pray, a God who would either change the cards’ positions in the deck or direct his hand. Dear God, give me a flush so that I can die. But there was nothing but the deck, life, and, just a blink away, death. He could have, surely, simply swallowed the pills, plus an insurance bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills, with a tumbler of bourbon; but he thought that his simple game was a duty that he owed to life, even though life had nothing for him anymore. One evening, after he’d begun his final routine, it came to him that this game, this civilized courtship of death, was the act that permitted him to go on living, it had become his life. There was a neat irony to this, it pleased him greatly: to look forward to living so that he could play for the right to die. Very neat. He, incidentally, was sure that he had an edge on the game, perhaps even an unfair advantage, one that had been hard for him to acknowledge, perhaps because he had never employed it. For he knew, quite simply knew that a deck of cards that he’d taken, some twenty years earlier, from a hotel room in the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, a deck which he’d never removed from its cellophane wrapper, was the charmed and magical deck that would, on its first use, lead him into the pleasures of nothingness. He even saw the flush, red and beautiful, in diamonds: three, seven, ten, nine, King.

CARSON TOLD HER THAT HE’D ONCE READ AN ACCOUNT IN some magazine of a dream in which a woman, the wife of the man who was dreaming, turned into Meryl Streep. In the dream. She looked at him and ate the last piece of dill pickle on her plate. And? she said. What’s your point? I don’t really remember the article too well, he said. Lunch was almost over, which was too bad, although he knew that he had no chance with her, well, maybe he did, maybe, but he didn’t have the courage to risk his marriage, it was ridiculous, unthinkable. But when she looked the way she looked today, in a dark business suit and white blouse, well, when she looked the way she looked today. Oh, wait, he said, right, I think the point was that the guy hated Meryl Streep but in the dream he wanted to — he wanted to make love to her. But he really didn’t like her at all, the actual her. You must have been asleep in your psych lectures, she said. Get yourself a selected Freud, one with the dream stuff in it, The Interpretation of Dreams. What do you think of Meryl Streep? she said. She stood up and smoothed her skirt over her hips and thighs. Oh sweet Jesus. She’s O.K.? he said, why? I think she’s a pretentious ham, she said, all those irritating accents are supposed to show us that she’s a great actress? She puts on some broad accent, her nose gets red, and she cries a few times, that’s the routine in every movie. Sure, he said, that’s right. He was looking at the lace edging on the collar of her blouse. Don’t you think so? she said, that that’s about the extent of her talent? I’m on the side of the guy who had the dream — but when he’s awake! He stood up and she asked him to leave the tip, she’d get the check. You bought last time, she said. O.K. he said, I’ll pick it up next time, then. She paid at the register and he stood back a few feet, admiring her, her nose and ears, her hair, her little gold-ball earrings, her jacket and skirt, her shoes and stockings, her legs. They walked out onto the street and started back to the office. You were looking at me back there, weren’t you? she said. Her voice was even, neutral, placid. Yes, he said, blushing. You were looking at my legs. Yes, he said, do you want to have a drink after work some time? I’m married, she said, you know that, and so are you. Do you want to have a drink some time? he said. He looked at the slender gold chain around her neck. Is the married, ah, thing, problem, she said, O.K. with you, is it all right with you? How about tomorrow? he said, sure it is. I’ll let you know in the morning, she said. A drink, right? Yes, just a drink. They stopped at the curb for traffic and he looked at her profile. His wife was just as attractive, maybe moreso. So, she said, buy that Freud, and see what he has to say. Meryl Streep! she said. They stepped off the curb and his forearm brushed her hip. It felt like fire.

AL WAS ALMOST ALWAYS LATE WITH THE CHILD-SUPPORT check lately, and when it did come, it was often for less than the court had ordered him to pay. But what was she supposed to do about it? She had no money for a lawyer, and the very thought of getting mixed up with family court or whatever it was and all the riffraff there made her want to cry. She was alone with her son and broke and in a new neighborhood that she hardly knew. And dependent on Al, the least dependable man in the world even when they were still married! On occasion, she tried to call him at his home number, but every time she did, Estelle would answer and pretend that she had no idea of who was on the line. Dottie? she’d say. Dottie who? She wanted to reach through the phone and scratch the bitch’s eyes out, Dottie who! And she was a whore as well. Mrs. Mertis had told her, not without sour pleasure, that she’d seen the woman Al ran off with in Coney Island, in Scoville’s, sitting drunk at the bar with two greaseballs who had their hands all over her, Estelle, wasn’t that her name? A disgrace, and I had my daughter with me. Dottie thought about writing Al a letter, telling him about his slut of a wife, but ended up turning on the radio and sitting in the dark, smoking. After a month or so, she began talking to a neighbor, a man who lived a couple of doors away, in a frame house that badly needed painting. He seemed friendly enough, a nice man, really, who worked for Con Ed, and who, he confided to her, not in so many words, was unhappy in his marriage. He looked helpless and sad and resigned as he told her this. Just between you and me, he said. Dottie had met his wife a couple of times; she was much older than her husband, drab and worn out. The man never told Dottie why he was unhappy, save to say that he’d married two women, his wife and her mother, it was a curse. Once a week his wife would go out to Elmhurst to visit her mother, who was—maybe, the man said — half-crippled with arthritis. Her daughter would shop, do the laundry, clean the apartment, cook for the week sometimes, and stay overnight. When she returned, she’d be tired, tense, mad as hell, and she’d take it out on him! Nag, nag, nag him about his drinking, which wasn’t drinking, a couple of beers, maybe a ball or two of whiskey, I work hard for a living, for Christ’s sake. One evening, after she’d put the boy to bed, she was surprised to get a call from him. He was alone, maybe she’d like to come over for a drink — iced tea or ginger ale, if she liked, maybe play some gin. It would be nice to talk to an adult for an hour or two. But she knew very well that he liked her by the way he looked at her when they met. But she was only two doors away, the boy would be fine, she’d be there and back in no time. So she left, walking quickly to the side porch door of his house. And so their affair began, Dottie visiting for an hour or two, never more, on those nights that the man’s wife — Mrs. Sweetness and Light, he called her — was in Queens. After their first sexual encounter, on the linoleum floor of the closed-in porch, which occurred abruptly as she was leaving after her initial visit, he asked her, matter of factly, if she’d bring a bath towel the next time. They could, well, love each other, he said, on the rug in the living room, it would be more comfortable, especially for her. She was shocked and embarrassed, but the next time she brought the towel. He told her that he couldn’t soil the sheets and he couldn’t use one of his — his wife’s — towels, she’d look in the hamper immediately and start in with a million questions. So Dottie brought the towel each time, and watched him spread it on the living room carpet next to the sofa. He’d kiss her, grope her, help her down to the floor, take off her panties, and mount her. She would feel dirty and disgusted, but she went over every week. She felt that it was a duty that she had somehow assumed. Eventually, she’d take her underwear off before she went to the house, and there she’d stand, after dark, it was always after dark, waiting for him to open the porch door, her towel under her arm, naked beneath her skirt. Just another slut, like Estelle, just another whore, she thought. On many, perhaps most occasions, the man was too drunk to do anything but writhe on top of her, pushing his groin against hers, cursing his wife. She’d get up off the floor and go home, once laughing to herself in the street at the thought that she didn’t, at least, have to get dressed. One night, when she got back home, the boy was sitting in the kitchen in the dark, weeping convulsively in terror. It took her an hour to make him believe that she was really his mother and not the lady who had stolen Daddy. She told the man the story, told him that she just couldn’t do it any more, she liked him, but, well, if he had children he’d know. It’s O.K. with me, he said, drunk, you’re just like the old lady, anyway, a goddamn iceberg, no wonder your old man walked out on you. After that, when they met on the street, they barely nodded, although his wife would sometimes give her a small, frightened smile. Soon after the affair ended, the checks stopped altogether, and when she called, the operator said that the number was no longer in service, and that there was no new listing for that name. She called Al’s office and asked for his department head — the man she’d always talked to whenever she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get Al at work: he had always stepped away from his desk. He told her that Al had been, well, he’d been, ah, let go. For some small indiscretions. Concerning the petty cash account, he said, in a whisper. It was handled quietly, stayed in the company. She hung up and looked at the wall, then lit a cigarette. Petty cash, she said. Petty cash. Petty cash, you stupid stupid stupid.

WHEN HE WALKED INTO HIS APARTMENT THE AIR FELT different, something was off. Then he saw, on the scarred drop-leaf table in what he jokingly called the dining room, a pearl gray homburg, its brim and crown soiled, its black grosgrain band sweat-stained and discolored. Draped over the back of one of the creaking library chairs he’d bought from the Salvation Army was Elaine’s long flowered skirt. He sat at the table and lit a cigarette, what the hell are these doing here? The hat? He got up and went into the living room to get an ashtray and saw, on the studio couch, a neat pile of change. The bowl, hand-thrown, as Elaine had noted, that she’d bought on Eighth Street for him to keep his change and keys in, was gone. She’d been in the apartment, but what was going on? Or maybe it was Jenny who’d been in the apartment, but he’d never given her keys. At that moment, he realized that Jenny had told Elaine that he’d been seeing both of them. He could imagine her face, screwed up in false anguish, as she’d asked Elaine to please understand, she was sorry, really sorry. It must have been an acute pleasure for her. He knew, then, that Elaine had taken everything that she considered hers, not just the bowl. Her clothes, of course, would all be gone, save for the skirt, but what else had she taken? Two hours later, after he’d checked, he had made a mental list of the missing items, which he then carefully transferred to a notebook: A 1960 Bodley Head edition of Ulysses, without a dust jacket; a Lamy combination pen-and-pencil in gray matte finish, with extra ink refills and leads; a heavy black woolen sweater with a shawl collar that a junkie friend of hers had stolen; a ten-inch Revere Ware skillet; a black-and-white-striped apron from Pottery Barn; a pair of porcelain egg coddlers; an oven mitt; a set of four wooden cooking spoons; a plastic lazy Susan; a Kent hairbrush; a loofah; an unopened package of Hanes briefs; a tobacco-colored suede jacket from B. Altman; a nickel-plated Zippo lighter; a paperweight of highly polished petrified wood; a Richard Avedon photograph, framed in chrome, of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams; three LP’S: Sonny Rollins’s Newk’s Time, John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, and Dexter Gordon’s Our Man in Paris; and paperback copies of The Sacred Fount, Pierre, The Confidence Man, The Plumed Serpent, and García Lorca’s Selected Poems. And, along with her flowered skirt, she’d left, at the back of a drawer in the little room he hopefully called his study, a black French garter belt and a pair of tangled off-black nylons. Was this by design, and how could he tell? The gray homburg, though, gave him an eerie feeling, as if the hat had a malign, extravagant power to do him harm. He wouldn’t touch it, not yet, not even to throw it out. He made himself a drink — she hadn’t taken the J.W. Dant anyway — and sat on the couch. It had to have been Jenny, the horny bitch, who’d told her. Her best friend, of course. How pleased she must have been to stab Elaine’s ego. They’d known each other since high school in Midwood, they even looked alike, had got stoned together, found the Village together. They were built the same and often shared each other’s clothes, even shoes and underwear, so Elaine said. He recalled the night they’d come into the bar together, both in black gabardine suits and black sunglasses, their black hair pulled back into chignons; for a brief moment, he couldn’t tell one from the other. He lit another cigarette, and said, aloud: So, I got bored with Elaine and started fucking her double, what a champ, they even look alike naked. About a week later, he went into the bar and saw Elaine, sitting over a pink gin and talking with Louie, the day bartender. He sat down next to her and ordered a draft beer. What the hell was that all about? he said, you even took a fucking oven mitt? And what’s with that weird filthy homburg? You left your print skirt, too. I threw it out! She turned on her bar stool so that her knees touched his thigh. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Elaine, even the goddamn bowl you bought me for my change, Jesus, that’s really small. And the hat! What is with the hat? Are you crazy? she said, are you going crazy? I’m Jenny, look. Look, I’m Jenny. I don’t know anything about hats or skirts, you ought to get back to work on whatever it is you were working on, get back to work. He was looking at her full in the face, she was Jenny, sure, probably, she was Jenny, of course. She was Jenny, she looked just like her. You can have your skirt back if you want, he said. I only said I threw it out. He wanted to ask her about the meaning of the hat on the table but he knew that she’d lie to him.

I WALK INTO THE DINER AND SIT AT THE COUNTER, THEN order a piece of cheesecake and a cup of coffee, which, I’m pleased to see, are both in front of me just as I finish ordering. “Some service.” The waitress stands directly behind me and says that it’s because she’s got Monday off this week. “You can’t hypnotize people who don’t want to be hypnotized.” Three young men in a booth are shouting and screaming with laughter, then they smash crockery on the floor and throw the cream pitcher and sugar dispenser at an old man who is eating a bowl of soup. “Yankee bean.” The waitress walks over to the young men and stands there looking at them, her order pad and pencil poised for their orders. One of them slides out of the booth and slaps her in the face. “Monday off, you cunt?” The other two young men rock back and forth in hysterical laughter, punching each other’s shoulders wildly. I finish my cheesecake and one of the young men, who is sitting next to me at the counter, orders a piece of cheesecake, and when it arrives, pushes it into my face. He grabs the waitress by the wrist and roughly shoves his hand under her skirt. “I told him I have Monday off so maybe that’s why.” I look for my paper napkin to wipe the cheesecake off my face but it’s missing, as are all the napkin dispensers. “Some service.” I hear applause and look around to see the waitresses, countermen, cooks, busboys, and dishwashers crowded under the television set. On its screen, a heavily sweating man in a pale-blue silk suit, whose pompadoured gray hair has a jaundice-yellow cast to it, walks wildly back and forth on a stage. “Jesus is HERE, friends, Jesus is HERE, friends, and he is fixin’ to fuck you ALL UP!” The little crowd of employees applauds louder. I reach up to my face and find that it is completely clean. “Thanks for the napkins.” I look behind the counter to see the waitress being raped by the young man who pushed the cheesecake into my face. She is naked save for her white cotton anklets and white canvas shoes. Tears flow from her staring eyes as the young man drives himself into her. “What you look? I fuck you next!” I get up from the counter and walk over to the employees, who are clustered about a booth. The waitress is sprawled on her belly across a table while a young man brutally sodomizes her. Another young man waits his turn, panting like a dog. His fly is open and a bottle of ketchup protrudes from it. “Some dick!” I go back to the counter and finish my coffee and the waitress sits next to me in nothing but her slip. “They really hurt me, they raped me to death, do you want to do it too?” Her face is bruised and bloody. “It was probably hypnotism.” She lets her head fall forward onto the counter and closes her eyes, even though I am trying to put the white nylon uniform on her. The three young men leave the diner, laughing and shouting. “Good night nurse!” I have the waitress’s uniform on her, it was easy to do after all. “Too bad, youthful pals, that it is not Monday yet!” I open my eyes rather theatrically, raise my right hand, in which I have a ballpoint pen, and gesture with it. “I have expelled all illusion from this place.” There is the sound of gunfire from the street, a quick, scattered volley of shots. The waitress peers out a window at the street, then turns to face the suddenly crowded room. “Just outside Roxy Deluxe Nails somebody shot the youths despite their prayers. The motherfuckers are dead.” Everyone in the diner applauds, no one as politely as the waitress, who is in a clean pink polyester uniform. She seems to be at least twenty-five years older now. “I am not a nurse but I am pregnant. I’ll get rid of it Monday, if I get the day off.” Two policemen enter and sit at the counter. “I’ll go with the cheesecake.” “I’ll have a, let’s see, a piece of cheesecake.” One asks me if I know anything about three deadbeats who got killed outside.

HAL IS DESTINED TO BECOME A RICH AND FAMOUS writer; this is known by the fact that he carries a Great Book through the Mean Streets of his grim neighborhood, even into the corner candy store and the poolroom, and despite the mockery and bullying of the ne’er-do-wells among whom circumstances have placed him. Here among the decaying tenements of the Slums, his worn and thinly smiling Mother, constantly drying her hands on her coarse apron, save when she is patting her severe bun into place, knows that her Yossel will be a Great Success some day. She looks very much like Ann Revere or Dorothy Adams, although her name is Sarah. Yes, he will make her proud one day, with his good grades and deep love of Education, even though she worries, at times, about his fascination with baseball. “Eat, eat, my darling,” she says, setting a steaming plate of Hearty Ethnic Food before him as he sits at the oilcloth-covered table, immersed in a thick book of philosophical Ideas or great Poetry. He wouldn’t be here all his life, no, he’ll be rich and set Ma up in a swell apartment off the Park. It’s too late for Papa, of course, dead of galloping consumption after long years in the Factory downtown. There is, however, a Siren in his future, soon to arrive, Monica, a sensuous, depraved, shallow, diabolical woman who wears nothing but evening gowns out of which her snowy bosom yearns to emerge. She will, at the moment of his Explosive Appearance on the Literary Stage with his first novel, Let No Man Judge My Anger, drive him mad with an Unlawful Passion and lure him away from sweet Peggy, his blond American Wife, who resembles June Allyson, dear, faithful, patient Peggy in her ruffled apron, bent, more often than not, modestly, of course, over an oven out of which come those pies that even Ma has to praise, and does, for she has come to love Peggy as the woman her beloved Yossel has chosen. His rich and spoiled enamorata, a dead ringer for Gail Patrick, has, although only twenty-five, seduced, toyed with, weakened, betrayed, and finally destroyed, a jazz trumpeter, a playwright, two scientists, a bullfighter, a second baseman, and a professor. Her father, Charles “Big Cholly” Cunningham, who is always flattered to hear himself described as an Edward Arnold look-alike, is highly amused by his daughter’s vile depravity, as befits the heartless Tycoon, the Boss of Cunningham Mining, and the owner of West Virginia and most of Kentucky. “Another fly in your web, Monica?” he’d roar. “Ha ha ha! See that it doesn’t cost me too much this time, my dear!” Hal has almost stopped writing, for his days are a Mad Whirl of polo, croquet, riding to hounds, fast cars, and brandy, his nights a Dizzy Kaleidoscope of fine restaurants, night clubs, hot jazz, and champagne, and he has almost forgotten that he is really Yossel from the Slums. His Ma, settled in the beautiful apartment off the Park that he promised her so many years ago, richly dressed, resplendent in pearls and diamonds, and splendidly coiffed, is not, certainly, Happy, and longs for her cramped little kitchen in the Tenement, longs for her coal stove, her coarse apron, her groats and flanken. She has no idea what has come over Yossel, and his angry outbursts when he visits to find her on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor in her evening gown, shock her into tears. He cannot understand her when she quaveringly suggests that the apartment is too big for her, or when she complains that the maid, Annette, is snooty and intrusive. He also spurns the good advice of his publisher, the suave and sophisticated Carruthers Astor, a brilliant yet down-to-earth gentleman with a rich voice and lustrous silver hair, a man much like Otto Kruger, who warns him that it is time to stop carousing with that playgirl and get back to work on his second novel, to be entitled A Wilderness of Tears, “before the critics and the public forget you, my boy.” Yet Monica’s corrupt beauty leads him to ignore Everything, her smoldering fascination tempts him over and over again to shameful, unutterable weakness, her eyes and hair, limbs and lips and sophisticated accent bewitch him. And so now he finds himself, always, among her frivolous, rich friends, young men and women who know nothing of Lou Gehrig and Schopenhauer and roasting mickeys in the corner lot. And in the smoke and brittle laughter of nightclub and cabaret and jazz joint, his pen is stilled. Peggy weeps silently night after night, gazing at the untouched table setting and his unmussed bed in the beautiful suburban mansion that seemed, once, to portend Happiness for them. One night, when a weak-chinned and pencil-mustached drunk at the bar of El Congo, remarks that it looks as if the boy genius’s first book will be his last, Hal slugs him and is thrown into the street by the nightclub’s bouncer. Lying in the gutter in the rain, he sees Ma’s face, her eyes filled with tears. Monica, soon after, during a bitter quarrel about his refusal to wear jodhpurs to her father’s annual Spring Hunt, spits out, “You’re nothing but a one-trick pony. Ricky was right.” She throws her sable over her shoulders and laughs. “A cheap vulgar drunk from the streets! Good-bye!” Hal is left alone in the penthouse apartment in which their Unlawful Passion began. Hours later, the telephone rings, waking him from his brandy stupor. It’s Peggy, and she tells him, sobbing, that their beautiful Scotty is dying of a Dread Disease that has no name, not, at least, one that the doctors wish to utter. She is in the Finest Hospital in The City, and the Greatest Specialist in The Country is at their darling’s bedside, and yet…. Dr. Charles Trowbridge and his colleague, Dr. Samuel S. Hines, stand in the shadows of the gleaming hospital room, stroking their chins, while a sturdy nurse, holding a white-enamel basin half-filled with a nameless liquid, stands somberly behind them. “It’s out of our hands now,” Dr. Hines says. “We can,” says Dr. Trowbridge, looking at his watch, “only pray.” Hal stands at the bedside, looking down at his angel’s sweaty face, and touches one of her curls, while cold rain lashes at the dark windows. Peggy is beside him, groping for his nerveless hand, while tears gleam in her eyes, and Ma is speaking softly to Heaven in the guttural syllables of her native tongue. The hands of the wall clock turn with astonishing rapidity and suddenly stop. It is 8:00 A.M., and in the silence of the room, Hal and Peggy hear, “Mommy, Mommy, I’m sursty.” The adorable Scotty, as pretty as Connie Marshall, and just as cute, is smiling weakly. Dr. Trowbridge hastens to the bedside and places his stethoscope on her chest. “The fever has Broken,” he says. “She’s going to be Fine, just Fine.” Sunlight floods the room and the nurse bustles about, doing things, while birds sing on the windowsill. “Thank you, God,” Ma says, while she and Peggy and Hal hug each other. Soon the leaves are falling and Hal is at his desk in the little study in the cabin that they’ve bought in the Pine Woods. He sits at his typewriter, and, smiling, types PERMIT HER MERCY, Chapter One. Peggy enters with a tray on which there is a sandwich on home-baked bread, an apple, and a glass of milk. “No apple pie today, honey?” he says, and they kiss. Outside, Scotty runs and tumbles with Lobo, her collie puppy, while Ma sits under an old elm tree, her knitting forgotten in her lap. “Is it really true, darling,” Peggy says, “about the Pulitzer Prize? Really, really true?” Her eyes are shining with pride as she dries her hands on her ruffled apron and tosses her blond hair. Hal wipes a smudge of flour off her pert nose. The postman arrives at the gate and calls out, “Letter from New York, Hal. Looks important!” Hal squeezes Peggy’s hand and rises. In the soft light of the study he looks almost like John Garfield.

RALPH SAID THAT HE’D EXPERIENCED A MORAL REBIRTH when he married Inez, a marriage that seemed incomprehensible to me and to many others who knew these somewhat fragmentary people — perhaps sketchy is a better descriptive. And while Ralph may have been reborn, morally or ethically or otherwise, this pious state did not prevent him from beginning an affair with Claire, a beautiful and somewhat unsettlingly placid woman who was, quite perfectly, one of Inez’s oldest friends. This surrender to the flesh, as the increasingly insufferable Ralph, in all his evangelical glory, might have put it, occurred just eight months into his conjugal annus mirabilis. To rehearse the ups and downs of this shabby amour, Inez’s suspicions — mundane, at best — the usual tears and quarrels, etcetera, would be tedious for me, and for you as well. It’s enough, perhaps, to say that the affair never quite attained even the lowest level of banality, the “star-crossed,” but wallowed just outside it, much as the lukewarm souls who are not permitted to enter hell congregate in its anteroom, bitching and moaning. In any event, Ralph and Claire blundered into her pregnancy, at which news Ralph, predictably and immediately, recoiled from any and all responsibility for his part in this misfortune. That Claire was surprised and hurt by this is, quite probably, a testament to her lack of acumen; that is, it seems clear that she never had an understanding of Ralph’s character, or, more accurately, his lack of character. After a few afternoons of sobbing and shouting and laying blame, mixed with loathsome prayers in which he begged Jesus to make Claire see her sins, he cut Claire out of his life. And then for some inexplicable reason, he put out the base story that Claire had been sleeping with her younger brother, Ray — a dim bulb, indeed — for a year or more, and was pregnant with his child. Perhaps Ralph thought of this as a narrative to set nicely in place as a counter to what may have been Claire’s desperate threat to tell Inez about the affair, such as it was. Nobody believed Ralph about Ray, most notably because he and Claire as an “item” had been an open secret for some time — to all, apparently, but Inez. If Claire were pregnant, the idea of Ray as the incestuous culprit was beyond absurdity. So Ralph, by this odious act, not only elaborated his petty, mean self, he also established that self as monumentally dumb. As someone said, not even Jesus on a good day could forgive such a prick. Claire, however, did go to see Inez, and, amazingly, told her that, yes, she were pregnant, it was true, and by Ralph! He had raped her in the bathroom at a party that they’d all been at a few months earlier, well, he didn’t rape her, but he took advantage of her drunkenness. This was, of course, a lie in every respect. Inez, who had never been reborn in the sublime mystery of marriage as had her spouse, believed it in all details, down to Claire’s description of looking at the black-and-white tiles on the bathroom floor as the deed was done. She took it in hook, line, sinker, float, rod, and reel. She wanted to. She began sleeping, quite openly, with Bill, a very bad guitar player but profoundly dedicated smoker of marijuana, hashish, kif, rope, old rags, hay, and newspaper; he introduced himself as “Tripper"; as Groucho Marx said, “Ah, he was a witty man.” Ralph soon left her, Bible and all—“I have my pride!”—I like to think of him saying, and went to San Francisco, Land of Heart’s Desire, where he worked for a time in the Classifieds department of the Chronicle. Claire’s child was stillborn and she and Ray moved to Phoenix. Soon after Ralph left town, Inez told Bill that she’d been having second thoughts and felt it was best for her to be alone for a while. Bill understood, surely, and asked her if maybe she could let him have fifty bucks or so, he had some dry cleaning and laundry and, you know. Sure, she said, you need clean clothes. Right, he said, his terrifying guitar slung over his shoulder.

HE STOOD IN THE WINDLESS COLD, WATCHING THE skaters at Rockefeller Center, their voices and laughter clear in the gray late afternoon. She wore a black silk blouse, they were in somebody else’s apartment, it was early morning. They drank coffee with the friend whose apartment it was and then he left for work. There was a girl in a bright green skating costume with a matching tam, the hem of the skirt trimmed with fur. They undressed and made love on the couch and then lay quietly, smoking, snow whirling past the windows into the street, the trees bordering the park opposite glowing with accumulating whiteness. He lay half-asleep, his lips against her shoulder, her breath warm and slow on his flesh. The girl fell and the young man she was with helped her up; neither of them could skate very well, but they were young and perfect. She put on a record that the friend had left on the coffee table: “You Better Go Now.” The girl had long, straight legs and good thighs but her physical beauty could not keep her from looking awkward on the ice, and this awkwardness, he knew, endeared her to the young man. Jeri Southern sang, a small and absolute perfection, long lost and almost forgotten: “Remind Me.” They made love again, the voice soft from across the dim room, the snow getting thicker, blunting the street noises, piling up on the windowsills.

DOCTOR GREENLEAF SENT HIS NURSE TO THE LAB TO PICK up a temporary bridge and two posts for a patient who would be in the following morning at nine. It was late in the afternoon and he told her to go home from the lab with the prosthesis — he’d see her in the morning. His last patient of the day, Claire Page, had to have a broken root removed from a molar, a procedure that he was hoping he could accomplish with little trouble. Doctor Greenleaf, whom his patients called Ralph, was nervous and excited — although he denied this to himself — for he would be alone with Claire, a sturdy, subtly provocative widow in her mid-forties, a strawberry blonde with a clear complexion and brown eyes. He was, to be blunt, sexually obsessed with her, and regularly fantasized about the two of them, rapt in their passion, together on a beach in the Caribbean, a chalet in the Swiss Alps, an autumnal path in Central Park, all of these civilized adventures preludes or postludes to shameless, burning sex. He would, in this blurry and absurd romance of a future, be free, of course, of Inez, his bored wife, and their two spoiled, graceless children; Claire would love him, deeply yet sadly, for she would feel the guilt of the femme fatale, the carnal engine that would shatter his troubled, unhappy, yet safe and, of course, lawful marriage. Yet their erotic attraction to each other would be so intense as to drive them to abandon and sacrifice everything to their sacred lust, a lust that thrilled and blinded and made them drunk; so Ralph knitted these clichés together. When Claire walked into his operating room, he was already half-aroused by his recurrent daydream and its elaborations. She settled into the chair and he lowered it to its horizontal position. He glanced at her legs, which, he was certain, oh yes, yes, he was certain that she’d revealed, as if accidentally, to mid-thigh. Sure, she had slipped her skirt up as she made herself comfortable in the chair. She felt, of course she did, she felt as he did! She smiled at him, nervously, pulling at her paper bib, her wondrous hair gleaming in the cold light of his overhead lamp. He’d use a light general anesthetic, he said, just a little, so she wouldn’t have to put up with the numbness of an injection, she’d be able to enjoy her dinner. She was pleased, for she dreaded dentistry, despite Ralph’s gentle expertise, he’d been such a wonderful dentist for her. She was under, and Ralph began working on her tooth, but it was almost impossible for him to concentrate. His breathing was ragged and he was fully erect. He watched his hands, tender and strong and caring, push her skirt up carefully and slowly, watched them fondle her belly and thighs and crotch, watched them unbutton her blouse and caress her breasts. He opened his fly and began to masturbate, then bent to kiss her between her legs. He was moaning, and Claire woke up just as his nurse entered the room. His nurse entered the room! For the smallest sliver of a second he thought that he could just kill the two women and flee. There is little point in detailing what happened after this incident, save to say that the newspapers and local television stations wiped out his career overnight, he lost his license, and he spent eleven months in prison after pleading to two counts of lewd and lascivious conduct, reduced from sexual battery and attempted rape. A lawsuit, of course, was pending. Inez took the opportunity to file for divorce so that she could marry a good friend of theirs, Marty, with whom she’d been sleeping for three years — although she actually made love to him on his office desk every two weeks or so. When she saw Claire she thought her a brassy, overweight whore, of course, and doubted that Ralph, that cold fish, ever did anything at all with her or with any other woman — awake, asleep, unconscious, or dead! When Ralph was released from prison, he left the state when it was legally permissible to do so and disappeared for three years, after which he landed, as they say, in Oldsmar, Florida, a small gulf town, with a license to practice in the state in hand. He opened an office, hired a nurse and a part-time receptionist, a woman older than he, whom he married a year later. One afternoon, a voluptuously built woman in her mid-forties came into the office to make an appointment for an initial checkup and routine hygiene and cleaning. She was a widow, it turned out, and her name, quite unbelievably, was Claire. She was, too, a strawberry blonde, although this state had been attained with professional aid. But still. But still. Coincidence, as life proves over and over again, is so routine as to beggar comment. He smiled warmly at Claire as his wife made the appointment and noticed that her legs and hips were very much like Claire’s, they were Claire’s. Perhaps she would need, in the future, some extensive dental work, a new partial; or perhaps she would have to come in late, the last patient; she might need emergency care on a Sunday. This time he’d give Claire enough to keep her peacefully under for a good while, long enough for him to show her that he still loved her, and to do his work the right way, befitting a doctor of his experience and abilities.

JANET’S HUSBAND, AL, WAS MAKING AN ASS OF HIMSELF, AS he usually did at parties lately. With a few drinks in him, he turned into an irresistible lothario, good God. There he was, drunk and clumsy, with his shirt off, dancing with a girl who was no more than eighteen. Nobody in the hot, crowded apartment paid any attention to him, but Janet was, nonetheless, embarrassed and angry. He had acted, since their arrival, as if he didn’t know her, as if she were somebody he’d bumped into on the street that evening. She went into the kitchen to make herself another drink. There were two men there, drinking straight whiskey and eating the cheese and crackers and pretzels that had been laid out on the counter. One, a short redhead, had an open, somehow friendly yet blank face, and the other, a black man, looked like a bank officer, in a dark suit, white shirt, and carefully knotted tie. Janet didn’t know them, but then she hardly knew anybody there, save for the host, one of Al’s friends from work, a prig of a man whom she despised. You’re not having too much fun it looks like, the black man said. The other man looked fleetingly at her legs and then up into her face, smiling candidly. Oh well, she said, a party, you know, and shrugged. She looked around into the living room and saw Al with his hands on the girl’s hips, swaying erratically to “Just For a Thrill,” the damn fool. I know what you mean, the redheaded man said, and a drag of a party, too. They all laughed, complicit. The black man suggested that they go up to the roof and smoke a little, you dig? that might help things along. Maybe the party will be better when we get back. Or at least look better, his friend said. Janet hesitated, but why not? Why not? She was tired of being humiliated, she was tired of being ignored. She thought to tell Al that she was going up to the roof for some air, but knew that he would immediately become the possessive and jealous husband and make a scene. Sure, she said, let’s go up. She liked these young men, if only for the fact that they weren’t the other young men at the party, laughing and shouting into each other’s faces, desperately hip. It was a warm, sticky August night, the moon hazy in an overcast sky, the smell of rain in the air. She was suddenly very high, very very high, they were all high, smoking two fat joints of hash. Oh my goodness, she said, I am so stoned, so stoned. She wasn’t, however, so stoned, wait! as to want this, wait! No, wait, no! she said. The redheaded man was kissing her in a frenzy, and roughly squeezing and pulling at her breasts, while the black man was pulling her skirt up and clawing at her panties, come on, bitch! They pushed her down onto her hands and knees and she felt the black man’s weight on her back and then he was in her. They were raping her, you’re raping me! she said, you bastard! She felt him coming in her and she started to cry. Her head felt as if it were floating free of her shoulders and then the redheaded man pushed a spittle-wet finger into her anus and pushed himself brutally into her, while the black man held her head between his hands. The pain traveled through her gut and up her spine and into her head, a blazing agony behind her eyes, and she sobbed and screamed, drooling onto her torn blouse. The black man slapped her across the face again and again while the other man moved wildly in her, grunting. Fuck the bitch! the black man said, fuck the cunt bitch! The man pulled himself out of her and came on her buttocks and thighs, panting. Then they ripped off her blouse and yanked off her skirt and half-slip as well. One of them threw her torn panties in her face and the black man put her skirt and blouse and slip under his jacket, laughing. Go back to the fucking party like that, bitch, see if it’ll be more fun! They left and she sat there, shivering and weeping in the soft rain that had been falling for some time. Her brassiere was soaked through, and one of the straps was broken. The cupola door opened and Al stood there, the cold light of the stairway behind him. Janet? he called. Janet? I can’t even dance with somebody without you getting all pissed off? Jesus Christ! She sat, biting her hand to keep silent, her knees pulled up to her chest, her torn panties clutched to her vagina. Her entire lower body throbbed and burned and she thought that she was going to move her bowels. Where the fuck are you? Al yelled.

WHO IS HE? WHO IS SHE? IS THIS HER HUSBAND? WHAT IS he doing here? Is she drunk? Is this apartment on Riverside Drive? Or on Bank Street? Is this a bathroom? A hallway? Tissues? Who is he and where did he go? He says he’ll fix her face? Fix it? What does that mean? Why is the floor sliding around? Is she going to vomit? Who is the woman in the photographs on the wall? Is this her bathroom? Or their bathroom? Why does the woman in the photographs look like her? Are they photographs? Or drawings? Do they look like her sister? How long has her sister been dead? What was her sister’s husband’s name? Why did she go to bed with him? Because her husband went to bed with her sister? Did he really? Where are her shoes? Or one shoe? Did she have both shoes on when he took her into the bathroom? Or down to the hallway? Why did she go with him? Is she really Claire? Or is she Inez? Or Cora, or Anna? Who is she? Who is he? Is he Pierre? What is he doing at the party? Is her husband jealous of him? Or jealous of her job? Is he jealous of her? But why? Why is the bathroom floor so familiar? Or the hallway floor? Why did she marry this old man? Is he really that old? Maybe this man is her sister’s husband? Or, rather, was her husband? Did she marry Ray after Claire died? Why? Is Claire, then, her sister? Or was? Are Ray and Pierre brothers? Or is Warren Ray’s brother? Are Ray and Warren and Pierre brothers? Did Claire really die of multiple myeloma? Or a botched abortion? Why is the bathroom floor so filthy? Is it a bathroom? Or a hallway? What does he mean, fix her face? What did he see in that whore at that party? What does he see in that girl at this party? Is she what her mother would have called a chippie? Why did he give her a cigarette? Didn’t she stop smoking a long time ago? A month ago? Last week? Yesterday? Why did she stop smoking? Does she want to live forever? In bathrooms and hallways? Why is he laughing? Who is he? Why is he adjusting her clothes? Is he fixing her clothes? Why did she want to go down to the street with that filthy man? What filthy man? Warren or Ray or Pierre? Is her husband Pierre? Or Warren? Or Ray? Is she Claire? Is she losing her mind? Don’t they say that if you think you’re crazy then you’re not? Who says that? Freud? Jung? Adler? Ferenczi? Is she really a wreck? What does he mean by badassid? Is he fixing her face and her clothes because she’s a wreck? Why is she all wet? Is it raining? Why is it always raining when they go someplace? Does she have amnesia? Why is the man showing her a detective’s shield? Is he a detective or is he a fake? Is Pierre a detective? Since when? Is she going to throw up again? Is this man a black man who looks white or a white man who looks black? Does it matter as long as he’s a detective? Is he a detective or is he a fake? Why is he taking her clothes off? Because she’s a wreck? To wash her? To fix her? To fix her in the shower? Who is he? Who is she? Why is there a shower in the hallway? Who is she?

IT WAS ABOUT 10:30 WHEN JACK GOT HOME. THE LIGHTS were on all over the house, but Anna wasn’t there, even though the table was set for supper, another cold supper. She was really cute. Through the kitchen window, he saw Joey sitting on the back steps, silent, his face vacant, his shoelaces untied, as usual. Anna always said he was driving her crazy, that there was something not right with the boy. Jack opened the back door and took his son by the hand. “Hello, Daddy,” he said. “Mama shut the door on me.” He didn’t seem upset and there was no evidence that he’d been crying. He certainly wasn’t frightened. Maybe there was something the matter with the kid, he was a little slow, but a lot of kids are slow. Jack made him a sandwich and poured him a glass of milk. “Eat your sandwich, Joey, and I’ll put you to bed, it’s very late. Where’s Mama?” Joey didn’t know, he’d been playing in the backyard and when he tried to come in because his shoes got loose, Mama wouldn’t open the door. She was all dressed up and had her furry coat on. Jack put him to bed and went downstairs to pour himself a whiskey. All right, so he’d seen Jenny, but just for a cup of coffee, it was over, he’d told Anna again and again that it was over, what the hell is she pulling now?

And at the meeting, Lawless had given him most of Nassau County, a goddamn gold mine, Thermo-Fax couldn’t ship the machines fast enough to keep up with the orders, not to mention the copy paper. He wanted to surprise Anna with the news, something fresh and good for a change, but now it was all spoiled. She locked the kid out? And in her fur coat, what the hell is that about? She was probably at her sister’s, what a piece of work she was with her dumb cop of a husband. He could see Anna now, sitting at the kitchen table, pissing and moaning about what a son of a bitch he was and swilling beer.

Anna went into the first saloon she saw, a place called the Melody Room, and sat at the bar. It looked like a decent enough place, and there was another woman at the bar with her husband probably. Just the three of them on this Monday night. She ordered a Seven and Seven and bought a pack of Chesterfields from the machine near the phone booth. She staggered a little, and after she finished the drink, knew that she was pretty well gone. “He doesn’t love me any more,” she said to the bartender. “Take it easy, sweetheart,” the bartender said, “just take it easy.” She nodded and ordered another drink and then another in what seemed like a minute. The couple at the end of the bar was looking at her, and then the man walked over and picked her fur coat up from the floor. “The floor’s not exactly clean, Miss,” he said. “He won’t sleep with me any more,” she whispered to him. “He won’t, you know, do anything with me any more.” She was crying.

Jack called her sister, but Anna wasn’t there. The bitch was pleased to hear that she’d just left. “Maybe you’ll get home for supper now once in a while before midnight,” she said. “Mind your fucking business,” he said and hung up.

The couple at the bar lived on the same street as Jack and Anna, and the husband suggested that he take Anna home, she was really tight, he told his wife, not making any sense, and might get in trouble alone like that. “I always thought she was a drunk,” his wife said, although this was the first time that either of them had seen her anywhere near drunk, the first time, for that matter, that they’d ever seen her in a bar. “I really think I ought to take her home,” he said, “it’s a fifteen-minute walk and I’ll be back in no time.” His wife looked at him. “We’ll go together,” she said, “we’ll both go.” He laughed and shook his head.

“Christ, what the hell do you think I’m gonna do? What do you think I am?” She smiled knowingly at him, an infuriating smile, smug and aggrieved. At that moment, whatever trust that still existed in their marriage disappeared.

While Jack thanked his neighbors, Anna was telling them what a big shot salesman he was, how he could lay the law down to the branch manager, he was fearless, a hero, that’s why he had this great territory in East Flatbush and Canarsie, where there were maybe five businesses, but he was such a tough guy that he couldn’t bear to scare the boss by complaining, by quitting, God no! But he was great at meetings, oh! those meetings! He spent so much time after work at those meetings! tell them about the meetings, Jack. Jack thought of how sweet it would be to strangle her right there, watch her turn blue, the fucking cunt. The couple backed away, nodding and smiling, then turned and walked off. “Come in the house, you drunk bitch,” Jack said. “Get in the fucking house before I kill you!” He pushed her in the door and slammed it. “Joey out in the cold and dark with his shoes falling off,” he said. “Oh, really,” Anna said, “now you know what I put up with all day, every all day.” “You’re his mother!” Jack shouted.

“She must be miserable with that guy to talk that way in front of strangers,” the husband said. “And what about him?” his wife said, “married to a drunk who just walks out whenever she pleases it looks like? Don’t they have a little boy? And did you see that dress she had on? Not much left to the imagination there.” “It looked all right to me,” he said, “that green dress you have looks like that.” “It does not,” she said, “not a bit! Looks all right to you! Maybe you’d like to take her out for a drink some time.” “Oh, for the love of Jesus,” he said. But he would, indeed, like to take her out for a drink, and a lot more. There was something lost and sweet in her face that appealed to him.

Jack pulled Anna into the living room and then saw the shards of the teapot on the floor, the teapot that Mom had given them for their first anniversary. She broke the teapot! Mom had told them that she’d looked for something really lovely and found it in Chinatown, and hinted that it had been very expensive. This was a lie, and he knew it. His mother had bought it in a local hardware store.

He turned to Anna and said, “You don’t give a damn about anything, do you? Joey, me, my mother,

your

mother, not a goddamn thing,” and then hit her across the face with the back of his hand and hit her again. She fell down and sprawled against the sofa, bleeding from her nose and mouth. “You bitch!” he shouted, “you mean drunk bitch! And I

got

the Nassau County territory, not that you give a shit!” At that moment, in Jack’s righteous mind, there had been no other women he’d slept with, certainly no Jenny, who had ceased to exist: he was understanding and faithful and self-sacrificing and noble. There was only Anna, who had no faith in him, who was a bad wife and a bad mother and a drunk trying to pick up men at a gin mill. He helped her roughly up from the floor and prodded her up the stairs in front of him. “Clean your face — and take that dress off, you look like a cheap whore!” He put his hand on the small of her back and pushed her into the bedroom. She fell again and sat slumped against the footboard of the bed, whimpering, bubbles of bloody mucus at each nostril. Her legs were thrust out before her, her legs open, and her dress had slipped to her upper thighs. He looked at her, instantly aroused, got down on the floor, and raped her.

I GOT TIRED AND BORED LISTENING TO HIM TELL ME about the afternoon, a few weeks ago, that his homburg, a ridiculous mouse-gray hat that made him look like a file clerk masquerading as a lawyer, blew off his head at Rockefeller Center, and rolled across the street to stop directly in front of a woman who picked it up and waited for him to cross over and claim it. I’d be ashamed to claim it, but that’s neither here nor there. The woman turned out to be someone he’d known in high school, a lovely girl whom he’d secretly adored. That was thirty-five years ago. They recognized each other, even though his hair was graying, and she’d put on about fifty pounds. She looked prosperous and beautifully groomed, and wore a camel’s hair polo coat with what he called “a reckless swagger.” It was a phrase he must have got from a magazine on how to live and what to do to be happy. They talked, and he asked her if she had time for a drink, so they went into a bar off Sixth Avenue. It was at about this point in his story that I more or less stopped listening, so I don’t know, with any accuracy, what happened next, although it’s possible that he became hesitant and coy with me about the rest of the afternoon.

It doesn’t matter to me at all. He did say, and of this I’m fairly sure, that the woman remarked that not many men wear homburgs anymore, and that it made

him

look distinguished. Or maybe he said that she said “but” it made

him

look distinguished. I’m also sure that she told him that she’d been divorced for almost five years, her husband having left her for his twenty-six-year-old secretary. What a perfect situation for total disaster. I didn’t mention this, of course: he was stupidly seventeen again and smitten.

It was especially boring and tiresome to hear him tell the story, again and yet again. How he bumped into the girl he’d been secretly mad about in high school, and there she was, right on the street. She’d picked up his homburg, which a sudden gust of wind had blown off his head, and waited for him to cross the street to reclaim it. He said that as he approached her, they recognized each other at the same instant, and that her face brightened as if the sun had risen in her heart. It was obvious that he’d picked up that unfortunate phrase from some noxious novel or maybe that feature on vivid language or whatever they called it, in The Reader’s Digest. He knew, he just simply knew, so he told me and told me and told me again, that she’d been as interested in him as he in her, all those years ago, but that things just work out the way they work out, or, in this case, don’t work out the way they might. He was babbling. She was married, had been married for years and years, with three grown children, one of whom she’d just had lunch with here in mid-town. She was on her way back to New Jersey, where she and her husband had just moved into a condominium. He went on and on and said they’d made plans to meet again, for lunch, somewhere near Rockefeller Center. I wasn’t paying all that much attention to him and made a show of looking at my watch, realizing, with some embarrassment, that I’d done the same thing when he’d first forced this story on me. I do recall that their planned meeting was imminent; he was so excited that he talked on, nervously, volubly, his face flushed and sweaty. I believe that Jung called this runaway speech “hysterical verbalization.” Amen. He was in this state, you must understand, over a woman of some fifty-five or so years, a woman as old as his wife. Was I missing something? Was he going to jeopardize his marriage over a grandmother? Good luck, I said, right. Really, yes, really good luck! I was still looking at my watch as I moved away, smiling foolishly at this foolish man.

The homburg, which, for some ridiculous reason, he’d affected a year or two earlier, blew off his head near the Rockefeller Center rink, so he told me. I was hoping that he’d tell me that it had been crushed by a truck or stolen by some idiot, but it survived and landed at the feet of a woman who picked it up and waited for him to cross the street and retrieve it. She was a handsome woman in her mid-fifties, a little overweight, perhaps, but well turned out in a camel’s hair polo coat and a little snap-brim felt hat. When he got closer to her he realized that she was the girl — a girl no more, of course — that he’d loved to distraction in high school, a feeling of which she was wholly and absolutely unaware. He wasn’t popular or smart or good-looking or hip or tough or talented, and she was everything perfect, even though there were some stories about her and a couple of older guys who’d dropped out. He took his hat from her and she smiled and he called her by name, how amazing, how strange it was, he said, to meet like this after thirty-five? thirty-six years. But she wasn’t that girl, it turned out, not at all, and her name was not the name he’d called her. He insisted that she was, that she must be, that she had to be, and she backed away from him and told him that her husband was meeting her here any minute. Then he said something that I took for a sign that he was heading, soon enough, into real trouble, despite the testament to gravity and stability of his absurd homburg. He wanted to tell this woman the truth, that he was sure that if he could make her remember that she was once the girl that he’d worshiped, she’d be sorry for having pretended to be a stranger, she would become his lover, they would live the life that they should have lived all these years, these lost years! He said none of this, luckily, but put his foolish hat on, thanked her, and walked toward Fifth Avenue. But she was the girl, no matter what she said, she was the girl, the same girl as always, beautiful and remote and lascivious and cruel.

His homburg blew off his head at Rockefeller Center. He’d bought and started wearing this hat after his wife admired an actor who wore one in a movie she liked, Clark Gable? or Gregory Peck? And he believed, too, that the hat made him look important, prosperous, and successful, although I told him, as nicely as possible, that an Adam hat doesn’t exactly say Money and Power. He apparently started running after the hat, which veered off the sidewalk into the street on the edge of its brim, “a grosgrain edge,” as he often remarked. He stepped off the curb and was about to check for traffic when he stopped to stare at a woman who stood on the opposite curb, watching the hat and him. He began to smile, according to a couple of people who were nearby, took a step or two toward her, and was about to call out to her, when a delivery van, barreling down the street, hit him and threw him thirty feet into the air. He must have been dead or near dead when he landed. The woman was, perhaps, one of the crowd that gathered, gawking and terrified, at his broken body and cracked head, but then she walked away and into her life, thinking, possibly, that the man looked familiar. The homburg simply disappeared. Perhaps some idiot took it.

JENNY STARTS DRINKING THE MINUTE SHE GETS IN FROM work. An hour or so passes, during which time she keeps on drinking, tumblers of straight blended whiskey. A bronze figurine of a lioness with a lamb in its mouth stares at her from its place on the black-lacquered table, its blank metal eyes terrible. She stands, slumped against the wall, a glass of whiskey in her hand. She is so drunk that she is unaware that she has wet herself. She takes a drag on a cigarette, then drinks off half the whiskey and gags. She is still dressed in her office clothes, for what she calls her position in her place of business, but Mr. Neumiller would be shocked and disgusted to see her at this moment. She’s wearing a dark suit, a white blouse, and on her jacket lapel is affixed a small piece of costume jewelry, red and blue glass flowers perched on a spray of gold-plated stems. She bends over slightly, staggering away from the wall and then back again, and lifts the hem of her skirt to look, bewildered, at her soaked stockings and the puddle in which she stands, shoeless. She has no idea why she’s all wet underneath her clothes. She drops her cigarette and starts across the room to get another one from her purse, staggers again, reels, then falls heavily on her back, slamming her head against the floor and spilling her glass of whiskey. The radio, she realizes, is playing, a song that she likes, but what song it? and the singer is, the singer is, she can’t remember his name. I hope Poppa doesn’t come over tonight, don’t come over, Poppa, I’m fine, fine, fine. She says this aloud. She sits up suddenly, aware of her wet clothes, her discomfort, her helpless drunkenness, and abruptly knows why her clothes are sodden. Her eyes open wide and her mouth twists in selfloathing. She’s going to throw up, she thinks, she wants another drink, her head hurts, she wants to take a bath, she wants a cigarette, she can’t keep her eyes open, her mouth sags and she drools on her blouse, she wants Warren to come back and find her and love her and forgive her and take care of her and do whatever he wants. It’s a sin, but she wants to die.

1 WHAT A GREAT DAY, WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY! IT WAS raining, but that meant nothing at all, surrounded, as he was, by his wonderful daughter, Janet, healthy and sure of herself now, beautiful, really; and her son, Jack, his terrific grandson, bright and tall and personable. And, of course, Warren, his son, finally employed by a company in which his intelligence and considerable skills were being put to use. “Cutting edge, Dad,” Warren said, his arm around Claudia, his fiancée, a grade-school teacher, all of whose pupils were reading at grade level. “Or better,” Warren said, looking at her adoringly.

2 THERE WAS LASAGNA, THAT HE’D MADE FOLLOWING Irene’s recipe, two big baking dishes of it, and a green salad with a savory, tangy vinaigrette, and plenty of crusty bread from Mazzola’s. “Great bread, Grandpa,” Jack said. “Yum, yum,” his mother said back. And, of course, two or three bottles of an excellent California Cabernet. For dessert, fruit and cannoli and sfogliatelle and rum baba and lots of strong coffee. Hennessy V.S.O.P. for those who wanted it. “Aren’t these Mom’s best dishes, Dad?” Claudia said. “About time, I’m glad.” “Wow!” Jack said, looking at the platters crowded with pastries.

3JACK HAS MADE HIM A LITTLE BOOKCASE IN SHOP, EVEN though his real talents lie in math and science. “A whiz at physics,” Claudia said. “I can hardly add,” Warren said. Everybody laughed, and Jack blushed as Claudia kissed him on the cheek. “Didn’t take after your uncle,” Janet said. It looks as if Jack will have his pick of the good schools, given his grades: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech. “He is so smart I could choke him!” Janet said. She looked fantastic now that she’d stopped drinking the way she’d been drinking. Absolutely fantastic!

4 HIS SON AND CLAUDIA, WHO IS A LITTLE OLDER, IT seems, than Warren, will be married in the spring. She’d been married twice already, to men whom she supported until it became impossible. “They were cheating on her too, Dad.” “What are you two whispering about? Have some dessert.” They’ll be moving to Ohio, Cincinnati, where Claudia’s mother lives. Claudia’s brothers live nearby, but, well, “Brothers!” The old lady needs someone to look in on her from time to time, run some errands, do a little shopping, cleaning, the laundry once in a while. “She’s not as young as she used to be.” There are apparently plenty of cutting-edge jobs out that way too. “Plenty.” Cincinnati, it appears, is really the next big high-tech area. “Oh, sure.”

5 BEFORE THEY LEAVE HE IS DELIGHTED TO LEND THEM some books, what a pleasure, what a real pleasure to see them reading again, after all those years of fun and, well, this and that. Janet borrowed Thomas Hardy’s Collected Poems and The Pictorial Key to the Tarot; Warren, Ficciones; and for Claudia, In Cold Blood. “Oh, great, I’ve heard so much about this book,” she said.

6“SO LONG, SO LONG, BYE, SEE YOU SOON, KEEP IN touch, Give me a call, Give me a call, Enjoy the books, Stay dry, You have an umbrella? Claudia will drop us off, Bye, Bye, Bye, So long,” and etcetera.

7 HE LOOKED OUT ON THE WET, COLD SATURDAY STREETS, growing dark now. Something is missing, what? His children seem to be doing well, he has a grandson to be proud of, look at the bookcase he made me, what a sweet thing to do. It will be perfect for his reference books. And Claudia seems very nice, a pretty woman, too, and lots of women are married more than once nowadays, more than twice even. Warren knows what he’s doing.

8 IT’S STILL RAINING, BUT HE’LL GO OUT AND RENT A video, something light and elegant and brilliant to help him shake off the curious sadness that possessed him.

9Singin’ in the Rain.

10 “CUTTING EDGE, DAD, OR BETTER. GREAT BREAD, Grandpa, yum, yum. Aren’t these Mom’s best dishes, Dad? About time, wow! I’m glad! A whiz at physics, I can hardly add! Didn’t take after your uncle, he is so smart! I could just choke him. They were cheating on her, too, Dad, cheating on her. What are you two whispering about? She’s not as young as she used to be, and my brothers? Plenty! Fantastic! I’ve heard a lot about this, what a sweet thing to do.”

11ETCETERA, ETCETERA, ETCETERA. “THAT’S WHAT STORMS were made for.” So they say.

HIS BITCH OF A WIFE HAD GONE BACK ON HER PROMISE, as usual, of course. So that when he got to the apartment she told him that she and the boy were going on a picnic with her latest wonderful and understanding boyfriend, some horny bastard at least ten years younger than she looking to get laid regularly. The upright and noble young man had called that morning to say that he was closing his cute little organic greengrocery for the day to drive them all up to White Plains to a lovely little park that had a beautiful picnic grounds. Including a lovely little pond with lovely little ducks that the boy could feed lovely little bread crumbs. What a prince this humble shopkeeper was! For the love of Christ! he yelled, for fucking Christ’s sake! After I come all the way down here from Washington Heights on the subway you pull this shit? This is not our deal, our arrangement, this is my Saturday! She’d tried to call him earlier but he wasn’t home, it wasn’t her fault. Her amazing and stalwart boyfriend never took a day off or even closed early, this was special, couldn’t he understand? Couldn’t he try to understand? He could take the boy the next two Saturdays to make up for it, but now — he was so excited to go on a picnic, he’d never been on a picnic. She gave him a look of saintly patience, one that said I hold no grudges and I will never point out to you your past and present grievous failings and flaws of character. This is my Saturday he yelled again, this! God, how he’d love to slap her fucking silly. Well, where were you on a Saturday morning? I tried to call you a half a dozen times. None of your business where I was. And where’s the kid? Ah, the boy was out with her warm and attentive companion buying cold cuts and salads and baguettes and soda and wine and such, he wanted to help, he’s so excited about this, really. Do you want to wait and see him and tell him — Tell him what? he said. That I came all the way down here to let him know that we were gonna go out but now he’s out of luck? That’s O.K., though, he’ll have a wonderful day with the super boyfriend, who, when he’s not fucking his mother in every hole upside down and twice on Sunday, he can give him potato salad tips and how to feed the duckies. What a guy! I should have put the make on him myself. You’re a bastard, she said, sober or not, a real bastard. And you’re a whore bitch. He left, and for no reason, walked over to the Alpine, where he’d planned to take the boy to a Tarzan-revival matinee, then for a snack in Holsten’s, with a chocolate frosted, and then for a walk in the park down to the promenade to watch the ships for a while. The kid would be able to see that he wasn’t the drunken slob of a rotten father she’d certainly told him he was and had always been — born drunk, according to her. And the kid would slowly, after a while, get the idea maybe that he was his father, his real father, not the parade of bums, including this latest clown with the fruits and vegetables, in his mother’s pants every night. How did she get to be such a whore? He sat in the theater, loud with kids, the movie probably half over by now, as if it mattered. There they were, Tarzan and Jane and the weird monkey, everything was perfect, peaches, they never argued, never a cross word, they just laughed and swam and swung through the trees and ate bananas and coconuts and papayas, all the animals loved them, and at night they humped each other blind. Tarzan never looked at another woman, not that there was much to look at, a bunch of crazy jigs running through the jungle yelling ugga bugga bongo dongo while Tarzan and Jane looked down from their tree house, feeling each other up. He left before the movie was over and went into the bar next door for a drink. He hoped the hero storekeeper of a boyfriend choked on his sandwich up in the woods in Yonkers with the ducks in the fucking pond. Her heroic and hardworking pal was choking on some organically produced pâté! How could he screw her while gasping for breath? Help! He settled himself on a bar stool and lit a cigarette, ordered a Fleischmann’s and a beer chaser. Tarzan was probably up under Jane’s little skirt made of hides or leaves or grass by now, they ought to show you that in the movie. He knocked back the whiskey and signaled the bartender for another as he drank down the beer. This was a nice bar, calm and quiet on a Saturday afternoon before the chumps came in with their whore girlfriends and two-timing wives. He’d sit for a while and have a few more, maybe, what the hell, get swacked. The alcohol had moved softly into his brain and, once again, the world was perfect. Tarzan’s world.

HE SAT AT THE COUNTER IN THE DINER WITH A CUP OF coffee and a cheese Danish, trying to remember, with a degree of clarity, something that had happened long ago, something fragile and insubstantial, so much so that it might as well have happened to someone else, and not necessarily someone else who was actual: a someone else who could have been his invention. An invented incident from a blurred past would surely be no less acceptable than his present poorly constructed, or, perhaps, arranged life. Or this someone else could have been a flesh-and-blood cipher that had once been him, but was no longer. Perhaps this was the best or the only way of thinking of the attenuated memory, that its protagonist had been a childish simulacrum of him; more perversely, perhaps he was but the adult simulacrum of the faded, all but obliterated figure of the child — who was standing in snow, in crepuscular gray light, and in — what was it? — a tunnel. A tunnel dug through snow banked on either side above him. His father was at the end of the tunnel, in a navy blue overcoat, a gray snap-brim fedora, and a silk scarf, snow-white with blue polka dots. His mother, a young woman of virginal beauty, holds his hand in her gloved hand, she smells of winter, a clean cold edged with a light perfume of delicate and unearthly flowers. It is intoxicating to the child. His father, now, is embracing his mother, their bodies pressed close to one another’s, and they kiss, they kiss in the snow before the door of the house. He has his arms around his mother’s legs, his face pressed into the soft wool of her coat, into her warm hip, he holds tightly to her legs, he wants to be embraced, he wants to be kissed, he wants to be his father. He is eating a green salad and a baloney sandwich with mustard in the bright kitchen. His mother pours him a glass of milk and says something to him, what? What does she say? She is still wearing the black dress with golden things on it that his father calls a knockout, a word that he really likes. He steps back to look at her, she’s flushed and smiling, and now, at the counter, he looks at her because he knows that he did not then know that she would never look that way again, because his father was disappearing, receding into winter days and nights, and that, by spring, his mother’s magical dress would be put away or given away or thrown away. He ate his baloney sandwich and felt, eating his cheese Danish at the counter, the emptiness of that little boy at the kitchen table, who could not understand the oddly desolate feeling that touched him. His father entered the kitchen, smiling, but his voice was hard and angry, and he could no longer remember what was said or done. There came to him an image of the table, on which stood a bottle of ketchup and one of Worcestershire sauce: there came to him an image of heaven.

WARREN AND RAY, BROTHERS WHO HADN’T MUCH TO do with each other since their late adolescent years, had been carrying on, as they might say, with each other’s wives. The latter were women whom both men had known as girls since grammar school, and as young women through high school and on into the years immediately following, years of loud saloons, louder parties, stupendous hangovers, and night classes at various public colleges. In point of fact, although it might fairly be thought of as point of fact ordinary in the extreme, both brothers occasionally dated each other’s wives before, of course, they were each other’s wives. Dated is probably the wrong word: saw, went out with, ran around with were the euphemisms in vogue at the time of these somewhat diffident and unsatisfactory liaisons. How these brothers and their wives began, some twenty-five years later, to betray each other, is a story so common as to make one weep with sad ennui and need not be told, or, to be candid, will not be told here. But let me note, for those who must have background information, that the sexual possibilities inherent in the reawakened relationships among these four people flickered into life at two parties, which, it is obvious, both couples attended. At one, Ray sang “Prisoner of Love,” a song learned from his mother — their mother — and delivered in what he mistakenly thought of as Russ Columbo’s style. Perhaps the mediocrity of Ray’s performance made Warren’s wife feel tenderness for him, or perhaps she saw, in the paunchy, balding, half-drunk shipping-room supervisor who was wreaking meticulous havoc on the sweetly despairing old song, the boy who had been the first to touch her bare breasts, the first to bring her to orgasm with his fingers. Why did I marry Warren? she may have thought, although such thought seems rather coarsely literary. It may be of interest to note at this point that Warren’s wife, post-“Prisoner of Love,” managed to tempt or lure or inveigle — or simply ask — Ray up to the roof where, to his astonishment, she performed fellatio on him, and, perhaps, thought about the old days. Why, she may have thought again, did I marry Warren? a thought, I grant you, as crudely literary as it earlier was. Ray realized that he loved Warren’s wife, that he’d always loved her, although this realization was, you might agree, suspect. And their affair began. Why Ray’s wife, at the same time, decided to throw herself — her unspoken phrase — at Warren is not known, and there seems little point in inventing good reasons for the amour. Let us take for granted that Ray’s wife and Warren, at another party during the same febrile holiday season, had much the same experience as their spouses’: backyard or roof or basement or hallway or closet or bathroom as erotic locale; a limited repertory of sexual acts, dictated by the constraints of time, place, weather, clothing, and experience: however combined, such elements were triggers for the release of love, or love’s counterfeit, fascination, which, as the old song has it, implies a line between itself and love that is hard to find on an evening such as this, or, in this case, an evening such as that. So their affair began. The women, or so it seems, never found out about each other’s regularly occasioned adventures, but the brothers found out about everything after a few weeks. How it happened that the women remained ignorant — blissfully ignorant, I’m tempted to say — is beyond the means of this somewhat thin narrative, and it isn’t, after all, important. The brothers met on a rainy evening at Rockefeller Center for some reason or other, something to do with an insurance policy of their mother’s: a rare meeting, indeed. They walked in a drizzle over to a bar off Father Duffy Square and, inevitably, after some business of their meeting had been settled, talked about their mutual betrayals of each other as well as, of course, the mutual betrayals of and with their wives. After a few drinks and the most halfhearted denunciations of each other’s despicable practices, it became clear that they were not only not angry with each other, they were, on the contrary, content, even, perhaps, a little happy. Neither was so crude, or, perhaps, brave enough to say so, but it was obvious by hint and indirection, a smile, a glance, that their couplings with each other’s wives had made them feel, if tritely, young again; but, better than young, reckless, daring, thrillingly transgressive, in a word, immoral. As they were getting ready to leave, Ray reminded Warren of the time, so many slow years ago, when they had gone, for the first time, to hear Charlie Parker. It was at the Three Deuces, you remember, Warren? Ray said. Bird and Kenny Dorham, with Roy Haynes and Al Haig. But who was the bass? Slam Stewart? but he never, right? played with Bird? Tommy Potter! Warren said. Right, right, Ray said, Tommy Potter. They stood in the doorway, buttoning their coats, remembering themselves as inept boys in their cheap one-button lounge suits from Buddy Lee, hiding behind their hipster sunglasses. They looked at each other, deep in their luscious sins, knowing the secrets of each other’s wives, their yielding, lustful bodies. You want a Charms? Warren said, I use them to cut down on smoking. Cut down? Ray laughed. You smoke like a fucking chimney. Warren put a lozenge in his mouth and lit a cigarette. Well, my intentions are good, kid. The road to hell, Ray said, and smiled. Sure, he said, gimme one, and a smoke, too. Jesus, Charlie Parker, I still remember how I felt. And Bird wore a purple tie, too, remember? Purple. Those were the good old days, really. Not too bad now, either, brother mine, Warren said, and winked.

THE FATHERS:

HE IS PROPELLED SLOWLY AND SMOOTHLY ACROSS THE floor of one of the smaller viewing rooms in the Thomas DeRosa Funeral Home, and in a strange yet quite understandable way, he is touching and not touching the carpet. He has on black-and-gray Argyle socks, but no shoes, a dark gray suit, white shirt, and a navy blue tie with a small, dubious heraldic device on its apron. He is wearing shoes, gleaming black bluchers. These articles of apparel, as the newspapers called them, are not his, but they are familiar to him. He is at the casket, which sits on a small catafalque covered with a deep-red velveteen spread of some sort; at the head of the casket is a floral spray of white roses, and the satin band that graces the flowers reads REST AND RELAX. He smiles and looks into the casket, and there he lies, dressed in the same articles of apparel, as the newspapers called them, as he is dressed in. Or he is dressed in the same articles of apparel, as the newspapers called them, as he, the corpse, is. This is a cliché, such a cliché, the man in the casket says: “the man in the casket is the same man as the man at the casket, God!” He says this to his ex-wife, who is standing next to him, the man at the casket. She is still attractive, quite attractive. In my attractive articles of apparel, she says. Especially the black dress I’m wearing — I bought it for your mother’s funeral, remember? He looks her up and down. Her legs are as good as they ever were. Nice legs, right? you old fuck, yum-yum, some moron with a ponytail and a badly fitting suit says. Not for you any more, you old fuck. The young man slowly kneels in front of his ex-wife and pushes his face into her crotch. “So this is the boy genius who was fucking you while I was working eleven-hour days,” he says from the casket, without opening his eyes or mouth. He floats to the back of the room, and stops next to a woman who looks familiar, save for her clothes. My attractive articles of apparel, the woman says, and they both laugh. Especially my purple velvet dress. Who wears purple velvet dresses any more, he asks, you? That bitch wears them, his ex-wife says from the casket, where she is lying on top of his corpse. Her boyfriend is on top of her, both of them pretending sexual intercourse, the boyfriend’s ponytail flopping, somewhat obscenely, back and forth on his thick neck. That’s the kind of sex she likes, the woman in the purple dress says, dead and fake. By the way, you don’t remember me, do you? I’m Anna. Anna? Anna is his ex-wife’s name, he’s pretty certain. Anna is my ex-wife’s name, he says, I’m pretty certain. You can hear her scream and sob, rather theatrically, I’m afraid, as the lunk of a boyfriend pretends to stick it in her. “Imagine pretending to fuck on a corpse, on me — or you,” he says from the casket. Anna? Anna? his ex — wife says, I’m Irene! That whore is wearing my old dress, the one that used to get you all hot and bothered when you could still give it to me every year or so! I had a massive heart attack, he says to Anna, a myocardial infection, just like the one I had when I was a young man at Budd Lake, my bad thumb was the cause. Myocardial events, as the newspapers called them, are very serious and few recover from them, despite elegant articles of apparel worn with panache. What of the intercession of skilled medical personnel, Anna says, in, of course, timely fashion? Oh! oh! oh! oh! oh! ohhh! Irene screams, wow! This young fellow, an attractive and virile greengrocer, can ball that jack and make my jelly roll sing and sizzle, uhhh! Anna notes that he didn’t really have to die and that death might well have been prevented by following the advice tendered in certain wise columns on nutrition and exercise found in numerous newspapers and magazines. Old Glory, if wrapped around one’s genital area, is also of immense help, but few know how to employ the sacred banner properly — particularly in the rain or after dark. He, Anna remarks to the few mourners in the viewing room, he always liked the way I gave him head, or as the promiscuous Irene probably says, blew him. So few women take the time to learn this basic sexual skill properly! In California it’s called oral copulation, Irene says, climbing out of the casket. Whatever it’s called, I like it an awful lot, the boyfriend says, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask my mother. Speaking of mothers, you’re not bad, he says to Anna, even though you’re old enough to be my mother. It must be the dress. And so am I, Irene says, putting on fresh lipstick and smoothing her skirt, and that’s all part of the forbidden thrill! He is at the casket again, looking in at himself, still wondering about the articles of apparel that they wear in common. “Exactly alike,” he says. Exactly, he replies, but how come? Maybe you know, Anna? he says, and turns to ask her to share her sartorial expertise, which is considerable, he knows or remembers. Or he may ask Thomas DeRosa himself, for he is — What are you, sir? he asks. An official spokesman for the dead, Mr. DeRosa says, few of whom can speak for themselves. Yet of articles of apparel I know little or nothing — my wife, Rosa, always dresses me, from the skin out. Mr. DeRosa inches out of the room, herding the mourners before him. This little black dress is a knockout, isn’t it? he says. Rosa’s taste is impeccable! Note its simple lines and the perfect skirt length, ideal for concealing my bony knees. He looks around and sees that he is alone with himself in the casket. From behind a sofa come sighs, grunts, gasps, shouts, yells, laughter, and frantic obscenities, issuing from the idiot boyfriend, his ex-wife, Irene, and his pleasant friend, Anna — or from the idiot boyfriend, his ex — wife, Anna, and his pleasant friend, Irene. You women look so much alike! he says, give me a break! He is almost uncontrollably aroused. Like Moon Mullins or Dagwood in the dirty books, he says aloud. In my mind’s eye, he says, I can see, with poisonous clarity, the frenzied sexual perversions that the three flawed, yes, but essentially decent — like the President! — human beings are salaciously delighting in. He stands in the center of the room, longing to join them in their erotic play, along with, of course, his buddy in the casket. He wants, even more than he wants to be alive again, to be dead with them, but he is dead with himself alone.