Lydia, out of nowhere, called to say she was in Chicago and would be arriving late the next night or early the morning after. She still had her key. We looked at her bed. It was the same bedding that had been there when she left. With no real enthusiasm we stripped it, flipped the futon and put on clean sheets and clean blankets. I liked making a bed with Sally. I liked smoothing out the sheets, lifting the futon to tuck them in, then opening the blankets, and slipping the pillows into cases. I watched her as she worked, as she clamped the pillow beneath her chin, and bent over and stretched her arms across the surface of the bed, stood up and fluffed the pillows.  

Lydia arrived the following night in good health, boisterous. Her face was a little lined but her dark brown eyes were bright. She was in jeans and a jean jacket, her hair cut into a bleach blond crew cut and she wore a white t-shirt. She put down two duffle bags and her bracelets slid into her wrist. Maureen in a brown bomber jacket followed her in with backpacks and shopping bags.

“There’s more in the lobby,” Maureen said. Her round glasses were fogged-up white and her cheeks were red from the cold.

“Where’d you get a car?” Sally asked. “What is it?”

“A Hawnder of course, what else. I got the car in Phoenix for 600 bucks. So Mo and me met up in San Francisco and I worked at the halfway house and we crashed at this girl’s place in the Mission. But I stayed clean. I went to meetings every fucking day. All day long was a meeting.”

“Are you parked?” I asked.

“Yeah yeah, just up the street. I’ll ditch the car I guess at some point. But I mean, six hundred bucks.” She took off her coat and tossed it across the piano bench. Her arms were strong from working out and she had flames tattooed on both biceps

“But you didn’t know how to drive.”

“I learned that. That was one of the things I had to do in Phoenix. Driving up to San Francisco was a little scary at first. I’ve never done things like that sober. You don’t think about it much, till you try it and everything is different in the way you feel. But who cares about that, listen to me.” She looked around, turned to face each wall, looked at the big painting in the living room, checking for changes. The figures then were quite large; what had started out as embryonic forms emerged as these enormous, multilayered Olmec-like faces, and it looked like they were all paddling a canoe made up of discreet layers of color. When she got to her part of the room she said, clasping her hands to her cheeks and making a face, “Oh you made my bed! Thank you. That’s something else I have to do every day. Where’s Roy? How is he?”

“He’s fine, as always,” I said.

“Well let’s call him up and go out for dinner.”

We made a plan for dinner the following night at a Japanese place in the East Village on First Avenue. We got there first, Sally, Lydia, Mo and me. “So what’s he like?” Lydia asked.

“Everyone sits waiting for him to blow up and abuse them,” Sally said.

I said, “He has ok days. He’s like a nut about me going to school. I’d like to stay off it.”

“He’s a fucking asshole. He’s trying to talk Alex out of leaving town. He’s basically using everything to badger him into staying.”

“Here he comes,” Lydia said.

Roy entered briefcase in hand, dressed in a black suit with a tie, sporting a mustache of sorts. He scanned the room for us, lockjawed, till he caught my eye and nodded, then turned around and opened the door to the vestibule, where, evidently, Dawn had been waiting.

She came in looking a foul mood and shook her face a little as she followed him past the host and to our table.

Lydia stood and got out from behind the table and hugged him. “Oh Roy, hi.”

He kissed her cheek and head and smiled. “They let you out finally?”

“Eh, they ain’t let me outta nuttin’.”

We sat down and looked through the menu.

“I don’t know why we come here,” he said.

“Cause it’s close by and it’s cheap and it’s good,” I said.

“Whatever, fuck it, I’m spoiled. I go out to these places with these people, man.”

“Sounds very uh, specific, man” Lydia said, flipping the menu over.

“So what, are we getting any appetizers? Dumplings?” he asked.

“Hijiki,” I muttered, “and that eggplant thing–”

“With the miso paste,” Sally said.

“Yeah, how about the calamari?” Lydia asked

“Oh, I love that,” said Dawn. “Let’s get a whole tempura appetizer.”

“You can’t order hot food first,” Roy said.

“Says who,” Dawn asked.

“Go ahead, it’s like asking for cheese with fish in an Italian restaurant. But go ahead. These people are just freaks, whatever. Spoiled little fuckers from the suburbs. Let’s just get a giant platter full of sushi and sashimi and eat it all. It’s on me. And sake all around?”

No one said a word.

Roy called the waiter over, a bored, 25 year-old Japanese guy with a rockabilly hairdo. “I’m ordering. Four sakes with cups for everyone. Hijiki, two orders of eggplant appetizer, the fried squid, one mixed tempura appetizer and 3 shumai. Then I want a sushi and sashimi platter for the whole table, maybe three, four deluxes? With seaweed? Just tell the chef to make one up for us.”

The waiter scribbled down the order looking world weary and left.

“So where were you living? I heard San Francisco,” he said to Lydia.

“For six months. I may go back. I got into this whole performance poetry thing there. It’s funny, all you gotta do is start talking about shit you did and they laugh. That’s really all I do. War stories. With hallucinations. Sometimes, I make ‘em feel reeeeaallly baaaaaaaad.”

“It’s like these apartments I’m trying to buy to rent to out of towners. I can make thousands a day on that alone if I can talk my way into it. You know I know these people,” he rubbed his face, “ha ha.”

“Whatever that means,” Lydia said.

“Did you ever hear the story of Mr. Ha Ha the baboon?” Sally asked.

Roy looked at her strangely. “No.”

“That is what you were quoting, is it not?”

“Not. I don’t know.”

“Oh, never mind then.”

“I know that story of Mr. Ha Ha the baboon from somewhere,” Dawn said. It was the first sign of interest she had shown.

“Bosse-de-Nage, ole bottom face, the baboon who accompanies Dr. Faustroll on his exploits,” Sally said.

“Dr. Faustroll!” she said. “You know about him?”

“The Eminent ‘Pataphysician.”

Dawn looked at her oddly and then smiled. “I read that at UGA. I lived in this house and that book was in the bathroom. Alfred Jarry. The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. I must have read it twenty times. That’s why I read Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and The Flowers of Evil, and Huysmans! How could I forget that?”

“I was just reading Frost at Midnight.”

“If that’s Coleridge I didn’t read it. Nope,” Dawn said, “I only read the Rime.”

“The Rind of the Ancient Marinara,” I said.

“Whatever,” Roy said. He pounded the sake and put his face close to Lydia’s. “I haven’t been to San Francisco in a while. It’s a hippy town. The girls there still don’t shave. I hope you stay home. That’s what I’m trying to talk these two into doing. Maybe you could give it a whack.”

“Why would I do that?” she asked. They put down the dumplings and the other appetizers and we dug in.

“Am I the only one?” he asked, his nostrils and neck throbbing iambically.

I found myself saying, “It is scary giving up an apartment in NY.” It felt like a slightly lose tooth that has just enough wiggle to cause you to check and loosen it, day by day, till it breaks free.

Lydia and Sally both burst into anapests at once, “Do you have to bring up that apartment again?” Roy’s beeper went off. He checked it and put it back.

The waiter cleared the plates and lowered this monstrous collection of raw fish and seaweed to the table. We surrounded it and began to reach our chopsticks in and pluck forth the fish, the red bricks of yellow fin tuna, and my favorite, wedges of Spanish mackerel. I stirred a dab of wasabi into the soy sauce and dipped a piece in. It has a dark, oily taste, but milder than sardine.

“I want some more shumai,” Lydia said. “Getting out of this place for a while’s the best thing that ever happened to me. You get some perspective. Shit you thought you never could do is easy. Like learning to drive. I thought it was some big deal but you get out west and it’s like taking the subway. And in Phoenix they take more antibiotics than anywhere else. And Phoenix is America’s fattest city. California’s not like that. In California, they hate you if you’re fat. I had to lose twenty pounds just so they wouldn’t hate me. Didn’t mean they started to like me. Only the dikes. The guys are like ‘Look at the fat chick.’ Ha ha. Now who’s the baboon. But you can’t even walk there. In San Francisco, you walk.”

“I don’t think anyone in Dallas doesn’t drive,” Dawn said.

Mo asked, “Why would anyone ever want to live in such a place?”

“I mean–” she looked confused. “What can I say? I left. There ain’t nothing to love there, not even my parents. But I want to defend it for some reason. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

“Sure,” Sally said, eating a dumpling and washing it down with Sake. “When I was overseas and people would talk about America as if we had all voted for that asshole. I felt defensive and foolish both.”

“That’s just it.”

“Only you can make a joke about your mother,” Mo said.

“No mother jokes,” Roy said. And then, “Your mother’s so fat that when I fucked her ass my dick never went inside her asshole. She’s so fat my father and I both fucked her and we couldn’t tell her tits from her ass.” 

I savoured the shoyu and wasabi on a piece of tuna. Roy picked at his mustache. It was a ratty, cheap mustache. All his life he went in for skeevy facial hair. He hadn’t eaten much at dinner, but he was going to pay for it. No one could pay for a thing when they were with Roy now. His eyes worked us over robotically. He jerked them back and forth between Sally, me, and the briefcase on the floor by his foot. His beeper went off. He stood, grabbed the briefcase and marched to the pay phone.

“Hoo,” Lydia said. “Is that relaxed for him? Cause he’s wound very tight.”

Dawn looked to make sure he was on the phone and said, “He’ll pretend to go do something and just listen to what you’re saying. Once, he took me to Vegas and spent the whole night playing cards and fighting with anyone he could find. I won’t touch that shit anymore. It makes you crazy. My husband’s gonna kill someone some day.”

Lydia was about to say something but Roy returned and snarled at his sake cup. “Don’t worry about money. No one here worries about money again. There are three things fueling this economy,” he said, counting off with his fingers, “Real Estate, Money Market Funds, and you know what the other is. I’m heavily invested in all three. We don’t worry. We take charge. All those assholes, who think they’re so goddamned cool, are putting me on top. And that will send us all to college.”

Sally touched my shoulder and said into my ear, “What is he talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

Lydia tried to order more shumai, but the waiter wouldn’t stop. “I just can’t stop eating them. The rawr fish isn’t floating my boat tonight.”

“We need more sake, where is that guy?” Roy craned his neck around and his face turned bright red. “Look,” he said, turning towards me, his eyes hardening in their sockets and jabbing his two fingers, “look. You at least apply here in the city and that way if she gets into Yale or Penn you can live here and commute. Not those other ones, the one in Provincetown.”

“Providence,” Sally said. “Brown.”

“Oh yeah, the color. They aren’t right for him and not you either. I know. I’ve been to those other places, those little cities, and there is nothing but murder and abuse in them. You can see them on the street, the survivors.”

A harried waiter in red sneakers ran past and Sally literally grabbed him. He wheeled around, his face a portraict of wrath. Roy bared his fangs. The tension circulated between them in little packets of energy ready to explode. Hair by hair, a chill creeped up my neck. For a moment the waiter and Roy were paralyzed by each other’s eyes. They were two ludicrous space creatures forged in the depths of galactic anger. And they were both so stylized–the bad mustache and acid burned skin of a cocaine addict versus the wild albino fury of the East Village waiter, overworked and overpaid, constant victim of the snide, unruly impulses of people who were in the habit of behaving as if they were always on vacation. Sally asked for two orders of shumai. The waiter let down, his face relaxed. Roy disengaged and said, “Four more Sakes.” The waiter nodded and took off and Roy said, “What the fuck was that all about? Did he hurt you?”

I touched his shoulder. He flinched and his eyelashes did battle. I said, “She touched him. He was in a hurry. It freaked him out. There was nothing personal.”

Sally said, “It was nothing. I’m fine,” and for the first time ever she smiled at Roy. I felt again the prick of jealousie, just like that day in Flint Park when Roy caught Tammy Markham’s eye.

“That wasn’t nothing. That was something. Did you see his face?” He made a guttural sound. Then he shook his head and laughed. “Did you see his face? Something or nothing? Is everybody done?” The beeper went off.

Lydia said, “No. We just ordered more shumai.”

“Right.” He marched off on his steel rods to the phone.

And so when the time came to visit some of these places I had worked out plans. I didn’t go to Penn since I saw no reason to move to Philly. It was close enough to at least test the waters of commuting. Ditto New Haven. That left Baltimore, Ithaca and Providence.

“You wouldn’t move to Philadelphia? Not even to be with me.” She shook her head. “We’ll see about that if I get in and go.”

“Well, I could always hang around the mint. That’s where we went on a class trip. And the liberty bell. I’ve been to Philly.”

“Then let’s take the train next weekend to Providence.”

“Where will we stay?”

“I have a friend there who lives in Fox Point. We can walk from there to Brown. She’ll pick us up. Her boyfriend drives.”

“She doesn’t drive? She’s a New Yorker?”

“But that’s not why. You’ll see. She’s kind of out there. I met her at a loft event in maybe ‘77? and became friends. One of those extended circumstances, her sister knew Christopher’s sister. I was a senior in high school? A junior? It was down in Soho. They had a performance called The Grapes of Rash in a garage and after we went up to their loft with these ancient dark and greasy kitchen shelves full of potions and stuff. There were cockroaches everywhere. We sat drinking wine. There was a big, lopsided wooden bowl full of spotted bananas and apples and pears and a swarm of fruit flies that hovered in the Netherlandische light. She was living down on Mott Street with this friend of hers, a lighting designer, terrified of her shadow. I loved her paintings. I used to go down to her place after school and we’d drink Cafe Bustello and look at pictures and talk about art. Then she moved to Providence to go to RISD, and hasn’t been back since, not even to see her family. She lives there now with a piano tuner and three dogs.”

I stopped to stare at her. “Three dogs?”

“Big ones. Mutts, with slather coming off of their lips.”

“Good lord. I’ll die.”

The ride up was bleak but painterly with light slanting through the girders of dying bridges, abandoned trestles, warehouses and water tanks, and there was the accelerating tick of anticipation as the train crossed into Queens and raced in a long arc away from the city.

Penn Station was barbaric. A sea of irritable, lost, demented, drug addicted, psychotic homeless drunks, who wandered among the zombies of circumstance, the terrified, bored, predacious, opportunistic, sadomasochistic citizens who milled, stumbled and cruised about the exhausted people with tickets waiting on or by their bags, adding to the garbage and the smell of bad food and cigarettes.

But now we were gone on the train, standing on line in the snack car, which rocked and clacked along while they nuked hot dogs and pretzels in bags, with mustard. We got two cans of beer and sat down to watch people. By New Haven we were slumped in our seats reading.

The boyfriend was a big man in coveralls and boots with prodigious hair erupting from his enormous face and head. Hair popped out of his cheeks, out of his nostrils and ears. He smiled and shook my hand. “Eugene,” he said.

We were on the platform. It was windy and chilly, raw. You could smell the bay over the diesel soot. She shook my hand and said, “Robin.” Robin also was buried under hair; it came off of her head like a fountain. She had a glow in her face, a soft, round nose and cheeks and big brown eyes. She smiled and when I said hello and introduced myself she laughed.

We got to their car, an old sixties station wagon. In the way back were three dogs hard to discern in the dark. When we opened the doors of the car two stood up and jumped into the backseat to greet us, wagging their tails and falling all over each other. The third, for whom there was no room (there was no room for two) started to bark and growl. Robin continued to laugh. “Come on boys,” she said in a commanding voice, a tail whacking her face. And every time the tail whacked her, she laughed some more.

Eugene chuckled along. “Look at all that hair,” he said, tugging two handfuls of his beard.

She laughed even harder now and grabbed one fistful of fur off the dog’s back and one off her head and said, “We’re hairy!”

Robin pushed the dogs till they retreated and we got in. One of the dogs poked my neck with his cold wet nose. I could feel the mucus drying on my skin. He decided he liked me, so he lowered his head down alongside mine and panted onto my chest contentedly, the slobber ropes slowly distending towards my lap. I tried to look at Sally but its head was so big that the ears blocked my view.

Eugene owned a triple decker on a run down street with clumps of grass around broken asphalt and poles stuck in uprooted concrete, chains hanging towards the ground, and dumpsters alongside boarded-up houses. He had his shop on the first floor, with garage doors so he could roll pianos in and out, and the second floor he rented out to artists and crafts people. He and Robin lived on the third, which he had gutted and finished as one big space. When they told me what they paid in rent, my interest in Providence was piqued.

They slept in a loft bed at one end, and she had her studio at the other, by a wall of floor to ceiling windows. There was an old paint covered radio, an Italian tuna can, with a red label, and a green and blue painting of a fish, full of hand rolled cigarette butts, and a Sherlock Holmes pipe and a pouch of borkum riff. In the middle area was the kitchen. There were open shelves painted a dark red over a million other layers of paint, crammed with spices and grains and beans. Bunches of herbs and strings of hot peppers were tied up drying. There was a dirty old stove and tiny sink and a refrigerator covered in junk. They were boiling cabbage with hot peppers and garlic and vinegar and the raw smell of vinegar filled the air.

There was a kitchen table with a bottle of wine and four glasses and a plate full of muffins. Robin laughed and said, “Yeah, I baked them. They’re pumpkin muffins. Oh, they’re really good. Have one.”

We ate muffins and drank wine. Robin lit up a clove cigarette and Sally had one too. Eugene told me about piano tuning and Providence and I told him about library work. We had both reached the point of instinctual caution when it came to discussing our trades, so it was a little slow. Sally and I slept on a futon on the floor, between Robin’s studio and the kitchen. There was heat; it was a cozy place. It smelled like paintings and food.

The next day, while Sally toured the Brown campus, Eugene and Robin showed me around town. It was grimy and depressing, a place of adversity. But I liked that it was stubbornly, defiantly so. They showed me the flood lines marked on the sides of buildings. It still had a 1950s feel, old bars with Narragansett signs in the windows, and dark lounges. Life had assumed a certain shape here long ago. But somewhere in their past lurked the epic impulse, in their monumental response to tragedy, in the Colossus of Rhode Island, the iron doors they built to keep out hurricane storm surges. I saw a Ray Harryhausen Giant Striding up through the water and pounding them off their hinges and laying waste to the town.

We returned on the train and snoozed the whole way back. It was 11:30 when we arrived home, Sunday night. Everyone was there, Christopher, Joseph, Sylvio, Jayda, Lou. I had to go to bed. I wanted her to come with me, but I didn’t know how to ask. So I went to bed alone and soon fell into an uneasy sleep. I was trying not to think about the ottomans. If they were going to wake me up at four or five, then I’d not be able to go back to sleep. And when I thought of this early in the night, then I could not go to sleep thinking about not being able to go to sleep. Since I didn’t want that to happen I had to try not to think of it, any of it. But it was impossible to ignore. The ottomans had become organizing principles.

They sounded like bowling balls. Inexplicably there were nights when Joseph and his friends came home and rolled about, the rumble of the wheels forming a bass drone for the compulsive ho ho hos, and the shrieks and yelps and yips of delight and cackling and cawing that went along with it, waking both Sally and me. The rolling of the ottomans was the final event of the night. I was became a solitary scold, a Timon. Sally didn’t care. She was on a one year vacation. She could always fall back to sleep and even if she tossed and turned, she could sleep when the sun had come up and it was quiet. She never said a thing about it. I would pad out into their midst and demand angrily that they cease. It got so as all I had to do was open the door and they would look like guilty children and apologize.

The night that we returned from Providence I awoke at 4:30 with a start of terror and stumbled half asleep out into the main room in the loft. They had cleared the furniture away and in each corner of the room was an ottoman. The big painting was like a portraict in heaven of the action below, or maybe it was the shadow cast on the screen. Lou in one corner, Joseph in another, and Jayda in the third and there in the fourth was Sally, lying on her belly facing the room and kicking her legs up and down. They were launching themselves towards the middle of the room and crashing into each other like bumper cars. The most insinuating, high-pitched snicker was Sally’s, as well as her more guttural ha! when she was dislodged from her ottoman and sent flying. It is an error of youth to subject oneself needlessly to others. I was a damned idiot, standing there in my underwear while they laughed, and I should have known it then, but instead I felt a jealous rage, such as I had experienced intermittently over the summer.

And there was still a heavy thread of guilt in me; I may have cut the thread but it was in there. It still is. So my own duplicitie fueled my suspicyons. But it was also entrapped by her silence. I was condemned in mine own eyes, and had no right to question her. And so I hid from her and she hid from me. I had no idea how it was I had come to such a pass. As I went along it all made sense. There was no point of evident absurdity to cause me to see where I had gone too far. There was no bounding; my increments were true, but the end was a wreck. For here we were ebbing and flowing in and out of each other and in and out of rooms and all the barriers were in the air between us. We had started to check each other; the emotions and their arguments had taken over. We were a transmorphic form of semi-discreet individuals, interdependent for purposes of reproduction.

I felt like a fool and retired and tried to sleep. In the morning Sally got up early and sat over her coffee, eyes swollen, skin puffy and pink, lips half open and beaded with saliva. The paper shades were closed but even this diffuse light made her blink.

“What were you doing last night?”

She stared at me and said, “Huh?”

“Last night you were doing what?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“It looked like you were rolling on the ottomans. You know how I hate those damn things. It’s like you betrayed me.”

“Betrayed!”

“Yes. That’s what it feels like.”

“In what way is rolling on the ottomans a betrayal?”

“Can you not see it?”

“See it? No I cannot. I can’t see it, no.”

“We’ll it’s right there for you to see if you’d only look.”

“As usual your powers of description fail you. Show me how I’ve betrayed you with my brother and his friends? Let’s see now, you’re jealous of a homosexual–”

“One you slept with.”

“Hardly. I did a lot of swallowing.”

“Please.”

“And then there’s Sylvio who’s like a 40 year old man!”

“He’s 40?”

“Maybe 35, no one knows. We keep trying to figure out. He was in Paris in ‘68. So he has to be about that old or older. But he was also in the Joyce Seminar. That was early seventies. So I don’t know.”

“Don’t you all discuss such things as birthdays?”

“Pretend you’re not there,” she said, making a weary face for me.

“Who’s listening. Who the fuck cares.”

“What is wrong with you!”

“You know, you can just apply alone to schools if you want. Tell me now.”

“You! What!”

“It’s what you want.”

“Not want. That’s you.”

“Not me, you.”

“This is your brother talking. You say you aren’t under his thumb but here it goes. He doesn’t want you to leave. You’re part of his entourage his tribe his clan. And he’s got something on you. What did he tell you?”

“I don’t want to fight about Roy.”

“Yeah he’s getting us to fight, so let’s talk about Roy. He’s totally out of control, and always has been. He’s going to suck you into his life.”

“It’s not that! And I am my own person. I don’t know him. I want to go. But you are more interested in your work and your friends than you are in me.”

“Oh for god’s sake, do you get up early to secretly drink or something?”

I was undone by ordinary anger then. She was making fun of me. “Well, if you’re going to stay up all night rolling around on those things.”

“Oh, is it really just those things again?”

“I have to get up and work in the morning.”

“Yes of course I know that. We all know that. That you suffer so to work. You could work other hours.”

“I’d like to work your hours.”

“You can work them any time you want and you know that.”

“But why.”

“We’d just gotten back. They wanted to hear about the trip. I was up and it looked like fun.” She smiled. “It was fun.”

“Do you want more coffee?”

She looked at me with her bloodshot eyes and pouted.

“I’m sorry then,” I said.

She blinked a few times. “I’ll take one more cup. Are you going to shower?”

“I think so. I’m becoming soft. Now I look forward to your parents’ shower. I remember when I felt I was too tough to care about such things. That was when I had the rubber hose between the showerhead and the faucet, and it would heat up and fall off in the middle of the shower. And the hose would wiggle around spouting water. It was very dramatic. Like Lacanian analysis.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Mind?

“Yes.”

“No.”

The next half hour was either all mind or all body and the rest of the day was like nothing at all.

I washed up the plates and poured a glass of wine and took off all my clothes and lay in bed. I put on TV and sat in the dark watching, waiting.

It was Iron Chef, not my favorite, so I watched This Old House and mostly gazed out the window at the helicopters and the planes crossing the sky. There were sudden bursts of firecrackers; entire packs going off at once, and the whistle and pop of bottle rockets.

Roy used to make time bombs with firecrackers, a dry cell battery and a cheap wind up alarm clock. He’d tape them together with gaffer’s tape, attach a lead to the minute hand on the clock and at 12 on the casing, and hook an Estes Dry Fuel Rocket Fuse up to an M-80 or a cherry bomb. The clock he’d set for 3 or 5 minutes, depending on the situation. Then he’d put it in a garbage can and run up the street and turn around to watch the people freak out when it exploded.

He liked scaring people, causing trouble, but he also loved fireworks. Every time they went off he laughed and clapped his hands like a monkey.

Roy was secretly prudent. He kept careful account of his fireworks, and his drugs, in the notebooks. And he apportioned out what he used, always leaving something in reserve. “Always have an out,” he told me when I was learning to drive. “You get out on the road, you should be thinking five moves ahead. Where will I go if that car stops short. And don’t use the fucking brake unless you have too.”

My mother loved fireworks too. She thought they were grand, whether it was a barge on the Hudson or the sidewalk, or the parking lot behind the building, or on the beach or the backyard. Every year she took us down to Chinatown to buy stuff for the 4th. Afterwards we’d celebrate over bowls of wanton soup and spareribs.

My father pretended to be bored but you could see him flinch every time one went off. It took something for him not to duck under a table. And he would laugh and shrug his shoulders and say, “I had enough of that in the war……and Alabama…..and Mississippi.” The same joke, every time.

Someone on the street yelled, “Joooooseeeee!” And then they laughed loud and hard and kept laughing as they walked on till their voices disappeared around the corner, to go up another street.

I had never thought of Sally as a drunk, but whether she was drunk or not is not something I took away with me from that year, that year she was out of school and I was working for Eakens at Columbia and at Pain et Poisson with Dorothy.

When Sally and I got back to Manhattan from the Island we fell effortlessly back into our old routine. That first night in town we stayed at the loft. It was our second fall and we did things we had done before. We had traditions now. I looked forward to the turning of the leaves and the first cold wind blowing in off the river, and in that expectation, she was there, walking down by South Street on Sunday, in the winter. The streets were empty. There were just the old tenements underneath the towers and the grey river pulsing against the piers.

The Green Market was just a few blocks away from the loft and we would go on Saturdays all the way through the fall till Christmas. Soon there would be apples and fresh cider. But this time things were not quite the same.

Sally was to spend her time applying to grad schools, and I to library schools. But I would be doing so during slow times on the counter at Pain and Poison, as we now called it. Business was way up. We had caught on and Patti wanted to expand the menu to include crepes. They could be rolled out on this machine a salesman showed us one afternoon, and then you spoon warm things over them and roll them up. It could be chocolate, cheese, jelly, peanut butter, or Fluff. Anything at all that rolls flat. Crepes were going to be the next big thing.

Eakens was able to pay me out of grant money he had raised for book repair, and he allowed me to sit in on his seminars, and other classes in the library school. I roved the stacks in search of the hardest luck cases, books with broken bindings and crumbling pages. But this soon proved to be fruitless, there was nothing to be done but box them, which we did. So I started to search for books in dire, but not forbidding, condition, nothing that would induce hopelessness and despair of doing good. Intermediary cases, especially of important editions, signed firsts, eighteenth century books, thousands, in decent but vulnerable condition. And so it went. I pushed my cart through the caverns in search of my books. As many as I could find he would repair with his class.

And so I would return after 9 hours of that and find her sacked out on the couch watching TV. “Djeet yet?” she’d ask.

“No.”

“Whereduya wanna to go?”

“I don’t know. Royal?”

And it would be Royal Indian on 6th Street.

Early in the fall the Lacan folks re-gathered in the living room. Now that Sally had graduated, their deliberations lasted long into the night. Dean didn’t get off work till 12. Antonia and Powell would drift in earlier, and Christopher and Sylvio were likely still to be there from the morning.

Christopher cleaned offices. He made forty bucks an hour sometimes. He’d work all night and then come over and pass out on the couch in front of the television. Two or three hours later, he’d get up, maybe go home to really sleep, or else he’d shower and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking coffee and reading or talking to whomever was around, usually Sylvio, who also kept unpredictable office hours. He was an adjunct at Columbia and worked as an editor at Semi(o)texte; yet he always seemed to be there. I don’t know when or how he taught his classes.

The ostensible purpose of their continued association as a group was their plan to finally write and publish the newsletter they had been discussing for 3 years. They were now prepared to begin writing what they had taken all that time to decide they could write. It was a receding goal as their intellectual alliances were not only shifting, but negatively reactive, mired in antithesis and non-coincident. Now, in a rare moment of syzygy, they were dedicated to pursuing a theoretical fusion of Marx and Lacan via Althusser and Marcuse. Sally was split into factions, having read The Making of the English Working Class (a book I had given to the psychiatrist just a few years before!) all summer, and Christopher Hill’s book on the Ranters and what not, and Raymond Williams’ The Town and the Country. She also felt a perverse attraction to Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. All of this was contre Lacan, whom I called Le Con, and whom she loved equally. So psychoanalysis was her way in to Marx, and Marxists. She read Marcuse, Althusser, and Sartre, but her copy of Kapital remained unopened. She was starting with The Grundrisse. It too had a place mark in the preface.

The house was quiet of crisis; Lydia no longer lay decaying in her nest. She was in San Francisco working and living in a halfway house. Even Joseph wasn’t there as much, mostly very late at night. His day didn’t begin till noon or 1 o’clock, so I never saw him, except through the blear of sleep. So Les Cons sat later and more uproariously each night.

Although I was not in the mood to socialize, I still felt the ghost of conciliation and the fear of the end was still palpable, so I would sit with them till about midnight when it was time to attempt to sleep over the rumble of conversation.

The school search was efficient enough. She was applying to Brown, Hopkins, Penn, Cornell, and Yale. There were library schools near each of those places. I wrote away for applications, made out checks for fees and mailed them. I went to Eakens for a letter. “I’d be happy to,” he said, opening the door to his office. We sat down. There was an old iron book press, a black corkscrew tightening a board against the cover of a book on his desk. He pointed to it. “It was shelved next to a radiator with a steam leak. Fortunately it only warped the boards. The binding’s not bad.

“Just tell me where to send it and I’ll know what to say. I’ve trained a number of them wherever you’re going. I only wish you were applying to Columbia.”

“Do you think I shouldn’t go to one of these places?” I showed him my list.

“Bah, of carse you should goo. You say your garl friend is applying to grad schools?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then, if you loov her, you’d better move on.”

“Between now and then I want to keep working.”

“Of course, of course. I’ll find money for you any day. You’re a bargain.”

“How so?”

“Well, you do the job, you see.”

I started to ask everyone about it, as the reality of leaving began to creep up the back of my throat. A lot of it had to do with the apartment, a fact I could not readily admit, to myself or anyone else. Only Roy knew it, and I had never told him.

I loved living there all summer. It was the perfect place to go mad in. I could shout in my underwear, I could grumble no no no and not care if anyone heard. It was always only mine. Except for that brief period at the beginning, Sally and I rarely if ever stayed there; and the more tightly bound to her I became (because I knew she would be there the next day and the next, and I always felt like something else was going on, something I wasn’t a party to), the less time I spent there. I could go a month or more without sitting down in the chair with a cup of coffee and a book.

Sometimes the feeling that something else was going on would be sexual, but other times it was just a hostile jealousie, a dark, contumacious passion, pure Thanatos and contemnible. But at the apartment it didn’t matter. It was my home, the place I could go to for refuge, where I depended upon no one. It was my territory, my turf. There wasn’t much of it, and the lease wasn’t in my name, but it was mine. I had lined it with my books, all of the walls, and I had there acted out my share of adult anabases, triumphs and penitential wanderings.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from packing up and moving back to the loft, greedily, at the end of the summer, when we returned from the beach. And even though I had spent considerable time there all summer I still had the impression of walking into an old familiar place after a long absence, with its deep scent memory diffusing in my mind and almost new again.

In fact, by now, I was realizing, drip by slow drip, that I did not need the apartment. Roy was not making it easy. Every time I saw him he asked if I had applied to Columbia. He called and left messages in the middle of the night. “Did you apply?” It got so I didn’t want to see him. We had dinner once, twice a week, at all kinds of places, and wound up the night either at Bar in the East Village or the Spring Lounge in Little Italy, or some place in his neighborhood. It all depended where we were.

There weren’t many slow times to talk at Pain et Poison any more, even in the afternoon gutter, which was my permanent place now. But it was a nasty leaf driven day with high winds and falling temperatures. The rain descended in squalls through the dark afternoon. Dorothy and I sat down across from each other at the counter. I had a double espresso and she had cappuccino. We faced each other, each with our elbows on the counter and heads on our hands.

Dorothy was doing the crossword, or had been, until the weather got dramatic and we were totally alone. “So,” she asked, “are you and Sally going to apply to Cornell?”

“They don’t have a library school. I’d have to go to Syracuse.”

“I never knew that. Lived there my whole life.”

“It’s an hour away.”

“Yeah, an hour and twenty to the airport. Ed and I both applied. We’ll know in the spring.”

“Would you really want to live there?” I asked.

She thought about it. “I didn’t used to think I did but now I think I do. We want to have a garden. I want to have children.”

“But you’re only 25!”

She blushed and smiled. “So what. People always think it’s strange when I say that. I want to have kids. I love kids. Anyway, for us it’s time to go. Ithaca’s beautiful, and I have family there.”

“So if we moved there too we would be like, friends?”

“Alex, of course we would be friends. You don’t want to leave the city?”

“It’s not that.”

“Is it Sally?”

“No, I know there are no guarantees, but I want to be with her, I just don’t know if I could be happy in another place. I find them all to be so depressing compared to the city.”

“In what way depressing?”

“Oh, you know, small and grimy with nothing to eat and nothing to do. I didn’t used to think I cared. I’ve been to New Haven and I’ve been to Philly. Please tell me Ithaca is nothing like that?”

“I never went to New Haven. I’ve been to Ethiopia. I got dysentery there. Not dysentery really, but uncontrolled vomiting and diarrhea for a week, with bloody discharge. Then they sent me home with my mother, who would have taken me the first day, but my father insisted it was just tummy rumbles.”

With Roy I took the opposite tack. We were drinking Rolling Rock and playing pool at Bar on 7th Street just off of First. We were losing to two regulars, who were kind about it. Roy ran the table once or twice and kept us alive but I never failed to let him down. “You’ll lose your mind,” he said, before lining up a shot in the far corner pocket. He dropped it and as he walked he continued to speak, his eye on the table. “These other places you’re talking about are dumps. So what, she can’t go to school in Miami? New Orleans?”

“You don’t want me to go anywhere.”

“If it were somewhere worth going–” he made the shot and searched for another. The guys on the other team watched Roy pace around the table with a cigarette in his mouth, and me following him around. “Or someone worth going with.”

“Stop that, you can’t say that! I love her.”

“Yeah yeah, yeah. You love her. But does she love you? You’re going somewhere for someone. That’s like, against the rules.” He had no easy shot and tried to take a very hard one involving many balls. It failed and left them with a shot.

“Against the what?”

“Slivovitz.”

“No.” I waved my hand.

“It’s not fucking absinthe! Jesus. And what you’re not listening to is what I’m saying. You’re moving for all the wrong reasons. You don’t just pick up and go because a flaky academic chick is going to school in a dump. You count for something. You always sell yourself short. Why shouldn’t she move where you want to go?”

“I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“Aha! You see, you don’t want to go.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“You said it.”

“But what I meant was I wouldn’t initiate it. I am willing to go along with it. More. More than willing.”

“Yeah, and are you really willing to give up that apartment? Forever? The best place. The cheapest rent. Where you know you can always afford to live. You’d give that up for her. Your family, your friends, and your home. I just don’t see it. What do you see in her?”

“What do I what?”

“Dude, I’m not the only one who doesn’t get it.”

“I can’t explain who a person is if you don’t get her I can’t make you but I would, yes, I would happily give up an apartment that isn’t even mine. I don’t need that place, or this city. I can live anywhere.” I took my shot and missed it.

There were no messages on the machine so I put on the TV and lay down on the bed and faced the sky above the buildings across the street. It was a clear night and still warm. I lay there not thinking, listening to book TV, until I started to get hungry. Nothing sounded good.

When the phone finally rang I ran to it, I confess.

“So you’re back then,” she said. “How was work?”

My stomach growled. I looked at the clock on the cable box. Ten. No wonder I was hungry. “I’ve been home for two hours.”

“When do you usually close?”

“As soon as I give up hope. It’s a struggle from 1 o’clock on. I had my employee there to keep my nose to the grindstone. He guilted me and left, the callous bastard.”

“Bartleby!”

“He’s far more Iago let me tell you. He seduces me with lies about myself and twists me about my own professed ideals. I’m skewered like a fool and grateful for it.”

“Did I ever tell you that my mother’s first therapist in New York was named Iago? It explains a lot.”

“Franklin Roosevelt said to Ickes, I think it was, or one of those men, ‘You’re my right hand, and my left is under the table.’”

“Oh like Henry the 8th, ‘If I thought my hat knew my counsel, I should cast it in the fire and burn it.’”

“Yes. ‘Three may keep counsel, if two be out of the room.’”

“Did you get my book?”

“Not yet. I ordered it. And I Googled it. You.”

“Well, now you know all about me.”

“Your class webpage, and the reviews. No websites dedicated to you as of yet. Is there a sallycam?”

“I’m a voyeur, not an exhibitionist.”

“I suppose that’s something we have in common?”

“Are you married?’

“No.”

“So that’s the TV?”

I turned it down and then off. “There.”

“I didn’t mean that. I’m surprised you watch TV.”

“What else is there to do?”

“I don’t know. Go out. Don’t you ever go out?”

“No.”

“But you must do something.”

“I see Tammy and her family. They’re nice to me, I love her kids, her husband is OK. We do the major holidays I don’t do with my mother and the chiropractor.”

“Herb Cheese,” she said.

“Czischz.”

“Don’t you have a girlfriend, someone you go out with?”

“Nothing regular.”

There was silence. I could tell by the breathing that she was guessing at my meaning. “So you just like screw around.”

“Something like that.”

She took in her breath and said, “Me too.”

“Only in your case–”

 “Well, I do want to be in love again some day. I believe it could happen,” she said.

“I’m too old for that,” I said.

“Old!” she shrieked. “Are you even fifty yet?”

“This year. I already got my AARP card.”

“That’s not old at all Alex, don’t be pathetic. Go out and have a few drinks.”

“Strange advice from an alcoholic.”

“I said a few drinks. With me it was never a few drinks. My life was a mess. It was starting to affect my work. I’m lucky to have gotten this job. It’s a real break, a second chance.”

“Your book didn’t hurt.”

“You read the reviews. I was attacked from all sides. It’s funny, I never thought about it being read by more than a few hundred people. My first book was like anyone else’s. I hardly expected this one to even get published. I just wanted to write about the plays and the time and bring everything I knew to it and then push past that in some direction I’d never gone before, and I wouldn’t plan where it would be, I’d have to know when I got there. I think it was when I finally could think about my mother’s death, when I was sober enough to grieve.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I loved your mother. How?”

“They don’t know. It was strange circumstances. She had a seizure driving one night and hit a tree going thirty miles an hour. After that, over a few months, she became totally debilitated. Anyway, it was horrible. She was 70. She died of pneumonia. I had so many bad years after that, but when it was over and I could see I saw the mother material, and started thinking about female inheritance and all the rest of it. Lineages. Networks. Nodes. The last chapter, the one that got me in all the trouble for my romantic stance, I wrote for you.”

“You wrote for me?”

“Well sure, you’ll see when you read it. But it’s about replacing the word desire with the word love, when we speak of books, and not texts. I thought of the way you used to touch a book when you were searching its contents for a quote, or how you held it in your hand to make a point, thumping the side with your finger, and how you read to express yourself, read mad and read depressed and read defiantly. Your relationship with the book was one of love, your interpenetration with the book is a loving one. It becomes a part of the mysterium, how one thing stands for another and perception creates what it sees.”

I didn’t know what to say so I said, “I see.”

“Ha!”

“So you were a wreck at meetings too? I’m trying to picture you as a drunk.”

“Well, your memory was always quite good, you must remember.”

“You sometimes drank too much. Everyone did.”

“I was always shooting my mouth off at school, smartest person in the room stuff, and the youngest. But that wasn’t such a big deal. Everybody is an egotist and it becomes a matter of habit and survival. But then I stopped producing, no more papers, a lot of sick days, no departmental duties. I wouldn’t show up places and then I ran into some ethical problems. They were doing me in.”

“Ethical? Were you stealing? Or having an affair–”

“Neither. I was watching porn. Downloading it. My work computer, home. They found it all. It started when I got into queer theory, which I had to include with gender, class and race. And it was sexy. It was that or post colonial. You could combine them. Whatever. You know how it is. I watched a few documentaries about avant-garde queer cinema in Germany, and I started to read about the politics of gay porn, and I watched queer movies, and those naked hairless men fucking really got me off.”

“Ew, hairless? I always like a little turf with my surf.”

“It was disturbing. I lost all desire for real men and just watched them fuck for hours and hours. They had the biggest fucking dicks you ever saw. That’s all I could think about. It was like being insane. I pretended it was research but I would go home after classes, open a bottle of scotch, take a few Xanax and watch all night long till I passed out. Then a few of my grad students started to come over, young, wild gay kids mostly who wanted to take my classes and whom I had no business hanging out with. I’d show them porno movies and we’d snort cocaine. I got caught when one of the grad students brought an undergrad and we were all really high and I started to make out with her. I hardly knew what I was doing. She told her parents. She thought it was funny. The kid also put it on her MySpace page. I’m surprised you didn’t get that when you did your search.”

“I didn’t go onto LexisNexis.”

“I squeaked through the investigation, but I was on a short leash, probation, and I had to go into therapy and treatment, of course. I’m surprised they didn’t make me pee in a cup. I negotiated a sabbatical, and Lydia drove me to Tully Hill in upstate New York. I went back twice but here I am.” She laughed. “More kicks than pricks I guess.”

“When did you manage to write the book?”

“I had all the research, it just wasn’t adding up to anything. I was stuck, but I kept reading of course, and taking notes. A lot of my hangovers were really lazy excuses to stay home and write. So when I got sobered up enough I got to work and it came out quickly. For the first time in my life I had a narrative I felt in control of, I didn’t panic about the details, they would be there to fall into place. I just knew that. And I’ve always been good at the scholarship. I have detailed notes going back to college. And bibliographies are a cinch. So I could fly and I did.”

“I’m going to switch phones. I’m hungry.”

“Don’t you have a cordless phone?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t work in the kitchen.”

“What are you eating.”

“I don’t know. I fell into a swoon and now I have a headache and I think I need to eat.” The kitchen phone is a pain in the ass. I cradled it against my ear and opened the fridge to see what there was to eat. “It looks like cold pasta with tomato sauce.”

“What kind of pasta?”

“Linguini, with mussels and clams.”

“No sausage.”

“Not in mine. I don’t eat much meat any more. As usual, I’m against the trend.”

“Well, I’m glad I caught you at home. I think I have to go now. You can eat.”

“When will you call again?”

“When I get to town, We’re going to have dinner, right? I don’t know that many people here anymore.”

I shut the refrigerator door and held the phone with my hand. “What does that mean for us then?”

She paused and said, “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.” We said goodnight. I had not said what I felt, but there didn’t seem to be a way. I heated the pasta in a saucepan with a little water to steam it. Then I ate in the bedroom on the bed, facing the chair and the window. The lights were quiet and reassuring. I felt the presence of others watching. Was I the man in the window now?

Sally flew back to NY on Metro International, a charter out of Boston. She had spent the night there and was coming into LaGuardia. I was to pick her up alone and drive her out to the Island house for a weekend with the family. I parked the car with confusion and doubt and walked across the lanes of traffic to the terminal. We met at the carousel. I saw her backpack, now battered, tumble down and go around before I saw her. We were on opposite sides, and our eyes met when she reached out to grab the bag that I was watching go around. She smiled and dropped the bag back on the belt and ran towards me. I held her to me and it was like the first time we had met all over again. How could I have ever doubted it? Tears pricked at my eyes. I could not hold her tight enough. She touched my hair and kissed me and smiled so sweetly. She was thinner and had gotten enough sun to bleach her hair and color her skin bronze. The white of her eyes was brighter and the bridge of her nose was freckled.

“Where is everyone?” she asked when we had grabbed her bag and matched the tags.

“We’re meeting there.”

We drove through heavy traffic and talked. She was manic with enthusiasm, sputtering out names and theories, and things she had done in a jumble made straight by emphasis.

“I’m just nuts about Raymond Williams. I looked at Marx’s chair in the British Museum. And read Williams, and E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill. I can’t stop thinking. There’s so much to read. The French Marxists–”

We pulled into the driveway. It was late afternoon and shimmering hot. Joseph was dressed entirely in black and talking to his father, who was in a pair of cut off shorts wearing a cap with leaping swordfish embroidered on the visor and the words, Ed’s Ice & Bait. They were sitting at a picnic table shucking corn and talking. A pair of muddy muck boots was next to the table and he was stretching out his toes and flexing his feet. He looked at us and rose. Cynthia came out. We stood around a heap of cornhusks.

“So, tell us all about it,’ Cynthia said.

“Yes,” said Joseph. “I want to hear everything. Even slides.”

Everyone laughed.

We had time to get a swim in before dinner and drove to the access point, parking behind a dune about a quarter mile back of the water. The sand covered boardwalk down to the beach was hot as was the path along it. Every step brought the smell of the ocean closer. I held her hand and carried a little cooler with water and a towel. It was a clear day. Gulls circled overhead and we mounted the top of the last dune. The beach sloped down to the water. There was a heavy surf and the air was full of spray. We dropped our things and ran to the water, catching the tall waves and riding them in or letting them dump over us. The water carried us about like unmoored buoys.

On our towels, the low sun coloring the sand and the pampas grass, crooked dune fences casting lattices of shadow, she said, “We went to Wordsworth’s house, Coleridge’s cottage. God is it beautiful there. Have you read Frost at Midnight?”

“Only Kublai Kahn and The Rime of the Auncient Mariner.”

“Oh, we have to read it when we get home. Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit/By its own moods interprets! Puny Flaps and Freaks!”

“Simon was in Rome. He saw the graves of Keats and Shelley.”

“I was there too. I want to see the Bay of Lerici one of these days. Oh yes, and Skelton. I met a grad student at Oxford who was studying Skelton, felt he was very underrated. It’s wild, way beyond what you get in the Norton Anthology.”

“Can I just kiss you?” I said. I could not think of anything else than the taste of ocean on her lips. I was enthralled to the colors and flavours and heart of the world. I wanted to drink it down I wanted to keep want alive all the time I wanted to live forever suspended between getting and giving with all the open and the close of it gone. Sally…. we kissed and lay back on the towels. A wind blew, a hot wind. People walked by. I lay on my stomach. “I was jealous.”

“You were? Of Christopher?”

“Mostly Sylvio.”

“He wasn’t there long. I was alone a lot of the time. I missed you so much. All I thought about was us. Christopher always went chasing after boys if we were anywhere for more than a few days. Italy was impossible. It was so Suddenly Last Summer. He met a Somali dancer of all things, maybe the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

“More than Simon?”

“Simon excepted.”

“I misread your postcard from Florence about the offal.”

“How so?”

“I took organ meats for cock.”

She looked puzzled and then started to laugh. “Yes, I can see how you’d think that.” She kissed the back of my neck and let her hair run over my shoulder. “But I am innocent of all charges. You have nothing to fear from me my liege lord.”

“Nor you of me sovrain ladie.”

Back at home Raph’s industry continued as he laid seaweed on the gas grill and the lobsters on top of that. The picnic table was spread with an old oilcloth and there were nutcrackers and picks and forks lined up alongside plates. In the middle of the table were two plastic tubs for shells. There were bowls of lemon butter, local salad greens, and iced tea in pitchers. Citronella candles in glass balls in white plastic webbing were out around the lawn and on the table. Cicadas seesawed in the trees. As twilight came the first few crickets started to quirk in the leaves. The lobsters steamed on the grill. Cynthia brought out a platter of corn and Sally brought a bowl of potatoes roasted with rosemary and garlic and sea salt. Then they brought out a pot of steamers and bowls. After the clams, we avidly ripped apart our crustaceans, sucking out the meat from spiked chambers. I pulled off legs and feelers and stared at two black eyes in a red carapace.

“The corn’s so sweet this year,” Cynthia said, biting into an ear.

“It’s the breed,” Raph said.

Joseph laughed. “Breed?”

“The white. It’s always sweeter. What, you want me to call it the race? ‘This race of corn is the sweetest…’”

“Oh for god’s sake,” Cynthia said. “Isn’t it ‘variety’?”

“Variety is the splice of life,” Sally said, dipping a forkful of tail meat in the bowl of melted butter and lemon.

“I’ll let that pass,” said Raph, smiling.

The bib made Joseph’s head looked like a turnip. “Tribes, as in tributaries.”

“And deltas,” I said.

“That’s where they disperse,” he said.

“And sometimes gather,” I said.

When we were done we scraped our plates into a garbage bag outside and went in to wash up and get dessert. I loaded the dishwasher, eyes dazed a little by the change in light. I couldn’t stop looking at her, the way her ass shook a bit when she scraped the plates. Her cleavage as she bent forward over the garbage. The faint blond hair on her arm. Her neck exposed as she rinsed the dirty dishes.

It seemed like the small talk would never end. We would be sitting on the couches for an eternity, or lawn chairs to look at the stars.

Finally that’s where we ended up, after Cynthia and Raph went to bed.

“So,” Joseph explained. I tried to hold her hand across the lawn chairs but it painful. “Judy agreed and Alex agreed and we did a gig at Maxwell’s in Hoboken and Pyramid Lounge.”

“You never said,” Sally said, looking at me.

“I had so many other things going on. What can you say in a postcard? How to give such a great undertaking its due.”

“So you sang?”

“Yes–” he said.

“Back up. Tra la las.”

“After the Pyramid gig we went to Hosaki, that new place and they were incredibly rude, full of attitude, and I was so drunk I pulled down my pants and wiped my ass with the check.”

“How charming,” she said. “And you? Did you do something to the check too?”

“No, I behaved.”

“Yeah, he held out. But Judy was sure trying hard to seduce him.”

“She had a what with who?”

“With Alex. Tell her.”

“I–she liked me, yes.”

“She must have really liked you an awful lot for you to be so upset,” Sally said, adopting a tone she used primarily for polemical analysis.

“An awful lot was evident at times. Nothing constant or anything.”

“Nah, nah, not constant, no,” said Joseph, flicking the ashes of his cigarette.

But she brushed that off. “You didn’t have yourself a little adventure, did you Alex?”

“She tickled me once. We had to wait on the couch for Joseph to set up. It was interminable.”

“That it was,” he agreed, turning his head towards us in the chair, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Moths twisted in the yellow light by the kitchen door. Our faces were dimly lit and the sky was awash in stars and the moon had just begun to rise.

“We watched TV and she told me funny waitress stories.”

“That was our summer,” Joseph said.

“Doesn’t seem like I missed much, but I did miss it. I couldn’t believe I had to spend the night in Boston. It was so close. I almost went out and rented a car.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“I didn’t think I could drive it. It was braggadocio, an empty threat.”

“Self-serving rhetorical excess. Bluster.”

“Yes.”

I took advantage of the silence and said, “Should we not–”

“Go up? I thought you’d never ask. Good night sweet prince, see you in the morning.”

“Ciao,” Joseph said, without moving or even turning his head to look at us.

We climbed the pull down stairs into the attic. Fans whirred the hot air around. We opened the windows in the eaves. Sally lit a candle and put it on top of the dresser and we sat down on the futons to undress. We kicked off our shoes and wiggled out of our shorts. It was a race to naked. The stale air was exchanging for fresh. I loosened the sand in her hair with my fingers. We touched and torrentially did what I would do again tomorrow if I could. The kisses were beyond recognition. The waxing crescent moon filled the room with blue light and shadow. She stood naked at the dresser. I watched her pick up a blue pack of French cigarettes and light one off the candle and smoke it. When she was done, I watched her come all the way back to the bed from the window. The smoke smelled good drifting in and out of the room, like distant burning tar, against the sea and air like cut hay and apples.

We awoke to the sound of birds and sun rising on the walls and made love again and slept again, and got up at noon. Cynthia served us French roast coffee in a Chemex and croissants and chocolate brioche at the iron table with an umbrella and chairs they had in the garden outside the living room, where we had taken our drinks at Passover. The roses that looked like lifeless, thorny masses in the spring were now sparsely in bloom with pink or white or dark red flowers.

 They were the only people I knew who used their Chemix. Thinking about it makes me want to go out and buy one. I don’t even know if they still make them. If I were downstairs in the store I would Google it. But the Google would be too much of an imposition at home.

Maybe Tammy was right. At that moment, standing in the kitchen, the same kitchen as always, and remembering Sally in that attic room, I wanted her back so badly I felt suddenly sick in the stomach, like 15 year old boy. It was the old lust. It was not a form of loneliness, where you desire something you lack. This was not about having someone about to talk to or balance the checkbook.

I rehearsed and recorded three more times with Joseph and Judy. Our rehearsals always began in auspicious ways. Judy and I sitting on the couch, feet up on the table, watching TV while Joseph set up. And just as inevitably, after recording two songs they would start to drink and people would start to drop in. One night Lou came by with a couple of his Larchmont friends who were in a band and they played a song with us. Then this guy who looked like Fred Flintstone got Joseph high, and they started to drink Jack Daniels and the Fred Flintstone guy started to insult Joseph and everyone laughed.

I asked him at the end of July when we were going to be done recording, just out of curiosity. I did very little but sing back up harmony on choruses. Chee chee chi chuga etc…. “We’re playing at Pyramid in two weeks. You’re coming right?”

“You want me to go on the stage with you and sing?”

“Yeah.” He smiled sweetly and looked particularly feline while doing so. To be beguiled while one is being had, and knowing it, has its special pleasures. Or sensations anyway.

And so it was I found myself, through the fault of the cauldron of passion I had been boiling in, wearing a suit of clothes chosen by Judy and Joseph. It was at that fitting in the loft that I discovered that my rival for the attentions of Judy was Joseph whom, in my naiveté, I had never suspected. But it was not entirely clear whether she was actually interested in him. The fact that I was in a relationship, thus making our lust, or mine anyway, adulterous, added a frisson, at least I so theorized based upon her gaze resting frequently on mine. Furthermore, she always looked pleased to see me when I sat down next to her on the couch. She lit up and turned to me and asked me how I was and told me about her day. She was a waitress at Dojos. She knew Dean and Tammy and Matthew and Simon. She knew everyone who liked chicken cutlet sandwiches and big salads. People were obsessed with the orange dressing.

“Don’t ask about the dressing,” she said, early on in the summer, when we were just getting to know each other. “It gets on the cuff of your sleeve. You can’t get it off. After a while, you come to loath and detest the orange dressing as much as anyone loves it. The grossest thing I can think of right now is a quart of the orange dressing, and it’s dribbling out of the sides a little, and you wipe it off and hand it to one of them, a customer, who just has to have it.”

Another week she told me about the waitress who went mad. “I couldn’t believe it. We were in the middle of a shift. It was busy, but not, you know, and she was bringing food to her tables and busing them, and there was a lull. And the next thing I know I hear her yell, ‘Butter!’ out of nowhere, just like that. And then she let out this blood-curdling scream that lasts and lasts. And when she had stopped she looked at everyone, at where she was, and you could see it on her face that she knew what she had just done. She took off her apron, put her checkbook on the bar and walked out the door. It was something else. People started to clap.”

Afterwards we went out to Mie for sushi and then to Bar for beer. Six of us crowded into a booth and drank beer and did shots of slivovitz. I hadn’t laughed so hard since I was in high school. And the whole time I snuggled up to Judy, and she snuggled up to me. At four, when we staggered out of there and parted ways on Second Avenue she kissed my cheek and turned around and I went, out of habit, up to the loft with Joseph.

The big night came and I sat at the bar drinking seltzer, feeling somewhat chastened by the headache I had had for two days after drinking the slivovitz. But I was certain this would be the night I would go home with Judy. The foundations were laid and now I only had to contrive to stay sober, or relatively so, late enough to go downtown with her, while Joseph went up. He had no choice but to leave us.

I was to sit between them and bang a tambourine and sing back up on the choruses, as per usual. I looked around. There were a bunch of people I knew and they came up one by one to say hello. I didn’t ask Tammy or Simon so it was all Babel people. But even those legions were not broad enough to fill the club. And so our tiny audience huddled about the stage while back towards the bar sat the regulars. I wish I could actually remember one of his songs. They all come out in my head like this now:

Joseph’s Song

I refuse to say

What Althusser

On the Champs Elysee

Said, or what Gaston Bachelard

Thought of the Bard

When he chanced on the Milky Way

Or where Paul de Mann

Got his sun tan

Was it niece, Japan

Or Tierra del Fuego?

Oh ho ho ho

Maurice Blanchot

Derrida got caught in the rain

He kicked up his feet

And fell in the street

And was picked up

By Michel Foucault.

Bahn bahn bahn on the autobahn

With ol’ Jaques Lacan

Abducted by a flying Saussure

Monsieur!

Judy wore a white tuxedo shirt with a bow tie and sat behind the Yamaha with her mike. Joseph sat on his stool, in baggy pants with braces and sleeve garters. And I was dressed in a polyester white shirt with little fuchsia polka dots. They put goop in my hair and made these tufts and spikes and made me shave so I was bloodied and sore. My first la la las were strident and delivered in a state of terror. I only lost the beat once with the tambourine. That machine was relentless and for a while it was all I could hear, besides the ringing in my ear and the ten miles of distance between me and the world.

Lou shouted, “Go Alex!” when I shook the tambourine with a little more vigor during the chorus of I Bought These Balloons For You:

I bought these balloons for you

Now I’m popping them one by one

And you have until tomorrow

To fill them back again

Back again

We played for about 20 minutes, maybe a half hour. And I don’t think we played many songs. For the second time that summer I was standing in a bar dressed up by someone else and in make up. I went to the bar and got my free drink while Joseph yacked. Judy sat down on the stool next to me. A man who looked and acted a little like Gumby took our drink orders.

“Well, that was unbearable,” she said in a low voice.

“Yes. They were friends. But it was still like playing for a hostile audience.”

“Well, at least it doesn’t mean anything. And we get a drink out of it.”

“What are we doing after?”

“I think we’re going to The Park Inn.”

Joseph, trailed by many friends, made for the door. I left a dollar on the bar and we headed over to The Park Inn. It was raucous. Lou, Jayda, the guy Henry we saw on the stoop, the tall people, including the Marxist bartender and his friend the bartender Bix, and about ten others, shouting and drinking. Judy and I took a booth. She plunked down two Jameson’s on the rocks and two bottles of Rolling Rock. Lou sat. “That really wasn’t bad,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “No, I mean it. You two were good. And your make up is cute, Al-ex. Look here then, you like poetry. Do you know this one?” He started to declaim John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, slowly, theatrically, pushing the stresses, swallowing insignificant syllables and stretching out the rhymes, giving now passion, now cool analysis to each line, as if he had spent long years playing out the verse till he knew all of its moods and could modulate his voice to find the perfect fit between his and Rochester’s heart and voice:

 So a proud bitch does lead about

 Of humble curs the amorous rout,

 Who most obsequiously do hunt

 The savory scent of salt-swoln cunt.

 Some power more patient now relate

 The sense of this surprising fate.

 Gods! that a thing admired by me

 Should fall to so much infamy.

 Had she picked out, to rub her arse on,

 Some stiff-pricked clown or well-hung parson,

 Each job of whose spermatic sluice

 Had filled her cunt with wholesome juice,

 I the proceeding should have praised

 In hope sh’ had quenched a fire I raised.

He snickered and looked at me. “I learned it at Harrow when I was ten, for a poetry class. This guy Calvin bet I wouldn’t read it aloud to the class instead of the lines from Ode: To A Nightingale or Il Penseroso or whatever. He wasn’t even one of these donnish types, he was a forty five year old functionary. Bloody fucking hell. Ha. We thought it would be a scandal but he just he looked bored and marked me down. Heard from Sally? Dean said Sylvio was there. What an idiot. Did I tell you–”

“It’s time to go to dinner,” Joseph shouted. The herd instinct took over.

“Are you going?” I asked, Judy.

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, don’t be depressing. Come on to dinner.”

We walked over to First and then down to 6th and over to this outpost on the block where Third Avenue ends, across from Cooper Union and down a little. It had black windows. It was late. We had gone on at 9. It had to be midnight. The entrance was lit by black lights. Inside was dark and sparse, walls of exposed brick and track lighting. The host sneered a little as we stumbled in and took us to a table in the back, behind a screen. We ordered sake and sushi and everyone was yelling at once. After about two hours, the table covered in fat jade bottles, our waitress came over and said, very pointedly, “Is there anything else I can get you before bringing the check?”

Joseph was telling a story about some artist at work. He had lost the thread of what he was saying but continued to speak loudly whatever it was that popped into his head. And it was funny. I know I was laughing. Judy was half off of her seat and onto mine, but I felt constrained by Joseph, who, after all, could not be trusted in the great enterprise, being both rival and brother-in-law. It was a relationship I’m sure he was unaware of. But he was obviously besotted as every time he spoke to Judy he became charming and flippant.

The waitress returned and placed the check on the table. “I need you to pay this check now.”

 Joseph toasted her and said, “Just as soon as we’re done with our drinks.”

“You don’t understand, sir. We’re closed. You have to pay up and leave.”

Joseph looked at her and smiled. He laughed slowly and stood up on his chair and turned his back on her and dropped his pants. The he wiggled his ass at her, as if it was waving hello, and wiped it with the check. The room was dead silent.

The waitress stared at him, her still face framed by Cleopatra hair. She said, “Go fuck yourself,” and walked away.

Now a commotion overtook us. People got up and threw 40 or 50 bucks down on the table. Bix said, “Count it out and give it to her.” The room was looking small all of the sudden so Judy and I walked out too, leaving Joseph to his reckoning. We met up with him on the Bowery. He had a bottle of vodka and all I remember of the night was staggering up and down the Bowery and then over to 103, a restaurant a few blocks away on Second Avenue, taking perhaps an hour or two, sharing the bottle with bums outside The Palace Hotel, waiting for Tammy to get off work at CBs.

It seemed as if Joseph would never give up and leave. We kept standing in circles of three and four, talking all at once and waltzing up and down sidewalks. But eventually Joseph wandered ahead and we held hands and slowed down walking. Our fingers curled together. We didn’t talk. I could barely breathe. This was it and I was drunk, totally unsure of putting one foot in front of another, and I was afraid if I leaned in the wrong direction I would throw up. But now we were holding hands. Joseph’s trudge grew quicker and quicker, his hands in fists turned outward from his body and head down. We paused between streetlights and looked at each other. Then we started to make out. If only we were in bed! That’s all we would have to do. It would go no further. Her tongue in my mouth felt as good as fucking. It was sex. It was the best sex. At the moment it was the only sex.

Soon we came into the light and entered the restaurant. We ordered eggs and toast and coffee and watched the sun rise. I looked at the yellow puddle of scrambled eggs and rye toast smeared with butter and wrinkled home fries. The light was coming through the window and lit up Judy’s chin. I stared at her chin, and at the light, and out the window and at Joseph, who was speaking. There were crumbs on his lips. I couldn’t follow what he was saying. I think I was asleep. I had to leave. I had to climb into bed or I would surely die.

So I gave them five dollars and left. My determination to get home was quite strong; I bared my face to the sun and pushed on, up the stairs, through the door and into my bed. I was breathing hard but I had made it. In the morning I awoke when my gut started to pitch and turn. Had I done anything? What had I done? What part was the dream?

I swore oaths of future fidelity. If I swore to myself it would never happen again, I didn’t have to tell her it had happened. I could pretend that it didn’t exist so it didn’t matter and I wasn’t lying then. And it didn’t of course. I just lay around more jealous than I had ever been before. I was giving it all over to her now. All my energy flowed in that direction. The circuit was complete. No one but I would ever have her. We were two bodies and one soul, as the poets of old said. I began to read Donne’s Elegies and his Songs and Sonnets. I began to understand my love as being a form of religious heresy. I had stumbled upon the old religion.

I spent the remaining weeks in penaunce. I had one desultory meal with Buddy and Simon in Chinatown. I was too ashamed of my stupidity to confess even to my closest friends. I began to await her arrival with weary happiness, having exhausted all of the other possible emotions. There really wasn’t a sensation I hadn’t milked of all its power. I had ridden for days on gusts of inconsequential air; it was mere convection that held us aloft through terrors of jealousie and possession. There may be acolytes who can sustayne the old religion in its purest form but I alas am a reprobate, backsliding pagan.

After the 4th it was brutally hot and I had no plans. I worked all week and tried to find things to do at night besides lie around obsessing that Sally was gone. I keened for her. I rent my garments, my chiton. Where had my wings gone? It was a constant throbbing disturbance of the heart, centered on the node where the blood and nerves mix. A postcard from Florence, the one I did not put on the refrigerator, read, Blech! The food here is gross; all we eat is organ meat. Love,-S. This was just awful! I imagined her giving blowjobs to Christopher in a decrepit Venetian pensione with heavy drapes and rococo framed windows. I took it to work and examined it in the stacks. As I attempted to bring some order to the gentle bedlam of the shelves I knew no peace, but only the image recurring of a faceless lothario doing faceless things to my beloved and her enjoying them more than she ever had my own embraces. The somber mildewy silence of the stacks gave way to obsession.

Out in the world, at Pain et Poisson, I broiled as well. The air conditioning did not work and Patty wouldn’t spend the money to get it fixed, even though it was hot and no one was coming in. I waited through dead evenings or afternoons till I could go home and lie in bed gripping onto phantoms.

I could have stayed at the loft with Lydia gone but I had no desire to live in Joseph’s filth and squalor, especially in the absence of Sally’s censorious presence, for she was the avatar of their mother when their mother was away. So at home I sat and slept in front of a blasting fan drinking Rolling Rock and watching people walk by on the street below. I waited for thunderstorms.

I also went out with Joseph. I thought I would want to be alone but in fact I had gotten used to the stimulation. So when, early in the summer, Joseph asked me over to sing with him and a friend of his I readily agreed. I have a tolerable baritone and always sang in school choirs. I would be afraid to sing alone but going oooh and laaaa and Yes she does, she does, didn’t seem to be terribly risky. There was nothing preposterous about the idea.

So I went to the loft, determined and serious, aware of what a Joseph Babel recording session could be. I walked in, using my key, and there was Judy Braine, the most beautiful woman in the world, seated on the couch drinking a beer and watching TV. Her hair was henna red and she was painfully thin and tall. She turned her black eyes upon me and said, “You must be Alex.”

“Yes.” I sat down next to her on the couch, my heart knocking hard in my skull, thinking, what?

We watched the Israeli army kill people in Lebanon while Joseph set up instruments, occasionally looking up from amps and wires to tell us something more about Kurt Weill’s Johnny Johnson.

Joseph had just started to work at his first job, as a receptionist at the Satyria Studios Print Gallery, in Soho. I went to a Leroy Nieman opening with Sally and another one, with Dean, Joseph and a couple of his Oberlin friends, a Marxist and a fellow traveler, both of whom worked as bartenders, one at The Palladium and the other at a toilet on First Avenue run by a nasty old lady. Tammy took me there on their lesbian night. She insisted on my dressing in a certain way and wearing make up. “Am I to pretend that I’m a woman,” I asked, as she brushed on blush. “Oh no,” she replied. “You have to act like your trying to be a man. It’s easy. They’ll probably think you’re really good.” I was assuming I would be in a bar full of women but apparently it was early and there were just a couple of women playing Ms. Pacman in the back, between the two ripe smelling bathrooms. The old lady was at the end of the bar yawning between puffs on her cigarette and watching Joseph’s friend Bix read the New York Times with a bored expression. He had been a counterman at Dojos, so he and Tammy recognized each other. I was a little relieved there was another man there and that I didn’t have to try to pretend to be a woman pretending to be a man. But I must confess to a certain disappointment too. I had actually imagined picking someone up. I suppose had I managed to seduce a woman in Diana’s den and become aroused, I might have been another Actaeon, set upon by a pack of dogs, in this case, not my own.

Joseph had a desk and a black phone near the back of the gallery, which was like a white cave. Sometimes during the day I’d drop by and we’d look at the prints and talk and go for a break in the neighborhood. There was a Ray’s on Prince and Elizabeth with good Sicilian slices, and the noodle shops in Chinatown, and the Italian bakeries on Spring Street.

He gathered us up off the couch and said, “So I’ve already recorded most of the parts. I’m going to put the drum machine on and play the accordion, and Judy’s going to sing and play keyboard. Whenever there’s a chorus, you sing harmony with her and me.”

Joseph started to play the accordion. Judy sat behind the Yamaha and sang into a mike and played the accompaniment to pi-koo-koo-peech. He belted out his lyrics in a thirties cloth cap and squeezed the hell out of his accordion or bandoneon. He had a set of traps. He sang all of his songs in his new, soulful, thirties protest style. It was like Woody Guthrie singing the line, My sneak attack/Will win you back.

Judy brought to the parts a trashy electronic cabaret feel. Her voice was good. But she was something to look at singing. My god. Suddenly I wanted to fuck her so badly, I didn’t even feel guilty. I just wanted to plot how. Sally was out of the country. No one would know. And I would have Judy. I just couldn’t let Joseph find out.

Other than rehearse with them and work I hung out with Tammy and Matthew and Simon and Buddy. Soon after the Romna dinner Simon called to invite me over. First we met at Ludlow Street. He tossed down the key and I creaked up the stairs to his apartment. Outside the door it smelled like linseed oil and turpentine. He let me in. I watched him make coffee. “Man, it feels so good to be making coffee here again. I missed this place. Not the city, just these rooms. Home.” He poured the water over the grounds and watched them bloom. Then he did the two-cup one-cone pour, moving back and forth without spilling any. When both cups were full he tossed the filter basket in the sink, where it joined a big can full of brushes and we went into the middle room. I looked around. Stuff was pulled down and plastered over.

“What happened to the cherubs and the demons you had over there?”

“Eh, got sick of ‘em. I want to start over, start fresh. I’ll keep some of it. I want to be fanciful, mix it up more. In Rome this guy I met had just gotten back from Malaysia where he was photographing Hindu Temples. They are so cool, bright colors and cartoony lines. There’s a blue ass playing violin, right there on the lintel, and an elephant with a guitar. I’m working on these Icons. In Italy, I didn’t have much space and I moved around a lot.”

“Did you ever end up taking lessons?”

“No, I wanted to but then I just got sidetracked with the radio station and the incredible scene there. I think when I used to paint small, I would take a big thing I had seen, and in my head, shrink it down. But after a while, I started to think small. That’s how I saw it, small. I paint these pieces on wood, in oils. They’re Saints.”

The faces hovered in the dark varnishes and oils. They were haloed and hollowed.

“What’s going on the wall?”

“I think some sort of totem pole. Ezekiel’s totem pole,” he laughed. “So how was the fourth at dad’s?”

“How was yours?”

“The usual. He cooked jerk chicken and drank Red Stripe and ranted. How’s Roy?”

“Well, catatonic on the 4th, except the end there and then he passed out in the car and I thought he was dead, but I was too scared to take my eyes off the road. It was so dark, I couldn’t see a thing but the guardrail when it loomed into the headlights. I’m pissed at him.”

“What, did he give you more money?”

“It’s stupid. He came over to the loft to hang out with me and Sally before Sally left and we talked about grad school, and she was saying where she was going to apply and I was saying how I would apply to library schools in the same cities so we could pick a place to go, that’s the plan. When I said that, he shut down completely, pfrist, like that. Later, I walk him down to his car and he was ranting the entire way giving me all the reasons why I shouldn’t leave the city. He starts with the apartment. It’s like, go for the jugular. I’d never be able to come back. His plan for me is that I go to Columbia and then work at the New York Public Library. But I could sublet it for 4 years or I could even give it up, follow Sally to the next place. Burn my bridges. That sounds good to me. But to Roy it’s like, I’m betraying him, abandoning him and my mother. And Dawn she doesn’t talk much at all. In enthusiastic bursts. She is a good conversationalist when she’s on the lawn chair with a cocktail in her hand and a show on. But get her to my father’s and she’ll go three hours without uttering more than 2 words. Roy grinds his teeth constantly. He was on Quaaludes and coke. She was dressed like Audrey Hepburn.”

“That’s pretty funny.”

“He drove us out there. Holy shit, I’m too old to get in cars like that. I don’t know why I do these things.”

“He’s not so bad, just totally fucked up on drugs. He should go to AA or something.” It was time to leave for dinner. “We’re making pork loin stuffed with prunes, porcini mushroom risotto, and rapini with pancetta and garlic. We should go.”

Their apartment was across from The Ritz. It was a small building with a nice facade and clean halls. We walked up a short flight of stairs and were met by a black scottie that came scurrying down. Simon laughed and bent to pet him. “Ronnie gave him to Buddy while I was away. He named him Alexander. I’m sorry.”

“I know what to name my next goldfish.”

“I’ll be lucky to come back as one.” We entered the apartment. It was painted shades of dark grey with track lighting, an exposed brick wall and a loft bed over the kitchen and bathroom. On the wall as you came in was an Andy Warhol Mao, blue, with red lips and yellow eyes. Buddy was stirring the risotto. Seated on the couch was Ronnie, a gnome like middle aged black man with a mostly bald head and thick black glasses.

“Come in,” Buddy said, leading me away from the kitchen and into the living room. Simon took off his coat and started to stir the risotto. I settled in on the low couch next to Ronnie, whom I had met a number of times. He and Buddy and Simon had all lived together many years before in a loft on University Place.

Simon, decorating windows with Ronnie, hooked up with Buddy again. They went out for a while and then Buddy was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer that was not AIDS. That was around when Simon was going to Italy, and so he rented the apartment to Buddy. Buddy taught design at FIT whenever he could, and went in for experimental chemo and vitamin therapy, which left him incapacitated for weeks at a time.

We faced an enormous television that was playing I Love Lucy with the sound off and two low chairs. Buddy sat in one of the chairs and offered me a drink. There was some sort of jazzy disco music on. On the table were crostini and a two-litre bottle of pinot grigio from Astor Liquor. He poured some over ice in a tall water glass and added a squeeze of lemon and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Simon and I sat here all weekend filling up ashtrays watching these. They are fabulous.”

Ronnie shook his head up and down and laughed quietly. “Ethel,” he said. “And Fred.”

“Right,” said Buddy.

“Where did you get the Warhol?” I asked.

“Oh that. I worked for a print shop down in Soho. It was my bonus.” He smiled.

“Was it Satyria?”

“How did you know?”

“Because Sally’s brother Joseph is working in their gallery.”

“I didn’t know they had a gallery. This was years ago. I was a silk screener.”

Simon came in holding a wooden spoon coated in risotto cream. “He’s got a Rauschenberg too. And an Alex Katz.” The buzzer went off. Simon went to the door and said, “Who?”

“Tammy.” He buzzed her in and went back to stirring.

“Well that is so uncanny,” Buddy said.

“Hi everybody,” Tammy said from the door. Simon came out and kissed her. She took off her leather jacket and hung it up in the closet.

“Can I do anything?”

“No,” said Simon, and they flirted briefly. “Go on in and get some wine. Dinner’s almost ready.”

“Good smells,” she said. “Hi Alex.”

I kissed her. She shook Ronnie’s hand. “Hey Ronnie.”

“Tammy.” He smiled. “I was listening again to the Staple’s Singers.”

“Oh my god!”

“Do you want ice in yours?” Buddy asked.

`“You know me, I’m straight up,” she said.

“You know who you remind me of,” Buddy said, pouring white wine from the big bottle into a square purple plastic cup. “My sister.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

Buddy nodded, as if to confirm the obvious. He had a deep voice, as did Ronnie, and they were both a little swishy. They were the wisest fools I knew. Things are not discreet in time but of penumbras; the end affects the course of events leading up to it. The end is not a mere cessation but the end of a story which is sensed long before it arrives. Buddy and Ronnie were well into Act 3. But we didn’t know it that night, there was just a feeling of having settled down. They were in their thirties. They would have been beautiful old men. “It’s my foster sister. I lived with her for eight years. She’s my best friend and my oldest friend. I see my foster parents too, but they are totally fucking crazy. I am not kidding. My stepfather hears voices and reads Edgar Casey books. He’s an apostate Old Order Amish. They live outside of DC, in Chevy Chase. Every year I go to the reunion. August 15th, in this big old park.”

Well, what is there to say about it. It was one of those nights where we drank and laughed and stayed up late together and had a merry time.

Roy pulled into the driveway. Our father moved a lot. This place was typical of his suburban phase. A fifties ranch on a mature cul de sac. The yard bordered woods. Behind the house was a kidney shaped pool and a putting green. There was a perennial border around the house with a white pebble path and birch and apple trees. We parked between the brown Mercedes and the 1972 green Pontiac Bonneville my father drove and went up the slate walk to the front door. My father came crunching through the gravel towards us from the pool, beneath a canopy of pine boughs, in his dripping swimsuit.

“I was worried to death!” He smiled. “Come in, come in.” Even in his mid fifties his ribs stood out. He could not put on weight because of the TB he got in Germany in 1945, during the occupation. He was already weak from months of fighting. He had a girlfriend, and spent nights at her home where her parents, children and grandparents were all living. Somewhere in those close quarters the bacillus entered his lungs. He had a long, narrow face with a large nose bent in the middle. The hair curled like whitecaps on the back of his head. Reading glasses made him look wiser than he was, as his eyes, focused on a piece of paper, became intent. Then he would raise his eyebrows and look out over the tops of those glasses, both amused and worried by what he had seen. He was deeply tanned as he always had been, since ‘72 anyway, when he first caught the bug for Miami, at the convention where his man got the nod.

His presidential record is impressive. The only one he worked for who managed to get elected was murdered 3 years later.

It started with his first love, Henry Wallace, in ‘48, who in his naiveté was crushed by communist conspiracy: “They took it over. Our last chance to stop this madness of the cold war, and they take it over and like everything else they touch, they fuck it up. It was a real political education, I can tell you. In England they elected the Socialists. Why couldn’t we do that? I ask you, is it so impossible? Bah. Fuck it. I’m not a fanatic, I’m not like that putz Podhoretz, but let me tell you, you can’t trust a Communist. At some point, I couldn’t tell you when exactly, they decided that the truth was not important, winning was, being right. So to them it doesn’t matter what they say, or what tactic they employ so long as it advances them on their way. Now, you could say that Marx is ethically neutral. But I never read him that way. If all you have to rely on is the historical necessity of socialism, not the fact that it is a more just way of doing things, you’re lost. There is no science of history. The only pattern is the pattern of life. What goes up, must come down. You know who was fond of saying that about politics don’t you? Richard Fucking Nixon, Quaker.”

Next he went for Kefauver, “Despite reservations, very severe ones. It cost me friends, not for the last time either. But there was Harriman, who was weak, and Stevenson; everyone wanted Stevenson but he wasn’t running and Truman acting like a crazy man, one day in, one day out, like Johnson did. Always playing with their dicks. So I figured Kefauver’s winning. People like him. He’s against organized crime, corruption, monopolies, and he’s a smart operator, and a good guy to have a glass of scotch with. My friends in the movement thought he was basically a southern racist politician. I didn’t think so. He was persuadable. Without the persuadable you got nothing. That’s how you get to a majority. If you want to get elected, do for the people. The democrats don’t understand this anymore.” Kefauver won all the primaries in 1952 but lost the nomination to Stevenson.

He backed Stevenson in ‘56 but sat the election out. “I can’t work for a loser.” Right. Then Harris Wofford brought him into the Kennedy campaign in 1960, at first very much against his will, but it was where he had been heading. He was tired of the abuse, of living in motels and pleading before judges who hated him. “John Kennedy was the slick child of a rich son of a bitch who helped bring on the crash of ‘29, a bootlegger, anti-Semite pro-Nazi, Boston Irish bastard. And this guy, what the fuck did he ever do? I don’t think I ever hated anyone more than McCarthy, except maybe J Edger Hoover and Nixon himself. I could never hate Johnson outright. I was disgusted by him. But McCarthy? The guy’s a fucking scumbag. Oh Jesus, and for him to be the one democrat who didn’t vote to censure, didn’t even show up. The guy’s back never hurt so much he couldn’t fuck a Mafia Don’s wife or an East German spy, right? That’s just bad character. Well, I figured if he was going to have a civil rights group in the campaign, he might as well have the real thing. I was tired of getting my head kicked in, and mobs, and bombs and shootings, tear gas, hoses and dogs. It’s surreal to think about now. I wanted to go to Washington and push paper in a quiet office somewhere. Some joke that, huh?”

At first he was their eye against the pane that separated them from CORE, SCLC and SNCC. He worked for Burke Marshall at the Justice Department. He was beaten unconscious in Montgomery in ‘61. But he took to Washington and even came to like Kennedy.

He followed RFK back to New York, a place where he had friends and family but no connections. “Until Bob ran for Senate in New York, the Jews on his staff never had the same influence as the Irish. That’s to be expected. Especially in those days. It was their culture, their political culture. Politics for the Irish is like Talmudic argument for the Jews. It’s endless. It never stopped, even on the train. You were there, you remember. The guy’s lying dead, the Jews and the blacks are crying their eyes out and his closest and oldest friends are getting drunk and handicapping McCarthy against Humphrey and trying to figure out what Johnson will do.

“We get to the city and suddenly the Jews are important. Ah, it was the war. We weren’t as complicit; we didn’t have to cover our asses. Even good people find it hard to admit they had fucked up with Vietnam. He’s a Liberal, but the NY liberals don’t like him too much, they never regarded any Kennedy as a true liberal. You’ve got nothing but factions, on the Upper West Side, there were 3, 4 factions sometimes factions within factions. And Lindsey changed everything except for the fact that you always had to kiss some non-entity’s ass because a guy upstate made a deal. Crangle of Erie County, Steingut from Brooklyn, Buckley up in the Bronx, or Carmine DeSapio. Guys you never fucking heard of. It’s dizzying. It still is. Have a talk with my friend Sonny Carson out in Brooklyn some time and then drop in on Meir Kahane.”

In 1967 Lowenstein approached him about his Dump Johnson project. “It was quixotic. Who was this guy? Everyone said you could never do it. Not since Franklin Pierce in 1856. You know what Pierce said after losing the Democratic nomination? ‘After the presidency, there’s nothing to do but get drunk.’” By January of ‘68 he was within an inch of quitting and joining the McCarthy campaign, but in the end he stuck it out with his boss.

For two or three years after that, nothing but sullen outbursts of irrational anger and recrimination. He sounded like Nixon on the tapes. “We’re going to get those bastards,” he’d say, fixing his tie in the Commodore mirror. He ran about his warren, weary, ashen, semi-shaved. Except for trips up to Westchester he was confined to his passageways. It was McGovern who pulled him out of it, when he asked him to be counsel to the McGovern Commission, which was changing the rules of the ‘72 convention to cut out the bosses. The same bosses who threw it to Stevenson in ‘52, who in ‘68 planned to give it to Humphrey no matter what McCarthy won.

He was back in the saddle. “McGovern, good man. Look, it’s impossible to talk about this with him. The enormity of the landslide. You, when you’re going to lose, knowing you’re going to lose big, possibly set a record, it doesn’t help at all. You still feel like shit. Absurdity is no balm. Whoever said so must have been a comedian.” But after the debacle of ‘72, he merely had to lick his wounds and did so with a man he’d first met in the fifties in NY through King, Albert Shankar. They had moved in adjacent circles for decades and they began their fruitful collaboration in ‘73.

In ‘76 he turned out for Fred Harris and went up to New Hampshire again. In ‘80 of course he took on Ted Kennedy. That really hurt him with the party. “They won’t take my calls! I was being loyal! Carter was taking the country in the wrong direction. And we needed to put a real liberal with a big name up against Reagan. Boy was I fucking wrong. I’ll tell you, ego. Everyone is an ego maniac but nothing clouds your judgment more.” I wondered who was next.

He slapped Roy’s shoulder. “Roy! Where ya been? Who’s this? What’s your name, Dawn? Was it Dawn? I got it right. Alex,” he hugged and kissed me. “How are the books and cappuccinos? Don’t they always go together? The friars and the scrolls. Come on back. You can go into the house from there. I’ve got the grill fired up. Let me get you a gin and tonic.” He bustled ahead and we followed him under the Nordic wood and around behind the house. “That boy can really swim now, you gotta see. Much better than last year. He made the team. Hey!” he yelled, waving at Barry who was by the side of the pool looking adenoidal and miserable in a wet bathing suit. Barry frowned and waved and headed out on the diving board.

“Go on up to the house and change into your suits.”

The sliding doors opened into a modern living room with Scandinavian furniture, puce pillows and mauve throws and dove walls. It looked purchased. My father was indifferent to many things. He had not always been rich and to him it didn’t matter one way or another. He drove a car till it dropped dead and never stopped working. And none of it, till he met Shankar, paid a dime.

We used to go to Cook’s on the Post Road and Rye Playland. Or we’d drive up to Bear Mountain and take a hike. He took us to Laguardia to watch the planes take off and we once drove out to see the World’s Fair Globe. We went to auto wreckers and climbed around in the old buses and cars stacked and piled up, the smell of hot corroded rubber and weeds in the air. There was a cemetery we went to also to go on the rope swing.

We stood around the pool, all four of us scrawny and unhappy in the blazing light. Roy and Dawn were in black suits with dark glasses, their skin puckered and pink. My trunks hung down to my knees and I was wearing a pair of new flip flops because the flagstones in past years were so hot they burned my feet. Elaine, my father’s second wife, was lying on a redwood chaise in a tiny bikini she burst out of and a big straw hat and oval sunglasses. Barry, in a blue racing suit, knock-kneed and trembling, stood on the end of the diving board.

“Go on, you can do it,” Elaine shouted.” She sipped a gigantic plastic cup of iced tea through a straw. “Don’t mind me if I don’t get up,” she said, smiling in our direction.

“Hi,” Dawn said, shielding her eyes, two blinding dazzles of sun playing on each dark lens of her glasses. “I’m Roy’s wife Dawn.”

“My wife, Elaine,” my father said, beckoning us to a table under an umbrella next to the chaise lounge. On it were four gin and tonics perspiring and in foment with a wedge of lime stuck on the rim. “I forgot who takes lime with theirs so I just put it on there. Lechaim.” We toasted. There are worse things than a gin and tonic on a hot day by the pool, like Jim Beam in a jelly glass. He nodded in Elaine’s direction. “She was made for days like this. You know how there are snow bunnies? Well she’s a sun bunny. She puts that oil on her and gets darker and darker. Me, I’d get skin cancer before I turned that color. I put it on a little at a time. Miami, just walking around, right Roy?”

“Yeah.”

Elaine lifted her head but otherwise remained flat out and said, “I said Go on. What’s to be afraid of? Look, the coach said if you can’t do a racing dive you can’t be on the team.” She propped her self up on her elbows and held up a magazine to block the sun. “Go on. Don’t be afraid, just do it. Oh my god. Say something!” she said, turning to my father. “Izzie.”

“Barry, just look at the water and fall in.”

“That’s a dive, not a racing dive.”

“I thought that’s what you meant.”

“Racing dive! He knows how to dive.”

“A cannon ball’s not a dive,” my father said.

“In any event, the type of dive he needs to learn is a racing dive.”

“I can’t help with that one there. You’re doing a terrific job Barry.”

My father was a man pretending to be a father, I think. He knew he was supposed to do certain things, and he had all the love of a father, which he could not show except to act like one who does. The whole ritual of the day down to the inane chatter had been repeated many times. He had a compulsion to repeat. It was not the same as what is so brutally reduced by the terms OCD, or PTSD, or ADHD, though certainly he was or had or had had all three of these. So if at one time we drank a gin and tonic and it was good he had to have a gin and tonic with you for it to be good again. The same with the pool and the kid. And the well charred porterhouse steak and claret for dinner. Barry flopped into the pool and started to swim back and forth.

“So,” my father said, “What were you boys doing, why were you late?”

I looked at Roy. He was grinding his teeth. If we waited long enough and smiled ambiguously he would move on to something else. Dawn said, “It’s my fault sir. I just had to watch the rest of Apocalypse Now. It’s my absolute favorite movie in the world.”

It was a favorite of his too. Roy must have prepped her. “No kidding?” he asked. “Do you know the scene where they give him his mission. Harrison Ford’s in it. Willard takes the Marlboro and lights it?”

“Extreme prejudice.”

“Come on Roy, help me burn a steak.”

I stood at the edge of the pool and looked at the water. Bugs struggled against the pitching waves. Reflections bloomed and broke. The chlorine smell mixed with the smell of lawn care products, lighter fluid and coconut tanning oil. The flagstones burned my feet. I dove into the pool. Barry was still swimming back and forth, underwater now. But he kept banging his nose into the walls because they were irregular. Elaine shouted from a full sitting position, “Oh my god will you stop it already?”

I lay back and swam around for a while feeling the sun on my face and letting my feet hang in the cold water of the deep end. I got out and dried off and watched my father and Roy at the grill. Roy looked tense and bored. He kept gazing off and didn’t smile. Normally they’d be yucking it up together, even if he were high. He must have done too much. He stared grimly at the grill while our father laid down a monumental slab of beef. It hissed and spit and flames started to lick the edges. “Out here, you have to show them how to cut the meat. The butchers in the city know what they’re doing. Everything is an education now. Anyway, that’s for you. For me I got this.” He slapped down a naked chicken breast. “No bones and no skin. Nothing to grind and suck and no crunch. All my life I can’t put on a pound and now they tell me I got high cholesterol. This is a stupidly run universe I can tell you that. What kind of a racket is it when a man like me has to go on a god damn diet?”

“Won’t it cook too fast?” I asked.

“Who the fuck cares?” He laughed. “If it burns maybe it’ll acquire some flavor. So what do you think of that son of a bitch Reagan now, huh?” He slapped Roy’s back and grinned at him demonically, showing all his teeth like a Wyndham Lewis drawing. At some point in the remote early days of our history when it was still a mythology, still malleable, he had decided to treat Roy like a gregarious colleague. It was shallow and yet it was evident how much he adored Roy and craved his love in return, which Roy repaid with everything from petulance to indifference.

He banged Roy’s shoulder again. It was like a block of wood. Roy swallowed hard and said, “That’s a big piece of meat, dad.”

He chuckled. “I may not be able to eat it, but,” he paused and covered his mouth with his hand and whispered, “I can tear off all I want. –But that doesn’t mean I can’t cook it. I know how to enjoy a thing if someone else is. Now that side looks done.” The smoke was racing up off the grill and the steaks were engulfed in flame. Roy took the tongs and flipped it and put the kettle lid on. Smoke gushed from the three vent holes.

We took the meat inside on a wooden platter. The dining room table was next to a sliding screen door. It was set with china, silver, grey and white linens and napkins and tea lights. Elaine had made tabbouleh and a salad of feta and cucumbers and olives. “Ain’t it beautiful?” my father said. He put the platter with the steak and the charred, shriveled chicken breast down and carved off slices of pink meat. Every minute or so he’d he’d pop a piece or two into his mouth and chew quickly, taking sips of red wine. In that way he consumed an entire portion of meat before we sat down.

“I thought, why always a baked potato. Let’s have a grain and salad,” Elaine said, seated at one end of the table. My father sat at the other. Roy and Dawn sat across from Barry and me. The air smelled like evening trees and cornsilk. There were fireflies and firecrackers going off. Roy and Dawn stared at their plates and slowly cut their meat into a hundred little pieces which they chewed a hundred times and swallowed down with wine.

He asked me about Sally and I filled him in on her itinerary and then unfolded my plan for going to library school.

“And you say you’re working at Butler?” he asked.

“Just a few hours a day. I met this old socialist, English conservator, and he put me on for the summer shelving books.”

“I spent a lot of time there. I can smell them now, the smell of all those bindings, and the light. Isn’t that good what he’s doing, Roy?”

Roy grunted. Dawn’s eyes were fixed on space.

Elaine said, “I worked in the library at Rutgers. I had to sort those cards. You shook these bars. God it was boring.”

“McBee cards, they’re very cool. I do those sometimes, when there isn’t much too shelve. And I fix bindings. So who do you like in ‘84?” I asked. “What do you think of Hart?”

“Tell me the difference between Hart and Reagan. He won’t make it. They’ll give it to Fritz. He’s their sacrificial lamb, their Stevenson. I’m thinking Jackson. He’s talking about running. Would you believe it, the guy’s popular in northern Wisconsin. That’s Wallace land.”

“Kennedy too,” I said.

“Be a prick. Jesse’s the only one who shows up for their strikes. He gets out on the picket line. He’s out there doing something, while this criminal boob makes a mockery of an office that was severely imperiled to begin with. It’s like kicking a sick dog. Things just keep getting worse. It’s unimaginable, as if the bottom had dropped out. If he weren’t so evil he’d just be ludicrous. Nixon was ludicrous in his way, and Johnson too. Johnson was a big baby, like Kruschev. The point is, they were tragic figures for crissakes, savage clowns, it wasn’t a farce. This is a farce. What did Clark call him? An amiable dunce, that’s the president of The United States of America! As if we could afford such a thing.”

We cleared our plates. Dawn started to stack them in the sink and was about to load the dishwasher. “Nah,” Elaine said, “I do them first. I don’t trust those machines to get things clean.” She pushed Dawn gently out of the way and said to me, “Now go with your dad to play pool, go on.”

We followed him to the lower level where there was a knotty pine paneled den with a pool table and small wet bar. He put on the light and a ceiling fan began to whirr.

“What’s everyone having?” he asked, stepping behind the bar.

I felt bloated with dead flesh and my skin was itching from the chlorine. The room was cool and airless. There were sliding glass doors and we looked out on the back lawn and the pool, which was lit up and placid.

“Whatever single malt you’ve got,” Roy said.

“And I have some cigars. I was in Canada a couple of weeks ago and picked these babies up.” He took out a wooden cigar box and handed Dawn and Roy one. They sniffed them and smiled. He rummaged around the cabinets and said, “What about you Alex.”

“If you’re smoking those I’m opening the door, OK?”

“Don’t do that,” he said, “you’ll let the bugs in.”

“There’s a screen?”

“So? It’s hot out. And the screen isn’t that good. But open them if you must.”

“Just, when you light up. It’s a beautiful night. When it’s steamy like this, out here, it smells so good.”

“So what are you having?”

“Do you have beer?”

“Sure.” He put a bottle of Glenlivet down on the bar and said to Roy, “Rocks?”

“Two,” Roy said.

Roy went over to the pool table and started taking the balls out three at a time, forming a loose herd. Whenever one took off he would reach over and retrieve it without looking.

“None for me,” said Dawn. “I mean scotch. I’ll take whatever bourbon on the rocks you have please sir.”

“O.K.,” he laughed. He found a bottle of Wild Turkey and screwed the cap off. “So where are you from?” He poured it over a couple of cubes in a highball glass.

“When Roy and I met I was living in Athens, Georgia but my hometown is Dallas.”

He handed her the drink and raised his eyebrows. “Nice place that,” he said. “Haven’t been in years. What do your parents do, what are they?”

“Well sir Mr. Ploomis–”

“Please, Izzie.”

“Izzie sir, my father’s an accountant at an accounting firm and my mother sells real estate, or rather, she’s getting her license now that I ran off and my brother doesn’t live at home anymore. He likes to say that the last Democrat he voted for was Richard Nixon.”

My father smiled. “Well drink up everybody and let’s shoot a rack.”

Roy racked the balls and rolled them into place. “You break,” he said to my father.

“I’ll take Dawn, you take Alex,” my father said.

“She can play better’n he can, if she’ll just stop talking for minute.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell you about that later,” she said under her breath, flexing her nostrils. She put the cigar in her mouth.

“Ah, allow me,” my father said, putting down his pool cue and taking out a disposable lighter and lighting it. She puffed three times and blew smoke rings. The ceiling fan dispersed the silver foxtail of smoke curling up to it. Roy and my father lit theirs up. It smelled like Julian’s on 14th Street. I slid open the doors and the puff of warm, humid air engulfed me. It smelled strongly of the night, of wet vegetation and trees sighing into the windless air. My father leaned down over the table, narrowed his right eye and drew the cue back with his left arm. Then the knock of the cue ball followed by the break and we watched various balls approach and miss the pockets. The clinamen of billiards. “Ah,” he said. “Your turn Roy.” He turned his back on the table and faced me. “You don’t know what your missing with these cigars, Alex.”

I choked loudly, and weighed a few cues in my hand. I liked a little weight in the back, something to hold onto when trying to make a shot. “I’m not missing a thing. I find the smell of even the finest cigar to be repugnant.”

“I see.”

“I don’t like the smell of cigars. It doesn’t make me want to smoke them.”

“Well anyway, you don’t,” he said. “Dawn, you go.”

She was lining the 3 up for a shot in the center pocket. It was kind of a hard angle to make. You had to aim carefully. She knocked it softly and sank the ball. Now she was surrounded by stripes. She managed not to knock any in but almost scratched the cue ball in the corner pocket. It was resting just on the edge. The eleven was sitting just on the near edge of the other corner pocket. I lined it up and hit the cue ball pretty hard, figuring it to bounce around and end up in the center of the table. It overtook the nine in the hole. They knocked together and rolled down the wooden ramps.

“It was an easy shot,” I said to Roy. “I’m sorry.”

He sat on a stool, sucking on his teeth as he had all through dinner. “Don’t sweat it. I can beat them both.”

He hopped down and made a few shots. My father said, “I’m telling you, this son of a bitch is killing us. There’ll be no unions left to back a president in ‘84. You see how this is all intentional. I mean, when you destroy the unions you don’t just destroy good jobs, you destroy the Democratic party. That’s been its base for forty, fifty years. Why don’t we shut down all the goddamn churches. You put Falwell out of business, you tax these for-profit churches and see what happens to the Reagan Revolution then.” He addressed all of this to Roy, but Roy was functionally inert. He would stand, knock in a few balls and return to his drink, grinding his teeth. He was listening to my father, but I have no idea what he was hearing, or imagining. I really think Roy didn’t give a damn about Reagan or politics, he just liked to argue.

“They put that midlevel mafia crook Ray Donovan in there. It’s enough to make me want to become a communist! I’m telling you, I never understood how Du Boise, one of the most brilliant men of this century, in the height of the cold war could become a Communist just to piss off Walter White. But now I understand, when I think about that bastard, that stupid, fucking bastard in the White House. It’s almost worse than Nixon. Nixon was both war criminal and crook but there never was any doubt about what he was. The man was an animal of power pure and simple. But this Reagan, people believe in his goodness. He’s got ‘em by the balls and he knows it. That’s why he smiles. People meet him and think, ‘Oh, what a nice man, I think I’ll put my balls in his hand.’ You’d be smiling too. They’re fascists, American fascists, and if you can call Helen Gehagen Douglas a Communist you can call this gang fascist. Look,” he counted off with his fingers, “he stages events, sets out to destroy people’s belief in the common good, in decency to the other guy, and he shows them pretty pictures of how good their lives will be. They’re fascists!”

Roy looked at our father now. When it was evident that he would take a breather Roy mumbled and then said, in a clear voice, with tears filling his eyes, “What the fuck are you talking about? You wanna see a fascist, a Nazi? Cause I have. Down in Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras. Go there to see the real thing. Up here, people like you get paid to mouth off. Down there they’d take you out and hack you up with a machete. Then they’d come back and rape your wife and your kid. They’d cut off her tits, and beat him to death with their rifle butts. They’d lay you three out in the village square and no one would say a word. Reagan’s whatever kind of fascist it is who pays people to do shit like that while people like you sit around their pool acting tough.”

“Who said anything about Nazis? I said fascist. And I think I know a thing or two,” his voice became constricted, as he realized how pointless it was to say anything more. It had exceeded even his seemingly limitless capacity for argument.

Now we played pool in silence, me sipping a Grolsch which for some reason was my father’s favorite beer. When he became a rich man he started to buy things that had looked good to him when he was poor; he had to have that Grolsch with the fancy top and the 50-year-old Cognac. He swirled some of that around in his snifter and stared off dully. Soon it was time to go home. We shook hands at the door. Elaine was in bed, Barry was watching TV and eating a can of Pringles. Roy mumbled good-bye to our father and Dawn, looking half asleep, kissed his cheek and said, “So now you’re my father-in-law. I’ll have to introduce you to my father.” She laughed, actually, giggled for just a second.

“Something to look forward to,” he said. “Go home and get some rest.”

“Alex–”

“Dad.”

“The books sound terrific. I think your idea about library school is just the thing for you. And next year, you’re going to bring Sally, right?”

“If we’re still together.”

“Your too young to be so cynical. Love her while you still can. Tell me when school starts, I’ll send you a hundred bucks, how’s that?”

We got in the car. Roy said, “You drive, I took a Quaalude with that scotch. I’m totally fucked up.” He started to laugh and then the laugh trailed off. He made an abrupt snoring noise.

“Did you have to be such a jerk to him? I can’t believe you said that. It’s not like he doesn’t know about these things. He’s on some Central American solidarity committee, he helped start a sister city somewhere in New Hampshire. His father was killed by Nazi agents. You’ve gone too far. You’re wasted on drugs all the time and all you do is go around doing just like whatever pops into your head. It’s like the world only exists for you to use it, it’s like, your toilet. What you like you like, what you don’t you don’t. Everyone’s the same. But all you do is take. He loves you, he’s just trying to connect with you somehow and you pay it back with contempt.” It was too cold in the car. “Roy, turn off the air conditioner or turn it down, please?” There was no answer. “Roy?” I didn’t want to take my eyes off the road or hand off the stick. I was not used to driving. The way was curvy and dark. I was so afraid my mind shut down and I forgot about them and just drove and drove doing all the things you do when you drive. By the time we parked I couldn’t remember getting there. Just the tunnel the headlights cut out of the dark and the others shining into it. You don’t know what to trust. I didn’t and I don’t.

I awoke early the next morning and had coffee alone by the open window. A fresh breeze blew in; the room was bright with early sun. I became absorbed in a book, emerged from the trance long enough to shower and dress and then returned to the chair for another hour. It was heating up. I had to move onto the bed to be in the shade. Still Roy had not called. The plan was for him to call to say what time he would pick me up for the ride out to our father’s.

My father lived with his second wife, Elaine, a former secretary. She was in her late thirties and came with a ten-year-old son named Barry. I would have rather broiled to death in the apartment than go out there to sip gin and tonics on the patio watching Barry attempt to do back flips and cannon balls, while his mother and my father applaud. Every summer we did this.

At noon I got Roy on the phone. At a quarter-to-one I entered his apartment. Dawn was sitting across the arms of a chair in a bra and underwear. The air was so cold you could see your breath. They were watching Apocalypse Now on the biggest TV I had ever seen. The pixels were so spread out the image was fuzzy. Roy was half asleep on a futon, an Indian blanket pulled up to his chin.

“I love this part,” Dawn said. “You know where they surf? I wish I could do that. Have you ever seen a wave like that, what they surf on?”

“The beginning of Hawaii 5-O,” I said.

“That’s stupid Alex. I don’t mean TV.”

“Then no, never, no.”

She tapped her cigarette in a sandbag ashtray and stared at the explosions on the TV. Without turning her head she said, “Roy, will you get up? Your brother’s here.” Then to me, “He don’t listen to me. I told him this morning, 8 o’clock when he walked in, ‘don’t even bother going to sleep, you have to be there in two hours.’ But he took a Quaalude.” She shook her head slowly back and forth.

Roy groaned. “Fuuuuuck. Let’s go.” He put on his sunglasses and stood staggering to his feet. His face looked like someone had knifed it on with silly putty.

“Go take a shower,” Dawn said. “You stink bad.”

I took him by the arm and led him willingly away into the black marble bathroom with stainless steel fixtures. He wiggled out of his clothes and stood trembling in his skin, which was colorless except for flushes of pink and blue. His ribs stood out. I turned the shower on, a steady jet of gentle water gushed through a huge showerhead. Most places you get the throbbing needles of water, a sputtering low use head. I closed the shower doors and watched him soap up. He was like a flame behind the textured glass, running with suds and water. His face was an oblong hole. He got out and dried off and weaved into the closet to dress. “Oh my god, fuck,” he said, putting on his shoes. He made some guttural sounds, cursed again and followed me into the living room. He was dressed in a blue Italian suit with narrow lapels, and dark sunglasses. Dawn had on dark glasses too, and a black dress, pearls and no stockings.

“You better let him drive your car, Roy.”

“Fuck you. Let’s go.”

We took a cab to the lot, found the car and Dawn got in back. I stood at the passenger side, facing Roy and the Hudson over the canvas roof of the car. I said, “Give me the keys, Roy.” Traffic crashed across metal plates. A tugboat pulled a rusty barge down the river. I watched myself in Roy’s sunglasses. In the bathroom he tried to hide behind his hands. “You can’t drive this thing.” He cleared his throat and lit a cigarette. I squinted. “Dawn said you took a Quaalude.”

“You ever take one?”

“No, never. No.”

“They’re nothing. They help you sleep.”

“You’re too fucked up to drive.”

“Am I? Cause I don’t see how you could know that. You don’t get high yourself. That’s a major strike against you, but you’re my brother, so out of love I make allowances. But I question your judgment.”

“You, you, you put on that Marcello Mastroianni suit and think it’s like a magic vest or something.” The roof was blazing hot. Tar and auto fumes scented the air. There were periodic eruptions of jackhammers demolishing concrete. My head started to ache. I held my hand out for the keys.

“Look, it’s like this,” he said. “A ‘lude lasts for all of four hours. I took it at 8. It’s 1:30. You see? I’m down from that and up from this.” He stuck a hitter to his nose and sniffed. “Now let’s cut the crap. Get in.”

We were very late. Our father would be pacing about wondering where we were, if we were all right. He was always late himself but got worried and angry if anyone kept him waiting. Roy would stand out there till sunset before he’d hand over the keys. Dawn was rapping at the glass and cursing at us. I gave up. Roy got in and started the car. I opened the door and sat down on the black upholstery. It made my back feel like pizza burn. They were both smoking. I rolled down the window. Roy yelled, “It’s too fucking hot for that. Put on the AC.” He slammed in a tape, Diamond Dogs. We headed north to the Henry Hudson, then up through Westchester to the Tappan Zee. Roy drove with the seat back as far as it would go, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Bowie sang, “When it’s good it’s really good and when it’s bad I go to pieces.”

“Can we listen to something else?” Dawn asked.

“I don’t think so. We’re practically there.” We got off the highway and squealed along a two-lane road.

“I can’t listen to this all the time. It’s like ten times a day now. I have a tape–”

“You don’t think it’s like this now? Just wait. Cause what you don’t see now you will live to see. See, I got it all worked out here with this music. Bowie’s just reporting on what’s out there. Sometimes there are things out there you don’t hear about here. The news doesn’t come. But I’ll tell you what. We’ll take a vote. That’s what we’ll do. How do you vote, Alex, in the matter of Dawn v. Roy?”

“Do you think we’ll have to watch him swim again?” I asked. “Or is he too old for that?”

“Too old,” Roy said.

“Back home, everyone could swim. It wasn’t nothing you would brag about.”

“The vote then. How do you vote Alex.”

“This tape,” Dawn said. “It’s my friend. Put it on next. And I don’t think he wants to vote. And please, turn it off before it goes rat rat rat rat rat. It gives me the creeps.”

“Bruh. Bruh Bruh Bruh Bruh Bruh,” he said.

“No, it’s rat.”

“Bruh, like in brother, big brother.”

“My god, you talk so much. If you’re so smart, how come I never see you read a book?”

“I read ‘em in spurts. Jail’s a good place for reading books. And a ship at sea. Men on submarines read a lot, and in the Antarctic. But the place I’ve read the most has been in decompression chambers, after working in a diving bell. You’re breathing helium. And there’s just nothing else you can do for weeks at a time. All you have to look forward to is a really deep dive, a dark and endless dive along a chain lit up only by your headlamp, disappearing deeper and deeper. Down there, at those pressures, only certain kinds of things can live. The seabed is a barren place they say, but I doubt it. There ain’t a barren place on this earth. I sometimes thought I could stay down there forever. It was so perfect. It scared the fucking shit out of me how perfect it was.”

Busted. I blushed. I stammered. Douglas Eakens saved me when he walked in blinking behind his thick lenses, wisps of hair floating over the imperfectly bald top of his head. He was breathing loudly and he rubbed his hands together. “What time do you leave, Alex?”

“Eleven, tonight.”

“What a shame. I’m just now going out with Allan Bejtelmann. We were hoping you’d join us at The West End for a pint.”

“I could stop by at 11.”

He laughed and shook his head. “At 11 I’ll be in bed asleep. We’ll come in and have a cup of tea and then go out for beer.”

Professor Bejtelmann was a formidable presence as well, at least when I think of what a learned man he was, a Medievalist who knew eight languages. He was the author of a five-volume study of the Albigensian Crusade, a book I bought for the psychiatrist as a birthday present the year he died. Eva gave it back to me and I have it in the glass display case in the front of the store, to the left as you come in. It’s not for sale, but I want people to be able to browse it if they want.

Bejtelmann I knew a little from having tea with in the employee lunchroom. After seeing me a few times he invited me to join him. He was seated, stooped over a china tea set, the pot in a cozy. There was no lemon but he had milk and sugar. I took mine black. He was white haired, slight of build, with a biggish head and papery skin, quite frail, but his blue eyes were vigorous and could emphasize his raspy, weak monotone. He was a Gnostic and a socialist.

They sat down and I got them each a cup of black tea.

“We were just discussing the White Goddess,” Bejtelmann said.

“I don’t think Graves is as insane as you say. And it wasn’t Provence that made Pound mad. Madness was just a court defense, whether ‘twas Hitler or Eleanor of Aquitaine.”

His hands rattled a bit as he brought the teacup to his lips. He sipped some in and put it down. “I think this Reagan fellow might be a Golem, under the control of an Alexandrian wizard.”

“Alexandria, Virginia you mean,” Douglas said.

“Hee-hee-heh…” Bejtelmann laughed. “I have this argument going now through letters to a journal about a scene in Comus, when the young lady is portrayed as being stuck to her seat by gums. And this fellow wrote an article claiming gums to be vaginal fluids. Comus has succeeded in making a virgin wet her panties. It’s preposterous and I said so.” He laughed some more. “Oh it’s hopeless. What can you expect. Librarians like professors have to publish or perish. Imagine comparing professional failure to death. I failed everything I tried except for books. All I could do was learn languages. There seemed to be but one place to go. Bloody librarians.”

“A murderous lot,” Douglas confirmed.

“And a dismal view of death, I should say. The Elizabethans compared an orgasm to death. Death should not be so denigrated as to invite comparison to professional neglect.”

“I look forward to total extinction with relief,” Eakens said.

“I thought you were a Catholic.”

“Pah, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. On all others a bloody atheist. And in your eye with it.”

“Life is pain. It wears out the soul.”

“The soul worries itself to death.”

“Oh yes, and the body makes its demands, exhausting the soul as the soul pursues itself in desire. Long before the body is done the soul is a wreck. And this is an anagram for the soul’s mortality. Because an immortal soul would not be worn out by forty years of beastly existence.”

I said, “Doesn’t sometimes a very demanding soul wear out a body first? So hungry for sensation and adventure, so reckless in the pursuit of knowledge and pleasure, it drives its body into an early death?”

“Hmm. Destroyed by mutual dependency, and destroyed by isolation,” Eakens said.

“Well, we’d best go to the bar. I think we’ve probably taken up enough of his time. Good night. We’ll try again.” They strolled out. I started to do my side work so I could get out right at 11.

“Who were they?” Antonia and Dean asked.

“Librarians, a medievalist and a preservationist. The preservationist, Douglas Eakens, I met here.”

“Ohhhh, so that’s how–” Dean said.

“Yeah. I thought you knew.”

“Maybe I did. Who knows what I know? It’s all in one ear.”

Antonia stood. She hadn’t taken her leather jacket off. She put a scarlet bowling ball bag up on the counter and said, pulling her wallet out from within, “We have to go. Can we have the check, Alex?”

I looked around to see if Dorothy was still there but she was in back. “No charge,” I said. She fixed me with her cat glasses and her lip twitched. Then she smiled. “Thank you, Alex.” Dean laid a five on the counter and they left.

I wiped down the counter, put their mugs in the dishwasher and washed their glasses. It was 10 o’clock. The side work was done. Except for the odd Columbia student or a bus driver on his way home from work, I didn’t expect much action. I watched the police cars and fire engines whoop whoop and yowl by, the bonk bonk of ambulances carting the dead and wounded away. Homeless men stopped sometimes to stare into the window. One walked in; I rushed out from behind the counter, put a dollar in his hand and gently urged him out the door. He smelled like piss and garbage.

 There were a few borderline functional people who sometimes used the bathrooms during the day and always bought a cup of coffee. A speed freak with no teeth spent a long time in there washing up. She never drank her glass of grapefruit juice but she always tipped a quarter on it. Another woman who talked to herself went in to the bathroom to weep. You could hear the muffled sobs through the door. There was a guy who brushed his teeth and shaved. The floor was always wet when he left.

On the rare occasions when the owner was there she would kick them out and reiterate her policy of no bums. But no bums wasn’t working. They used to just be drunks but now there were people living in their cars or breaking into other people’s cars to sleep. Down around 1st Street it looked like a necropolis. Where old men played bocce ball between Houston and First, near the F stop, there was a permanent encampment of dirty, grizzled, hopeless men. They kept a fire going all night long, a grim vigil for nothing. Over by the Bowery on Second Street they lined up on the street and napped and drank on the stoops looking for a bed for the night. They tumbled out of the flophouse hotels or slept along the street wrapped up in filthy blankets or newspapers on cardboard. They picked through garbage cans and hung around with the rats in the backs of restaurants. We threw our stale pastry out and it was gone in seconds. Patty wanted to make it inedible but we wouldn’t do that. Finally she stopped us from throwing it out altogether and instead took whatever she could downtown to Park Place to make crumble and crust for the next day’s tarts. Park Place was the cafe on 7th between First and A Patty owned (Pain et Poisson was a place she owned with a silent partner); it had a large kitchen which she used for baking everything sold uptown.

I had seen the psychiatrist with Roy for dinner in May. Sally was unable to attend and was furious. The psychiatrist took us to Joseph Glancey’s, a fancy fish place downtown. He lived mostly in LA with his new wife and baby. My hand disappeared within his as he greeted me on the street outside the restaurant. It was a good meal but it was also my first encounter with medium rare swordfish, not quite sushi, not quite anything at all, though the squiggle of grapefruit béarnaise was delicious. He spent the whole meal attacking Ronald Reagan. Roy was fried and maintained an inauspicious silence. There was just not much there. The psychiatrist was normally sensitive to such things and might at a certain time have been worried, but he was totally preoccupied with the loss of his beloved walk-in clinics. “It could not have been verse. Ve conwince them to release people from brutal, stupid insane asylums, and they cut all of their benefits, and shut down the very outpatient clinics ve created to serf them. Unbelievable. It’s a mental health disaster. This isn’t a civilization anymore. It’s fascism with a happy face brand. I don’t approof of wiolence, but I testified at John Hinckley’s trial. The man is insane, OK. So are the gun lows that allow him to buy a pistol and if you vant my opinion, he shoot haf bought a 44 magnum, like Dirty Harry, and finished the job.” He poked at his salad with a fork and drank Riesling.

Ronald Reagan was a hated man indeed.

I was reading In the Belly of the Beast, and The Executioner’s Song, and Ada and Earthly Powers, which put me on a Burgess kick, reading everything I could find.

Abbot was overbearing and sociopathic, but his case was compelling, that of a man who had lived most of his life in reform schools and prisons, and who had been drugged forcibly for years.

The door swung open. I looked up from my book, startled, but ready to make a fresh pot of coffee if that’s what they wanted. It was Tammy.

“Hey. What brings you in?” I asked.

“Chinatown at the Thalia. What are you reading?” I showed her. “Oh that. Matthew and I read it. So when are you off?”

“I can walk out the door at 11.”

She checked her watch and said, “I’ll wait. Are you riding downtown?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to go out?”

“Sure. Dojo’s?”

“I was thinking Romna.”

“Are they open that late?”

“I don’t know. We can see.”

“I thought you liked Royal now.”

“Yeah, but I thought for a change.”

“Simon likes Romna better. I don’t care. It all tastes the same to me.”

“It’s the head waiter I hate.”

“But you were drunk that one time he was mean.”

“Well we’re always drunk by the time we go there. It was late. What does he expect? If I were mean to every drunk customer I had I’d be fired. And it’s not like we don’t tip well. Fucking christ. You could live a year in Pakistan on what I leave.” I closed up, counted out the drawer and said good-bye to Dorothy. We walked down to 96th and took the express to Times Square and changed for the RR to 8th Street and Broadway. There was a fight on the platform and the conductor of the N train that was pulling out of the station stopped the train and actually leaned out of his window to watch. No cops came. Everyone was afraid to look and no one moved, except to back away from the two men. When one was lying dazed on the ground, the other left and everyone went over to stare. He was alive. His back arched and he looked like he was going to puke. As one the crowd backed off. The R arrived and we all got on, leaving the man in a puddle of blood behind.

The walk to 6th Street was short. There were students out and about. We bought beer on Second Avenue. “I told Matthew to meet us there,” she said. Romna was open. We stepped down into the vestibule and then into the dark green, narrow restaurant. The lighting was amber and subdued. It smelled like curry and chappatis and tandoori chicken. With a stately gait waiters delivered sizzling onions and chicken on iron griddles to couples at deuces. Matthew was at a four top in back.

“Hi Alex,” he greeted me. There was another man next to him, ten years older, in his mid-thirties, with very short hair, a heavy build and an elegant manner. There was a fifth chair at the head of the table with a leather coat hung on its back. We sat down.

“Hi,” the man said. “I’m Buddy.”

“Alex.” We shook hands.

“Would you like some wine? I brought a fabulous pinot grigio.”

Tammy put the six pack of Rolling Rock on the table.”

 “I’ll take a Rolling Rock,” I said.

I sensed a feeling of anticipation, muffled by a practiced casualness that didn’t seem quite right. Just as I was putting it together, my half-formed premonitions were confirmed by Simon’s grand entrance from the bathroom. “You’re back!”

“I sent you a postcard.”

“But you said early summer. You didn’t say June!”

 We hugged and I sat down feeling so happy. He looked like a model, with his hair cut on the sides and tall and angular and flat on top. He was relaxed, glowing in the dark. “It’s so good to be back in the center of the world. Italy is totally cool, I love it, but it just always felt like last year there. Now I’m in the future again.”

“The future as past,” I said.

Tammy never showed extreme emotion, except for very occasionally, but her happiness to have Simon back was palpable.

“This is my friend Buddy,” he said. “Buddy was subletting my place.”

“What happened to the guy–”

“That’s me,” Buddy said.

He didn’t look ill at all. “I see.”

“Is there anything that’s not totally gross?” Matthew asked. He was turning the menu over on his plate. In the dark he looked pale and juvenile. He hadn’t taken his leather coat off. He drank a soda with a straw. “I just want chicken with NO bones.”

“That’s chicken tikka,” Tammy said. “And you’d like pakora and the breads. Or biryani, that’s just rice.”

“What’s that they keep bringing out on the hot plates?” he asked.

“That’s the chicken tikka,” Buddy said. He poured a glass of wine and lit a cigarette. Simon took out a bidi and lit it. The waiter looked at him strangely and smiled. He spoke rapidly in Bengali to one of the other waiters, who nodded and retired behind the curtains that led to the kitchen doors.

“The tikka is better at Royal,” Tammy said. “That’s where I usually go now.”

“It’s all the same kitchen, isn’t it?” I asked.

“God, the things that change in a year,” Simon said. “So where’s Sally?”

“You didn’t tell him?” I asked Tammy.

“We haven’t talked really. You called,” she said to Simon. “You left a message but we didn’t actually talk much and then they told me to go uptown and get you and pretend I had seen a movie, as a surprise, like a birthday party.”

“Sally’s in Rome.”

Simon laughed. “I should have stayed.”

“Well I’m still here.”

“You didn’t–”

“Break up? No. We’re together.”

“Good.”

“I thought you didn’t like her,” I said. “So what were you doing? Where were you last?”

“Rome. Didn’t I send you a postcard?”

“I’ve got mine on the refrigerator,” Tammy said. “The Coliseum.”

“Mine was the Protestant Cemetery.”

“I read The Witch of Atlas and Lamia there.”

“Oh!” I cried, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

“Let’s order, I say,” Buddy said.

We ordered the food.

“I’m starving,” Simon said.

“When did you get in?”

“Just a few hours ago.”

“More than that,” Buddy said.

Simon said, “Well whatever. I don’t even know what time it is. I keep cursing in Italian.”

We ate a bunch of poori and an appetizer platter. “Milano was just work but Rome was so cool. I met these guys, anarchist artists, who were doing what I was doing, the classical style, really hard light on objects. Marble busts. And I got a scooter, and almost fucking died. Giuseppe, and Tonio, and Marco and Lance, this English guy, and Lucia, Anouk, Clarissa. I worked at their radio station. At the end of a dingy alleyway you went through this door and upstairs to a makeshift studio.  We’d sit drinking absinthe, playing Captain Beefheart, and Loft mixes I brought on tape, freeform jazz, Jimi Hendrix, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra and Henry Cow and all this weird shit all night long. I didn’t understand half of what they were saying. I should have stayed. When I got off that plane at Kennedy I felt like Caliban waking up from a dream.”

We decimated the mixed tandoori platter. Matthew glumly dissected his red chicken chunks, bending close to examine connective tissue. Once he had trimmed the meat of any extraneous inedible matter he cut off pieces and labouriously consumed them.

“So where are we going after?” Tammy said.

“Not Danceteria,” Matthew said.

“Don’t worry,” Buddy said. His face was punky in a 1930’s way. He looked like a grown up Dead End kid.

“Where then?”

“Don’t look at me,” Simon said. “I’ve been gone.”

“Let’s just go to Pyramid then,” Tammy said.

On the way down to Avenue A I walked with Simon. “Where are you living?”

“Right now we’re on Ludlow but Buddy found an apartment on 12^th Street. I’m going to move in there with him and keep my old place as a studio. I think I’ll turn the whole thing into the chapel. You’ve got to come over, his place is small but it has a nice little kitchen. You gotta taste my Italian now.”

“I’m off all summer. We can have dueling kitchens.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Except tomorrow, tomorrow I have to go with Roy to my Father’s.”

“The Fourth?” I nodded and then he nodded. “Whatever. The day after.”

“I’ll call.”

“You’re not coming then?”

“No, I have to go to sleep. Good night all,” I said and turned for home.