A Retraction

Yesterday I posted a rant that later embarrassed me. While I assume everyone who reads this blogh is a friend, probably a friend I’ve known for over ten years! I know sometimes someone comes upon it who doesn’t know me, and that either way a blogh is a public statement, and public statements of the sort I was making usually piss me off. I have no business engaging in things that would piss me off if done by others. I want to emphasize that I don’t retract the substance of what I was saying, but the rhetoric was inexcusable, and I muddled things together into a swirl of violent emotion. Well, since the post is down, what was I saying?

One of the things I said was that i want to kill republicans and i want to kill bankers. I do feel that way, but it is not a real feeling. I don’t believe in violence. I don’t even believe in justified armed struggle. But I know the ANC, the PLO and the NLF (Viet Cong) would all say that they had reached the end of rational persuasion and that armed struggle was their only option, and that it is (was) justified self-defense. I think this gets to the root of the problem. I may oppose violence, I may not want to be like the violent people who oppose me, but when the way of language is abandoned or ineffective, then the way of violence and war becomes inevitable. In those circumstances people have few choices. And I suppose dying for the value of non-violence just isn’t in me.  I equated the end of language with apoplexy. It is apt. My own anger makes me apoplectic. In a situation of collective apoplexy, people start to say things they don’t mean or intend (or grunt them). Those who are threatened respond in kind. Violent rhetoric leads to violent action, violent action leads to violent reaction, and there you have it, civil war.

Societies that can no longer reform themselves through peaceful means will do so through violent conflict. I believe ours is such a society. I do not want this to happen. I do feel that my children and grand children are being threatened. I believe the other side feels the same. I know these are dangerous ideas and feelings. I am frustrated that we can’t seem to step back and deal with things. Much of my anger and frustration is directed towards my own side in politics and in art. That is, I believe the left has disintegrated. I believe the left has failed utterly to do the basic political work that would persuade people that their true interests lie with the left and not the right, and because of that, the polar ice caps will melt, and tens of millions of the world’s poorest people will die, and the united states, which is bankrupt through lack of taxation of the rich, will not be able to afford to mitigate rising sea levels, or even deal with baby boom retirements. In my old age I will work and eat dog food. So will you.

As for my evangelical brethren, i repeat, the day of the lord will truly be upon you the day people like me get off their bloghs and decide to actually DO something. But, alas, pitchforks don’t burn. Expect your adversary to be a man in a dress. No, not J Edgar Hoover.

Well, that leaves my silly attack on Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, two authors I respect and like, whose books I have enjoyed. I do believe what i said about them, but not with the hostility that dripped off of my words. I liked Fortress of Solitude and Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I do believe they are tourists in the land of failure. There is a deeply negative, dark and destructive element in American life, the anti-hero of the anti-myth, that of failure, futurelessness, envy, blame, resentment. It is what fuels noir. And I do believe, given the political situation, that rage at the human tragedy is preferable to the detached observation of the human comedy. A real fusion of the literary and noir modes of fiction would be exciting and interesting. Neither of them has achieved this. These two books are fine examples of ironic pastiche, a way of writing that is moribund.

 As for Lang Po and the experimental wang of american poetry, well, it is a fruitless battle. poetry is unimportant. I write poetry. i am tired of the poet wars. They mean nothing.

Early next morning around 11 I was awakened by Joseph’s booming laugh (a rare sound at that hour), followed by Raph’s gentler, drier one. “Which way does it go?” Joseph asked.

There was silence. I got out of bed, put on a robe and came out into the big room. By the door the two men stood looking at a large rectangular canvas, perhaps 6×4. On it were painted stripes, a gold one, a green one, a red one, a white one, repeated. Raph was a few feet back examining the painting which Joseph would turn now one way and now another. “It’s hard to say,” Raph said. “What do you think?”

Joseph looked at me and chuckled. “I think vertical.”

“Why?”

“More like prison bars.”

Raph’s face fell. His ebullience was always perched at the margin. “Do you really think so? What do you think Alex?” His voice was becoming plaintive.

“Oh, I thought it was supposed to be nonfigurative, without narrative content, a statement of pure form.”

“Oh yes, I see,” Raph said, back up on the razor. “Well let’s try it horizontal for a while then and if it feels too ocean linerish we’ll make it into a prison. Heh heh heh.”

Joseph leaned the canvas against the wall on the back of the loft, near Sally’s and my room, where all the canvas’s ended up. It joined a bunch of abstractions he had made with arbitrary procedures on masonite. I went into the kitchen to make coffee. “Coffee?” I yelled.

“No,” said Raph.

“Only if we have ice,” Joseph said.

I put a pot on and joined them at the window. “So Lydia’s not around?” Raph asked.

Joseph and I looked at each other. “Not much,” he said. “New boy friend.”

“Is he a degenerate, someone who slaps her around? These guys think they’re something and she falls for it. I was hoping to see her before Passover. Just to go over the plans. You’re sure you can drive in the city?” he asked me. “It’s an Accord.”

“I think I can handle it Raph. Are you parked on the street?”

“Nah, I put it in the garage. Age makes you a pussy. Age and money. You got enough money, and you can go in your pants like a little child and someone will clean you up. Cynthier has the ticket. Put it on our card.”

I poured a cup for me and yelled, “There’s ice,” and sat down at the table. Raph joined me while Joseph made iced coffee.

“Are we on for dinner?”

“Uh, is that what Sally said?” I asked.

He laughed. “You’ve learned early.”

I sighed and gave up my protest without a wheeze. “What time and where?”

“Let’s just meet here at 6. Go out for an early dinner.”

Joseph sat down. “So who is coming?”

“Well, Bubbe and Isaiah, Lee and Bee, oh yes, and your distant cousin Moishe, he’s about a hundred years old. You never met him. Last time I saw him he had an ear infection, couldn’t hear a thing so everyone shouted at him. I don’t think he had a clue but who knows. He’s a World War I vet. He fought for the Axis powers. The enemy. Austria. He got captured by the British and they put him in a POW camp in Italy. He rotted in there till‘20, ‘21? The things they never teach you. Thousands died, a third of all the prisoners. And that was after the war. But Moishe? He walks out of there and all the way home to his village in Galicia. Anyway, he didn’t like Poland. He was a communist in those days too. He came here to work in a factory but after Israel, I don’t know, something happened to him politically. These guys when they’re young are real ball busters, but you put a few miles on them and they grow their beards and sit around drinking coffee and complaining. I swear to you, you’d go to his house in Queens and it was bedlam. All that shouting. He married some Orthodox woman. Nothing but kids in that house, it was like they were Catholic or something. Now he’s the only one left. Half his kids are dead. He knew my Grandfather back there in Poland. They weren’t just cousins, they were friends. So he’ll be there.” We looked at the floor and out the window. Joseph smoked a cigarette and Raph brooded. Finally he said, “I’m just worried something’s happened to her. No one’s heard a thing, for days?”

“There might have been a message,” Joseph said, so casually it seemed calculated to torture him even more.

“I’m sure she just needs to be out of touch for a while,” I said. Then I added the always helpful, “What can you do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m going to the hardware store to get some things to hang that picture in the hall there of the big room, so when you open the door, before you see the Triptych, you see the stripes.”

When Sally awoke I made coffee and we sat at the table. It was my fourth cup and things were beginning to wash out. The taste of coffee permeated my cheeks and tongue and was starting to come out my pores. Joseph was lying on the couch reading with the TV on.

“So what was that all about?” she asked.

“We’re meeting for dinner at six, when he’s going to hand over the keys. And he’s worried about Lydia.”

“I don’t see how she could do this to him. It’s unconscionable.” She sipped her coffee. She was tired. Her eyes were dull and her skin was bleached, puffy, her lips dry and cracked.

“It’s at least possible that something bad has happened. You saw her when she left.”

“Uh,” she groaned. I had exasperated her. “Every year she does this. Plays on his guilt by making him and everyone else think something truly awful has happened to her. But I’m not buying it. She’s crashing on different floors every night, or sleeping every two days. She’ll ride the subway. She’ll take the 5:30 train to New Haven and sleep all the way there and then go crash in the library at Yale.”

Joseph said, “I did that once.”

“He’s just all eaten up with guilt. It’s pathetic.”

“Her friend was very sick it sounds like.”

“If she read the papers she’d have some idea of what’s going on with that.”

“You don’t know what he’s got. The point is she was frightened and upset.”

“Lydia is a drama queen. She has been all her life. She’s gonna walk in here in time to go out to the beach.” We sat in silence watching the building across the street. “Well, I can’t wait for a break from Merchant.”

“Just being out at the beach will be nice. It’s supposed to be sixty and sunny all weekend.”

“Where’s dinner?”

“He hasn’t said.”

“I hope he doesn’t tell the turd story.”

“The what?”

“You haven’t heard it?”

“The turd story, no.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. I’ve heard it twice. Well, I’d rather just let him do it.”

“I’m curious now. You’ve aroused me with shit.”

“I am only revealing the hidden signifier. So where were you last night? I got home and you were mysteriously gone.”

“Tammy called. She was very upset because her father got busted giving someone a blow job at the 96th Street Exit off the Henry Hudson.”

“So what did she want?” She sounded a little jealous.

I said, “Want? She wanted to thread her meat on my skewer.”

“That’s gross.”

“She wanted to hear Elton John records. I couldn’t sleep anyway. One of my regulars it turns out is a librarian at Columbia. He pretty much offered me a job there. He said to come by his office, he’d show me the stacks. I want to ask him about library school.”

“What do you mean library school?”

“We’ve talked about it.”

“But I don’t even know where I’m going to grad school.”

“Do you even know when or if?”

“That’s ludicrous. Of course I’m going. If not in the fall, then I’ll go in the spring or the fall after. Let’s see how things work out.”

“I have to do something. I can’t just keep working shit jobs watching you work with your friends all night long, and sleep half the day and then go off to the library. It’s like, we trudge together, but we never see each other. At least if I were in school too I’d have that to do.”

“We see each other every day, twice a day, and we sleep all night together. I don’t call fucking you trudging.”

“But sometimes you’re out and I’m in, and less often the other way, you’re in and I’m out, like last night–”

“Last night! More like I was out while you were in.”

Jesus! I loved talking to her. “If I don’t have a more serious life, what am I gonna do with you? I have to have something here. I can find a school near where you go, but I have to know that that is what I should be doing, not have it be something I do with an expectation and then you don’t go.”

She fluffed up her hair and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t have any idea of what you mean.”

“I mean a couple of things. I mean first of all I’m not going to apply to schools outside of the city if we aren’t going there together. And I also mean that the fact that it’s not equal between us will start to make a difference when you go to grad school. So I need to go to grad school or library school–”

“Of course you do. But if you’re asking me to commit to something a year from now.”

I felt this cold open up in my gut. “What.”

“I’m just saying a year is a long time.”

What was I hearing, I wondered. There seemed to be some awful, fatal end to this line of conversation. “You don’t see yourself with me in a year?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“Yes you are. That’s what you said.”

“What I said is a year is a long time.”

“And commit. You used that word. I can tell you that I can commit to being with you in a year and a half, that’s not a problem.”

“Of course I plan on being with you. I have no plan not to be with you. I have no plan. There can be no plan.”

“What can there be?”

“What there is.” I thought about it. This was the turn. I took it. I nodded. She said, “You can plan on grad school or library school.”

“Well library I think. You yourself agreed with Roy.”

“Library, yes, OK about the library school. Just, see what the deadlines are.”

“You have no idea where you’re applying?”

She thought about it and shook her head. “Definitely Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, Brown, Duke…”

“Duke’s down south.”

“Yeah, but it’s an oasis. You’d never know it. People fly in and out.” I wondered what my mother would say to that.

We showered and dressed and picked up our dirty clothes from around the loft. Raph came in out of breath and observed, “It’s a beautiful day.” Joseph stretched out. He was in faded black sweat pants and a white T-shirt. His pale bony shins stood exposed when he got up and walked barefoot over to his father. They started to putter and by five had finished putting up the stripes, finally in the horizontal position, after many alternations, all carried forth in patient, slightly ironic conversations that were clipped, despite containing immeasurable variation in meaning.

On the table were take-out cartons of hot and sour soup and cold sesame noodles and broccoli with garlic sauce. Sally was folding laundry from the baskets and the kitchen was hot and humming. It had a L’Assomoire feel of slow corruption with steam and irons.

Raph went out to meet Cynthia while we finished packing. Joseph carefully stowed away two bottles of vodka and four bottles of wine, wrapping each in tee shirts so they wouldn’t clink. Everyone was afraid to drink in front of Raph, though on holidays they did. Cynthia was drunk at Thanksgiving, by the time I arrived at 11. She met me at the door with a square plastic tumbler of red wine, and said hello grandly, giving me a kiss on the cheek and hugging me. “Come in, come in, have a glass of wine,” she said, leading me by the hand past the table heaped with spoils. They ate Thanksgiving at 9pm.

Guests at the Babel home usually brought their private stashes and on festive evenings, wherever Raph was there was a room full of people who had all snuck off to pour a couple of shots into their coffee cups. It was hard to imagine he didn’t know what was going on but the man walked around in a convincing impersonation of a fog. Sometimes the dumb dogs aren’t so much dumb as disobedient. Animals turn you into an authoritarian, they reveal your hidden totalitarian impulses, feed desires for adulation and order. It is corrupting. Soon your tautology is in place. The rebel dog is a dog who has no intelligence for the intelligent dog obeys. Perhaps then he checked out because he disagreed but didn’t wish to spoil the fun.

We took the train to Canal and walked to this Sichuan restaurant on East Broadway.

After we had ordered the food, during a lull in the conversation, Raph turned to me and said, “I haven’t told you about the floating turd.”

Cynthia shook her head and drank down a cup of tea and poured another from the steel pitcher. “Do we have to?”

“Don’t be so up tight,” Raph said. “It’s a funny story, like a Bunuel movie. Here we are in a South Hampton mansion, I don’t know what else to call it–”

“It’s a bungalow. Two bedrooms and a modest yard.”

“A half a million bucks, at least! I think more like two. It’s on the beach for god sake.”

“They’re friends. Business friends, but good people.”

“Who said bad people? Three couples for dinner, in a mansion, bungalow, whatever, there’s wine on the table, a white cloth, crystal chandelier. You’d think in vino veritas, huh?

“Dinner’s over, we blow out the candles and take our coffee to the living room. I had to go to the bathroom, so I excuse myself and go into the downstairs bathroom and there’s this turd floating in the toilet. To be sanitary, I flushed before I did my thing, but it doesn’t go down. I take a leak and flush again but still, it won’t go down. For some reason, it disturbed me. I didn’t want people to think it was mine! Can you imagine? I slink back to the living room and as the night wore on, I noticed how each person would excuse themselves and return with this pained, melancholy expression on their faces. I was really struck by it.

“Towards the end I started to watch our host, a man I had barely acknowledged for years, because you know, we never, whatever, anyway, it was plain as day that he was suppressing a laugh. It was like, we were in his social experiment. He was fucking with us and observing the results. I started to look around the room. There were pictures (inane ones), placed in odd spots on the wall. I’ve read about people who cut peepholes into their walls and install cameras and mikes.”

“Oh,” moaned Cynthia. “It gets longer and more involved each time, as if you were rehearsing this.”

“Where’s the food? Is it taking a long time?” he asked.

“We just ordered,” she said.

“It’s been five minutes,” Sally said. “I wonder why it didn’t go down.”

“What do I know about that, the physiology of it.” He looked around for our waiter and then at each of us, as if he were trying to ascertain guilt and innocence.

The food arrived, thank god. “So, what time will you leave?” Cynthia asked, taking a dumpling and passing them on to Joseph. Joseph was suddenly alert. A question had been asked. He looked at Sally.

“Eight,” she said. “We’ll be there at–”

Sally looked at me. I said, “If we don’t get lost and there’s no traffic and nothing happens, 10:30.”

“All right,” she nodded. “I got the lamb from the butcher, and the cleaning woman came three times this week, but I’m only now done with the laundry, so you will have to make up all the beds, but I’ll get out the china and the silverware. I got what you need for the haroseth.”

Joseph said, “As long as you remember the gefilte fish. ‘He took one part of the carp unto him and one part of the pike unto him and one part of the whitefish unto him and made of it a paste.’”

“Maybe it wasn’t a turd at all,” Raph said. “Maybe it was a matzo ball! Who’s having ribs?”

“You ordered those,” Sally said.

“Sally makes the best haroseth,” Cynthia said.

“Oh please mom it’s just the Israeli Folk Dancing Club recipe, which is the same as the one on the back of the package.”

“Now dear, it’s not about the notes, you know that, it’s the way you play them.”

It was a long night made longer by the cold reverberations of our talk, what she had stirred up, the future, time. I felt safe again, but with a difference, I had glimpsed that this would end. We walked up Mott to Canal and then over to Mulberry Street for biscotti and espresso. Nothing tasted good. The lemon ice was bitter, and the espresso full of dregs. We put them in a cab to Penn Station and as it pulled away Raph rolled down the window and yelled, “Tell Lydia to call if you talk to her. The machine is on all the time.”

The machine  will not stop

driving our unwinding sheet

Back at the loft we found Christopher and Sylvio seated in the dark at the long worktable by the door. They weren’t saying a word. Sylvio had a cigarette going. We entered speaking loudly and turned on the light. They flinched.

“Could you turn that off please?” Christopher said.

Joseph was putting on the TV. Sally shut off the light and said, “What are you doing?”

Christopher said, “Mushrooms,” and started to laugh. Sylvio smiled. I saw his teeth! Was he eating mushrooms as well?

“It’s much better in the dark,” Sylvio said. “We were sitting with the light on before, but it was too agitating.”

“I think we said aggravating.”

“Possibly we did.”

I sat on the couch next to Joseph. We were all packed up. There was nothing to do. So we watched The Getaway.

Christopher and Sylvio sat for a long while in the dark and then joined us around the TV. They were too afraid to go anywhere. Sally and I went to bed at two when they put on Tom Snyder.

A Good Chord on a Bad Piano

The fissures in the studio grow large.
Transplantings from the Rivoli, no doubt.
Such latter-day disfigurements leave out
All mention of those older scars that merge
On any riddled surfaces about.

Disgusting to be sure. On days like these,
A good chord on a bad piano serves
As well as shimmering harp-runs for the nerves.
F minor, with the added sixth. The keys
Are like old yellow teeth; the pedal swerves;

The treble wires vibrate, break, and bend;
The padded mallets fly apart.
Both instrument and room have made a start.
Piano and scene are double to the end,
Like all the smashed-up baggage of the heart.

The Phoenix Park Restaurant dinner was not the first time Roy told me to become a librarian. Once, when I was in high school he met me at the main branch of the Public Library and we walked over to Grand Central together. We were to meet our father there for dinner at the Oyster Bar and then I was going home on the train and Roy was taking off.

“The thing about a library,” he said as we walked down 42nd Street, “is anyone can read whatever they want. No one’s there to tell you what to read or when to read it by or what to think. And even some poor black guy can walk in there and read and think and figure out his next move. We wouldn’t be here now if you didn’t have a public library. We’d still be pushing carts on First Avenue. But the thing is like, schools, they tell you what to read and they tell you what to think. So you gotta ask yourself, what’s better, being a professor somewhere, or being a librarian? Think about it. You know, I sometimes worry about you, that you’ll do something like become a professor, when you could be, like, the world’s greatest librarian. Isn’t that something to want to be?” He laughed. “Something nobody gives a fuck about? The best at it? Go for it man. Did you see dad’s beard?” He laughed drily. “He’s got a new girlfriend too. She’s like 23. I mean, doesn’t he even give a fuck about mom. I mean, she’s got her shit but he’s like, out of control. I don’t know. She’s not happy with the psychiatrist, I can tell.”

I didn’t even think I was listening, but here I am, a librarian without position, and by choice. It is an old profession, as is the book trade. But running a bookshop is a different sort of thing altogether. It is not like a Lord’s private library in Provence ca. 450 CE. It is a place of commerce. Retention is not the policy here. I am not the guardian of tradition. Virtue is no concern of mine. Books are exchanged for money, not saved for the ages.

I had not had a customer when Tammy Markham came in on her way home to Brooklyn (she takes the F train). She had her two kids with her and was looking good in faded bell-bottom jeans, boots and a black waffle pattern shirt. Her hair was cut at the shoulder and fell in curls and waves of white and chestnut. I said hello to the girls and they pretended at first not to know me, looking around and laughing.

“What am I, chopped liver?” I said.

“Limburger,” Tammy said.

“I’m not no Limburger.”

“Just limburger. We’ve been shopping.” The girls had two bags in each hand. June, the 17 year old, was dressed in athletic clothes and Mara, the 13 year old, was in high heels and a black miniskirt. Her blue fingernails clutched the strap of a maroon backpack.

I had an urge to tell Tammy that Sally had called, but I knew Tammy never liked Sally much, though she put up with her. Without any effort at all I knew just what she would say. And worse, the look on her face. I was anxious to close the store and go home to check my messages. “It’s been a slow day,” I said.

“Really? But everyone was out. They still are.”

“Well it was not a day to buy a book, it was a day to stop by and get out of the sun. They always blink back the dark when they come in on a day like this. Later in the summer, it’s for the air conditioning.”

“It is a dark business.”

“So are they all. One must make a living.”

“There are drearier ways than yours,” she said.

“I don’t dispute that. This is a commodious and gentle desiccation. Well girls, aren’t you dying to browse?”

“No thank you Alex,” Mara said brightly.

“Can’t you see he’s kidding?” June said. “God, you’re so stupid.”

“You call me stupid? Fucking bitch?”

“Oy,” said Tammy. “Girls. Girls! Shut up. Can’t you at least respect Alex enough not to talk like that.”

“Ah, Tammy, fuck it, that’s o.k. The world went to hell before they were born. That which is was predetermined long ago.” I addressed the ladies thus, “I changed your diapers, so don’t get wise with me.”

“Well, come to dinner then if you have time on Sunday. Ralph’s cooking, you don’t have to worry.”

The gals rolled their eyes. Mara said, “Well if he’s coming.”

“I will beat you both at poker. You will lose so badly that late into your lives when you are ancient, shriveled creatures and I am long past, you will still remember it.”

Tammy laughed. “A cracker barrel prognosticator?”

“No, the fatwa of your philosopher king!”

“Do you know the story of Demetrius of Athens?” she asked.

“Demetrius the Besieger?”

“Nope. The other Demetrius, Demetrius of Phaleron, the philosopher, and later, the decadent king of Athens. One of Alexander’s Macedonian generals put him on the thrown and he said to the Athenians, ‘Here is your philosopher king.’ Demetrius bankrupted them with feasts and entertainments.” She looked directly in my eyes and I looked away. “What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?” The girls drifted off to look at the big art books.

“Yeah I guess it’s.”

“That all?”

“I got a call from Sally.”

“What does she want?” she asked, making just the face, a pinch face it was! I was astounded. All those years, the mention of Sally elicited a pinch face from Tammy. And without fail. Even when they met. It was an uncharacteristic face for her. It was her Sally face. And she wore it now, asking what she always asks, “What does that woman want?”

“I know you don’t like her, but it was quite unsettling. We talked.”

Tammy relaxed a little and walked towards the desk. I went and got a chair and she sat down behind the desk, facing me. “So what does she want?”

“Got me. To talk. Be friends maybe?”

“Why now? I don’t get it. What’s it been. 25 years?”

“She’ll be back in the city.”

“I always thought you were right to put all that behind you.” Even as she said it she looked unhappy. “I’m not saying you could. Well, how do you feel? You’re not falling back in love with her are you?”

“That would be crazy, right?”

She rubbed her chin and then smiled. “I would never suggest such a thing of you.”

“But maybe that’s what she wants?”

“How did she sound? Did she say that?”

I tried to remember how she had sounded. “Up beat. She’s a tenured professor at NYU with a hit book.”

“So maybe she was just calling to gloat.”

“She said she couldn’t stand the thought of me hating her or blaming her.”

“Hate I don’t know but blame? Who else would you blame?”

“Well, whatever. She wants to be forgiven.”

“Yeah, who doesn’t.”

“I just didn’t even remember what had happened.”

“Well then, what do you want? If it’s disturbing.”

“Disturbing. Yes.” I rubbed my face and bit my lip, thinking. “I might want to be disturbed. In the right way.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I see where you’re going. You don’t really want to see her, you want to sleep with her.”

Was that so crazy? I wasn’t even sure that was it. “I’m not even sure,” I started to say.

“Oh now, busted! Don’t try to squirm out, dude.”

“O.K. so fuck man. But I didn’t know that’s what it was till just now.”

“What are you, a girl?” She laughed and looked around. “I can’t imagine you anywhere but here.” Then she looked at me and I could fleetingly see her as a 50 year-old woman, and not as an twelve year-old girl in tennis whites. Her daughters looked like their father, Ralph. They had his straight hair and narrow nose and thin lips. But June in her grey sweats had Tammy’s energy, and lack of self-consciousness. They looked up from the Warhol book at their mother and June smiled, lips pushed off of her teeth by invisible braces. “I don’t know what I would do,” Tammy said at last. “I guess not remember who they even are. Back then,” she whispered, “I was so high, I don’t remember a thing. You I remember. Just not the girls I went home with.”

“I guess we got away with something, right?” I asked.

“I guess so, cause here we are.” And we both felt sad, but we were both smiling because after all, it was good to be there.

“See you Sunday then?” Tammy asked. Then to the girls, “Say g’bye guys.” They bickered over who would put it back; I had them trained to do it right and I was still foreign matter enough to occasionally want to impress. Tammy got up out of my chair and I stood. I kissed her at the door and the girls joined us.

They said, “G’bye, Alex.”

“G’bye.”

For a while I stood at the door, watching the street. I shut down the computer and locked the register drawer in the floor safe in back, turned off the lights and pulled down the gates. The street was all in shadow now though the sky was still blue and the sun was sinking through the side streets, lighting up walls of glass and flashing on concrete. The door closed behind me and I started up the steps.

I thought briefly of buying a fish and roasting or steaming it. But the thought of walking out there and down to Chinatown to lug a cold dead animal up five flights of steps was ruinous to my intention as were the two slices of pizza I had eaten at 3. But I knew I’d be hungry, there was no use pretending otherwise. At 8 I would want to eat, wouldn’t I?

I always feel better after seeing Tammy. That’s the way it’s been. I was there when her children were born and when her father died of aids, I was there. He and her mother were just names to me, though I had been in her house in Larchmont, where scenes from a student soap opera I was in were shot. But she didn’t even acknowledge my existence at that point. She was lighting the show and volunteered her house during the day when her parents were away, her father at work, her mother at various functions and committee meetings. She wasn’t beautiful anymore and I wasn’t in love with her but I couldn’t stop watching her work. She didn’t talk much and she was always reading some weird book she picked up somewhere, whatever was just lying around. It’s like with that Bukowski. I have no idea who left it there in the station. And no one had to tell Tammy a Black Sparrow book was worth taking.

And there are times when she just has to have something or she will go out of her mind. It might be a movie or a song or a place she needs to walk. Once, Tammy called me late at night. I lay in the dark, my mind chattering through the events of the day as I tossed back and forth. In vain I tried to invoke Sally but even she couldn’t stop the overflow of thought and emotion provoked by Douglas Eakens (up to that point merely one of my more interesting regulars), when he noticed I was reading Batsard’s. I had been thinking about what I would do when Sally went to graduate school. I didn’t think about much else. I could apply to library schools in cities where she applied for graduate schools. Cities, not burgs. New Haven no doubt is a city, but there are cities and there are cities.

In any event, I had amorphous thoughts about becoming a librarian and was going about it autodidactically, which is stupid.

Douglas Eakens was the first librarian I ever met, and also the greatest. He was a cantankerous Anglo-Catholic socialist from somewhere in the north of England, in his mid-fifties, with a red face and a sour, alcoholic nose. He had the feel of a poob bouncer ca. 1955, which he had been, for a time. He enjoyed a pint and an impious joke. As people go (never mind liebrayrearends), they don’t come any better.

I am always surprised by how dry the industry is, given its ballast of eccentricity. I have never known a librarian to let down her hair and shut the blinds, though I have seen one or two trip drunkenly out of her thong. Primarily one encounters manias, for collections or else for some antiquarian pursuit: jousting, tractor pulls, soap making. Some fellows write haiku and others ride choo choo trains. I knew a librarian who, for over twenty years, could be found performing as a one-man-band in dives. He drove his contraption around in a ‘66 Dodge Dart. He had a kick drum on the floor, bass drum on his chest, cymbals under his arms, bugle, kazoo and harmonica on metal bars ranged before his mouth and a synthesizer strapped to his back, which he operated with a pair of electronic glasses that responded to blinks.

 I’ve known Hegelians, Gurdieffians, Steinerists, Reichians, Stoics, Buddhists but whatever the pursuit it comes down to books. That’s why most of us are there. In a library, there is no way around the fact of books. Paying a bibliophile to be a librarian is like paying a fat man to go to the China Buffet.

“Whoot are you doing with a book like that?” he asked, taking a sip of coffee. He was fierce to behold, framed by Broadway traffic and grey-white hair tossed in the ten directions. He rubbed them into ten more. “Principles of Descriptive Bibliography.” He rolled his Rs.

“I’m thinking of going to library school. I wanted to read a classic.”

He turned the book over in his hands. “This bloody stoof will kill you.” He laughed. “What do you want to be a librarian for?”

“I love books.”

“Hmm. Well, then you ought to get a job working with books. Come by my office. I’ll show you around the stacks.” He finished his coffee and put 25 cents on the counter. His eyes, in deep sockets, were pale blue. Capillaries and veins webbed his forehead. “Well you know, books like Batsard’s are only part of what this business is about. You see, he wants you to read a verbal description that is so accurate, it would be as if you held the book in your hand and could do anything but read it. You will know its dimensions, the number of signatures, the printing details, the size of the paper. But, without the book, where is the record? Hm? Somewhere in there it says that the amateur cannot teach himself the science of descriptive bibliography. It can only be done by someone with long experience of books. How they are made, and how they are preserved and restored.”

“I worked in bookstores for years. I’m a collector. I’d love to see the stacks. I don’t know your last name though.”

“Oh yes, Eakens. Douglas Eakens.” He smiled and went out the door. I couldn’t believe it. I wondered what it would be like to be on the inside of something.

It was no use trying to sleep. When the phone rang I answered hoping it would be someone I knew, and it was Tammy, out of breath, crying, something I had never known her to do before. “Alex, you have to help me, I have to hear Elton John. Can you bring over some records? You have them don’t you?”

“Well, everyone’s out tonight. Hold on, I’ll check.” Faced with the riot of titles and no discernible order, I decided that the order was determined by level of enthusiasm. As he raged in one direction, all music metonymically related formed a clade. And from this clade was excluded all items deemed not. I knew his current fascination with proletarian music from the thirties did not by Rube Goldberg machinations lead to Elton John, so I searched for an abandoned vein of seventies pop and there they were, Honky Chateau, Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player, Good Bye Yellowbrick Road, all together towards the back, near the kitchen wall. “How are these?” I read off the titles.

“Oh, thank god! Pleeeaaase come over with them Alex, I’m begging you.”

I looked at the clock. It was two in the morning. “Yeah, I’ll be there in a half hour.”

“Take a cab. I’ll pay you back.”

She answered the door in grey sweats. Her eyes were red and tears were still wet on her cheeks. She had a bottle of Rolling Rock and a cigarette in one hand. She grabbed the records with the other and marched back to the stereo. “I can’t get these out of my head. I’m gonna go crazy.” She put on Honky Chateau and moaned with pleasure. “Do you want something? I’ve got beer. We could smoke a joint. I know you don’t do that, but. What do you want?”

“Just a beer is fine.” We sat on her bed and faced the mute black and white TV with a bent wire hangar sticking out of the antenna holes. It was red and every few hours the sound would go off and you had to hit it hard in just the right place. The bed was unmade. She pulled the sheets up and smoothed them out and threw a few more pillows from the floor against the wall so I could sit. A baby blue down comforter was bunched up at the end of the bed.

 “What’s going on?” I asked, after settling in against the pillows. She lay beside me chewing her lower lip.

She shivered a little and pulled the comforter up to her chin. “You would not believe what’s going on. Nothing, that’s what’s going on, nothing.” She covered her face with her hands and pressed her eyes till a groan came out of her that was so guttural it was hard to interpret. “Did you ever think you knew how crazy someone was and then find out that you have no idea?” she said through her hands. “A year ago I could have told you why my father was totally fucked up. I could have named the reasons, given dates and times. I had this fucking bill of particulars. But I didn’t know the half of it. He was arrested down in Riverside Park, you know where the 96th Street Exit is on the Henry Hudson? They caught him giving someone a blowjob. My lawyer father who takes the Stanford Local to Grand Central five days a week and plays golf at Century? Is gay? What the fuck? Are we really all like this? My whole family, a fucking mystery? Everybody lies? Would I show them who I am?

“Never. I know what they think. They don’t hide it. But daddy’s giving blow jobs in the park and I’m a fucking lesbian?

“I had to talk to my mother on the phone. She said–” Tammy started to laugh and had to catch her breath. She touched my arm and said, “She said, ‘Your father was arrested for having oral sex with a man in a parking lot.’ It’s the way she said oral sex, I literally had to bite my fist to keep from cracking up. ‘Are you laughing?’ she asks, oh…in that grating, Great Neck accent…. it used to embarrass me so much. She was a Temple lady. I loathed temple ladies. You’re lucky Alex, you never had to go. I used to look at all those fat calves and ankles bulging out of their shoes with such fucking horror. And all I could think was that one day I would look like that. Scooping out kugel at functions and Israeli folk dancing. And they didn’t like it any more than we did, they just did it. I mean, doesn’t that make it even more disgusting, when they don’t believe and don’t even have the fucking guts to admit as much?

“Emma didn’t care, she just split but I felt guilty all the time. I look at my mother and she looks like someone who if she doesn’t let it out she’ll lose her mind; but if she ever does let it out, if she sees it all, then she’ll really go insane. The whole thing would come apart. Better to dish out the kugel. Then your faygelah husband comes home a day late because he’s been sitting in the Tombs all weekend waiting for a judge. It was just to torture him, cause he was one of their own. Kai Halpern, he’s the lawyer, called her at three in the morning. They play Bridge together. Whatever. I’ve been to their house. I played with his kids. They lived out on the Island. His son’s a big time junkie. I used to see him down on Avenue B all the time.

“I’ve never been what they are. That’s who I am, who’s not them. They can’t be me. My life is bars and parks. That’s mine, he doesn’t get that. None of them do. How it all became like this. Who was the first? What did they do? Was it in the body, the heart, or was it something they said or did, or thought to do?

“I’m doing all the wrong things. I haven’t hung a show in months. All I do is pour drinks from 8 till 4, three nights a week. It’s not bad but, last week I was drinking Southern Comfort just because it was funny. I still have some if you want.”

“I’m fine.”

“But the thing is, I didn’t come back to tend bar and take drugs. There was something I wanted to do. Maybe I should have done what you did, just work with books. But there’s no money in it, and it doesn’t seem like you have any fun.”

“But I’m a counterman now. I make coffee and serve donuts, like in high school.”

“I remember that. You worked at Dunkin’ Donuts on the graveyard shift. We would go in there and laugh at you because you were so straight, and then we started to think you were really cool. I never got it one way or another till Hunter. I didn’t even think of you as the donut guy. But in that class your face suddenly seemed so familiar, like I had known it my whole life.”

“Or since sixth grade anyway. You played tennis down at Flint Park. You wore whites and those bands around your wrist and head.”

“Oh yeah, it’s tennis or horses, right? Man. It’s hard to even remember what being a kid was like. When was it you first thought, I’m not looking at anything real. That’s what they say. It all passes you by and then you’re nothing. That’s what it was all along, what you were becoming. They say you’re becoming something but that’s not what you’re becoming at all. I don’t think I want to fuck another woman as long as I live. I’m done with pussy. I’m done with nothing. I just want to get the fuck out of here and it feels like the way out is the way in.” She kicked the down blanket to the foot of the bed and stared at her beer and said, “Miserable comforters are ye all.”

Shortly before sunrise I walked home, a miserable comforter indeed, and without Joseph’s records. The worktable by the door was piled up with books and notebooks and typescripts. There were dictionaries, French, German, English, open at one end, with a yogurt cup and spoon and stacks of index cards. Lydia’s bed was still empty. Every time I passed it I checked to see if she was lost in its rumpled covers. It was beginning to look like a shrine we had erected to bring about her return instead of what it actually was, neglect.

Sally grunted when I climbed in next to her. “Are you asleep?” She grunted again. I rubbed her till she got wet and fucked her from behind and fell asleep inside her.

It was my day off and I had to meet my mother for lunch in the East Sixties. I had time to walk; I preferred it to watching Sally go to work on the Opus, which had swelled to 100 closely argued pages, half of the intended length. With only a month to go she had to generate 100 more closely argued pages on the first tetralogy, Merchant, Loves Labours Lost; oath taking, deeds, gages, pledges, honor and blood. I felt like a widow to these and a hundred other terms and categories. It was like being locked up in a tower of abstraction, some Blakean hell dimension laid out by Urizen in one of his rages. Only, the ultimate author of this labyrinth was Lacan. Lacan was an evil wizard who had used a ray to transport his victims into the realm of the Imaginary. And all I wanted was a little more of l’objet petite a.

Sally started to pace back and forth with her coffee. Some days she baked bread so she would have to get up from the typewriter and do something. She liked kneading the dough, it was clearly cathartic, but she was baking the bread of affliction. Lydia said, “OK, time to go. How do I look?” She had on a black leather jacket and black jeans. Her face was washed out and sad, and she had on this incredibly bright red lipstick. She was smiling.

Sally said, “You look fine. Very, bubbly for a trip to the hospital.”

“Huh? I dunno. I guess it sounds kind of fun. Old times, sit around the hospital. I’m gonna bring him some fruit.”

“Grapes,” I said.

“Tangerines,” said Sally.

“Later,” Mo said, pulling the bottom of her black sweater down as they walked out the door.

I kissed Sally goodbye and left to walk uptown.

I avoided Grand Central and the Oyster Bar by walking through Madison Park and over to Second and then up. I don’t know why it turned out that way, but I wasn’t looking at anything, I chugged along increasingly aware of some emotional irritant that would not show its face. With every step its presence grew more intense till it bubbled up, one thought at a time, beginning with Sally’s abstraction, her near total emotional removal from me when she was working. She could strut about a room speaking with her voice and her hands and not know I was there. Absorption and focus I could understand, but I missed her. And things would not get better. No. Over time she would more and more have to immerse herself in her studies if she were to continue, not less. And I didn’t see where that left me. If I too had an academic career it might be different. Then we would have commensurate islands, our alienation would be equal. But I didn’t. I was a counterman in a cafe by a habit of job osmosis.

By the time I crossed under the bridge at 59th I was angry. It seemed so willful. Her work occupied a place in her heart that I expected to inhabit. When she was in the room, there was no other focus for me. She was my lodestar, or so I thought, by 59th Street.

Oh, and then I thought of how she was always trying to improve things, subjecting the most trivial shit to scrutiny and analysis, her close readings of careless statements, insisting that their very unconsciousness was what made them compelling. She who denied any design or natural order in things had filled in all the arbitrary silences of life with meaning! Her intellectual obsessions shaped our private world. We were in danger of being modeled on principle, as opposed to necessity. Sally had even gone so far as to find a Lacanian therapist. There were actually two in Manhattan. Sessions typically lasted 20 minutes and cost 90 dollars.

I tried to shake it out and then I entered the restaurant, still arguing with her in my head, saying all of the things that I never say, even to myself, such that I started to feel sorry for her, as if I had attacked her in the flesh. My mother was seated at a window table. She was watching something outside of it that made her laugh, I could tell by the way her shoulders moved.

She was dressed in red stockings and some sort of a borderline schmatta of layered gold and olive cloth. A wide-brimmed, burgundy hat of felt was on her head. I sat down and she took my hands. “Hello.”

“Hi. Have you been waiting long?” I asked.

“No. I was just having this cup of tea and lemon and enjoying the day.”

We ordered bloody Maries, and they put down a basket of bread and breadsticks with butter. We hadn’t had lunch together in a while. She looked at me until I almost felt uncomfortable and she asked, “So how are you? How’s it going with Sally?”

For some reason, I blurted a piece of it out. “Sally always thinks something is wrong, but it’s always something wrong with me, never what I think is wrong with her. And I’d let it slide, but she’s either on me, or the rest of time, it’s like I don’t exist, she’s so absorbed in work. She’s seeing a Lacanian psychiatrist.”

“Those psychiatrists are the worst of the lot,” my mother said.

“When things are going right, she thinks that’s a sign that something’s terribly wrong.”

She laughed low and coughed. The sounds rolled out of her. There’s a picture of her at twenty standing in a sequined costume on the back of a white spangled circus pony juggling bowling pins. As a child she began to perform in circuses and eventually became a carnival dancer. When a horse kicked her in the head, she went a little deaf in one ear. It was hard but good work and it saved her from the fate of her mother and sisters. Her father sold bibles, preached at revival meetings and pimped his family out. Once, he was shot by a gambler, who caught him cheating at cards, but he survived. Her mother grew up in a whorehouse and worked as a barmaid. They all lived in a one-room tenement without running water. Now, she ate lunch on the Upper East Side and wore big hats and scarlet stockings, and dyed her hair red.

We watched the people. She said, “Look at those pants. They aren’t right on her. They make her legs look like pastry bags.” She smiled and took a gap-toothed bite out of her celery. “Most relationships don’t work out, son. It took me thirty years to find the right one. That chiropractor and I are all right. Herb Czischz is the man for me. But I bet if I had met him at twenty nothing would have come of it. He would have bored me to death. I would have laughed in his face. You aren’t made for it then. You’re both too young to know what you’re good for.”

I sipped my bloody and tried to butter a bread stick. “Of all people, you certainly should know.”

“Experience in marriage. Pardon me for trying. But it always starts with love. They should have money but I don’t marry them if I don’t love them. Now your father–” she shook her head. “I wanted to kill him I loved him so much. It just seemed so unfair that I should love someone like that. Love like that makes you a slave. We had some good times. And some couples just aren’t meant to settle down. That’s what killed us.”

The waiter put down an overgrown salad in front of her and a reuben in front of me. I smacked Ketchup onto the fries. “So Roy and I ruined your first marriage.”

She laughed. “Your father wasn’t exactly flexible. I didn’t expect him to change his work, but I just had no idea what raising two boys alone would be like. Used to be, when we weren’t on the road, and we were broke, we’d lie around the apartment, the studio on Irving Place, drinking beer and listening to the Giants on the radio. We couldn’t get enough of each other in those days. I never met anyone who talked like that.”

“You mean like a blood sport?”

“Don’t think I hadn’t already met my share of men who talked a line bullshit, starting with my father. The people I knew had notions, or a mind to do something, the poorest dumbest sons of bitches you ever met. Don’t let anyone tell you different cause they ain’t been there. Oh, they’re nice all right, ten minutes before they string you up. And they’ll be reading the bible at you the whole time. I’ve seen it happen. Yes sir. Huh. Izzie had ideas. And I’d just get so angry on the road. And angry as I was I’d find myself saying, ‘Izzie, you just don’t talk to people like that around here.’ You learn your whole life to be a certain way, sanity seems to be impolite.

“Your brother was born on the road halfway between Jackson and New Orleans, which was where we were trying to get. We drove home to the city with the baby. I rode in the back with Roy in my lap, that’s how I started to nurse him. That’s why he’s got the road in him so bad.

“For three months Roy cried and cried and cried. Your father was in Montgomery on the boycott. And there I was with a screaming infant and a bunch of Stuy Town mothers. They like to bore me to death in that courtyard. I’d sit by them on the bench with my pram and they’d start to talk, lord, I could feel myself crash between my feet.” She yawned and lowered her face down into her open hands, then started laugh. “Then you came and I got so tired, that when he wanted to get romantic he had to roll me over and do it in my sleep. God, I was so mad all the time. We did not treat each other right. But, oh, how I loved that man. And he loved me. I know it. You can feel that in the way someone holds you. We were just always frustrated. I didn’t understand.

“You were just 2 when he went to Washington, but I had to work. I was losing my mind. So I hired Ireni to watch you during the day. Without all that mess to clean up, the diapers, and the toys, and the food stuck to plates, and the chaos, and the screaming, I started to think again. One morning, I woke up and saw your father as a man. And for the first time in my life, I wanted a man. I wanted back what I had been putting out for years, since I was thirteen and that busboy got me drunk on bourbon and left me for dead on mama’s stoop.

“Your father stabbed me right in the heart with a piece of ice when I caught him with her that afternoon. I couldn’t get him to look at me anymore. But that twenty year old girl? When I walked in on them, buck-naked on the bed, do you know what he said? ‘Allisoun, get the fuck out of here!’ I mean really.”

“Do you still wish you had a gun that day?”

She smiled. “Sometimes I do.”

“Isn’t it ever over?”

“No! We’re human aren’t we? But I gave as good as I got. I mean, I walked in on them four years before we moved up to Larchmont. Everything changed when he went to work in Washington. When he came home he didn’t shave, he didn’t get out of his pajamas practically. Some days he’d spend three hours in the tub and the rest napping and drinking scotch on the rocks. I don’t think he once stopped looking at the TV, except to read the papers. Then he’d go back to DC for two, three, four weeks. You can’t live like that. It’s no wonder I married the psychiatrist. I was forty years old, I looked pretty good for two kids. And life with that psychiatrist was grand. Drinks out on the veranda around the pool? Are you kidding? I knew just what to do. I played the good little southern hostess. I decorated his house, I paid the bills, took care of everything. All that psychiatrist cared about was his work. I figured it was a trade, and for a while it worked out. I collected art, and went to parties, and I raised you and kept track of Roy best as anyone could.

“He was the vainest man I have ever met. 58 years old and he still wanted to be a man of twenty. He cashed me in.” She looked for the waiter and pushed her salad bowl away, drank some water, her eyes on me all the time, and lit up a cigarette. “The fact is, it’s always something that ends it. Men and women just aren’t suited to each other till they get about fifty, fifty-five. We just aren’t in sync. Our rhythms are opposed. The man gets horny and the woman feels nothing. Then it’s the other way around. It’s like the Yin and the Yang are chasing each other around and never catching up. But you want them to curl up around each other, see? The man who can’t get past beauty will never get anywhere, I can tell you that.”

After lunch I decided to take the subway home and got the RR to 14th Street and walked up to the loft. Christopher sat on the couch with Joseph watching Live at Five. Sally was pacing back and forth (as she had been when I left) in a knitted skullcap speaking Portia’s words: “So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. Oh, hi.” She put the book down. I took off my jean jacket. I kissed her. “Cold hands,” she said, lifting one up and placing it against her warm, fully blooded cheek. Christopher and Joseph chuckled and then laughed. The door opened and Lydia and Maureen came in, as if in a great hurry. It almost appeared that Maureen was running after Lydia, as she rushed into the kitchen and sat down at the table gulping for air, tears surging into her eyes. “They said it was pneumonia, they didn’t say he was wasting away into nothing!” She groaned and rubbed her head and said slowly, as if in agony, “He is so sick. They tried to give him a shot but there was no muscle left, it made his skin bubble up.” Lydia grabbed her hair and started to gag. She stood and screamed, “I gotta get fucked up.” We watched her go out the door.

“Shut up!”

“Yeah shshsh.”

He whispered loudly, “It’s Peckinpah. He’s like the father of bloody movies. Oh, oh, I mean, foundational.”

“Shut the fuck up, Joseph.”

“You shut the fuck up, I’m talking.” He reached out and pinched Lou.

“Good night,” I said.

“Aw!!”

Lydia was passed out on the floor with her boots on. Seated next to her was a young woman with short black hair and glasses like a VW. She said, “Hi.”

“Are you staying here too?” I closed my nose so as not to inhale the pungent breath of Lydia’s nest.

She looked at Lydia critically and said, “Yeah. I guess.”

“Well all right then,” I said, and walked past her and through the door to our room. It was a strange door. The ceilings were twenty feet high and the wall was a narrow section that bumped out of the back wall of the loft. It felt both cramped and isolated, and yet entering the door I was always aware of a vast expanse of white space. To enter the door was to expand and contract simultaneously. There was no net change despite a high degree of distortion and discomfort. One became the knot of nonexistence

I took off my clothes and kicked them into the corner, brushed my teeth and climbed wearily into the bed, over Sally, who slept on the edge facing outward, squeezing in between her and the wall. She slept curled up and her ass stuck halfway out across the bed. I curled up behind her and asked, “Are you awake?”

“Yes. How was it?”

I snuggled up to her and put my face in her hair. “Roy’s married.”

“Oh my god, Roy’s married.”

“He met her on an airplane. They got married in Vegas.”

She rolled over on to her back. “That only happens on Love American Style.”

I smiled. The beeswax candle on the shelf was low and starting to gutter. “What happened to Karen Valentine.”

She rolled over to face me. Her hair stood out in tiny peaks. I could feel the heat of her body. “I got a lot done today,” she said. “But there’s something. It just isn’t coming out right. I keep reading and reading, trying to back everything up and now I don’t even have any idea of what I’m trying to say. I feel like this total, fraud. You know? Like, I am fully capable of convincing them that I can do this, but totally unable to do it. It’s almost like Sylvio and Christopher are trying to sabotage me. I don’t know.”

“You’ll work it out.”

She kissed me and asked, “So, did you get any reading done? When did you see Roy.”

“When I got home Roy was sitting at the table, reading a paper and watching that woman walk naked across the airshaft. It went on after that. He took me up on an airplane and we buzzed my father’s house, until he came out and cursed us.”

She laughed. “Where did you get a plane?”

“Westchester Airport. And that’s not it. He bought a place in Tribeca, on Walker Street. We went to his place to meet his wife, Dawn, and admire the view.”

“Admire the view with Dawn. Was dawn in the view you admired?”

“I didn’t mention the greaser car either. ‘66 Mustang convertible. Robin’s egg blue. Dawn was cool. He dragged me to some Larry River’s party at One Fifth, and then dinner at this place called Odeon down on West Broadway.”

“I read about that place in New York Magazine.”

“Where do you read New York?”

“At my dentist and my therapist.”

“That’s pretty good for a waiting room. My dentist is in the Chrysler building. He doesn’t have shit in his waiting room. His mother died and they cleaned all the catalogs and magazines out of her apartment and now they cycle them through the waiting room. He’s got Modern Maturities from 1971, and Highlights from the sixties.

“Where was I? Oh yeah. So we stayed there till closing, don’t ask me how, they barely ate a thing. Then Roy insinuated himself into this little claque of people working there and we went to Lucky Strike. I stayed for one drink. That place gave me a headache. It was so brightly lit. People with acne wouldn’t go there. What’s a bar without dark festering corners? I left and I think they were headed off to Berlin. I suppose you know what that is too.”

“Of course. But what I don’t know is, what’s a greaser and what’s a mustang.”

“A Mustang is a kind of cheap sports car. And a greaser is like a fifties guy. The Fonze is a greaser. Rocky’s a greaser. It comes from the hair, the grease in the hair, and the thing about working on cars, like grease monkeys? Grease? The play, Grease?”

“So that’s what that was? We put it on at this summer camp I went to in the Catskills. Sloatsburg?”

“What the fuck?”

She laughed. “That’s what my father said when he got the stuff in the mail. Sloatsburg! What the fuck? It’s a town near Bear Mountain. It’s scary. There are no dogs there. I think they ate them all. You get off the bus from the city, and the clapboards are peeling, and it looks abandoned and dark. Then they pick you up in this little bus they have and you ride up to the camp which was really a camp for Jewish hippy nymphomaniacs. But I mean, seriously belated hippies. Very mannerist. And their promiscuity totally uninspired. The natural result of careful study.”

“So you didn’t have greasers or greaser cars at your high school?”

“Not at Dalton, no! How fast does a Mustang go?”

“I prayed towards the end. He had a radar detector, so there was no pressure of law upon him, not that that would have mattered much. At one point I believe he said he was doing 95 on 95. It was hard to hear, with the top down, but I am sure he was gloating. His mood was one of gloat throughout.”

“Gloating into the gloaming with Dawn.” The candle flickered and went out. The dark for a moment was absolute. “I wish I could go that fast,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Just as I settled out I could feel her eyes pop open. “I’m afraid of how much I love you,” she said.

I groaned out of sleep. “Why should you be afraid?”

“Because of everything. What if I lose you, what then? If I don’t have you, I don’t lose you. And then, there’s the problem of the truth, or of delusion. It is possible we don’t actually love each other, or that all of loves labours are lost. All we do is chase after ourselves in each other, and chase each other in our dreams.”

“Keats. When I have doubts–”

“Fears. When I have fears that I may cease to be/Before my pen has glean’d my teaming brain.”

“Then on the shore/Of the wide world I stand alone, and think/Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

*******************

I said to Dorothy, “I know where we met now. It was at Odeon. You were waiting for your friend Hong, with that woman Helen.”

“Ohhhh, yeah! That’s it,” she laughed and put her head on her hand and her hair fell over it and almost touched the counter. “Your brother is out of his mind. You two are so different.”

“I had to bail.”

“We had a lot of fun, but it was scary for a bit there when Roy wouldn’t get off of Vietnam. And Hong may not speak much English, but he’s been in Canada for five years and understands a lot more than you would guess. But I mean now of course they live here. What a relief.” She stood and headed into the back. I lined up metal pitchers steaming from the dishwasher and filled them with milk and half and half. Dean walked in.

Dean, who did what I did at Dojo, and had been doing it longer, was there to give me some pointers. He had witnessed a few of my more spectacular fiascos behind the counter the first week. Dorothy was a tolerant boss I suppose, but it really was that she was just glad it wasn’t her. And she couldn’t fire me, she wasn’t that kind of boss. She just ran the place for the owners, who also had a restaurant downtown on Tompkins Square. One night after a particularly awful shift I was having dinner at the counter at Dojo’s with Tammy and Matthew. Matthew had become obsessed with the orange dressing and had to eat a chicken cutlet sandwich every day. Now that I was in the business I couldn’t help but notice that Dean’s cappuccinos had a nice billow of foam to dust with cinnamon. And his espressos always had a thick crema. Mine did not.

“Alex,” Dean said, slouching a little, and pushing the hair off his cheek and behind his ear. He was in tan corduroys and loafers without socks, and a leather jacket. His face was red and his glasses were fogged up. “Is today cool? I was up here anyway to have coffee with Powell.”

I stood and said, “No, it’s fine, let’s go. How is Powell?”

“Oh, don’t think I don’t know you hate her.”

“Hate’s too strong a word. Contempt. There’s an unfortunate difference.”

We were two men who don’t go in for manly things doing a thing that is manly, that is, we were inspecting a recalcitrant machine; and one man was about to initiate the other into its mysteries. Dean had tanned this hide to his uses and it was part of the ritual that we first examine the equipment in general before proceeding to the details of milk steaming.

“You have the same one I do. I’m sure whatever works on mine will work on yours.”

“As it is in all things,” I said.

“The first part is, this thing here?” He held the steamer stem by the tip and twisted it back and forth, gently. “Now, this thing is filthy. See this white film on it? You’re letting your milk deposits build up, and it’s disgusting. You’ve got to wipe it down with a hot rag after you use it, every time. And you have to boil a pitcher of water with it a couple of times a shift. You want to pull it out, like this, and then turn the knob here and let the cold water out first?” He turned the knob and it squirted before issuing a cloud of steam. “So where’s your milk and pitcher and stuff?” I busied myself getting them. “Well if it’s contempt and not hatred,” he said, “I’m sure you don’t care that Antonia and Powell are breaking up.”

“Really? Is she upset?”

“They haven’t had sex in two years.”

All I could think was that two years ago I hadn’t ever had sex. That’s like, twenty-one years or something. Two years couldn’t be too long. But why would they continue to share a bed? “Why are they still together? It hardly seems worth it without the sex.”

“Oh my god, Alex.” He took the pitcher from me smiling wickedly. “Milk,” he said, like a surgeon requesting an instrument. I handed him a half-gallon carton, which he set down so he could examine the pitcher. “You’re going to have to keep this clean too for it to work right. Always use fresh cold milk. It doesn’t steam right twice and it doesn’t steam right if it’s already hot. You fill it up at least a third of the way, but no more than half? You don’t want to do too much and you don’t want to do too little. It’s got to be, you know, just right. So then you spit this thing,” (it shot out its stream of water) “and just put the tip down into it and start to steam the milk. You want to get it hot but you don’t want to boil it…and then draw it up like this–” It swelled up the sides of the pitcher as he drew the foam up off the surface of the milk. He shut it down and showed me the pitcher of hot milk suffused with a bloom of foam. “You just get it going and draw it up.” He looked around at the rest of the layout. “Where do they line up, at the register? Or at the counter?”

“Wherever.”

“Tell your manager to manage the crowd. You know, make a line for ordering, and another one to pay your check. If it’s really busy, the manager should come out and work the register, so you can make the drink orders. And you have to line your orders up, start doing two, three things at once. Keep the espresso machine clean. Always use fresh cold milk and don’t boil it. Tamp the grounds. That’s it.” He pulled out the filter handle and felt around the dispersion screen the water goes through. “Yeah, the grounds are imbedded in the holes. You’re not getting much flow. You gotta use that thing there.” He pointed to a blind filter on the counter. He cleaned it while he talked, letting the steam back up and then slowly opening the handle to release the pressure. “It doesn’t have any holes in it. It forces the water up into the screen and cleans it out. Tamp down the grounds when you load, but not too hard. And then keep an eye on it while it runs.” It dribbled and then ran into a demitasse. The espresso had a thick crema on top. “Same with a double.” He whacked the grounds out into the knock box, rinsed the filter and picked up the double spout, loaded it and made two more. He steamed another pitcher of milk and poured some in a glass. He poured the coffee in and then layered it with foam and sprinkled cinnamon on top. It took a couple of seconds maybe. “When it gets busy, just keep doing everything faster. But don’t freak out. If you go too fast at first, you’ll fuck up, and then you have to deal with that.”

I whacked the grounds out of the double and rinsed the filter. Then I pulled some coffee into it, tamped it down and twisted it into place. I was just getting agile at loading and unloading the handle so that the gaskets aligned and sealed with ease. We watched it flow and spurt into the two demitasses. As he had done I turned it off just as the last of the crema was coming out.

“You got it. Mind if I have one?”

“On the house. You want a pastry?”

“That chocolate brioche looks kind of intense.”

I walked over to the case and took two out with wax paper. He munched on one avidly and nearly finished it and the cappuccino before he spoke again. “Are you reading it too?” he asked, pointing his nose at The New Yorker lying open on the counter. “Jonathan Schell?”

“Dorothy and me both.”

“It freaked me out too much. I didn’t sleep so I didn’t read part two or three.”

Sally came in wearing a black cashmere overcoat, and a long, fuzzy, multicolored scarf which was wound around her neck and, out on the street, coiled about her head like a Bedouin. She had on thick mountaineering mittens and carried a backpack full of books. We kissed and then the rush began. This time I was much smoother, more confident for having talked to Dean.

Now in the morning, or at noon, Sally and I took a left out the door together and rode the express to 96th street. Then we hoofed it to 112th, where I got off and she kept going. Her scholarly desperation was acute, but not nearly so acute as Lydia’s decline. Lydia was now either in a stupor, or on the couch glaring at the TV, drinking cans of coke. The empties, some of them crushed, covered the coffee table. She would start out sitting with her feet up on the table covered in crushed empties and then slowly through the evening sink till she was lying propped up on pillows, with an ashtray on her stomach. Her hair had grown out and was several mismatched colors. Her lips were slack and her skin was thick and grey. She didn’t bathe anymore and had a wet, hacking cough and hemorrhages. When she spoke it was in a frayed, whiney voice.

Nobody seemed particularly concerned. It’s not like we didn’t notice, we just took it for granted. Lydia had slidden almost imperceptibly into this state of sleeping in her boots, surrounded by clothes, half-eaten, weeks-old to-go cartons and empty bottles. The air around her bed was dense with fetid glandulations and the alien odor of her friends, cigarette smoke, patchouli oil and dirty laundry. Her mood was condignly vituperative, unless she was in need, in which case she became seductive, beguiling or pathetic, as indicated.

One morning in the early spring she awoke in a downright chipper mood. Actually, for several weeks there had been some improvement to her condition, which we attributed to the presence of her on-again, off-again girlfriend, Maureen, an NYU film student. Maureen appeared to be living with us.

The household liked Maureen. She got along with the Lacan folks, and with Joseph and his friends. Even Sally and I liked Maureen. The person none of us could stand was Lydia. People were disgusted by her. They even started to laugh when she left the room. One night at around 3 in the morning, she got up off the couch and Lou refused to sit in the spot. He sniffed the pillows and made a face. He and Joseph both said, “Ew!” and laughed so hard they couldn’t breathe.

Lydia rumbled back in from the kitchen, trailing smoke behind her. “Are you laughing at me? Ech. Little babies with little babie dickie poos.” She sat down and changed the channel. “There’s nothing good on anymore. 26 fucking channels.” She hit the channel button every two seconds for five minutes.

So when Lydia actually began to leave the apartment, and occasionally bathe and change her clothes, when she was sufficiently defended to withstand the needled water and the cold, stiff cloth of a shower, we liked Maureen even more.

Lydia shaded her eyes with her hands and opened the paper screens, looking down on the street. “Look at that guy trying to drive up on the sidewalk!” she laughed and clapped her hands. “Arse, hole.”

I was giving Batsard’s Principles of Bibliographical Description another shot: ‘(h) New impressions from standing type: It may be taken as a general rule that insufficient type will be left standing by accident to cause any doubt whether a book printed from a mixture of reset formes and standing type is an edition or an issue.’ To whom is it given to know suche stuff?

I asked them if they wanted coffee. “Yes I do, Al-ex. C’mon Mo.” Only Lydia got to call her Mo.

I poured them coffee from the machine. “What calls forth ye young ladies from your raptures of sleep so early in the morn?”

“The Lawk,” Lydia said. “You didn’t know about Lawks, did you. Like the Meadow Lawk.”

“Oh, like a nightingale kind of lark, a skylark.”

“Not a fucking Buick, I don’t mean. What calls us forth is I got a sick friend in the hospital with pneumonia. I gotta go cheer him up. We danced together for years. He’s such a little fag about things.”

Maureen sipped her coffee and blinked. “Do you have to say faggot all the time?” she asked.

“I said ‘fag’, you faggot. And you got a better word for it you fucking dyke? Lezzie bitch faggot cunt asshole.” She smiled and laughed. “How long a sentence do you think you could say with only bad words in it? They make those books in libraries with word lists. You could just read that. But the fun would be seeing how many you actually know. The other night Lou said to me, ‘There I was staring at her beef-curtains.’”

“Her what?” I asked.

“I know. I thought I’d heard everything. But beef curtains! Ew! Those fucking Englishmen only like assholes, pussy freaks them out.”

Maureen looked at me and said, without inflection, “The coffee’s always good when you make it.”

“That’s because he’s a fucking anus! He measures it with a spoon, haven’t you ever watched? It’s a sociopathic thing. Ask your girlfriend what it’s called, Alex. It’s retentive.”

Sally came in in her bathrobe. She hadn’t shaved her legs in months. They were covered in hair. It was blond, but it was coarse and long. I kept praying she would shave them. “Oh hell, goddamn it all. Today’s Merchant. I’m going to be patrolling liminal spaces and traducing, transferring, traversing and transgressing all day long. The codes are in dire danger. The edifice will collapse. Gentlemen, the revolution is upon us.”

“That ain’t revolution. That’s just what people do. Isn’t it just like what I was saying to Mo the other day?” She looked at Mo. “It is isn’t it? We gotta transgress us some sublimanal spaces, maaan.” Lydia could make the most ordinary words sound vulgar. She could make your ideas taste like they had died in your mouth.

“It’s just like being at dad’s, only the gin is better. No Gordon’s around here.”

The view south was of buildings like foothills slowly mounting the Wall Street towers. Several burnt orange skylights like pyramids at dawn hung in the air.

The apartment was oddly shaped, very wide and tall but shallow. The windows in the living room were nearly twenty feet high. The moldings looked like columns with pedestals. Except for the lawn chairs and a futon he had thrown down in the loft bedroom, there was no furniture. In one corner of the living room there were six small black and white TV’s wired up to motion-activated micro video cameras.

“No one gets in here without me knowing it,” he said.

“What about on the street? Can’t someone get you there, Bugsy?”

“Bugsy got shot in his living room.” He smiled and patted the briefcase. “I don’t keep shit in it, I keep these.” He snapped it open and strapped to the insides were two big pistols and ammunition and two long knives sheathed in leather.

“If you get arrested, these make it life.”

“Won’t happen. I’ve got people I can call. This firepower is nothing compared to what I can get. But that’s crazy stuff, not the way I do things. It’s a gentleman’s sport. I make a few large transactions, and distribute over a small network, mostly an entree, don’t you see? To fund other projects, like this. And the restaurant. It’s time to settle down. My roots are here, with you, and mom.” He made a weasel face and stood up to stomp around purposefully from room to room, checking the bags. Finally he returned with a cigar which he lit up before laying back in the chair. “Remember when dad smoked these?”

“Cubans? They made jokes about it. Then mom started to smoke them too. That’s the last thing I remember about him living with us.”

“Putz. Look at him now. I used to want to be like him. Working for the president, kicking ass in Dixie, and getting it kicked at Ole Miss. That was something. I saw that on TV and next day, I went to school all puffed up. Like–” He puffed his cheeks out and made two fists with his hands and moved his shoulders like a football player does when he walks down the hall at school. We both laughed.

“You didn’t go to school much in Larchmont,” I said.

“Oh fuck that. Those schools were lame. What are you gonna do? I got out fast and did other things. It hasn’t worked out too bad so far. So aren’t you going to ask me what I’m talking about?”

“I gave up on that years ago.”

“Weisenheimer, ey? A smart guy. I oughta–

“Ask you about what?”

“Boom zoom, Alice.”

“What girl have you been sneaking around telling me about. I mean, you don’t come out with it, why?”

He scowled and whispered, “Maybe I’m just paranoid.”

“About what?”

“Guess what I’m going to say.”

“How can I do that?” I asked.

“I’m married. You gotta meet her. She’s coming with us to One Fifth, then it’s Odeon for dinner. After that, we’ll see what time it is. There’s this bar Lucky Strike.”

“I can’t go there.”

“What are you, afraid of French junkies? So what if they’re fucking fools, it’s fun.”

“Afraid? I hate them. I don’t wanna go there. They’re using you for your drugs.”

He laughed a little. “Yeay-uh. Or I’m using them with my drugs, like I said, I don’t need to sell little bags of coke to make a living. Entree. Like in a restaurant, the main dish. To people who have money, and people who know people who have money, coke is like a business expense. It’s practically a write-off. Haven’t you seen the box? Check here to take the standard coke deduction.”

The lawn chairs creaked as we lay back in them and looked at the panes of light patterned on the sky. It was like being out there. Roy puffed at the cigar and blew smoke at the glowing tip. “I really love her. I’ve never loved anyone else in my life.”

“What’s her name?”

“Dawn. From Dallas. But she’s been living in Athens, Georgia. Three weeks ago I met her on an airplane and took her to Vegas where we got married.”

A face filled up one of the monitors. There was a beeping sound. Roy stood and marched over to the door. “That’s her.”

Dawn was cool whip white and about 95 pounds, with a sharp face and dark eyebrows. She had thin black hair that hung straight down with a flip at the shoulders. She was sickly in a non-New York kind of way, some sort of mall aetiolation, a pallor of unguarded fluorescent bulbs and K Mart makeup. Roy paced around swinging his hands behind him.

“Pleased to meet you, Alex,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand. “Roy just loves you to death.”

Roy said, “Hey, no crack of dawn jokes either, cause I’ve made them all.”

“Oh god, christ, holy fucking jesus, doesn’t it wear you out saying that all of the time? Why did I ever marry you? A man I met on the plane to Dallas. Don’t you believe my momma didn’t warn me. So gimme a cigarette, I left mine in the car service.” She looked at me. “Car service. All those cabs driving around and you got to spend more money having one waiting around for you? No thank you. Hey. Ever see how jesus bites his nails? Like this, look–” She gnawed at her palm. “–Roy, get me something to drink.”

“Roy’s a big spender,” I observed.

She wiped her palm on her jeans and said, “That ain’t why I married him, but it didn’t hurt!” She laughed and blew smoke at the ceiling and pointed to the lawn chair with her toe. “If we’re going to entertain, we need another one of these.”

Roy handed her a gin and tonic, and sucked half of one down. I just stayed in the chair, hoping we wouldn’t have to leave soon. I asked, “So you and Roy just met on that flight?”

“Well, he likes to tell it that way, but the fact is I was saving up to come to New York City ASAP. All I ever wanted to do since high school was to move here and work in a photography gallery.”

“Just give me a few days,” Roy said. “There’s this girl I know from junior high who I keep meeting at parties. She’s an assistant at this gallery on Park Avenue South. A bunch of old Max’s people with uptown money. I’ll give her a call and see what she can do. Let’s get out of here, we’ll miss all the good hors d’oeuvres.”

“Is there even such a thing as that? I feel like I just got in,” Dawn said. She untied her sneakers and kicked them off and peeled off her socks and stretched out her toes, the nails painted red. “Either move over or get another chair,” she said playfully. He touched her feet and gazed up at her. “Your brother’s here Mr. Ploomis.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time, Mrs. Ploomis. Remember when I screwed Eva on the top bunk?” he asked, as if this would be a fond memory of mine as well.

“Was that what you were doing up there?” I said.

“I don’t like war stories,” she said. “If you want, I can run down a few good ones myself. Like Danny Loredo. I let him bend me over a toilet and fuck me from behind for three lines of speed and a ticket to David Bowie. That’s what I thought short leather skirts were made for.”

“I always like cheap dates,” Roy said. “And a pale ass beneath a black skirt–”

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd/Petals on a wet, black bough.”

“I read that one,” Dawn said. “Freshman English class.”

“Pound,” I said.

“Don’t start boring me to death yet,” Roy said, standing and stretching out. He headed to the bathroom and yelled, “You better get dressed to go out, if you want to meet Larry Rivers.”

“Will he really be there Roy? You aren’t just making it up?” She stole his seat, winked at me and then looked at the view, visually enraptured.

“The man is totally nuts. And whatever you do, don’t talk art. Baseball, jazz, anything but art. They hate art.”

She pouted. “Well I could talk the airline business. My sister is a stewardess. Don’t know shit about jazz. You know they have less than a 24 hour turn around on flights to Tokyo? Just time enough to shit, shower and shave.”

“Do stewardesses do that?” I asked. Roy came out zipping up his fly and drying his hands on his pants. He rummaged around in the fridge, took time in the kitchen doing nothing and came back with a beer, sniffling.

“I’ll take a line too, but we won’t eat,” she said, stretching out on the lawn chair and letting her long bony arm dangle to the floor. I couldn’t help but notice a line of perfectly straight scars like railroad tracks on her wrists.

“Food sucks anyway,” he said. He handed her an amber vile and a small platinum coke spoon. She dipped it in four times and winced and sniffled. Then she dipped her fingers in her gin and tonic and was about to snort it up.

“Whoa!” Roy said. “Don’t be gross.” He brought her a glass of ice water. “The tonic and gin will burn and stick and you’ll get a bloody nose. Not sexy.”

“I get them all the time,” I said.

“You’re a man. Blood is sexy on a man.”

“Yeah,” Dawn said sarcastically. “Only women bleed I suppose. Where did you learn that poem?” she asked.

“In a Station at the Metro? It’s a warhorse. You said so yourself.”

“At U.G.A. if you’re an art major, you have to study all the arts. When my poetry professor learned what I wanted to do he gave me what he called the Imagistes to study and that was the first poem I read. In high school we didn’t read poetry or hardly anything at all. Pretentious little fucker that one. He wanted my sweet and low, but older men, Mr. Ploomis excepted, are not my thing. And I did a semester of modern dance. I finally got to meet a few gay men. Lord I had no idea. You know what a genital wart is?”

“Sure,” I said. “You can get anal warts too.”

Roy cleared his throat. “Punishments from god for perversity,” he said.

“What are you now, a Baptist preacher?” she asked.

“You don’t believe in god,” I said.

“Things are meant to come out of your ass, not go in,” he said.

“Things are not meant to be anything at all,” Dawn said thoughtfully. “That’s what I always hated about church. God’s will was all mixed up in everything. But I see a random universe devoid of intention. You ever go into an old junk shop? It’s the difference between that and an antique shop. An antique shop is a selection, according to a criteria. But a junk shop is just a place where any old thing that walks in the door is for sale. You might have a Louis quattorze chair next to a mildewy stuffed bunny and a pile of tea-stained lace. Everything is just the residue of history, things too stubborn to fail or go away. Say you take a photograph. But you don’t see all the camera’s going to see. You just see the design. That’s what it is to look into the sky. There’s no more order to those stars than there is in this view.”

“Well,” I said. “This view is the result of intentional and orderly processes.”

“Only if they planned all these buildings at once. But they planned each one separately, and the newer ones were planned to fit in with the older, but in this city you knock ‘em down as often as you put ‘em up. See that sky scraper down there?”

“That’s the Woolworth’s building,” Roy said.

“Well, they put that up without a thought to anything but how it would look by itself.”

Roy said, “They put it up to be the tallest building in the world. They wanted to conquer the view, not enhance it.”

“And those right there, they were factories,” she said. “Any order is strictly aesthetic, imposed by me upon it. If my imposition is forceful enough, you’ll see it too.”

“What about the World Trade Center?” I asked.

“It’s like the ocean and the sky, everything else sinks beneath it.”

“We can go to the restaurant sometime if you want,” Roy said.

I made a brrr sound. “The place gives me the creeps. I won’t go up there.”

“In high school my parents took me to the city and we went up there. It had just opened. You take two elevators and it makes your ears pop.”

“Once I watched Japanese tourists take pictures of construction debris in the plaza. They thought it was art!” I said.

“Time to go,” Roy said, snapping his fingers.

“That’s what I’m trying to say. They must have seen art like that somewhere.”

Roy stood by the door tossing his keys up and down. I looked at Dawn. She was sitting up on the edge of the lawn chair with her feet on the floor and as she spoke, she spoke into the space formed by her hands in the air, as if she were turning an invisible, geometric construct and examining its points of connection and discord. “I think it’s time,” I said, standing.

“Oh, OK. How’m I dressed?” Dawn was not a dresser, apparently. I believe she was usually dressed in tight jeans and a variety of t-shirts. But she had deadpan beauty that got her into whatever place she wanted to go. She seemed a little nervous though that she should do something different, as she looked around. “I could put on that new sweater I bought, and I got my leather jacket.”

“Let’s just go,” Roy said. He squatted down by the equipment and put a tape into the VCR, to record the surveillance cameras.

One Fifth was crowded. There wasn’t a smokeless corner in all that marble expanse. It was packed with roving, hors d’oeuvres nibbling, wine sipping, martini guzzling, gossip getting people. Not a herd but a hoarde of tribes gathered together to plunder. The man of the evening, Larry Rivers, was talking loudly in a corner, surrounded by well-wishers in suits, in leather jackets, in blue jean jackets, bare shouldered and in stoles. Roy took off with Dawn, leaving me to drift in the Sargasso Sea among the spawning eels. The white wine in my glass was warm and syrupy. I ate a piece of fried cheese and bread and another shrimp toast. There was a very plain looking woman with long hair, standing quietly alone by a giant potted palm. I tried to talk to her but it didn’t work out very well. I had to walk away, and I didn’t know about walking backwards yet. I didn’t learn that till several months ago, when an old friend of mine in the book the trade stopped by. He had a hankering to read Thoreau in the park and only had a Times in his hand.

“What’s it like owning a store then?” he asked.

“The worst part is getting stuck in conversations.”

“Oh.” He nodded his head with such sincere sagacity that I sensed that something remarkable was about to happen. My friend has these dark, very kind and patient eyes, and his presence is calm. “You’ve got to practice walking backwards. When you find yourself in a conversation that you have to leave, but don’t want to offend the other person, you slowly walk away backwards, and keep talking. Don’t stop talking, just back away until they disengage, nodding and smiling. It works every time.”

“So the thing is,” I said, “don’t get trapped, right?”

“It doesn’t work if they’ve got you backed into a corner.” He shook his head. “Avoid that before it happens.”

And so I just told the woman by the giant potted palm that I had to go to the bathroom.

Two hours later we were in a car service headed to Odeon. We pulled up to the place, this big neon sign, behind a couple of limos. Inside it was like a dive almost, only clean. As clean as any place gets. We took a table with maroon and black banquets. Ceiling fans stirred the smoke like a paddle in the Gowanis Canal.

Our waitress wasn’t terribly expressive; she took our drink orders and went away.

Roy said, “What’s with that?”

“With what?” I asked.

“That didn’t seem, I don’t know, aloof to you?”

“Well it’s not the House of Pancakes, Roy,” I said. The room was packed, the conversation deafening. It was like this giant party going on. And it seemed like the same party we had just left.

“I come here all the time!” he said. He craned his head around looking for her. “Well if that cold bitch is so made out of ice I don’t get anything from her, I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

Dawn laughed. “What are you going to do, go fuck her? Because you know that no husband of mine is going to cheat on me, at least not if I know about it. Cause if he does, I’m gonna kill him.”

The menu had all the usual bistro stuff on it. Moules and frites and steak au poivre and a half chicken. “I’m not hungry really,” Roy said, grinding his teeth together. “I think I just want a burger and like, ten martinis.” He laughed. “Where is she? So what about the party? Was it good?”

Dawn sighed. “I’m exhausted by it. I talked so much bullshit to so many people. I think I need to watch Love Boat for a week. And I didn’t come here to eat a hamburger. I’m getting the steak tartare, and frisee with lardons.”

“So what did you do at the party?” he asked me.

“What do you think? I stood there doing nothing. It’s a beautiful restaurant.”

They recapitulated the conversations they had had and disputed the minutiae of the party. By the time dessert arrived we were one of the only people there and our waitress was sitting down at a table nearby counting her tips and talking to a friend.

“When you’re done with that, come here and sit with us,” Roy said.

She looked up from her money and blinked at him. I could see it on her face, she was going to say no and say it nastily. But she said, “I guess so. I get a shift drink.”

“This is my wife, Dawn,” he said, when she sat down next to me in the booth. The woman she was with pulled a chair up. “You girls wanna get high?” he asked.

“Sure,” they both said. He handed the waitress a vial and she snorted some.

“We’re waiting for Hong,” they said.

“I’m Helen,” the waitress said. “He works in the kitchen.”

“Dorothy,” the woman not dressed like a waitress said.

“We’re going to Lucky Strike. Wanna come?” Roy asked.

“Hong too? Hong’s my boyfriend.” Helen said. “We’re from Canada.”

  I had one drink at Lucky Strike, this brightly lit place on 9th Street that was all windows, and there was nowhere to sit. Roy was grilling Hong, a middle aged, slightly heavy, Asian man with a gold flat top, about some air force base in Germany. Hong only spoke German and a little English, but the waitress seemed to understand him.

“Hong’s from Viet Nam,” she said.

“Ja, ja, scheiser, man. 1968, I go.”

“He went to Germany,” she explained.

Hong laughed and rocked on his heels and drank down some beer. “Nine year!” he said, shaking his head.

“He was a porcelain engineer in Viet Nam, so he got a job in a toilet factory.”

“Ja, ja! Scheiser man. Oh that was bad. But gutt money, ja?”

“We live in Brooklyn, with Dorothy’s brother Tom. They have a band.”

Dorothy said, “That’s how we all met, right?”

“I was at that air base,” Roy said, finally.

“Ja ja, scheiser man.”

I went to the bathroom and then, didn’t really return to the table but drifted out onto Third Avenue. It had turned cold and misty and was starting to drizzle. The streets were slickening and the leaves of trees and bushes were holding back the water.

The other is personal. At my friend Bob’s 50th birthday in Brooklyn last weekend (a bash not to be forgotten, at least those parts we all remember through a cloud of Absinthe) I ran into David Sandlin and Joanie (don’t know if they have different last names). David and Joanie were among my first friends in NYC I didn’t grow up with or go to Oberlin with. He was working as a printer at Styria Studios, where Bob worked and later Shelly. It was great to see him after so long. David has been that greatest of all things, a dedicated artist who works for a living. His work appears many places, but his limited edition, silk screened books and paintings are amazing. Over the years in the library I’ve caught his work in publications like BLAB!. Follow this link to see his work. It is witty, phantasmagoric, political in the best sense, rough and eccentric.