Let the Great World Spin

PART OF THE PARTS

THE THEATER BEGAN SHORTLY AFTER LUNCH. His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.

He had said to his wife many times that the past disappeared in the city. It was why there weren’t many monuments around. It wasn’t like London, where every corner had a historical figure carved out of stone, a war memorial here, a leader’s bust there. He could only really pinpoint a dozen true statues around New York City — most of them in Central Park, along the Literary Walk, and who in the world went to Central Park these days anyway? A man would need a phalanx of tanks just to pass Sir Walter Scott. On other famous street corners, Broadway or Wall Street or around Gracie Square, nobody felt a need to lay claim to history. Why bother? You couldn’t eat a statue. You couldn’t screw a monument. You couldn’t wring a million dollars out of a piece of brass.

Even down here, on Centre Street, they didn’t have many public back-slaps to themselves. No Lady Justice in a blindfold. No Supreme Thinkers with their robes wrapped around themselves. No Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil carved into the upper granite columns of the criminal courts.

Which was one of the things that made Judge Soderberg think that the tightrope walker was such a stroke of genius. A monument in himself. He had made himself into a statue, but a perfect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city. A statue that had no regard for the past. He had gone to the World Trade Center and had strung his rope across the biggest towers in the world. The Twin Towers. Of all places. So brash. So glassy. So forward-looking. Sure, the Rockefellers had knocked down a few Greek revival homes and a few classic brown-stones to make way for the towers — which had annoyed Claire when she read about it — but mostly it had been electronics stores and cheap auction houses where men with quick tongues had sold everything useless under the sun, carrot peelers and radio flashlights and musical snow globes. In place of the shysters, the Port Authority had built two towering beacons high in the clouds. The glass reflected the sky, the night, the colors: progress, beauty, capitalism.

Soderberg wasn’t one to sit around and decry what used to be. The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

He figured that the tightrope walker must have thought it over quite a bit beforehand. It wasn’t just an offhand walk. He was making a statement with his body, and if he fell, well, he fell — but if he survived he would become a monument, not carved in stone or encased in brass, but one of those New York monuments that made you say: Can you believe it? With an expletive. There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?

SODERBERG HIMSELF HAD just missed the walk. It upset him to think so, but he had, just by minutes, seconds, even. He had taken a cab all the way downtown. The driver was a sullen black man blaring music through the speakers. A smell of marijuana in the cab. Sickening, really, the way you couldn’t get a clean, decent ride anymore. Rastafarian music from the eight-track. The driver dropped him off at the rear of 100 Centre Street. He walked past the D.A.’s office, stopped at the locked metal-framed door on the side, an entrance only the judges used, their one concession, designed so they wouldn’t have to mix with the visitors at the front. It wasn’t so much a furtive doorway, or even a privileged thing. They needed their own entrance, just in case some idiot decided to take matters into his own hands. Still, it brightened him: a secret passage into the house of justice.

At the door he took a quick look over his shoulder. In the upper reaches of the next-door building he noticed a few people leaning out of the windows, looking westward, pointing, but he ignored them, assumed it was a car crash or another morning altercation. He unlocked the metal door. If only he had turned around, paid attention, he might have been able to go upstairs and see it all unfolding in the distance. But he keyed himself in, pressed the button for the elevator, waited for the door to accordion open, and went up to the fourth floor.

In the corridor he stepped along in his plain black everyday shoes. The dark walls with a deep fungal smell. The squeak of his shoes sounded out in the quiet. The place had the summer blues. His office was a high-ceilinged room at the far end of the corridor. When he had first become a judge he’d had to share chambers in a grimy little box not fit for a shoeshine boy. He’d been astounded how he and his fellows were treated. There were mouse droppings in the drawers of his desk. The walls desperately in need of paint. Cockroaches would perch and twitter on the edge of the windowsill, as if they too just wanted to get out. But five years had gone by and he’d been shunted around from office to office. His was a more stately chambers now, and he was treated with a modicum more respect. Mahogany desk. Cut-glass inkwell. Framed photos of Claire and Joshua by the sea in Florida. A magnetized bar that held his paper clips. The Stars and Stripes on a standing pole behind him, by the window, so that sometimes it fluttered in the breeze. It wasn’t the world’s fanciest office, but it sufficed. Besides, he wasn’t a man to make frivolous complaints: he kept that powder dry in case he’d need it at other times.

Claire had bought him a brand-new swivel chair, a leather number with deep pouchy patterns, and he liked the moment, first thing every morning, when he sat and spun. On his shelves there were rows and rows of books. The Appellate Division Reports, the Court of Appeals Reports, the New York Supplements. All of Wallace Stevens, signed and arranged in a special row. The Yale yearbook. On the east wall, the duplicates of his degrees. And the New Yorker cartoon neatly framed by the doorway — Moses on the mountain with the Ten Commandments, with two lawyers peeping over the crowd: We’re in luck, Sam, not a word about retrospectivity.

He switched on his coffeepot, spread The New York Times on the desk, shook out a few packets of creamer. Sirens outside. Always sirens: they were the shadow facts of his day.

He was halfway through the business section when the door creaked open and another shiny head peeped itself around. It was hardly fair, but justice was largely balding. It wasn’t just a trend, but a fact. Together they were a team of shiny boys. It had been a phantom torment from the early days, all of them slowly receding: not many follicles among the oracles.

— G’morning, old boy.

Judge Pollack’s wide face was flushed. His eyes were like small shining metal grommets. Something of the hammerhead about him. He was blabbering about a guy who had strung himself between the towers. Soderberg thought at first it was a suicide, a jump off a rope suspended to a crane or some such thing. All he did was nod, turn the paper, all Watergate, and where’s the little Dutch boy when you need him? He made an off-color crack about G. Gordon Liddy putting his finger in the wrong hole this time, but it whizzed past Pollack, who had a small piece of cream cheese on the front of his black robe and some white spittle coming from his mouth. Aerial assault. Soderberg sat back in his chair. He was about to mention the stray breakfast when he heard Pollack mention a balancing bar and a tightrope, and the penny dropped.

— Say again?

The man Pollack was talking about had actually walked between the towers. Not only that, but he had lain down on the wire. He had hopped. He had danced. He had virtually run across from one side to the other.

Soderberg spun in the chair, a decisive quarter-turn, and yanked open the blinds and tried looking across the expanse. He caught the edge of the north tower, but the rest of the view was obstructed.

— You missed him, said Pollack. He just finished.

— Official, was it?

— Excuse me?

— Sanctioned? Advertised?

—’Course not. The fellow broke in during the night. Strung his wire across and walked. We watched him from the top floor. The security guards told us.

— He broke into the World Trade Center?

— A looney, I’d say. Wouldn’t you? Take him off to Bellevue.

— How did he get the wire across?

— No idea.

— Arrested? Was he arrested?

— Sure, said Pollack with a chuckle.

— What precinct?

— First, old boy. Wonder who’ll get him?

— I’m on arraignment today.

— Lucky you, said Pollack. Criminal trespass.

— Reckless endangerment.

— Self-aggrandization, said Pollack with a wink.

— That’ll brighten the day.

— Get the flashbulbs going.

— Takes some gumption.

Soderberg wasn’t quite sure if the word gumption was another phrase for balls or for stupidity. Pollack gave him a wink and a senatorial wave, closed the door with a sharp snap.

— Balls, said Soderberg to the closed door.

But it would indeed brighten the day, he thought. The summer had been so hot and serious and full of death and betrayal and stabbings, and he needed a little entertainment.

There were only two arraignment courts and so Soderberg had a fifty percent chance of landing the case. It would have to come through on time. It was possible that they could shove the tightrope walker swiftly through the system — if they found it newsworthy enough, they could do anything they wanted. They could have him squared away in a matter of hours. Fingerprinted, interviewed, Albany-ed, and away. Brought in on a misdemeanor charge. Perhaps him and some accomplices. Which made him think: How the hell had the walker gotten the cable from one side to the other? Surely the tightrope was a piece of steel? How did he toss it across? Couldn’t be made of rope, surely? Rope would never hold a man that distance. How then did he get it from one side to the other? Helicopter? Crane? Through the windows somehow? Did he drop the tightrope down and then drag it up the other side? It gave Soderberg a shiver of pleasure. Every now and then there was a good case that would come along and add a jolt to the day. A little spice. Something that could be talked about in the backrooms of the city. But what if he didn’t get the case? What if it went across the hall? Perhaps he could even have a word with the D.A. and the court clerks, strictly on the sly, of course. There was a system of favors in place in the courts. Pass me the tightrope walker and I’ll owe you one.

He propped his feet on the desk and drank his coffee and pondered the pulse of the day with the prospect of an arraignment that wasn’t, for once, dealing with pure drudge.

Most days, he had to admit, were dire. In came the tide, out they went again. They left their detritus behind. He didn’t mind using the word scum anymore. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dared. But that’s what they mostly were and it pained him to admit it. Scum. A dirty tide coming in on the shores and leaving behind its syringes and plastic wrappers and bloody shirts and condoms and snotty-nosed children. He dealt with the worst of the worst. Most people thought that he lived in some sort of mahogany heaven, that it was a highfalutin job, a powerful career, but the true fact of the matter was that, beyond reputation, it didn’t amount to much at all. It landed the odd good table in a fancy restaurant, and it pleased Claire’s family no end. At parties people perked up. They straightened their shoulders around him. Talked differently. It wasn’t much of a perk, but it was better than nothing. Every now and then there was a chance for promotion, to go upstairs to the Supreme Court, but it hadn’t come his way yet. In the end so much of it was just mundanity. A bureaucratic babysitting.

At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he’d been sure that one day he’d be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you’d make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and you make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can. You go home to your good wife and you calm her nerves. You sit down and compliment the cutlery. You thank your lucky stars for her inheritance. You smoke a fine cigar and you hope for an occasional roll in the silk sheets. You buy her a nice piece of jewelry at DeNatale’s and you kiss her in the elevator because she still looks beautiful, and well preserved, despite the years rolling by, she really does. You kiss her good-bye and you go downtown every day and you soon figure out that your grief isn’t half the grief that everyone else has. You mourn your dead son and you wake up in the middle of the night with your wife weeping beside you and you go to the kitchen, where you make yourself a cheese sandwich and you think, Well, at least it’s a cheese sandwich on Park Avenue, it could be worse, you could have ended up far worse: your reward, a sigh of relief.

The lawyers knew the truth. The court clerks too. And the other judges, of course. Centre Street was a shithouse. They actually called it that: the shithouse. If they met one another at official functions. How was the shithouse today, Earl? I left my briefcase in the shithouse. They had even made it into a verb: Are you shithousing it tomorrow, Thomas? He hated admitting it even to himself, but it was the truth. He thought of himself as being on a ladder, a well-dressed man on a ladder, a man of privilege and style and learning, in a dark robe, in the house of justice, using his bare hands to pull the rotting leaves and the twigs from the shithouse gutters.

It didn’t bother him half as much as it used to. The fact was that he was part of a system. He knew that now. A small piece of skin on a large elaborate creature. A cog that turned a set of wheels. Perhaps it just was a process of growing older. You leave the change to the generations that come behind you. But then the generation that comes behind you gets blown asunder in Vietnamese cafés, and you go on, you must go on, because even if they’re gone they still can be remembered.

He was not the maverick Jew that he had once set out to be; still Soderberg refused to surrender. It was a point of honor, of truth, of survival.

When he first got called, back in the summer of ′67, he thought that he’d take the job and be a paragon of virtue. He wouldn’t just survive, but flourish. He packed up his job and took a fifty-five percent pay cut. He didn’t need the money. He and Claire had already set a good deal aside, their accounts were healthy, the inheritance strong, and Joshua was squared away at PARC. Even if the idea of being a judge came as a complete surprise, he loved it. He had spent some early years in the U.S. Attorney’s office, sure, and he had put his time in, had served on a tax commission, built himself a track record, buttered up the right people. He had taken a few difficult cases in his time, had argued well, had struck a balance. He’d written an editorial for The New York Times questioning the legal parameters of the draft dodgers and the psychological effects conscription had on the country. He had weighed the moral and constitutional aspects and came out firmly on the side of the war. At parties on Park Avenue he had met Mayor Lindsay, but only glancingly, and so when the appointment was suggested, he thought it was a ruse. He put the phone down. Laughed it off. It rang again. You want me to do what? There was talk of eventual promotion, first as acting judge of the Supreme Court of New York, and then, who knows — from there anything was still possible. A lot of the promotions had stalled when the city started to go bankrupt, but he didn’t mind, he would surf it out. He was a man who believed in the absolute of the law. He would be able to weigh and dissect and ponder and make a change, give something back to the city where he’d been born. He always felt that he had skirted the city’s edges and now he would take a pay cut and be at its core. The law was fundamental to how it was imparted and to what degree it could contain the excesses of human folly. He believed in the notion that even when laws were written down they ought not to remain unaltered. The law was work. It was there to be sifted. He was interested not just in the meaning of what could be, but also what ought to be. He would be at the coal face. One of the important miners of the morality of the city. The Honorable Solomon Soderberg.

Even the name rang right. Perhaps he had been used as judicial fodder, a balancing of the books, but he didn’t mind too much; the good would outweigh the bad. He’d be rabbinical, wise, caring. Besides, every lawyer had a judge inside him.

He had walked in, his very first day, with his heart on fire. Through the front entrance. He wanted to savor it. He’d bought a brand-new suit from a swanky tailor on Madison Avenue. A Gucci tie. Tassels on his shoes. He approached the building in a great swell of anticipation. Etched outside the wide gold-colored doors were the words THE PEOPLE ARE THE FOUNDATION OF POWER. He stood a moment and breathed it all in. Inside, in the lobby, there was a blur of movement. Pimps and reporters and ambulance chasers. Men in purple platform shoes. Women dragging their children behind them. Bums sleeping in the window alcoves. He could feel his heart sink with each step. It seemed for just a moment that the building could still have the aura — the high ceilings, the old wooden balustrades, the marble floor — but the more he walked around the more his spirit sank. The courtrooms were even worse than he remembered. He shuffled around, dazed and disheartened. The corridor walls were graffitied. Men sat smoking in the back of the courtrooms. Deals were going down in the bathrooms. Prosecutors had holes in their suits. Crooked cops roamed about, looking for kickbacks. Kids were doing complicated handshakes. Fathers sat with smacked-out daughters. Mothers wept over their long-haired sons. On the courtroom doors, the fancy red leather pouching was slit. Attorneys went by with battered attaché cases. He ghosted past them all, took the elevator upstairs, then pulled up a chair at his new desk. There was a piece of dried chewing gum underneath the desk drawer.

Still and all, he said to himself, still and all, he would soon have it all sorted out. He could handle it. He could turn things around.

He announced his intentions in chambers one afternoon, at a retirement party for Kemmerer. A snicker went around the room. So sayeth Solomon, said one sad sack. Slice the baby, boys. Great hilarity and the tinkling of glasses. The other judges told him he’d get used to it eventually, that he’d see the light and it’d still be in a tunnel. The greatest part of the law was the wisdom of toleration. One had to accept the fools. It came with the territory. Every now and then the blinkers had to be lowered. He had to learn to lose. That was the price of success. Try it, they said. Buck the

system, Soderberg, and you’ll be eating pizza in the Bronx. Be careful. Play the game. Stick with us. And if he thought Manhattan was bad, he should go up to where the real fires were raging, to American Hanoi itself, at the end of the 4 train, where the very worst of the city played itself out every day.

He refused to believe them for many months, but slowly it dawned on him that they were correct — he was caught, he was just a part of the system, and the word was appropriate, a part of the Parts.

So many of the charges were just whisked away. The kids pleaded out, or he gave them time served, just so he could clear the backlog. He had his quota sheet to fill. He had to answer to the supervisors upstairs. The felonies got knocked down to misdemeanors. It was another form of demolition. You had to swing the wrecking ball. He was being judged on how he judged: the less work he gave to his colleagues upstairs, the happier they were. Ninety percent of the cases — even serious misbehavior — had to be disposed of. He wanted the promised promotion, yes, but even that couldn’t stifle the feeling that he had taken whatever idealism he once had and stuffed it inside a cheap black robe, and now, when he went searching, he couldn’t even find it inside the darkest slits.

He arrived at 100 Centre Street five days a week, put on his robe, wore his shiniest shoes, pulled his socks up around his ankles, and prevailed when he could. It was, he knew, about choosing his fights. He could have easily had a dozen pitched battles a day, more if he wanted. He could’ve taken on the whole system. He could have given the graffiti writers fines of a thousand dollars so that they’d never be able to pay it. Or he could’ve sentenced the firework kids on Mott Street to six months. He could’ve sent the drug addicts down for a full year. Chained them with a heavy bail. But it would all rebound, he knew. They would refuse to plead. And he would get the book slung at him for clogging up the courts. The shoplifters, the shoeshine boys, the hotel sneaks, the three-card-monte kids, they were all entitled eventually to say, Not guilty, Your Honor. And then the city would choke. The gutters would fill up. The slime would spill over. The sidewalks would fill. And he’d be blamed.

At the worst of times he thought, I’m a maintenance guy, I’m a gatekeeper, I’m a two-bit security man. He watched the parade come in and out of his courtroom, whichever Part he was in that day, and he wondered how the city had become such a disgusting thing on his watch. How it lifted babies by the hair, and how it raped seventy-year-old women, and how it set fires to couches where lovers slept, and how it pocketed candy bars, and how it shattered ribcages, and how it allowed its war protesters to spit in the faces of cops, and how the union men ran roughshod over their bosses, and how the Mafia took a hold of the boardwalks, and how fathers used daughters as ashtrays, and how bar fights spun out of control, and how perfectly good businessmen ended up urinating in front of the Woolworth Building, and how guns were drawn in the pizza joints, and how whole families got blown away, and how paramedics ended up with crushed skulls, and how addicts shot heroin into their tongues, and how shysters ran scams and old ladies lost their savings, and how shopkeepers gave back the wrong change, and how the mayor wheezed and wheedled and lied while the city burned down to the ground, got itself ready for its own little funeral of ashes, crime, crime, crime.

There wasn’t a bad thing in the city that didn’t pass through Soderberg’s gutter watch. It was like surveying the evolution of slime. You stand there long enough and the gutter gets slick, no matter how hard you battle against it.

All these idiots kept coming from their grind houses, strip joints, freak shows, novelty stores, peep shows, fleabag hotels, and they looked even worse for having spent some time in the Tombs. Once, when he was in court, he saw a cockroach literally climb from a defendant’s pocket and crawl along his shoulder and up along the side of his neck before the man even noticed. When he realized it, the defendant just whisked it away, and continued his guilty plea. Guilty, guilty, guilty. They nearly all pleaded guilty and in exchange got a sentence they could live with, or they went for time served, or they coughed up a small fine, and went along their merry way, a swagger in their walk, out into the world, just so they could turn around and do the same foolish thing and be back in his courtroom a week or two later. It put him in a state of constant agitation. He bought a hand exerciser that fit in the pocket. He slid his hand underneath the slit in his robe and took it from his suit pocket. It was a spring-loaded thing with two wooden handles that he squeezed surreptitiously under his garments. He only hoped he wasn’t seen. It could of course be misinterpreted, a judge fumbling beneath his gown. But it calmed him as his cases came and went, and his quota filled. The heroes of the system were the judges who disposed of the most cases in the quickest amount of time. Open the sluice gates, let them go.

Anyone who swung by, anyone who participated in the system in any way, got sideswiped. The crimes got to the prosecutors — the rapes, the manslaughters, the stabbings, the robberies. The young assistant D.A.’s stood horrified by the enormity of the lists in front of them. The sentences got to the court officers: they were like disappointed cops, and would sometimes hiss when the judges were soft on crime. The slurring got to the court reporter. The blatant sideswipes got to the Legal Aid lawyers. The terms got to the probation officers. The vulgar simplicities got to the court psychologists. The paperwork got to the cops. The fines — light as they were — got to the criminals. The low bail figures got to the bondsmen. Everyone was in a jam and it was his job to sit at the center of it, to dole out the justice and balance it between right and wrong.

Right and wrong. Left and right. Up and down. He thought himself up there, standing at the edge of the precipice, sick and dizzy, unaccountably looking upward.

Soderberg downed his coffee in one smooth swallow. It tasted cheap with creamer.

He would get the tightrope man today — he was sure of it.

He picked up his phone and dialed down to the D.A.’s office, but the phone rang on and on and when he looked up at his little desktop clock it was time for the morning’s clear-out.

Wearily, Soderberg rose, then smiled to himself as he followed a straight line along the floor.

HE LIKED THE BLACK gossamer robe in summertime. It was a little worn at the elbows, but no matter, it was breezy and light. He picked up his ledgers, tucked them under his arm, caught a quick glance of himself thick-bodied in the mirror, the tracery of blood vessels in his face, the deepening eye sockets. He pasted the last few hairs on his pate down, walked out solemnly through the corridor and past the elevator bank. He took the stairs down, a little skip in his step. Past the correction officers and probation people, into the rear hallway of Arraignment Part 1A. The worst part of the journey. At the back of the court, the prisoners were kept in the pens. The abattoir, they called it. The upper holding cells ran the length of half a block. The bars were painted a creamy yellow. The air was rank with body odor. The court officers went through four bottles of air freshener every day.

There were plenty of police and court officers lined up along the gauntlet and the criminals were smart enough to keep quiet as he went along the chute. He walked quickly, head down, among the officers.

— Good morning, Judge.

— Like the shoes, Your Honor.

— Nice to see you again, sir.

A quick simple nod to whoever acknowledged him. It was important to maintain a democratic aloofness. There were certain judges who bantered and mocked and joked and buddied up, but not Soderberg. He walked quickly out along the chute, in through the wooden door, into civility, or remnants of it, the dark wood bench, the microphone, the fluorescent lights, up the steps, to his elevated seat.

In God We Trust.

The morning slipped away quickly. A full calendar of cases. The usual roll call. Driving on an expired license. Threatening a police officer. Assault in the second degree. Lewd public act. A woman had stabbed her aunt in the arm over food stamps. A deal was cut with a tow-headed boy on grand theft auto. Community service was handed out to a man who’d put a peephole into the apartment below him — what the Peeping Tom didn’t know was that the woman was a Peeping Tom too, and she peeped him, peeping her. A bartender had been in a brawl with a customer. A murder in Chinatown got sent upstairs immediately, bail set and the matter passed along.

All morning long he wheeled and bartered and crimped and cringed.

— Is there an outstanding warrant or not?

— Tell me, are you moving to dismiss or not?

— The request to withdraw is granted. Be nice to each other from here on in.

— Time served!

— Where’s the motion, for crying out loud?

— Officer, would you please tell me what happened here? He was what? Cooking a chicken on the sidewalk?! Are you kidding me?

— Bail set at two thousand dollars’ bond. Cash one thousand two hundred fifty.

— Not you again, Mr. Ferrario! Whose pocket was picked this time?

— This is an arraignment court, counselor, not Shangri-La.

— Release her on her own recognizance.

— This complaint does not state a crime. Dismissed!

— Has anybody here ever heard of privilege?

— I’ve no objection to a nonjail disposition.

— In exchange for his plea, we’ll reduce the felony to a misdemeanor.

— Time served!

— I think your client was overserved in the narcissism department this morning, counselor.

— Give me something more than elevator music, please!

— Will you be finished by Friday?

— Time served!

— Time served!

— Time served!

There were so many special tricks to learn. Seldom look the defendant in the eye. Seldom smile. Try to appear as if you have a mild case of hemorrhoids: it will give you a concerned, inviolable expression. Sit at a slightly uncomfortable bend, or at least one that appears uncomfortable. Always be scribbling. Appear like a rabbi, bent over your writing pad. Stroke the silver at the side of your hair. Rub the pate when things get out of hand. Use the rap sheet as a guide to character. Make sure there are no reporters in the room. If there are, all rules are underlined twice. Listen carefully. The guilt or the innocence is all in the voice. Don’t play favorites with the lawyers. Don’t let them play the Jew card. Never respond to Yiddish. Dismiss flattery out of hand. Be careful with your hand exerciser. Watch out for masturbation jokes. Never stare at the stenographer’s rear end. Be careful what you have for lunch. Have a roll of mints with you. Always think of your doodles as masterpieces. Make sure the carafe water has been changed. Be outraged at water spots on the glass. Buy shirts at least one size too big in the neck so you can breathe.

The cases came and went.

Late in the morning he had already called twenty-nine cases and he asked the bridge — his court officer, in her crisp white shirt — if there was any news on the case of the tightrope walker. The bridge told him that it was all the buzz, that the walker was in the system, it seemed, and he would likely come up in the late afternoon. She wasn’t sure what the charges were, possibly criminal trespass and reckless endangerment. The D.A. was already deep in discussion with the tightrope walker, she said. It was likely that the walker would plead to everything if given a good enough deal. The D.A. was keen on some good publicity, it seemed. He wanted this one to go smoothly. The only hitch might be if the walker was held over until night court.

— So we have a chance?

— Pretty good, I’d say. If they push him through quick enough.

— Excellent. Lunch, then?

— Yes, Your Honor.

— We’ll reconvene at two-fifteen.

THERE WAS ALWAYS Forlini’s, or Sal’s, or Carmine’s, or Sweet’s, or Sloppy Louie’s, or Oscar’s Delmonico, but he had always liked Harry’s. It was the farthest away from Centre Street, but it didn’t matter — the quick cab ride relaxed him. He got out on Water Street and walked to Hanover Square, stood outside and thought, This is my place. It wasn’t because of the brokers. Or the bankers. Or the traders. It was Harry himself, all Greek, good manners, arms stretched wide. Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that it was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar. But Harry could also make a steak sing, pull a trumpet line out of a string of spaghetti. He was often down in the kitchen, slinging fire. Then he would step out of his apron, put on his suit jacket, slick back his hair, and walk up into the restaurant with composure and style. He had a special inclination toward Soderberg, though neither man knew why. Harry would linger a moment longer with him at the bar, or slide up a great bottle and they’d sit underneath the monk murals, passing the time together. Perhaps because they were the only two in the place who weren’t deep in the stock business. Outsiders to the clanging bells of finance. They could tell how the day was going in the markets by the decibel level around them.

On the wall of Harry’s, the brokerage houses had private lines connected to a battery of telephones on the wall. Guys from Kidder, Peabody over there, Dillon, Read there, First Boston over there, Bear Stearns at the end of the bar, L. F. Rothschild by the murals. It was big money, all the time. It was elegant too. And well mannered. A club of privilege. Yet it didn’t cost a fortune. A man could escape with his soul intact.

He sidled up to the bar and called Harry across, told him about the walker, how he’d just missed him early in the morning, how the kid had been arrested and was coming through the system soon.

— He broke into the towers, Har.

— So … he’s ingenious.

— But what if he had fallen?

— The ground’d hardly cushion the fall, Sol.

Soderberg sipped his wine: the deep red heft of it rose to his nose.

— My point is, Har, he could’ve killed someone. Not just himself. Could’ve made hamburger of someone …

— Hey, I need a good line man. Maybe he could work for me.

— There’s probably twelve, thirteen counts against him.

— All the more reason. He could be my sous chef. He could prepare the steamers. Strip the lentils. Dive into the soup from high above.

Harry pulled deeply on a cigar and blew the smoke to the ceiling.

— I don’t even know if I’m going to get him, said Soderberg. He may be held over until night court.

— Well, if you do get him, give him my business card. Tell him there’s a steak on the house. And a bottle of Château Clos de Sarpe. Grand Cru, 1964.

— He’ll hardly tightrope after that.

Harry’s face creased into a suggested map of what it would become years later: full, sprightly, generous.

— What is it about wine, Harry?

— What d’ya mean?

— What is it that cures us?

— Made to glorify the gods. And dull the idiots. Here, have a little more.

They clinked glasses in the slant of light that came through the upper windows. It was as if, looking out, they might’ve seen the walk re-enacted up there, on high. It was America, after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted. But what if you were the one walking underneath? What if the tightrope walker really had fallen? It was quite possible that he could have killed not just himself, but a dozen people below. Recklessness and freedom — how did they become a cocktail? It was always his dilemma. The law was a place to protect the powerless, and also to circumscribe the most powerful. But what if the powerless didn’t deserve to be walking underneath? It sometimes put him in mind of Joshua. Not something he liked thinking about, not the loss at least, the terrible loss. It brought too much heartache. Pierced him. He had to learn that his son was gone. That was the extent of it. In the end Joshua had been a steward, a custodian of the truth. He had joined up to represent his country and came home to lay Claire flat with grief. And to lay him flat also. But he didn’t show it. He never could. He would weep in the bath of all places, but only when the water was running. Solomon, wise Solomon, man of silence. There were some nights he kept the drain open and just let the water run.

He was the son of his son — he was here, he was left behind.

Little things got to him. The mitzvah of maakeh. Build a fence around your roof lest someone should fall from it. He questioned why he had bought the toy soldiers all those years ago. He fretted over the fact that he’d made Joshua learn “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the piano. He wondered if, when he taught the boy to play chess, he had somehow instilled a battle mentality? Attack along the diagonals, son. Never allow a back-rank mate. There must have been somewhere that he’d hard-wired the boy. Still, the war had been just, proper, right. Solomon understood it in all its utility. It protected the very cornerstones of freedom. It was fought for the very ideals that were under assault in his court every day. It was quite simply the way in which America protected itself. A time to kill and a time to heal. And yet sometimes he wanted to agree with Claire that war was just an endless factory of death; it made other men rich, and their son had been dispatched to open the gates, a rich boy himself. Still, it was not something he could afford to think of. He had to be solid, firm, a pillar. He seldom talked about Joshua, even to Claire. If there was anyone to talk to, it would be Harry, who knew a thing or two about longing and belonging, but it wasn’t something to talk about right now. He was careful, Soderberg, always careful. Maybe too careful, he thought. He sometimes wished he could let it all out: I’m the son of my son, Harry, and my son’s dead.

He lifted the glass to his face, sniffed the wine, the deep, earthy aroma. A moment of levity — that’s what he wanted. A good, quiet moment. Something gentle and without noise. While away a few hours with his good pal. Or perhaps even call in sick for the rest of the day, go home, spend an afternoon with Claire, one of those afternoons when they could just sit together and read, one of those pure moments he and his wife shared increasingly as their marriage went along. He was happy, give or take. He was lucky, give or take. He didn’t have everything he wanted, but he had enough. Yes, that’s what he wanted: just a quiet afternoon of nothingness. Thirty-odd years of marriage hadn’t made a stone out of him, no.

A little bit of silence. A gesture toward home. A hand on Harry’s wrist and a word or two in his ear: My son. It was all he needed to say, but why complicate it now?

He lifted the glass and clinked with Harry.

— Cheers.

— To not falling, said Harry.

— To being able to get back up.

Soderberg was beginning to swing away from wanting the tightrope walker in his courtroom now: it would be too much of a headache, surely. He would have preferred to just fritter the day away at the long bar, with his dear friend, toasting the gods and letting the light fall.

— CRIMINAL COURT ARRAIGNMENT Part One-A, now in session. All rise.

The court officer had a voice that reminded him of seagulls. A peculiar caw to her, the tail end of her words swerving away. But the words demanded an immediate silence and the buzz in the rear of the court died.

— Quiet, please. The Honorable Judge Soderberg presiding.

He knew immediately he had the case. He could see the reporters in the pews of the spectator section. They had that jowly, destroyed look to them. They wore open-neck shirts and oversize slacks. Unshaven, whiskied. The more obvious giveaways were the notebooks with yellow covers jutting out of their jacket pockets. They were craning their necks to see who might emerge from the door behind him. A few extra detectives sat on the front bench for the show. Some off-duty clerks. Some businessmen, possibly even Port Authority honchos. A few others, maybe a security man or two. He could even see a tall, red-headed sketch artist. And that meant only one thing: the television cameras would be outside.

He could feel the wine at his toes. He wasn’t drunk — nowhere near it — but he could still feel it swishing at the edges of his body.

— Order in the court. Silence. The court is now in session.

The doors creaked open behind him and in slouched a line of nine defendants toward the benches along the side wall. The usual riffraff, a couple of con men, a man with his eyebrow sliced open, two clapped-out hookers, and, walking at the rear of them all, a grin stretched from ear to ear, a slight bounce in his step, was a young white man, strangely clad: it could only be the tightrope walker.

In the gallery there was a stir. The reporters reached for their pencils. A slap of noise, as if a liquid had suddenly splashed through them.

The funambulist was even smaller than Soderberg had imagined. Impish. Dark shirt and tights. Strange, thin ballet slippers on his feet. There was something even washed-out about him. He was blond, in his mid-twenties, the sort of man you might see as a waiter in the theater district. And yet there was a confidence that rolled off him, a swagger that Soderberg liked. He looked like a small, squashed-down version of Joshua, as if some brilliance had been deposited in his body, programmed in like one of Joshua’s hacks, and the only way out for him was through performance.

It was obvious that the tightrope walker had never been arraigned before. The first-timers were always dazed. They came in, huge-eyed, stunned by it all.

The walker stopped and looked from one side of the courtroom to the other. Momentarily frightened and bemused. As if there was way too much language in this place. He was thin, lithe, a quality of the leonine to him. He had quick eyes: the glance ended up on the bench.

Soderberg made a split second of eye contact. Broke his own rule, but so what? The walker understood and half nodded. There was something gleeful and playful there in the walker’s eyes. What could Soderberg do with him? How could he manipulate it? After all, it was reckless endangerment, at the very least, and that could end upstairs, a felony, with the possibility of seven years. What about disorderly conduct? Soderberg knew deep down that it’d never go in that direction. It’d be kept a minor misdemeanor and he’d have to work it out with the D.A. He’d play it smart. Pull something unusual from the hat. Besides, the reporters were there, watching. The sketch artist. The TV cameras, outside the courtroom.

He called his bridge over and whispered in her ear: Who’s on first? It was their little joke, their judicial Abbott and Costello. She showed him the calendar and he skimmed down quickly over the cases, flicked a quick look at the sin bin, sighed. He didn’t have to do them in order, he could juggle things around, but he tapped his pencil against the first pending case.

The bridge stepped away and cleared her throat.

— Docket ending six-eight-seven, she said. The People versus Tillie Henderson and Jazzlyn Henderson. Step up, please.

The assistant D.A., Paul Concrombie, shook out the creases in his jacket. Opposite him, the Legal Aid attorney brushed back his long hair and came forward, spreading the file out on the shelf. In the back of the court, one of the reporters let out an audible groan as the women stood up from the bench. The younger hooker was milky-skinned and tall, wearing yellow stilettos, a neon swimsuit under a loose black shirt, a baubled necklace. The older one wore a one-piece swimsuit and high silver heels, her face a playground of mascara. Absurd, he thought. Sunbathing in the Tombs. She looked as if she had been around awhile, that she’d done her share of circling the track.

— Aggravated robbery in the second degree. Produced on an outstanding warrant from November 19, 1973.

The older hooker blew a kiss over her shoulder. A white man in the gallery blushed and lowered his head.

— This isn’t a nightclub, young lady.

— Sorry, Your Honor — I’d blow you one too ’cept I’m all blowed out.

A quick snap of laughter circled the room.

— I’ll have decorum in my court, Miss Henderson.

He was quite sure he heard the word asshole creeping out from under her tongue. He always wondered why they dug such pits for themselves, these hookers. He peered down at the rap sheets in front of him. Two illustrious careers. The older hooker had at least sixty charges against her over the years. The younger one had begun the quick portion of the slide: the charges had started to come with regularity and she would only accelerate from here on in. He’d seen it all too often. It was like opening up a tap.

Soderberg adjusted his reading glasses, sat back a moment in the swivel chair, addressed the assistant DA. with a withering look.

— So. Why the wait, Mr. Concrombie? This happened almost a year ago.

— We’ve had some recent developments here, Your Honor. The defendants were arrested in the Bronx and …

— Is this still in the complaint form?

— Yes, Your Honor.

— And is the assistant D.A. interested in disposing of this on a criminal-court level?

— Yes, Your Honor.

— So, the warrant is vacated?

— Yes, Your Honor.

He was hitting his stride, getting it done with speed. All a bit of a magic trick. Sweep out the black cape. Wave the white wand. Watch the rabbit disappear. He could see the row of nodding heads in the spectators’ area, caught on the current, rolling along with him. He hoped the reporters were getting it, seeing the control he had in his courtroom, even with the wine at the corners of his mind.

— And what’re we doing now, Mr. Concrombie?

— Your Honor, I’ve discussed this with the Legal Aid lawyer, Mr. Feathers here, and we’ve agreed that in the interests of justice, taking everything into consideration, the People are moving to dismiss the case against the daughter. We’re not going to go further with it, Your Honor.

— The daughter?

— Jazzlyn Henderson. Yes, sorry, Your Honor, it’s a mother-daughter team.

He flicked a quick look at the rap sheets. He was surprised to see that the mother was just thirty-eight years old.

— So, you two are related.

— Keeping it in the family, Y’r Honor!

— Miss, I’ll ask you not to speak again.

— But you axed me a question.

— Mr. Feathers, instruct your client, please.

— But you axed me.

— Well, I will axe you, yes, young lady.

— Oh, she said.

— Okay. Miss … Henderson. Zip it. Do you understand that? Zip it. Now. Mr. Concrombie. Go on.

— Well, Your Honor, after studying the file, we don’t believe that the People will be able to sustain our burden of proof. Beyond reasonable doubt.

— For what reason?

— Well, the identification is problematic.

— Yes? I’m waiting.

— The investigation revealed that there was a matter of mistaken identity.

— Whose identification?

— Well, we have a confession, Your Honor.

— Okay. Don’t bowl me over with your certainty about this, Mr. Concrombie. So you’re dropping the case against Miss, uh, Miss Jazzlyn Henderson?

— Yes, sir.

— And all parties are agreed?

A little nodding field of heads around the room.

— Okay, case dismissed.

— Case dismissed?

— You serious? said the young girl. That’s it?

— That’s it.

— Done and dusted? He’s cutting me loose?

Under her breath he was sure he could hear her say: Getdefuckouttahere!

— What did you say, young lady?

— Nothing.

The Legal Aid lawyer leaned across and whispered something vicious in her ear.

— Nothing, Your Honor. Sorry. I said nothing. Thanks.

— Get her out of here.

— Lift the rope! One coming out!

The younger hooker turned to her mother, kissed her square on the eyebrow. Strange place. The mother, beaten down and tired, accepted the kiss, stroked the side of her daughter’s face, pulled her close. Soderberg watched as they embraced. What sort of deep cruelty, he wondered, allows a family like that?

Still, it always surprised him, the love these people could display for each other. It was one of the few things that still thrilled him about the courtroom — the raw edge it gave to life, the sight of lovers embracing after beating each other up, or families glad to welcome back their son the petty thief, the surprise of forgiveness when it shone in the core of his court. It was rare, but it happened, and like everything, the rarity was necessary.

The young hooker whispered in the mother’s ear and the mother laughed, waved over her shoulder again at the white man in the spectators’ section.

The court officer didn’t lift the rope. The young hooker did it herself. She swayed as she walked, as if she was already selling herself. She brazened her way down the center of the aisle toward the white man with graying flecks at the side of his hair. She took off the black shirt as she went, so that only her swimsuit could be seen.

Soderberg could feel his toes curl at the sheer audacity of it.

— Put that shirt back on, right now!

— It’s a free world, ain’t it? You dismissed me. It’s his shirt.

— Put it on, said Soderberg, leaning close into his microphone.

— He wanted to dress me up nice for court. Didn’t you, Corrie? He got it sent down to me in the Tombs.

The white man was trying to drag her across by the elbow, whispering something urgently in her ear.

— Put on the shirt or I’ll pull you up on contempt…. Sir, are you related to that young woman?

— Not exactly, said the man.

— And what does not exactly mean?

— I’m her friend.

He had an Irish accent, this gray-haired pimp. He raised his chin like an old-fashioned boxer. His face was thin and his cheeks were sunken.

— Well, friend, I want to make sure that she keeps the shirt on at all times.

— Yes, Y’r Honor. And, Y’r Honor …?

— Just do what I say.

— But, Y’r Honor …

Soderberg slammed the gavel down: Enough, he said.

He watched the younger hooker as she kissed the Irishman on the cheek. The man turned away, but then took her face gently in his hands. A strange-looking pimp. Not the usual type. No matter. They came in all sizes and packages. Truth was, the women were victims of the men, always were, always would be. At the essential core, it was idiots like the pimp who should’ve been jailed. Soderberg let out a sigh and then turned toward the assistant D.A.

An eyebrow raise was language enough between the two of them. There was still the matter of the mother to take care of, and then he’d get to the centerpiece.

He flicked a quick look across at the tightrope walker sitting at the benches. A befuddled gaze on the walker’s face. His own crime so unique that he surely had no idea what he was even doing here.

Soderberg tapped the microphone and those in the courtroom perked up.

— As I understand it, the remaining defendant, the mother here …

— Tillie, Y’r Honor.

— I’m not talking to you, Miss Henderson. As I understand it, counselors, this is still a complaint with a felony. Is it going to be acceptable to dispose of it as a misdemeanor?

— Your Honor, we already have a disposition here. I have discussed it with Mr. Feathers.

— That’s right, Your Honor.

— And …?

— The People are moving to reduce the charge from robbery to petty larceny in exchange for the defendant’s plea of guilty.

— Is this what you want, Miss Henderson?

— Huh?

— You are willing to plead guilty to this crime?

— He said it’d be no more’n six months.

— Twelve is your maximum, Miss Henderson.

— Long as I can see my babies …

— Excuse me?

— I’ll take anything, she said.

— Very well, for the purpose of this plea, the outstanding charges are reduced to petty larceny. Do you understand that if I accept your plea pursuant to this decision you’ve made, that I have the power, that I could sentence you to up to one year in jail?

She leaned over quickly to her Legal Aid lawyer, who shook his head and put his hand on her wrist and half smiled at her.

— Yeah, I understand.

— And you understand you’re pleading to petty larceny?

— Yeah, babe.

— Excuse me?

Soderberg felt a stab of pain, somewhere between the eyes and the back of the throat. A stunned flick. Had she really called him babe? It couldn’t be. She was standing, staring at him, half smiling. Could he pretend that he didn’t hear? Dismiss it? Call her up in contempt? If he made a fuss, what would happen?

In the silence the room seemed to shrink a moment. The lawyer beside her looked as if he might bite her ear off. She shrugged and smiled and waved back over her shoulder again.

— I’m sure you didn’t mean that, Miss Henderson.

— Mean what, Y’r Honor?

— We will move on.

— Whatever you say, Y’r Honor.

— Keep your language in check.

— Cool, she said.

— Or else.

— You got it.

— You understand that you are giving up your right to trial?

— Yeah.

The Legal Aid lawyer’s lips recoiled as they touched, accidentally, against the woman’s ear.

— I mean, yessir.

— You have discussed pleading guilty with your lawyer and you are satisfied with his services? You are pleading guilty of your own free will?

— Yessir.

— You understand that you’re giving up your right to trial?

— Yessir, you bet.

— Okay, Miss Henderson, how do you plead to petty larceny?

Again, the Legal Aid lawyer leaned across to school her.

— Guilty.

— Okay, so very well, tell me what happened here.

— Huh?

— Tell me what occurred, Miss Henderson.

Soderberg watched as the court officers moved to reduce the yellowback form to a blue-back for the misdemeanor crime. In the spectators’ section the reporters were fidgeting with the spirals on their books. The buzz in the room had died slightly. Soderberg knew that he would have to move quickly if he was going to pull out a good performance for the tightrope walker.

The hooker raised her head. The way she stood, he knew for certain she was guilty. Just by the lean of the body, he knew. He always knew.

— It’s a long time ago. So, I was, like, I didn’t want to go to Hell’s Kitchen, but Jazzlyn and me, well me, I got this date in Hell’s Kitchen, and he was saying shit about me.

— All right, Miss Henderson.

— Shit like I was old and stuff.

— Language, Miss Henderson.

— And his wallet just jumped out in front of me.

— Thank you.

— I weren’t finished.

— That’ll do.

— I ain’t all bad. I know you think I’m all bad.

— That’ll do, young lady.

— Yeah, Pops.

He saw one of the court officers smirk. His cheeks flushed. He lifted his glasses high on his head, pinned her with a stare. Her eyes, suddenly, seemed wide and pleading, and he understood for a moment how she could attract a man, even in the worst of times: some layered beauty and fierceness, some history of love.

— And you understand that by pleading guilty you are not being coerced?

She tottered close to her lawyer and then she turned, heavy-eyed, to the bench.

— Oh, no, she said, I ain’t being coerced.

— Mr. Feathers, do you consent to immediate sentence and waive your right to presentence report?

— Yes, we do.

— And, Miss Henderson, do you wish to make a statement before I give sentence?

— I want to be in Rikers.

— You understand, Miss Henderson, that this court cannot determine which prison you will be in.

— But they said I’d be in Rikers. That’s what they said.

— And why, pray tell, would you like to be in Rikers? Why would anyone like …

— Cuz’a the babies.

— You’ve got babies?

— Jazzlyn’s got.

She was pointing over her shoulder at her daughter, slumped in the spectators’ section.

— Very well, there is no guarantee, but I’ll make a note to the court officers to be so disposed. In the case of the People versus Tillie Henderson, the plea is guilty and I sentence you to no more than eight months in prison.

— Eight months?

— Correct. I can make it twelve, if you like.

She opened her mouth in an unsounded whimper.

— I thought it were gonna be six.

— Eight months, young lady. Do you wish to adjust your plea?

— Shit, she said and she shrugged her shoulders.

He saw the Irishman in the spectators’ section grab the arm of the young hooker. He was trying to make his way forward in the court to say something to Tillie Henderson, but the court officer prodded him in the chest with a billy club.

— Order in the court.

— Can I say a word, Your Honor?

— No. Now. Sit. Down.

Soderberg could feel his teeth grind.

— Tillie, I’ll be back later, okay?

— Sit. Or else.

The pimp stopped in the aisle and looked up at Soderberg. The pupils small, the eyes very blue. Soderberg felt exposed, open, unlayered. A blanket of quiet fell over the court.

— Sit! Or else.

The pimp lowered his head and retreated. Soderberg let out a quick breath of relief, then turned slightly in his chair. He picked up the calendar of cases, put his hand over the microphone, nodded across to the court officer.

— All right, he whispered. Get the tightrope walker up.

Soderberg glanced at Tillie Henderson as she was escorted out the door to his right. She walked with her head low and yet there was a learned bounce in her gait. As if she were already out and doing the track. She was held on each side by a court officer. The jacket she wore was crumpled and dirty. The sleeves were way too long. It looked as if two women could have fit inside it. Her face looked odd and vulnerable, and yet still held a touch of the sensual. Her eyes were dark. Her eyebrows were plucked thin. There was a shine to her, a glisten. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time: upside down, the way the eye first sees, and then must correct. Something tender and carved about the face. The long nose that looked as if it might have been broken a few times. The flare of her nostrils.

She turned at the door and tried to look over her shoulder, but the court officers blocked her.

She mouthed something toward her daughter and the pimp, but it was lost, and she gave a little winded sigh as if she were on the beginning of a long journey. Her face seemed for a second almost beautiful, and then the hooker turned and shuffled and the door was closed behind her, and she vanished into her own namelessness.

— Get the tightrope walker up, he said again to his bridge. Now.

CENTAVOS

THERE IS, AT LEAST, ALWAYS THIS: It is a Thursday morning. My first-floor apartment. In a clapboard house. In a street of clapboard houses. Through the window, a quick flit of dark against the blue sky. It is a surprise to me that there are birds of any sort in the Bronx. It is summertime so there is no school for Eliana or Jacobo. But they are already awake. I can hear the sound of the television turned high. Our ancient set is stuck on one channel and the only program playing is Sesame Street. I turn in the sheets towards Corrigan. It is the first time that he has ever slept over. We have not planned it: it has just happened this way. He stirs in his sleep. His lips are dry. The white sheets move with his body. A man’s beard is a weather line: an intersperse of light and dark, a flurry of gray at the chin, a dark hollow beneath his lip. It amazes me how it darkens him, this morning beard, how it has grown in such a short time, even the little flecks of gray where there was none the night before.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

One arm of Corrigan’s shirt is on, one arm off. In our haste we have not even undressed properly. Everything is forgiven. I lift the weight of his arm and unbutton the shirt. Wooden buttons that slip through a cloth loop. I pull the shirt along the length of his arm and off. His skin is very white, the color of newly sliced apple, beneath his brown neck. I kiss his shoulder. The religious chain around his throat has left a tan mark, but not the cross, since it sits underneath his shirt, and it looks like he wears a necklace of white skin that finishes in midair. Some bruises on his skin still: his blood disorder.

He opens his eyes and blinks a moment, makes a sound that is somewhere between pain and awe. He pushes his feet out from under the sheets, looks around the room.

“Oh,” he says, “it’s morning.”

“It is.”

“How did my trousers get over there?”

“You drank too much vino.”

“¿De veras?” he says. “And I became what — an acrobat?”

From upstairs, the sound of footsteps, our neighbors awakening. He waits out the sounds, the eventual thump of their feet into shoes.

“The children?”

“They’re watching Sesame Street.”

“We drank a lot.”

“We did.”

“I’m not used to it anymore.” He runs his hands over the sheets, comes to the curve of my hip, draws away.

More sounds from above, a shower, the fall of something heavy, the click of a woman’s high heels across the floor. Mine is the apartment that receives all noises, even from the basement below. For one hundred and ten dollars a month, I feel as if I live inside a radio.

“Are they always this loud?”

“Just wait until their teenagers wake.”

He groans and looks up at the ceiling. I wonder what it is Corrigan is thinking: up there, his God, but first my neighbors.

“Doctor, help me,” he says. “Tell me something magnificent.”

He knows that I have always wanted to be a doctor, that I have come all the way from Guatemala with this intention, that I was not able to finish medical school at home, and he knows too that I have failed here, I never even got to the steps of a university, that there was probably never a chance in the first place, and yet still he calls me “Doctor.”

“Well, I woke up this morning and diagnosed a very early case of happiness.”

“Never heard of it,” he says.

“It’s a rare disease. I caught it just before the neighbors woke.”

“Is it contagious?”

“Don’t you have it yet?”

He kisses my lips, but then turns away from me. The unbearable weight of the complications he carries, his guilt, his joy. He lies on his left shoulder, his legs tuck into a bend, and he puts his back to me — he looks as if he wants to crouch and protect himself.

The first time I saw Corrigan, I was looking out the window of the nursing home. He was there, through the dirty panes, loading up Sheila and Paolo and Albee and the others. He had been in a fight. There were cuts and bruises on his face and he looked at first glance like exactly the sort of man I should stay away from. And yet there was something about him that was loyal — that’s the only word I knew, fidelidad—he seemed to be loyal to them because maybe he knew what their lives were. He used wooden planks to roll the wheelchairs up into the van and he strapped them in. He had pasted his van with peace and justice stickers: I thought maybe he had a sense of humor to go along with his violence. I found out later that the cuts and the bruises were from the pimps — he took their worst punches and never hit back. He was loyal to the girls too, and to his God, but even he knew that the loyalty had to break somewhere.

After a moment he turns to me, runs his finger along my lips, then out of the blue he says: “Sorry.”

We were hasty last night. He fell asleep before I did. A woman might think it thrilling to make love to a man who had never in his life made love before, and it was, the thought of it, the movement towards it, but it was as if I was making love to a number of lost years, and the truth is that he cried, he put his head on my shoulder, and he could not keep hold of my gaze, couldn’t bear it.

A man who holds a vow that long is entitled to anything he wants.

I told him that I loved him and that I’d always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.

He wanted to repeat the attempt at lovemaking. Each time another surprise and doubt, as if he did not trust himself, what was happening.

But there is a moment when he wakes now — on this day that I will remember over and over again — when he turns to me and there’s still a hint of wine on his breath.

“So,” he says, “you took my shirt off too.”

“It’s a trick.”

“A good one,” he says.

My hand travels across the sheet to meet him.

“We have to cover the mirilla,” I say.

“The what?”

“The mirilla, the peephole, the spy thing, whatever it is called.”

There is a spyhole in every door of my apartment. The landlord, it seems, once got a good deal on these doors, and hung them all around. You can look from one room to the other and the curved glass makes it either narrow or wide, depending on what side you happen to be on. If you look into my kitchen, the world is tiny. If you look out, it stretches. The bedroom spyhole faces inwards, where Jacobo and Eliana can look in upon me while I am sleeping. They call it the carnival door. It seems to them, through the distortion, as if I lie in the biggest bed in the world. I puff myself up on the world’s largest pillows. The walls curve around me. The first day we moved in I stuck my toes out from under the covers. Mama, your feet are bigger than your head! M’ijo said that the world inside my bedroom seemed stretchy. M’ija said it was made of chewing gum.

Corrigan shifts sideways out of bed. His thin, bare back, his long legs. He steps to the closet. He puts his black shirt on a hanger, wedges the metal end of the hanger in the gap between door and frame. The dangling black shirt covers the spyhole in the door. From outside, the sound of the television.

“We should lock it too,” I say.

“¿Estás segura?”

These small Spanish phrases he uses sound like stones in his mouth, his accent so terrible it makes me laugh.

“Won’t they worry?”

“Not if we don’t.”

He returns to the bed, naked, embarrassed, covering himself. He slips beneath the covers, nudges against my shoulder. Singing. Off-key. “Can you tell me how-to-get, how-to-get to Sesame Street?”

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.

I do not even hear the pounding at the door, but Corrigan stops and grins and kisses me, a rim of sweat at the top of his brow.

“That’ll be Elmo.”

“I think it’s Grouchy.”

I step out of bed and remove the shirt from the hanger in front of the spyhole, look down. I see the tops of their heads: their eyes look tiny and confused. I pull Corrigan’s shirt on and open the door. Bend down to eye level. Jacobo holds an old blanket in his hands. Eliana an empty plastic glass. They are hungry they say, first in English and then in Spanish.

“Just a minute,” I tell them. I am a terrible mother. I should not do this. I close the door again, but open it just as quickly, rush out into the kitchen, fill two bowls with cereal, two glasses of water.

“Quiet now, niños. Promise me.”

I step back to the bedroom, glance at my children through the spyhole, in front of the television, spilling cereal on the carpet. I cross the room and jump on the bed. I throw the sheet to the floor, and then I fall beside Corrigan, pull him close. He is laughing, his body at ease.

We rush, him and I. We make love again. Afterwards, he showers in my bathroom.

“Tell me something magnificent, Corrigan.”

“Like what?”

“Come on, it’s your turn.”

“Well, I just learned to play the piano.”

“There’s no piano.”

“Exactly. I just sat down at it and could immediately play every note.”

“Ha!”

It’s true. That is how it feels. I go into the bathroom where he is showering, pull back the curtain, kiss his wet lips, then pull on my robe and go out to look after the children. My bare feet on the curling linoleum floor. My painted toes. I’m vaguely aware that every fiber in me is still making love to Corrigan. Everything feels new, the tips of my fingers alive to every touch, a stove top.

He comes out of the room with his hair so wet that at first I think the gray at the side temples has disappeared. He is wearing his dark trousers and his black shirt since he has nothing else to change into. He has shaved. I want to tell him off for using my razor. His skin looks shiny and raw.

A week later — after the accident — I will come home and tap out his hairs at the side of my sink, arrange them in patterns, obsessively, over and over. I will count them out to reconstitute them. I will gather them against the side of the sink and try to create his portrait there.

I saw the X-rays in the hospital. The swollen heart-shadow from the blunt chest trauma. His heart muscle getting squeezed by the blood and fluid. The jugular veins, massively enlarged. His heart went in and out of gallop. The doctor stuck a needle into his chest. I knew the routine from my years as a nurse: drain the pericardium. The blood and fluid were taken out, but Corrigan’s heart kept on swelling. His brother was saying prayers, over and over. They took another X-ray. The jugular veins were massive, they were squeezing him shut. His whole body had gone cold.

But, for now, the children just look up and say: “Hi, Corrie,” as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Behind them, the television plays. Count to seven. Sing along with me. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.

“niños, apaguen la tele.”

“Later, Mom.”

Corrigan sits at the small wooden table at the rear of the television set. He has his back to me. My heart shudders every time he sits near the portrait of my dead husband. He has never asked me to move the photo. He never will. He knows the reason it is there. No matter that my husband was a brute who died in the war in the mountains near Quezaltenango — it makes no difference — all children need a father. Besides, it is just a photo. It takes no precedence. It does not threaten Corrigan. He knows my story. It is contained within this moment.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt. Corrigan glances back at me, smiles. He fingers one of my medical textbooks. He even opens it to a random page and scans it, but I know he isn’t reading at all. Sketches of bodies, of bones, of cartilage.

He skips through the pages as if looking for more space.

“Really,” he says, “that’d be a good idea.”

“What?”

“To get a piano and learn how to play it.”

“Yes, and put it where?”

“On top of the television set. Right, Jacobo? Hey, Bo, that would work, wouldn’t it?”

“Nah,” says Jacobo.

Corrigan leans across the sofa and knuckles my son’s dark hair.

“Maybe we’ll get a piano with a television set inside it.”

“Nah.”

“Maybe we’ll get a piano and TV and a chocolate machine all in one.”

“Nah.”

“Television,” says Corrigan, smiling, “the perfect drug.”

For the first time in years I wish for a garden. We could go outside in the cool fresh air and sit away from the children, find our own space, shorten the nearby buildings into blades of grass, have the stonemasons carve flowers at our feet. I have often dreamed of bringing him back to Guatemala. There was a place my childhood friends and I used to go, a butterfly grove, down the dirt road towards Zacapa. The path dipped through the bushes. The trees opened into the grove, where the bushes grew low. The flowers were in the shape of a bell, red and plentiful. The girls sucked on the sweet flowers while the boys tore the butterflies apart to see how they were made. Some of the wings were so colorful they could only be poisonous. When I left my home and arrived in New York, I rented a small apartment in Queens, and, one day, distraught, I got a tattoo on my ankle, the wings spread wide. It is one of the stupidest things I have ever done. I hated myself for the cheapness I had become.

“You’re daydreaming,” Corrigan says to me.

“Am I?”

My head against his shoulder, he laughs as if the laughter wants to travel a good distance, down through my body also.

“Corrie?”

“Uh-huh?”

“You like my tattoo?”

He prods me playfully. “I can live with it,” he says.

“Tell me the truth.”

“No, I like it, I do.”

“Mentiroso,” I say. He creases his forehead. “Fibber.”

“I’m not fibbing. Kids! Kids, do you think I’m fibbing?”

Neither of them says a word.

“See?” says Corrigan. “I told you.”

My desire for him now is raw and sharp. I lean forward and kiss his lips. It is the first time we have kissed in front of the children, but they do not seem to notice. A sliver of cold at my neck.

There are times — though not often — when I wish that I didn’t have children at all. Just make them disappear, God, for an hour or so, no more, just an hour, that’s all. Just do it quickly and out of my sight, have them go up in a puff of smoke and be gone, then bring them back fully intact, as if they didn’t leave at all. But just let me be alone, with him, this man, Corrigan, for a tiny while, just me and him, together.

I leave my head on his shoulder. He touches the side of my face absently. What can be on his mind? There are so many things to pull him away from me. Sometimes, I feel he is made of a magnet. He bounces and spins in midair around me. I go to the kitchen and make him café. He likes it very strong and hot with three spoonfuls of sugar. He lifts the spoon out and licks it triumphantly, as if the spoon has gotten him through an ordeal. He breathes on the spoon and then hangs it off the end of his nose, so it dangles there, absurdly.

He turns to me. “What do you think, Adie?”

“Que payaso.”

“Gracias,” he says in his awful accent.

He walks over in front of the television set with the spoon still hanging off the end of his nose. It falls and he catches it and then he breathes on it once more, does his trick. The children explode in laughter. “Let me, let me, let me.”

These are the little things I am learning. He is ridiculous enough to hang spoons off the end of his nose. This, and he likes to blow his café cool, three short blows, one long blow. This, and he has no taste for cereal. This, and that he’s good at fixing toasters.

The children return to the television show. He sits back and finishes his café. He stares at the far wall. I know he is thinking again of his God and his church and his loss if he decides to leave the Order. It is like his own shadow has leaped up to get him. I know all this because he smiles at me and it is a smile that contains everything, including a shrug, and then he suddenly gets up from the table, stretches, goes to the couch and falls over the back of it, sits between the children, as if they can protect him. He drapes his arms around them, over their shoulders. I like him and dislike him for this, both at once. I feel a desire for him again, in my mouth now, sharp like salt.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve work to do.”

“Don’t go, Corrie. Just hang around awhile. Work can wait.”

“Yeah,” he says, as if he might believe it.

He pulls the children closer to him and they allow it. I want him to make up his mind. I want to hear him say that he can have both God and me, also my children and my little clapboard house. I want him to remain here — exactly here — on the couch, without moving.

I will always wonder what it was, what that moment of beauty was, when he whispered it to me, when we found him smashed up in the hospital, what it was he was saying when he whispered into the dark that he had seen something he could not forget, a jumble of words, a man, a building, I could not quite make it out. I can only hope that in the last minute he was at peace. It might have been an ordinary thought, or it might have been that he had made up his mind that he would leave the Order, and that nothing would stop him now, and he would come home to me, or maybe it was nothing at all, just a simple moment of beauty, a little thing hardly worth talking about, a random meeting, or a word he had with Jazzlyn or Tillie, a joke, or maybe he had decided that, yes, he could lose me now, that he could stay with his church and do his work, or maybe there was nothing on his mind at all, perhaps he was just happy, or in agony, and the morphine had scattered him — there are all these things and there are more — it is impossible to know. I hold in confusion the last moments of his language.

There was a man walked the air, I heard about that. And Corrigan had spent the night sleeping in his van down near the courthouse. He got a ticket for it. On John Street. Perhaps he woke up, stumbled out of his van in the early morning, and saw the man high up there, challenging God, a man above the cross rather than below — who knows, I cannot tell. Or maybe it was the court case, that the walker got off free, while Tillie was sent away for eight months, maybe that annoyed him — these things are tangled, there are no answers, maybe he thought she deserved another chance, he was angry, she shouldn’t have gone to jail. Or maybe something else got to him.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along — trying to wound his faith in order to test it — and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

In my worst moments I am convinced that he was rushing home to say good-bye, that he was driving too fast because he made up his mind, and it was finished, but in my best, my very best, he comes up on the doorstep, smiling, with his arms spread wide, in order to stay.

And so this is how I will leave him as much, and as often, as I can. It was — it is — a Thursday morning a week before the crash, and it fits in the space of every other morning I wake into. He sits between Eliana and Jacobo, on the couch, his arms spread wide, the buttons of his black shirt open, his gaze fixed forward. Nothing will ever really take him from the couch. It is just a simple brown thing, with mismatching cushions, and a hole in the armrest where it has been worn through, a few coins from his pocket fallen down into the gaps, and I will take it with me now wherever I go, to Zacapa, or the nursing home, or any other place I happen to find.

ALL HAIL AND HALLELUJAH

I KNEW ALMOST RIGHT OFF. Them two babies needed looking after. It was a deep-down feeling that must’ve come from long ago. Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.

I grew up in southern Missouri. The only girl with five brothers. It was the years of the Great Depression. Things were falling apart, but we held together as best we could. The house we lived in was a small A-frame, like most houses on the colored side of town. The unpainted timbers sagged around the porch. On one side of the house was the long parlor, furnished with cane chairs, a purple divan, and a long table, rough-hewn from the bed of a broken cart. Two large oak trees shaded the other side of the house, where the bedrooms were built to face east into sunrise. I hung buttons and nails from the branches, a wind chime. Inside, the floors of the house were unevenly spaced. At night, raindrops fell on the metal roof.

My father used to say he liked to sit back and listen to the whole place make noise.

The days I recall finest were about as ordinary as they come — playing hopscotch on the slab of broken concrete, following my brothers through the cornfields, trailing my schoolbag through the dust. My older brothers and I read a lot of books back then — a bookmobile came around our street once every few months, staying fifteen minutes. When the sun bubbled yellow on the broken fence we ran out from the house, down towards the back of Chaucer’s grocery store, to play in a stream that strikes me now as paltry, but back then was a waterway to contend with. We’d sail steamships down that mighty creek, and we’d have Nigger Jim whopping on Tom Sawyer for all he was worth. Huck Finn was not one we knew quite what to do with, and we mostly left him out of our adventures. The paper boats went around the corner and away.

My father was a house painter most of the time, but the thing he loved to do was hand-paint signs on the doorways of businesses in town. The names of important men on frosted glass. Gold-leaf lettering and careful silver curlicues. He got occasional work with the trading companies, the mills, and the small-town detective agencies. Every now and then a museum or an evangelical church wanted its welcome signs touched up. His business was nearly all in the white part of town, but when he worked on our side of the river we would go along with him and hold his ladder, hand him brushes and cloths. He painted wooden signs that swung in the wind for real estate and riverbed clams and sandwiches that cost a nickel. He was a short man who dressed impeccably for every job, no matter where it was. He wore a creased shirt with a starched collar and a silver tie pin. His trousers were cuffed at the bottom and he was happy to say that if he looked hard enough he could see the reflection of his work in his shoes. He never mentioned a single thing to us about money, or the lack of it, and when the Depression really kicked in, he simply went around to all of his old jobs and touched up the paint in the hope that the business would stay alive, and they might slip him a dollar or two when times were good.

The lack of money didn’t bother my mother too much — she was a woman who had known the worst of times and best of times: she was old enough to have heard all the slave stories firsthand, and wise enough to see the value of getting out from under its yoke, or at least as far as anyone could get out from it in southern Missouri in those days.

She had been given, as a memento, the exchange slip from when my grandmother had been sold, and it was something she carried to remind her of where she came from, but when she finally got a chance to sell it, she did — to a museum curator who came from New York. She used the money to buy herself a secondhand sewing machine. She had other jobs too, but mostly she worked as a cleaner in the newspaper office in the center of town. She came home with papers from all over the country and at night read us the stories she considered the good ones, stories that opened up the windows of our house, simple tales about climbing a tree for cats, or boy scouts helping the fire brigade, or colored men fighting for what was good and right, what our mother called justful.

She wasn’t from the Marcus Garvey choir: she held no rancor nor any desire to go back, but she wasn’t averse to thinking that a colored woman could get herself a better place in the world.

My mother had the most beautiful face I knew, perhaps the most beautiful one I’ve ever known: dark as darkness, full, perfectly oval, with eyes that looked like my father had painted them, and a mouth that had a slight downturn of sadness, and the brightest teeth, so that when she smiled, it threw her whole face into another relief. She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we’d never seen.

Up until the age of eight I was allowed to sleep alongside my brothers, and, even after that, our mother would still put me in the bed beside them and read us all to sleep. Then she slipped her wide arms under me and carried me to my own mattress, which, because of the layout of the house, was in the narrow hallway outside her bedroom. I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don’t begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going.

On an August evening when I was eleven, my father walked through the door with a splatter of paint on his shoes. My mother, who was baking bread, just stared at him. He had never before, not once, ruined his clothes while out painting. She dropped a teaspoon to the ground. A little patch of melted butter spread on the floor. “What in the name of Luther happened t’you?” she whispered. He stood pale and drawn, and gripped the edge of the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. He seemed like he was swallowing to steady his voice. He faltered a little and his knees buckled. She said: “Oh, Lord, it’s a stroke.” She put her arms around him.

My father’s narrow face in her big hands. His eyes skipping past hers. She looked up and shouted at me: “Gloria, go get the doctor.”

I slid out the door in my bare feet.

It was a dirt road in those days and I can recall the texture of each step — it sometimes feels that I’m running that road still. The doctor was sleeping off a league of hangovers. His wife said he couldn’t be disturbed, and she slapped me twice on either side of the face when I tried to break past her up the stairs. But I was a girl with a good set of lungs. I screamed good and loud. He surprised me when he came to the head of the stairs, peered down, and then got his little black bag. I rode for my very first time in a motorcar, back to our house, where my father was still sitting at the kitchen table, clutching his arm. It was, it turned out, a mild enough heart attack, not a stroke, and it didn’t change my father much, but it took the wind from my mother’s heart. She wouldn’t let him out of her sight: she was afraid he’d collapse at any moment. She lost her job at the newspaper when she insisted that he had to come sit with her as she cleaned: the editors couldn’t abide the thought of a colored man sifting through their papers, though they saw nothing wrong with a woman doing it.

One of the most beautiful things I ever saw — still, to this day — was the sight of my father getting ready to go fishing one afternoon with some friends he’d made at the local corner store. He bumbled his way around the house, packing. My mother didn’t want him to carry any of it, not even the rod and tackle, for fear it might strain him. He slammed more tackle into the picnic basket and shouted that he’d carry any damn thing he wanted. He even loaded the basket with extra beer and tuna-fish sandwiches for his friends. When a whistle came from outside, he turned and kissed her at the door, tapped her rear end, and whispered something in her ear. Mama snapped her head back and laughed, and I figured years later that it must’ve been something good and rude. She watched him go until he was almost out of sight beyond the corner, then she came back inside and got on her knees — she wasn’t a godly woman, mind; she used to say that the heart’s future was in a spadeful of dirt — but she began praying for rain, an all-out serious prayer that might bring my father back quickly so she could be with him.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it’s hard to think you’ll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it’s just so comfortable you don’t want to have to develop your own.

I will not for the life of me forget the sign they painted for me a few years later, after I’d lost two of my brothers in the Second World War over Anzio, and after the bombs had been dropped on Japan, after the speeches and the glad-handing. I was on my way up north to attend college in Syracuse, New York, and they had written on a little sign with my father’s favorite paint, the precious gold that he kept for high-class jobs, and they held it up at the bus station, the placard built strong like a kite with a diamond-shaped back so it wouldn’t flap in the wind: COME HOME

SOON, GLORIA.

I didn’t come home soon. I didn’t come home at all. Not then, at least. I stayed up north, not so much running wild as having my head in books, and then my heart in a quick marriage, and then my soul in a sling, and then my head and heart in my own three little boys, and letting the years slip by, like folk do, watching my ankles puff up, and the next time I truly came home, to Missouri, years later, I was freedom-riding on the buses, and hearing stories about the police dragging out the water cannons, and I could hear my mother’s voice in my ears: Gloria, you’ve done nothing all this time, nothing at all, where have you been, what have you done, why didn’t you come back, didn’t you know I was praying for rain?

I’VE GOT A BODY NOW, near thirty years later, that people think is church-going. I’ve got dresses that pull tight in the rear and keep my bosom from swaying. I thread the left shoulder of my blackest dress with a gold-colored brooch. I carry a white handbag with a looping handle. I wear hose stockings right up to my knees and sometimes I pull on a set of white gloves that go high to my elbows.

I’ve got a voice, too, with an undertow, so people look at me and think that I’m about to break into some old cane-field spiritual, but the truth is I haven’t seen God since those early days when I left Missouri and I’d rather go home to my room in the Bronx and pull the bedsheets high and listen to Vivaldi slide through the stereo speakers than listen to any preacher ranting on about how to save the world.

In any case, I can hardly fit in pews anymore: it’s never been comfortable to slide my body through.

I lost two marriages and three boys. They left in different ways, all of which broke my heart, but God isn’t about to patch any of it back together. I know I made a fool of myself at times, and I know God made a fool of me just as often. I gave up on Him without too much guilt. I tried doing the right thing most of my life, but it wasn’t in the Lord’s house. Still and all, I know that churchy is the impression I’ve come around to giving. They look at me and listen and think I’m leading them towards the gospel. Everyone has their own curse, and I suppose — for a while at least — Claire saw me fitting in that peculiar box.

She wasn’t a woman with whom I had any dispute. She seemed perfectly fine to me, as gentle-wayed as they come. It wasn’t as if she tried to beat me upside the head with her tears. They came natural, like anyone else. She was embarrassed too, I could tell, with her curtains, her china, her husband painted on the wall, the teacup rattling on her saucer. She looked like she could fly out the window to Park Avenue at any time, with the streak of gray in her hair, her thin, bare arms, her long neck with blue veins. There were university diplomas on the wall in the corridor, and anyone could see that she was born on the right side of the river. She kept her house neat and scrubbed and she had a tiny southern lilt to her voice, so if there was any one of the ladies I felt a kinship with, it was her.

That morning glided by, like most good mornings do.

We had our flipflap with the tightrope man and then we wandered down from the roof and ate the doughnuts and sipped the tea and rattled on some. The living room was flooded with light. The furniture had a deep sheen to it. The ceilings were high and trimmed with a fancy molding. On the shelf, a small four-legged clock in a glass bell. My flowers were sitting in the center of the table. They had already begun to open a little in the heat.

The others were giddy with Park Avenue, I could tell. When Claire disappeared to the kitchen, they kept picking up their cups and glancing at the bottom to see what sort of stamp was there. Janet even lifted a glass ashtray. There were two cigarette butts squeezed into it. She held it up in the air to see if she could find some mark there, like it might have come from Queen Elizabeth herself. I could hardly contain my smile. “Well, you never know,” said Janet, in a fierce whisper. She had a way of flipping her hair sideways without hardly moving her head. She placed the ashtray back down on the table and gave a little sniff as if to say, How dare you. She rearranged her hair with another flick and looked across at Jacqueline. They had the white-woman language going between them, I’ve seen it enough times to know, it’s all in the eyes, they dip a little to the side, they hold the gaze a moment, and then they look away. They got centuries of practice at it — I’m surprised some people aren’t frozen in it.

I glanced towards the kitchen, but Claire was still beyond the louvered door — I could see her thin outline, bustling away, getting more ice. The snap of an ice tray. A running tap.

“Be with you in a jiffy,” she called from the kitchen.

Janet stood and tiptoed over to the portrait on the wall. He was painted very fine, the husband, like a photograph, sitting in an antique chair with his jacket and blue tie on. It was one of those paintings where you’d hardly notice a brushstroke. He was looking out at us very seriously. Bald, with a sharp nose, and a little hint of wattle at his neck. Janet slid up next to the portrait and made a face. “Looks like he’s got a stick up his rear end,” she whispered. It was funny, and true, I suppose, but I couldn’t help but feel a tightening in my chest, thinking that Claire was going to come out of the kitchen at any moment. I said to myself, Say nothing, say nothing, say nothing. Janet reached across and put her hand on the frame of the painting. Marcia had a wicked smile on her face. Jacqueline was biting her lip. All three of them were on the point of bursting out in laughter.

Janet’s hand moved up along the frame and hovered over his thigh. Marcia threw herself back on the couch and clasped her mouth as if it was the funniest thing ever to happen. Jacqueline said: “Don’t excite the poor man.”

A hush and a few more giggles. I wondered what might happen if I were the one to get up and touch his knee, run my hand along the inside of his leg — imagine that — but I stayed rooted, of course, to the chair.

We heard the push of the louvered door and Claire was out and about, a big jug of ice water in her hands.

Janet stood away from the painting, Marcia turned into the couch and pretended to cough, and Jacqueline lit herself another cigarette. Claire held the plate out to me. Two bagels and three doughnuts. One with glazing, one with sprinkles, one plain.

“If I have another doughnut, Claire,” I said, “I’ll spill out into the street.”

That was like letting the air out of a balloon and allowing it to fly around the room. I didn’t mean for it to be that funny, but by all accounts it was, and the room let out a big breath. We soon fell to talking again with our serious faces on — truth, it was good talk, honest talk, remembering our boys, how and what they were, and what they went and fought for. The clock ticked on the shelf near the bookcase and then Claire walked us down the corridor, past the paintings and the university diplomas, to her boy’s room.

She pushed open the door like it was the first time she’d done it in years. It creaked and swung on its hinges.

The room looked as if it had hardly been touched. Pencils, sharpeners, papers, baseball charts. Rows of books on the shelves. An oak dresser on tall legs. A Mickey Mantle poster above the bed. A water stain on the ceiling. A creak in the floorboards. It surprised me some, the smallness of the room — it just about fit all five of us. “Let me crack the window,” said Claire. I was careful to take the end of the bed where there was most support — I didn’t want it creaking. I put my hands down on the mattress so it wouldn’t bounce and I leaned against the wall where I could feel the cool of the plaster against my back. Janet sat on the beanbag chair — she hardly made a dent in it — and the others took the far end of the bed, while Claire herself took a small white chair by the window where the breeze came in.

“Here we are,” she said.

The sound in her voice like we’d come to the end of a very long journey.

“Well, it’s lovely,” said Jacqueline.

“It really is,” said Marcia.

The ceiling fan spun and the dust settled like little mosquitoes around us. Along the shelves there were lots of radio parts and flat boards with electronic gizmos, wires hanging down. Big batteries. Three screens, their backs open and tubes showing.

“He liked his televisions?” I said.

“Oh, they’re bits of computers,” said Claire.

She reached across and picked up a photo of him in a silver frame on his table, passed it around. The frame was heavy and it had a MADE IN EN-GLAND sticker on the back velvet. In the photo Joshua was a thin little white boy with pimples on his chin. Dark glasses and short hair. Eyes that weren’t comfortable looking in the camera. He wasn’t in uniform either. She said it was taken just before his graduation from high school, when he was valedictorian. Jacqueline rolled her eyes again but Claire didn’t notice — every word she said about her son seemed to spread the smile on her face. She picked up a snow globe from his desk, shook it up and down. The globe was from Miami, and I thought, There’s someone with a touch of funny — snow falling over Florida. But when she turned it upside down it was like there was some other gravity in the world: she waited until every little flake had settled and then she turned it again and she told us all about him, Joshua, where he went to school, the notes he liked on the piano, what he was doing for his country, how he read all the books on the shelves, how he even built himself his own adding machine, went to college, then out to some park somewhere — he was the sort of boy who was once liable to put another man on the Moon.

I had asked her once if she thought Joshua and my boys were friends, and she said yes, but I knew nothing was probably further from the truth.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

No shame in saying either that I let her rattle on, even encouraged her to get it all out. Years ago, when I was at university in Syracuse, I developed a manner of saying things that made people happy, kept them talking so I didn’t have to say much myself, I guess now I’d say that I was building a wall to keep myself safe. In the rooms of wealthy folk, I had perfected my hard southern habit of Mercy and Lord and Landsakes. They were the words I fell back on for another form of silence, the words I’ve always fallen back on, my reliables, they’ve been my last resort for I don’t know how long. And sure enough, I fell into the same ditch in Claire’s house. She spun off into her own little world of wires and computers and electric gadgets, and I spun right back.

Not that she noticed, or seemed to notice anyway; she just peeked up at me from under her gray streak, and smiled, like she was surprised to be talking and nothing could stop her now. She was a picture of pure happiness, collecting one thought after the other, circling around, going back, explaining another thing about the electronics, detailing another about Joshua’s time in school, rattling on about a piano in Florida, doing her own peculiar hopscotch through that boy’s life.

It grew hot in the room, all five of us stuffed together. The hand of the clock by the bedside table didn’t move anymore, maybe the batteries were expired, but it got to ticking in my mind. I could feel myself drifting. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep myself from nodding off. Sure enough, it wasn’t just me, we were all getting a little itchy, I could feel it, the shifting of bodies, and the way Jacqueline was breathing and the little cough that came every now and then from Janet, and Marcia wiping her brow with her little handkerchief.

I could feel a case of pins and needles coming on. I kept trying to move my toes and tighten my calf muscles — I guess I was grimacing a little, moving my body, making too much noise.

Claire smiled at me but it was one of those smiles that has a little zipper in it, a little too tight at the edges. I gave her a smile back, and tried hard not to make it seem like I was fidgety and awkward both. It wasn’t as if she was boring me, it had nothing at all to do with what she was telling me, just my body giving me a hard time. I tightened my toes again, but that didn’t work, and as quiet as possible I started knocking my knee off the edge of the bed, trying to get that half-gone feeling out of my leg. Claire gave me a look like she was disappointed, but it wasn’t me who stood up at all; it was Marcia who finally stretched herself up in the air and flat-out yawned — yawned, like a child pulling a piece of chewing gum from her mouth, a thing that said, Look at me, I’m bored, I’m going to yawn and nobody’s going to stop me.

“Excuse me,” she said with a half-apology

There was a lockdown for a moment. It was like seeing the air fall apart so that you could recognize all the separate things that go together to make it.

Janet leaned across and tapped Claire on the knee and said: “Go on with your story.”

“I forget what I was saying,” she said. “What was I saying?”

Nobody stirred.

“I know I was saying something important,” she said.

“It was about Joshua,” said Jacqueline.

Marcia glared across the room.

“I can’t for the life of me recall what it was,” said Claire.

She smiled another one of her quick zipper smiles, like her brain was refusing to accept the bold-faced evidence, and took a deep breath and jumped right in. Soon she was traveling on that highballing Joshua train again — he was at the cusp of something so entirely new, she said, that the world would never quite know what it missed, he was bringing machines to a place where they would do good things for man and mankind, and someday these machines would talk to each other just like people, even our wars would be fought through machines, it might be impossible to understand, but believe me, she said, it was the direction the world was going.

Marcia stood up again and stretched near the doorway. Her second yawn was not as bad as the first, but then she said: “Has anyone got the timetable for the ferry?”

Claire stopped cold.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Sorry. I just don’t want to get caught up in any rush hour,” said Marcia.

“It’s lunchtime.”

“I know, but it gets very busy sometimes.”

“Oh, it does, yes,” piped Janet.

“Sometimes you have to wait in line for hours.”

“Hours.”

“Even on Wednesdays.”

“We could order something in,” said Claire. “There’s a new Chinese place on Lexington.”

“Really, no. Thank you.”

I could see the red rising to Claire’s cheeks. She tried to smile again, a neutral smile, and I thought of that old yea-saying line A little bit of poison helped her along, from an old song my mother had taught me as a child.

Claire was pulling at her dress, straightening it, making sure it wasn’t puckered. Then she picked the photo of her Joshua off the window ledge, and got to her feet.

“Well, I can’t thank you enough for coming,” she said. “It’s been I don’t know how long since someone has been in this room.”

Her smile could’ve broken glass.

Marcia smiled a hammer blow right back. Jacqueline wiped her brow like she’d just been through the longest ordeal. The room filled with hems and haws and pauses and coughs, but Claire still clutched the photo frame right into her dress. Everyone began saying what a wonderful morning it was, and thank you so much for the hospitality, and wasn’t Joshua such a brave guy, and yes we’ll meet as soon as we can, and wasn’t it a wonder that he was so smart, and Lord give me the address of the bakery that made the doughnuts, and whatever other specimen of word-fill we could find to plug the silence around us.

“Don’t forget your umbrella, Janet.”

“I was born with my umbrella in hand.”

“It won’t rain, will it?”

“Impossible to get a cab when it rains.”

In the corridor Marcia adjusted her lipstick in the mirror and hung her handbag on her wrist.

“Next time I’m here, remind me to bring a tent.”

“A what?”

“I’ll camp right here.”

“Me too,” said Janet. “It’s really a glorious apartment, Claire.”

“A penthouse,” said Marcia.

All sorts of lies were flying through the air, going back and forth, colliding with each other, and even Marcia was afraid to be the first to turn the handle of the door. She stood by the hat stand with the ball-and-claw feet. Her shoulder touched against it. The feet tottered and the handles swayed.

“I’ll call you first thing next week.”

“That would be wonderful,” said Claire.

“We’ll begin again in my house.”

“Great idea — I can’t wait.”

“We’ll put out yellow balloons,” said Janet. “Remember those?”

“Did we have yellow balloons?”

“In the trees.”

“I can’t recall,” said Marcia. “My mind’s shot.” Then she leaned across and whispered something in Janet’s ear and they both giggled.

We could hear the clack outside from the elevator going up and down.

“Delicate question?” said Marcia. She had a guilty look on her face. She touched Claire’s forearm.

“Please, please.”

“Should we tip the elevator boy?”

“Oh, no, of course not.”

I took a quick last look in the hallway mirror, and checked the clasp of my handbag, when all of a sudden Claire tugged my elbow and brought me down the corridor a little ways.

“Would you like some extra bagels, Gloria?” she said for all to hear.

“Oh, I’ve got enough bagels,” I said.

“Just stay here a little while,” she said under her breath.

There was a little rim of moist at her eye.

“Really, Claire, I got enough bagels.”

“Stay awhile,” she whispered.

“Claire,” I said, trying to move away, but she had a hold of my elbow like she was clutching a last piece of twine.

“After everyone leaves?”

I could see the little tremble going in her nostrils. She had the type of face when you look closely at it, you think it’s gone all a sudden old. There was a pleading in her voice. Janet and Jacqueline and Marcia were down the far end of the corridor, tickling their ribs now at one of the paintings on the wall.

Sure, I didn’t want to leave Claire there with all those leftover crumbs on the carpet, and the crushed-out cigarettes in the ashtrays and I suppose I could’ve easily stayed, rolled up my sleeves, and started washing the dishes and cleaning the floor and tucking the lemons away in the Tupper-ware, but the thing is, I had the thought that we didn’t go freedom-riding years ago to clean apartments on Park Avenue, no matter how nice she was, no matter how much she smiled. I had nothing against her. Her eyes were big and wide and generous. I was pretty sure I could’ve just sat down on the sofa and she would’ve served me hand and foot, but we didn’t go marching for that either.

“Mercy,” I said.

I couldn’t help it.

“Ah-hem,” went Jacqueline from the front door, like she was clearing her throat for speech.

“Coca-Cola one two three,” said Marcia.

I could hear the tip-tap of Janet’s shoes against the wooden floors. Jacqueline gave another little cough. Marcia was adjusting her hair in the mirror and muttering something under her breath.

There it was, I might never have believed it at any other time in my life — three white women wanting me to leave with them, and one of them trying to get me to hold back with her. I was flat-out dilemma’d, tied to a galloping horse. My heart began going hammer and tongs. There was moistness gathering in Claire’s eyes and she was looking at me like I had to decide quickly. One choice was, I went with the others, down the elevator and out into the street, where we could stand and say our goodbyes. The next choice was I stayed with Claire. I didn’t want to lose our run of mornings by playing favorites, no matter how good-hearted she was, or how fancy her apartment, and so I stepped back and flat-out lied to her.

“Well, I got to make my way home to the Bronx, Claire, I got a church appointment in the afternoon, the choir.”

I felt plain-out awkward for the way I was lying. She said of course, yes, she understood, how silly of her, and then she kissed me gentle on the cheek. Her lips brushed against the side of my hair clip and she said: “Don’t worry.”

I don’t know the words for how she looked at me — there are few words — it was a welling up, a rising, a lifting up on the surface from the water, it was the sort of thing that could not be told. It felt for a moment that something had unthreaded down my spine, and my skin got tight, but what could I say? She grabbed hold of my wrist and tweaked it, saying a second time that she understood and she didn’t mean to take me away from the choir. I stood away from her. It was over then, I was sure, happily solved, and the corridor brightened up for me and a few more smiles went around among us, and we declared we’d see each other at Marcia’s next time — though it felt to me that there’d probably never be another time, that was the heartbreaker, I had a good idea that we’d let it slip away now, we had all had our chance, we’d brought our boys back to life for a little while — and we stepped out into the hallway, where Claire pressed the button for the elevator.

The iron gate was opened by the elevator boy. I was last to step in, and Claire pulled me back by the elbow and brought me close again, a sadness settling over her face.

She whispered: “You know, I’d be happy to pay you, Gloria.”

MY GRANDMOTHER WAS a slave. Her mother too. My great-grandfather was a slave who ended up buying himself out from under Missouri. He carried a mind-whip with him just in case he forgot. I know a thing or two about what people want to buy, and how they think they can buy it. I know the marks that got left on women’s ankles. I know the kneeling-down scars you get in the field. I heard the stories about the gavel coming down on children. I read the books where the coffin ships groaned. I heard about the shackles they put on your wrists. I was told about what happened the first night a girl came to bloom. I heard the way they like their sheets tight on the bed so you can bounce a coin off them. I’ve listened to the southern men in their crisp white shirts and ties. I’ve seen the fists pumping in the air. I joined in the songs. I was on the buses where they lifted their little children to snarl in the window. I know the smell of CS gas and it’s not as sweet as some folks say.

If you start forgetting you’re already lost.

Claire panicked the moment she said it. It was like all of her face whirlpooled down to her eyes. She got sucked up into her own unexpected words. The bottom of her eyelids trembled a second. She opened a limp, resigned palm, and stared at it as if to say that she had disappeared from herself and all she had left was this strange hand she was holding out in the air.

I stepped quickly into the elevator.

The elevator boy said: “Have a nice afternoon, Mrs. Soderberg.”

I could see her eyes as the door was pulled across: the tender resignation.

The door slid shut. Marcia sighed with relief. A giggle came from Jacqueline. Janet made a shushing sound and stared ahead at the elevator boy’s neck, but I could tell she was holding back a grin. I just thought to myself that I wasn’t going to fall into their game. They wanted to go off and whisper about it. You know, I’d be happy to pay you, Gloria. I was sure they had heard it, that they’d dissect it to death, maybe in some coffee shop, or some luncheonette, but I couldn’t stand the thought of any more talking, any more doors closing, any more rattle of cups. I would just leave them behind, go for a walk, a little way uptown, clear my head, glide a little, put one foot in front of the other, and just mash this over in my mind.

Downstairs, the light was pouring clear across the tiles. The doorman stopped us and said: “Excuse me, ladies, but Mrs. Soderberg called down on the intercom and she’d like to see you again a moment.”

Marcia gave one of her long sighs, and Jacqueline said how maybe she was bringing us some leftover bagels, like it was the funniest thing in the world, and I felt the heat pulse up in my cheeks.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Ooh, somebody’s hot under the collar,” said Marcia. She had sidled up beside me and laid her hand on my forearm.

“I’ve got choir practice to go to.”

“Lordy,” she said, her eyes reduced to a slit.

I stared right back at her, then stepped out the door, up the avenue, the burn of their eyes on my back.

“Gloria,” they called. “Glor-ia.”

All around me, people were walking surefooted and shiny down the street. Businessmen and doctors and well-dressed ladies on the way to lunch. The taxis were driving by with their lights off all of a sudden for a colored woman, since they didn’t want to pick me up, even in my best dress, in the bright afternoon, in the summer heat. Maybe I’d take them the wrong way, out of the city, where the money and the paintings were, to the Bronx, where the money and the paintings weren’t. Everyone knows the taxi drivers hate a colored woman anyway — she won’t tip him, or at the very best she’ll nickel-and-dime him, that’s the thinking, and there’s no way to change it, no amount of freedom-riding is ever going to shift that. So I just kept placing one foot in front of the other. They were my best shoes, my going-to-opera leathers, and they were comfortable at first, they weren’t too bad, and I thought the walking would shuck the loneliness.

“Gloria,” I heard again, as if my own name were drifting away from me.

I didn’t look back. I was sure that Claire would run after me, and I kept wondering if I’d done the right thing, leaving her behind, with the radio parts spread around her son’s room, the books, the pencils, the baseball cards, the snow globes, the sharpeners, all neatly arranged on the shelves. Her face came back to me, the slide of sadness along her eyes.

Walk, don’t walk.

I flat-out wanted to go home and curl up, to be buried in my apartment, away from traffic signals. I didn’t want the shame, or anger, or jealousy, even — I just wanted to be home, the doors locked, the stereo on, some libretto sounding out around me, to sit on the broken-backed sofa, drowning everything else until it was all invisible.

Walk, don’t walk.

Then again, I was thinking that I shouldn’t be acting this way, maybe I was getting it all wrong, maybe the truth is that she was just a lonely white woman living up on Park Avenue, lost her boy the exact same way as I lost three of mine, treated me well, didn’t ask for nothing, brought me in her house, kissed me on the cheek, made sure my teacup was full, and she just flat-out made a mistake by running her mouth off, one silly little statement I was allowing to ruin everything. I had liked her when she was fussing all over us, and she didn’t mean harm, maybe she was just nervous. People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time — but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.

I could imagine her there, staring at the elevator, watching the numbers go down, chewing on her fingers, watching it all descend. Kicking herself for trying too hard. Running back to the intercom and begging us to stay just a minute more.

After almost ten blocks I got a little stab in my stomach, a stitch. I leaned up against the doorway of a doctor’s office on Eighty-fifth Street, under the awning, breathing heavily, and weighing it all up in my mind, but then I thought, No, I’m not going to turn back, not now, I’m going to keep right on going, that’s my duty and nobody’s going to stop me.

Sometimes you get a bug in your mind. I’m going to make it all the way home even if it takes me a week, I thought, I’m going to step every inch of the way, gospel, that’s what I had to do, no matter what, back to the Bronx.

Marcia, Janet, Jacqueline weren’t calling after me anymore. Part of me was relieved that they let me go, that I didn’t give in to them, didn’t turn around. I wasn’t sure what sort of response I would’ve let loose if they came trundling up alongside me. But another part of me thought that Claire at least should have kept after me, I deserved that much, I wanted her to come tap me on the shoulder and beg a second time so that I knew it mattered, like our boys mattered. And I didn’t want that to be the end of things for my boys.

I looked up the avenue. Park was gray and wide and there was a small rise of hill up ahead, a stepping-stone of traffic lights. I tightened the buckles on my shoes and stepped out into the crosswalk.

WHEN I LEFT MISSOURI, I was seventeen years old, and I made my way to Syracuse, where I survived on an academic scholarship. I fared pretty well, even if I say so myself. I had gifts for putting together some fine written sentences, and I could juggle a good slice of American history, and so — like a few young colored women my age — we were invited to elegant rooms, places with wooden panels and flickering candles and fine crystal glasses, and we were asked to give opinions on what had happened to our boys over Anzio, and who W.E.B. Du Bois was, and what it really meant to be emancipated, and how the Tuskegee Airmen came about, and what Lincoln would think of our achievements. People listened to our answers with that glazed-over look in their eyes. It was like they really wanted to believe what was being said in their presence, but they couldn’t believe they were present for it.

Late in the evenings I played the piano stiffly, but it was as if they wanted jazz to leap from my fingers. This was not the Negro they expected. Sometimes they would look up, jolted, as if they’d just brought themselves, cold, out from a dream.

We were ushered to the door by the dean of one school or another. I could tell the parties only really began after the door closed and we were gone.

After visiting those splendid houses, I didn’t want to go back to my little dorm room anymore. I walked around the city, down by Thornden Park and out to White Chapel gardens, sometimes until the blue dawn rose, wearing holes in my shoes.

Most of the rest of my college days were spent clutching my school satchel close to my chest and pretending not to hear the suggestions of the fraternity boys who wouldn’t have minded a colored woman for a trophy: they had a safari intent to them.

Sure, I ached for the backroads of my hometown in Missouri, but leaving behind a scholarship would’ve been a defeat for my folks, who had no idea what it was like for me — they who thought their little girl was up north learning the truth of America in the sort of place where a young woman could cross the thresholds of the rich. They told me that my southern charm would get me by. My father wrote letters that began: My Little Glorious. I wrote back on airmail paper. I told them how much I loved my history classes, which was true. I told them I loved walking the woods, true too. I told them that I always had clean linen in my dorm room, true as well.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

Still, I graduated with honors. I was one of the first colored women at Syracuse to do so. I went up the steps, looked down on the crowd of gowns and hats, emerged into a stunned applause. A light rain fell across the college courtyard. I stepped past my college mates, terrified. My mother and father, up from Missouri, hugged me. They were old and ruined and held each other’s hands as if they were just one piece. We went to a Denny’s to celebrate. My mother said that we’d come a long way, us and our people. I shrank back down in the seat. They had packed the car so there was space for me in the back. No, I told them. I’d rather stay a little while as long as they didn’t mind, I wasn’t ready to return just yet. “Oh,” they said, in unison, grinning just a little, “you’re a Yankee now?” It was a grin that held pain — I guess you’d call it a grimace.

My mother, in the passenger seat, adjusted the rearview mirror as they drove off: she watched me go and waved out the window and shouted at me to hurry home.

I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love. My husband-to-be was from a family in Des Moines. He was an engineering student and a well-known debater on the all-Negro debating circuit: he could hold any subject in the palm of his hand. He had bad skin and a beautiful bent nose. His hair was cut into a conservative Afro, tinged cinnamon at the edges. He was the sort of man who adjusted his glasses, precisely, with a middle finger. I met him on the night when he said that what America didn’t realize was that it was forever censored, forever would be, unless common rights were changed. They were the words he used instead of civil rights: common rights. It brought a silence to the hall. My desire for him gripped my throat. He glanced across the room at me.

He had a lean boyishness, a full mouth. We dated for six weeks, then took the plunge. My parents and two remaining brothers drove north to join us for the wedding. The party had been arranged in a run-down hall on the outskirts of town. We danced until midnight and then the band left, dragging their trombones behind them. We searched around for our coats. My father had been silent most of the time. He kissed my cheek. He told me that not many people were ordering hand-painted signs anymore, that they were all going neon, but if he had one sign he could put on the world he would say that he was Gloria’s father.

My mother gave advice — I still can’t remember a single thing she said — and then my new husband whisked me away.

I looked across at him and smiled and he smiled back, and we both knew instantly that we’d made a mistake.

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.

Our honeymoon was a disaster. The cold sunlight slanted through the windows of a rooming house in a small upstate New York town. I’d heard there were lots of wives who spent their wedding nights apart from their husbands. It didn’t alarm me at first. I saw him curled, sleeplessly, on the couch, trembling as if in a fever. I could give him time. He insisted he was tired and spoke gravely of the strain of the day — I found out years later that he had spent absolutely all of his family savings on the marriage ceremony. I still felt a strong residue of desire for him when I heard him speak, or when he called me on the phone to tell me he wouldn’t be home — it seemed that words had an affection for him, the way he spoke was magical, but after a while even his voice began to grate and he began to remind me of the colors of the walls in the hotel rooms in which he stayed: the colors leached into him and took him over.

After a while he didn’t seem to have a name.

And then he said — in 1947, after eleven months of marriage — that he had been looking for another empty box to fit inside. This was the boy who had been the star of the Negro debating team. Another empty box. It felt as if my skull was being lifted from my flesh. I left him.

I avoided going home. I made up excuses, elaborate lies. My parents were still clinging on — what use was it to hurt them? The thought of them knowing that I had failed was coiled up inside me. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t even tell them that I was divorced. I would phone my mother and tell her that my husband was in the bath, or down at the basketball courts, or out on a big job interview for a Boston engineering firm. I’d stretch the phone all the way to the front door and press the bell and say: “Oh, gotta go, Mom — Thomas has a friend here.”

Now that he was gone he had a name again. Thomas. I wrote it in blue eyeliner on my bathroom mirror. I looked through it, beyond, at myself.

I should have gone back to Missouri, found myself a good job, settled back with my folks, maybe even uncovered a husband who wasn’t scared of the world, but I didn’t go back; I kept pretending I would, and soon enough my parents passed. My mother first, my father a broken man just one week later. I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other’s breath.

There was a loss lit in me now, and a rage, and I wanted to see New York. I heard it was a city that danced. I arrived at the bus station with two very fancy suitcases, high heels, and a hat. Men wanted to carry my cases but I walked on, head held high, down Eighth Avenue. I found a rooming house and applied to a scholarship foundation but heard nothing, and took the first job I could find: as a clerk for a betting outfit at the Belmont racetrack. I was a window girl. Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it’s not a coat at all, it’s more like another skin. I was more than overqualified, but I took it anyway. Out I went to the racetrack every day. I thought I’d get out of the job in a matter of weeks, that it was just a moment, a blip of pleasure for a girl who knew what pleasure was but hadn’t fully tasted it. I was twenty-two years old. All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the ordinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past. Besides, I loved the sound of the gallop. On mornings, before the races, I would walk down among the stalls and breathe in all the scents of the hay and the soap and the saddle leather.

There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it. In New York, at the racetrack, I loved to see the horses up close. Their flanks looked as blue as insect wings. They swished their manes back in the air. They were like Missouri to me. They smelled of home, of fields, of creek sides.

A man came around the corner with a horse brush in his hand. He was tall, dark, elegant. He wore overalls. His smile was so very wide and white.

My second and last marriage was the one that left me eleven floors up in the Bronx projects with my three boys — and I suppose, in a way, with those two baby girls.

Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.

I WENT STRAIGHT on up Park and made it to 116th Street, at the crosswalk, and had begun to ponder just how exactly I was going to make my way across the river. There were always the bridges, but my feet had begun to swell and my shoes were cutting the back of my heels. The shoes were a half-size too big. I had bought them that way on purpose, for the opera on Sundays, when I liked to lean back and quietly flip the shoe off, let the cool take me. But now they rode up with each step and cut a little trench in my heels. I tried adjusting my stride, but the flaps of skin were beginning to come away. Each step dug a little deeper. I had a dime for the bus and a token for the subway but I had insisted to myself that I’d walk, that I’d make it back home under my own steam, one foot after the other. So, I kept on north.

The streets of Harlem felt like they were under siege — fences and ramps and barbed wire, radios in the windows, kids out on the sidewalks. Up in the high windows women leaned out on their elbows like they were looking back into a better decade. Below, wheelchair beggars with scraggly beards raced each other to cars stopped at the lights: they took their chariot duel seriously, and the winner dipped to pick a dime off the ground.

I caught glimpses of people’s rooms: a white enamel jar against a window frame, a round wooden table with a newspaper spread out, a pleated shade over a green chair. What, I wondered, were the sounds filling those rooms? It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

A small blade of pain shot through me each time I stepped, but I could handle it — there were worse things than a torn-up pair of heels. A pop song traveled across my memory, Nancy Sinatra singing about her boots being made for walking. I had it in my thoughts that the more I hummed the less my feet would hurt. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you. One corner to another. One more crack in the pavement. That’s the way we all walk: the more we have to occupy our minds the better. I started humming louder, not caring a bit who saw or heard me. Another corner, another note. As a little girl I had walked home through the fields, my socks disappearing into my shoes.

The sun was still high. I’d been walking slow, two hours or more.

Water ran down a drain: up ahead some kids had opened a fire hydrant and were dancing through the spray in their underwear. Their shiny little bodies were beautiful and dark. The older kids hung out on stoops, watching their brothers and sisters in their wet underclothes, maybe wishing they too could be that young again.

I crossed to the bright side of the street.

Over the years, in New York, I’ve been mugged seven times. There is an inevitability to it. You can feel it coming, even if from behind. A ripple in the air. A pulse in the light. An intent. In the distance, waiting for you, at a street garbage can. Under a hat, or a sweatshirt. The eye flick away. The glance back again. For a split second, when it happens, you’re not even in the world. You’re in your handbag and it’s moving away. That’s how it feels. There goes my life down the street, being carried by a pair of scattering shoes.

This time, the young girl, a Puerto Rican, stepped out of a vestibule on 127th. Alone. A swagger to her. Shadows from a fire escape crisscrossing her. She held a knife in under her own chin. A drugged-out shine to her eyes. I had seen that look before: if she didn’t slice me she’d slice herself. Her eyelids were painted bright silver.

“The world’s bad enough,” I said to her, using my church tone, but she just pointed the blade of the knife at me.

“Give me your fucking bag.”

“It’s a sin to make it worse than it is.”

She looped the handbag on the blade of the knife. “Pockets,” she said.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she said, and pulled the handbag high on her elbow. It was as if she already knew from the weight that there was nothing inside but a handkerchief and some photographs. Then, swiftly, she leaned forward with the knife and sliced open the side pocket of my dress. The knife blade ran against my hip. My purse, my license, and two more photos of my boys were kept inside the pocket. She sliced open the second side.

“Fat bitch,” she said as she walked around the corner.

The street throbbed around me. Nobody’s fault but my own. The bark of a dog flew by. I pondered the notion that I had nothing to lose anymore, that I should follow her, rip the empty handbag from her, rescue my old self. It was the photographs that bothered me the most. I went to the corner. She was already far down the street. The photos were scattered in a line down the pavement. I stooped and picked up what remained of my boys. I caught the eye of a woman, older than me, peeping out the window. She was framed by the rotting wood. The sill was lined with plaster saints and a few artificial flowers. I would have swapped my life for hers at that moment, but she closed the window and turned away. I propped the empty white handbag against the stoop and walked on without it. She could have it. Take it all, except the photos.

I stuck out my hand and a gypsy cab stopped immediately. I slid into the backseat. He adjusted his rearview mirror.

“Yeah?” he said, drumming away on the steering wheel.

Try measuring certain days on a weighing scale.

“Hey, lady,” he shouted. “Where you going?”

Try measuring them.

“Seventy-sixth and Park,” I said.

I had no idea why. Certain things we just can’t explain. I could just as easily have gone home: I had enough money tucked away under my mattress to pay for the cab fare ten times over. And the Bronx was closer than Claire’s house, that I knew. But we wove into the traffic. I didn’t ask the driver to turn around. The dread rose in me as the streets clicked by.

The doorman buzzed her and she ran down the stairs, came right out and paid the cab driver. She glanced down at my feet — a little barrier of blood had bubbled up over the edge of my heel, and the pocket of my dress was torn — and something turned in her, some key, her face grew soft. She said my name and discomforted me a moment. Her arm went around me and she took me straight up in the elevator, down the corridor towards her bedroom. The curtains were drawn. A deep scent of cigarettes came from her, mixed with fresh perfume. “Here,” she said as if it was the only place in the world. I sat on the clean unrumpled linen as she ran the bath. The splash of water. “You poor thing,” she called. There was a smell of perfumed salts in the air.

I could see my reflection in the bedroom mirror. My face looked puffed and worn. She was saying something, but her voice got caught up in the noise of the water.

The other side of the bed was dented. So, she had been lying down, maybe crying. I felt like flopping down into her imprint, making it three times the size. The door opened slowly. Claire stood there smiling. “We’ll get you right,” she said. She came to the edge of the bed, took my elbow, led me into the bathroom, sat me on a wooden stool by the bath. She leaned over and tested the warmth of the water with her knuckle. I unrolled the hose from my legs. Bits of skin came off my feet. I sat at the edge of the bath and swung my legs across. The water stung. The blood slid from my feet. Some vanishing sunset, the red glow dispersing in the water.

Claire laid a white towel out in the middle of the bathroom floor, at my feet. She handed me some sticky bandages, the back paper already peeled off. I couldn’t help the thought that she wanted to dry my feet with her hair.

“I’m okay, Claire,” I told her.

“What did they steal?”

“Only my handbag.”

I felt charged with dread: she might think that all I wanted was the money she had offered me earlier to stay, to get my reward, my slave purse.

“There was no money in it.”

“We’ll call the police anyway.”

“The police?”

“Why not?”

“Claire…”

She looked at me blankly and then an understanding traveled across her eyes. People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don’t. There’s no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

I bent down and put the bandages on the backs of my heels. They weren’t quite wide enough for the cut. I could already feel the sharp sting of having to take them off later.

“You know the worst of it?” I said.

“What?”

“She called me fat.”

“Oh, Gloria. I’m sorry.”

“It’s your fault, Claire.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s your fault.”

“Oh,” she said, a tremble of nerves in her voice.

“I told you I shouldn’t’ve had those extra doughnuts.”

“Oh!”

She threw her head back until her neck was taut, and reached out to touch my hand.

“Gloria,” she said. “Next time it’s bread and water.”

“Maybe a little pastry.”

I leaned down to towel my toes. Her hand drifted to my shoulder, but then she rose and said: “You need slippers.”

She rummaged in the closet for a pair of felt slippers for me and a dressing gown that must’ve belonged to her husband since her own wouldn’t have fit me. I shook my head, and hung the gown on a hook on the door. “No offense,” I said. I could live in my torn dress. She guided me into the living room. None of the plates or cups had been cleared from earlier. A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle. Ice was melting in a bowl. Claire was using the lemons we had cut instead of limes. She held the bottle high in the air and shrugged. Without asking she took out a second glass. “Excuse my fingers,” she said as she dropped ice into the glass.

It had been years since I’d had a drink. It felt cool at the back of my throat. Nothing mattered but that momentary taste.

“God, that’s good.”

“Sometimes it’s a cure,” she said.

Sunlight shone through Claire’s glass. It caught the color of lemon and the glass turned in her hands. She looked like she was weighing the world. She leaned back against the white of the couch and said: “Gloria?”

“Uh-huh?”

She looked away, over my head, to a painting in the corner of the room.

“The truth?”

“The truth.”

“I don’t normally drink, you know. It’s just today, with, you know, all that talking. I think I made a bit of a fool of myself.”

“You were fine.”

“I wasn’t silly?”

“You were fine, Claire.”

“I hate making a fool of myself.”

“You didn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“The truth’s not foolish,” she said.

She was swiveling her glass and watching the gin swirl in circles, a cyclone she wanted to drown herself in.

“I mean, about Joshua. Not the other stuff. I mean, I felt very silly when I said I’d pay you to stay. I just wanted someone to hang around. With, you know, with me. Selfish, really, and I feel awful.”

“It happens.”

“I didn’t mean it.” She looked away. “And then when you left, I called your name. I wanted to run after you.”

“I needed to walk, Claire. That’s all.”

“The others were laughing at me.”

“I’m sure they weren’t.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.”

“Of course we will.”

She let out a long sigh and threw back the drink, poured herself another, but mostly tonic this time, not gin.

“Why did you come back, Gloria?”

“To get paid, of course.”

“Excuse me?”

“A joke, Claire, joke.”

I could feel the gin working under my tongue.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m a little slow this afternoon.”

“I’ve no idea, really,” I said.

“I’m glad you did.”

“Nothing better to do.”

“You’re funny.”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Oh!” she said. “Your choir. I forgot.”

“My what?”

“Your choir. You said you had choir.”

“I don’t have choir, Claire. Never did. Never will. Sorry. No such thing.”

She seemed to chew on the thought for a moment and then broke out in a grin.

“You’ll stay awhile, though? Rest your feet. Stay for dinner. My husband should be home around six or so. You’ll stay?”

“Oh, I don’t think I should.”

“Twenty dollars an hour?” she said with a grin.

“You’ve got me,” I laughed.

We sat in happy quiet and she ran her fingers over the rim of her glass, but then she perked up and said suddenly: “Tell me about your boys again.”

Her question rankled. I didn’t want to think about my boys anymore. In a strange way, all I wanted was to be surrounded by another, to be a part of somebody else’s room. I took a piece of lemon and slid it between my teeth and gums. The acid jarred me. I guess I wanted another sort of question altogether.

“Can I ask you something, Claire?”

“Of course.”

“Could we put on some music?”

“What?”

“I mean, I suppose I’m just still in a little bit of shock.”

“What sort of music?”

“Whatever you have. It makes me feel, I don’t know, it calms me down. I like having an orchestra around. Do you have opera?”

“Afraid not. You like opera?”

“All my savings. I go to the Met every chance I get. Way up in the gods. Slip off my shoes and away I go.”

She rose and went to the record player. I couldn’t see the sleeve of the record she took out. She cleaned the vinyl with a soft yellow cloth and then she lifted the needle. She did everything small as if it was extraordinary and necessary. The music filled the room. A deep, hard piano: the hammers rippling across the strings.

“He’s Russian,” she said. “He can stretch his fingers to thirteen keys.”

I WAS HAPPY ENOUGH the day my second husband found himself a younger version of the train he was riding towards oblivion. His hat had always been a helping too large on his head anyway. He upped and left me with three boys and a view of the Deegan. I didn’t mind. My last thought of him was that nobody ought to be as lonely as him, walking away. But it didn’t break my heart to close the door on him, or even to suck up the pride of a monthly check.

The Bronx was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. My boys wore brown hunting caps with earflaps. Later they threw the caps away and grew up into Afros. They hid pencils in their hair. We had our good days. I recall one summer afternoon when all four of us went to Foodland and raced up and down the frozen-food aisles with our shopping cart, keeping ourselves cool.

It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.

I asked Clarence one day why he was going and he said one or two things about liberty, but mostly he was doing it because he was bored. Brandon and Jason said about the same thing too when their draft cards were dropped in our mailbox. It was the only mail that didn’t get stolen in the houses. The mailman carried around huge bags of gloom. There was heroin all over the projects in those years and I thought maybe my boys were right, they were getting themselves free. I’d seen far too many children slouched down in the corners with needles in their arms, little spoons sticking out of their shirt pockets.

I as much as opened the windows and told them to be on their merry way. They flew off. Not one of them came back.

Every time a branch of mine got to being a decent size, that wind just came along and broke it.

I sat in my chair in my living room, watching afternoon soap operas.

I guess I ate. I suppose that’s what I did. I ate whatever I could. Alone. Surrounded by packets of Velveeta and saltines, trying hard not to remember, switching channels and crackers and cheeses so the memories didn’t get me. I watched my ankles swell. Every woman with her own curse, and I suppose mine was not much worse than a whole lot of them.

Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound. I took to listening on the radio every Sunday and spent whatever extra grief money the government gave me on tickets to the Metropolitan. I felt like I had a room full of voices. The music pouring out over the Bronx. I sometimes turned the stereo so loud the neighbors complained. I bought earphones. Huge ones that covered half my head. I wouldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. But there was a medicine in it.

That afternoon, too, I sat in Claire’s living room and let the music float over me: it wasn’t opera, it was piano, but it was a new pleasure — it thrilled me.

We went through three or four records. In the late afternoon or early evening, I wasn’t quite sure, but I opened my eyes and she was putting a light blanket on my knees. She sat back against the white of the couch, the glass held at her lips.

“You know what I’d like to do?” said Claire.

“What’s that?”

“I’d love to have a cigarette, right here, right now, in this room.”

She fumbled around on the table for a package.

“My husband hates it when I smoke indoors.”

She fished out a single cigarette. It was turned the wrong way around in her mouth and for a moment I thought she was going to light it that way, but she laughed and flipped it. The matches were wet and they dissolved at the touch.

I sat up and picked another book of matches off the table. She touched my hand.

“I think I’m a little tipsy,” she said, but her voice was elegant.

I had the horrific feeling then — right then — that she might lean across and try to kiss me, or make some strange approach, like you read about in magazines. We lose ourselves sometimes. I felt hollow inside and there seemed to be a cool wind moving along my body like a breeze down a street, but it was nothing of the sort — all she did was sit back and blow the smoke to the ceiling and allow the music to wash over us.

A short while later she set the table for three and heated up a chicken pot pie. The phone rang a few times but she didn’t answer. “I guess he’s going to be late,” she said.

On the fifth ring she picked it up. I could hear his voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying. She held the mouthpiece close and I could hear her whispering the words Dear and Solly and I love you, but the conversation was quick and sharp, as if she were the only one talking, and I got the strangest feeling that the response at his end of the line was silence.

“He’s in his favorite restaurant,” she told me, “celebrating with the D.A.”

It didn’t make much difference — it’s hardly like I wanted him to step down off the wall and get all friendly with me, but Claire had a far-off look in her eyes, like she wanted to be asked about him, and so I did. She launched into a long story about a promenade, a walk she was taking, a man who came towards her in long white flannel trousers, how he was the friend of some famous poet, how they used to go to Mystic every weekend, to a little restaurant there where he sampled their martinis; she went on and on and on, her eyes towards the front door, waiting for him to come home.

What drifted across my mind was how unusual it must have been, if anyone could have watched us from the outside, sitting with the light dimming outside, letting simple talk drift over us.

I CAN’T RECALL what it was led me to the small ad that was in the back of The Village Voice. It was not a paper I had any particular fondness for, but it was there one day, like sometimes happens, Marcia’s ad, by the strangest chance, her, of all people. I sat down to compose a letter that maybe I wrote fifty or sixty times over, at the small counter in my kitchen. I explained everything about my boys, over and over again, the Lord knows how many times, saying how I was a colored woman, how I was living in a bad place but I kept it real nice and clean, how I had three boys and how I’d been through two husbands, how I’d really wanted to get back to Missouri but I never had the chance or the courage, how I’d be fine and happy to meet up with other people like me, how I’d be privileged. Each time I tore the letter up. It just didn’t seem right. In the end all I wrote was: Hello, my name, is Gloria and I’d like to meet up too.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN ten in the evening when her husband stumbled through the door. From the corridor he actually called: “Honey, I’m home.”

In the living room, he stopped and stared, as if he were in the wrong place. He slapped his pockets like he might find a different set of keys there.

“Is something wrong?” he said to Claire.

He looked as if he could have aged some and then stepped right out of the portrait on the wall. His tie was a little askew but his shirt was buttoned up to the neck. The bald dome shone. He carried a leather briefcase with a silver snap. Claire introduced me. He pulled himself together and walked across to shake my hand. A faint scent of wine rolled from him. “Pleasure to meet you,” he said, in the sort of way that meant he had no idea whatsoever why it might be a pleasure, but he had to say it anyway; he was bound to it by pure politeness. His hand was chubby and warm. He placed his briefcase at the foot of the table and frowned at the ashtray.

“Girls’ night out?” he said.

Claire kissed him high, on the cheek, near his eyelid, and loosened his tie for him.

“I had some friends over.”

He held the empty gin bottle to the light.

“Come sit with us,” she said.

“I’m going to run and have a shower, hon.”

“Come join us, come on.”

“I’m pooped,” he said, “but, boy, do I have a story for you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Boy oh boy.”

He was undoing the buttons on his shirt and for a moment I thought he might take the shirt off in front of me, stand in the middle of the room like some round white fish.

“Guy walked a tightrope,” he said. “World Trade.”

“We heard.”

“You heard?”

“Well, yes, everyone’s heard. The whole world’s talking about it.”

“I got to charge him.”

“You did?”

“Came up with the perfect sentence too.”

“He got arrested?”

“Quick shower first. Yes, of course. Then tell you all.”

“Sol,” she said, pulling his sleeve.

“I’ll be right out, tell you everything.”

“Solomon!”

He glanced at me. “Let me freshen up,” he said.

“No, tell us, tell us now.” She stood. “Please.”

He flicked a look in my direction. I could tell he resented me, just being there, that he thought I was some housekeeper, or some Jehovah’s Witness who had somehow come into his house, disturbed the rhythm, the celebration he wanted to give himself. He opened another button on his shirt. It was like he was opening a door at his chest and trying to push me out.

“The D.A. wanted some good publicity,” he said. “Everyone in the city’s talking about this guy. So we’re not going to lock him up or anything. Besides the Port Authority wants to fill the towers. They’re half empty. Any publicity is good publicity. But we have to charge him, you know? Come up with something creative.”

“Yes,” said Claire.

“So he pleaded guilty and I charged him a penny per floor.”

“I see.”

“Penny per floor, Claire. I charged him a dollar ten. One hundred and ten stories! Get it? The D.A. was ecstatic. Wait ’Til you see. New York Times tomorrow.”

He went to the liquor cabinet, his shirt a full three-quarters open. I could see the protrusion of his flabby chest. He poured himself a deep glass of amber liquid, sniffed it deeply, and exhaled.

“I also sentenced him to another performance.”

“Another walk?” said Claire.

“Yes, yes. We’ll get front-row tickets. In Central Park. For kids. Wait until you see this character, Claire. He’s something else.”

“He’ll go again?”

“Yes, yes, but somewhere safe this time.”

Claire’s eyes skittered around the room, as if she was looking at different paintings and trying to hold them together.

“Not bad, huh? Penny per floor.”

Solomon clapped his hands together: he was enjoying himself now. Claire looked at the ground, like she could see all the way through to the molten iron, the core of everything.

“And guess how he got the wire across?” said Solomon. He put his hand to his mouth and coughed.

“Oh, I don’t know, Sol.”

“Go on, guess.”

“I don’t really care.”

“Guess.”

“He threw it?”

“Thing weighs two hundred pounds, Claire. He was telling me all about it. In court. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow. Come on!”

“Used a crane or something?”

“He did it illegally, Claire. Stealth of night.”

“I don’t really know, Solomon. We had a meeting today. There were four of us, and me, and …”

“He used a bow and arrow!”

“… we sat around talking,” she said.

“This guy should’ve been a Green Beret,” he said. “He was telling me all this! His buddy shot a fishing line across first. Bow and arrow. Into the wind. Judged the angle just right. Hit the edge of the building. And then they fed the lines across until it could take the weight. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Claire.

He put his bell-shaped glass on the coffee table with a sharp snap, then sniffed at his shirtsleeve. “I really must have a shower.”

He walked over towards me. He became aware of his shirt and pulled it across without buttoning it. A waft of whiskey rolled from him.

“Well,” he said. “Gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t really catch your name.”

“Gloria.”

“Good night, Gloria.”

I swallowed hard. What he really meant was “good-bye.” I had no idea what sort of reply he expected. I simply shook his hand. He turned his back and walked out along the corridor.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he called over his shoulder.

He was humming a tune to himself. Sooner or later they all turn their backs. They all leave. That’s gospel. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. They all do.

Claire smiled and shrugged her shoulders. I could tell she wanted him to be someone better than what he was, that she must have married him for some good reason, and she wanted that reason to be on display, but it wasn’t, and he had dismissed me, and it was the last thing she wanted from him. Her cheeks were red.

“Give me a moment,” she said.

She went down the corridor. A mumble of voices from her bedroom. The faint sound of a bath running. Their voices raised and dipped. I was surprised when he emerged with her, just moments later. His face had softened: as if just being a moment with her had relaxed him, allowed him to be someone different. I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they’re the things that matter.

“I’m sorry to hear about your sons,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t mean to be so brusque.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll excuse me?” he said.

He turned and then he said, with his gaze to the floor: “I miss my boy too sometimes.” And then he was gone.

I suppose I’ve always known that it’s hard to be just one person. The key is in the door and it can always be opened.

Claire stood there, beaming ear to ear.

“I’ll drop you home,” she said.

The thought of it flushed me with warmth but I said: “No, Claire, that’s all right. I’ll just get a taxi. Don’t you worry.”

“I’m going to drop you home,” she said, with a sudden clarity.

“Please, just take the slippers. I’ll get you a bag for your shoes. We’ve had a long day. We’ll take a car service.”

She rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a small phone book. I could hear the sound of the bath still running. The water pipes kicked in and there was a groan from the walls.

DARK HAD FALLEN OUTSIDE. The driver was waiting, propped, smoking a cigarette, against the hood of the car. He was one of those old-time drivers, with a peaked hat and a dark suit and a tie. He suddenly stubbed the cigarette out and ran to open the rear door for us. Claire slid in first. She was agile across the rear seat and she swung her legs across the well in the middle of the seats. The driver took my elbow and guided me inside. “There we go,” he said in a big false voice. I felt a little old-black-ladyish, but that was all right — he was just doing his best, wasn’t trying to make me feel bad.

I told him the address and he hesitated a moment, nodded, went around to the front of the car.

“Ladies,” he said.

We sat in silence. On the bridge she flicked a quick look back at the city. All was light — offices that looked as if they were hovering on the void, the random pools from street lamps, headlights flashing across our faces. Pale concrete pillars flashed by. Girders in strange shapes. Naked columns capped with steel beams. The sweep of the river below.

We crossed over into the Bronx, past shuttered bodegas and dogs in doorways. Fields of rubble. Twisted steel pipes. Slabs of broken masonry. We drove beyond railroad tracks and the flashing shadows of the underpass, through the fire-blown night.

Some figures lumbered along among the garbage cans and the piles of refuse.

Claire sat back.

“New York,” she sighed. “All these people. Did you ever wonder what keeps us going?”

A big smile went between us. Something that we knew about each other, that we’d be friends now, there wasn’t much could take it from us, we were on that road. I could lower her down into my life and she could probably survive it. And she could lower me into hers and I could rummage around. I reached across and held her hand. I had no fear now. I could taste a tincture of iron in my throat, like I had bitten my tongue and it had bled, but it was pleasing. The lights skittered by. I was reminded how, as a child, I used to drop flowers into large bottles of ink. The flowers would float on the surface for a moment and then the stem would get swamped, and then the petals, and they would bloom with dark.

There was a commotion outside the projects when we pulled up. Nobody even noticed our car. We glided up by the fence, shadowed by the overpass. The black steel beams were shimmying with streetlight. None of the women of the night were out, but a couple of girls in short skirts were huddled under the light in the entrance. One was leaning across the shoulder of another and sobbing.

I had no time for them, the hookers, never had. I didn’t hold any rancor for them nor any bleeding heart. They had their pimps and their white men who felt sorry for them. That was their life. They’d chosen it.

“Ma’am,” said the driver.

I still had my hand in Claire’s.

“Good night,” I said.

I opened the door, and just then I saw them come out, two darling little girls coming through the globes of lamplight.

I knew them. I had seen them before. They were the daughters of a hooker who lived two floors above me. I had kept myself away from all that. Years and years. I hadn’t let them near my life. I’d see their mother in the elevator, a child herself, pretty and vicious, and I’d stared straight ahead at the buttons.

The girls were being guided down the path by a man and a woman. Social workers, their pale skin shining, a scared look on their faces.

The girls were dressed in little pink dresses, with bows high on their chests. Their hair was done in beads. They wore plastic flip-flops on their feet. They were no more than two or three years old, like twins, but not twins. They were both smiling, which is strange now when I think back on it: they had had no idea what was happening and they looked a picture of health.

“Adorable,” said Claire, but I could hear the terror in her voice.

The social workers wore the straitjacket stare. They were pushing the kids along, trying to guide them through the remaining hookers. A cop car idled farther up the block. The onlookers were trying to wave to the little girls, to lean down and say something, maybe even gather them up in their arms, but the social workers kept pushing the women away.

Some things in life just become very clear and we don’t need a reason for them at all: I knew at that moment what I’d have to do.

“They’re taking them away?” said Claire.

“I suppose.”

“Where’ll they go?”

“Some institution somewhere.”

“But they’re so young.”

The kids were being bundled towards the back of the car. One of them had started crying. She was holding on to the antenna of the car and wouldn’t let go. The social worker tugged her, but the child hung on. The woman came around the side of the car and pried the child’s fingers off.

I stepped out. It didn’t seem to me that I was in the same body anymore. I had a quickness. I stepped off the pavement and onto the road. I was still in Claire’s slippers.

“Hold on,” I shouted.

I used to think it had all ended sometime long ago, that everything was wrapped up and gone. But nothing ends. If I live to be a hundred I’ll still be on that street.

“Hold on.”

Janice — she was the older of the two — let her fingers uncurl and reached out to me. Nothing felt better than that, not in a long time. The other one, Jazzlyn, was crying her eyes out. I looked over my shoulder to Claire, who was still in the backseat, her face shining under the dome light. She looked frightened and happy both.

“You know these kids?” said the cop.

I guess I said yes.

That’s what I finally said, as good a lie as any: “Yes.”

ROARING SEAWARD, AND I GO

October 2006

SHE OFTEN WONDERS WHAT IT is that holds the man so high in the air. What sort of ontological glue? Up there in his haunted silhouette, a dark thing against the sky, a small stick figure in the vast expanse. The plane on the horizon. The tiny thread of rope between the edges of the buildings. The bar in his hands. The great spread of space.

The photo was taken on the same day her mother died — it was one of the reasons she was attracted to it in the first place: the sheer fact that such beauty had occurred at the same time. She had found it, yellowing and torn, in a garage sale in San Francisco four years ago. At the bottom of a box of photographs. The world delivers its surprises. She bought it, got it framed, kept it with her as she went from hotel to hotel.

A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a larger one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later. The intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories. We wait for the explosion but it never occurs. The plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don’t fall apart.

It strikes her as an enduring moment, the man alone against scale, still capable of myth in the face of all other evidence. It has become one of her favorite possessions — her suitcase would feel wrong without it, as if it were missing a latch. When she travels she always tucks the photo in tissue paper along with the other mementoes: a set of pearls, a lock of her sister’s hair.

At the security line in Little Rock she stands behind a tall man in jeans and a battered leather jacket. Handsome in an offhand way. In his late thirties or early forties, maybe — five or six years older than she is. A bounce in his step as he moves up the line. She edges a little closer to him. The tag on his bag reads: DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS.

The security guard bristles and examines his passport.

— Are you carrying any liquids, sir?

— Just eight pints.

— Excuse me, sir?

— Eight pints of blood. I don’t think they’ll spill.

He taps his chest and she chuckles. She can tell that he’s Italian: the words stretched with a lyrical curl. He turns to her and smiles, but the security guard stands back, stares at the man, as if at a painting, and then says: Sir, I need you to step out of line, please.

— Excuse me?

— Step out of line, please. Now.

Two other guards swing across.

— Listen, I’m only joking, says the Italian.

— Sir, follow us, please.

— Just a joke, he says.

He’s pushed in the back, toward an office.

— I’m a doctor, I was just making a joke. Just carrying eight pints of blood, that’s all. A joke. A bad one. That’s all.

He flings out his hands to plead, but his arm is twisted high behind his back, and the door is closed behind him with a thump.

The rancor passes down the line to her and the other passengers in the security area. She feels a thread of cold along her neck as the security guard stares her down. She has a bottle of perfume sealed in a little ziploc bag, and she places it carefully in the tray.

— Why are you bringing this in carry-on, miss?

— It’s less than three ounces.

— And the purpose of your travel?

— Personal. To see a friend.

— And what’s your final destination, miss?

— New York.

— Business or pleasure?

— Pleasure, she says, the word catching at the back of her throat.

She answers calmly, practiced, controlled, and when she goes through the metal detector she automatically stretches her arms out to be searched, even though she doesn’t set off the alarm.

The plane is near empty. The Italian finally slouches on, quiet, embarrassed, contrite. He has a hunch to his shoulders as if he can’t quite deal with his height. His light-brown hair in a havoc. A small shadow of gray-tinged beard on his chin. He catches her eye as he takes the seat behind her. A smile travels between them. She can hear him, behind her, as he takes off his leather jacket and sighs down into his place.

Halfway through the flight she orders a gin and tonic and he extends a twenty-dollar bill across the seat to pay for her drink.

— They used to give things out free, he says.

— You’re used to traveling in style?

She is annoyed at herself — she didn’t mean to be so curt, but sometimes it happens, the words come out at the wrong angle, like she’s on the defensive from the very beginning.

— No, not me, he says. Style and I never got along.

She can tell it’s true, the wide collar on his shirt, an ink spot on the breast pocket. He looks like the sort of man who might give himself his own haircut. Not your normal Italian, but what’s a normal Italian anyway? She has grown tired of the people who tell her that she’s not a normal African-American, as if there were only one great big normal box that everyone had to pop out of, the Swedish, the Poles, the Mexicans, and what did they mean anyway that she wasn’t normal, that she didn’t wear gold hoop earrings, that she moved tightly, dressed tightly, kept everything in line?

— So, she says, what did they tell you in the airport?

— Not to make jokes anymore.

— God bless America.

— The bad-joke police. Did you hear the one …

— No, no!

— … about the man who went to the doctor’s office with the carrot up his nose?

Already she is laughing. He gestures to the aisle seat.

— Please, yes.

She is surprised by the immediate comfort she feels, inviting him to sit, even turning toward him, bridging the distance over the middle seat. She is often nervous around men and women her own age, their attention, their desires. A tall, willowy beauty, she has cinnamon skin, white teeth, serious lips, no makeup, but her dark eyes always seem to want to escape her good looks. It adds up to a strange force around her: she strikes people as intelligent and dangerous, an otherland stranger. Sometimes she tries to claw her way through the awkwardness, but falls back down, suffocating. It’s as if she feels it all bubbling up inside, all that wild ancestry, but she can’t get it to boil.

At work she is known as one of the bosses with ice in her veins. If there’s a joke e-mail sent around the offices, she is seldom copied on it: she would love to be, but seldom is, even among her closest colleagues. In the foundation the volunteers talk about her behind her back. When she steps into jeans and a T-shirt to join them in the field there is always something stiff about it, her shoulders in a controlled line, her demeanor mannered.

— … and the doctor says, I know exactly what’s wrong with you.

— Yes?

— You’re not eating properly.

— Ba dah boom, she says, bringing her head alarmingly close to his shoulder.

Four small plastic bottles of gin rattle on his airplane tray. He is, she thinks, already too complicated. He is from Genoa and divorced, with two children. He has worked in Africa, Russia, and Haiti, and spent two years in New Orleans working as a doctor in the Ninth Ward. He has just moved to Little Rock, he says, where he runs a small mobile clinic for veterans home from the wars.

— Pino, he says, extending his hand.

— Jaslyn.

— And you? he asks.

— Me?

A charm in his eyes.

— What about you?

What can she tell him? That she comes from a long line of hookers, that her grandmother died in a prison cell, that she and her sister were adopted, grew up in Poughkeepsie, their mother Gloria went around the house singing bad opera? That she got sent to Yale, while her sister chose to join the army? That she was in the theater department and that she failed to make it? That she changed her name from Jazzlyn to Jaslyn? That it wasn’t from shame, not from shame at all? That Gloria said there was no such thing as shame, that life was about a refusal to be shamed?

— Well, I’m sort of an accountant, she says.

— A sort of accountant?

— Well, I’m at a small foundation. We help with tax preparation. It’s not what I thought I’d do, I mean, when I was younger, but I like it. It’s good. We go around the trailer parks and hotels and all. After Rita and Katrina and all. We help people fill out their tax forms and take care of things. ’Cause often they don’t even have their driver’s licenses anymore.

— Great country.

She eyes him suspiciously, but wonders if perhaps he means it. He could — it’s possible, she thinks — why not, even in these times.

The more he talks the more she notices that his accent has a couple of continents in it, like it has landed in each place and picked up a few sounds in each. He tells her the story of how, as a child in Genoa, he used to go to the soccer games and help bandage the wounded who were involved in stadium fights.

— Serious injuries, he says. Especially when Sampdoria played Lazio.

— Sorry?

— You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?

— No, she laughs.

He cracks the small seal on another bottle of gin, pours half in her glass, half in his own. She feels herself loosening further around him.

— Well, she says, I once worked at McDonald’s.

— You’re kidding.

— Kind of. I tried to be an actor. Same thing, really. Learn your lines — you want fries with that? Hit your mark — you want fries with that?

— Film?

— Theater.

She reaches across for her glass, lifts it, drinks. It is the first time in years that she’s opened herself to a stranger. It’s as if she has bitten into the skin of an apricot.

— Cheers.

— Salute, he says in Italian.

The plane banks out over the city. Storm clouds and a driving rain against the windows. The lights of New York like shadows of light, under the clouds, ghostly, rain-dampened, dim.

— So? he says, gesturing out the window, the darkness webbed over Kennedy.

— Excuse me?

— New York. You staying long?

— Oh, I’m going to see an old friend, she says.

— I see. How old?

— Very old.

When she was young and not so shy, she used to love going out on the street in Poughkeepsie, outside their small house, where she would run along with one foot on the pavement and the other on the road. It took some gymnastics: she had to extend one leg and keep the other slightly bent, running at close to full pace.

Claire came to visit in a chauffeured town car. Once she sat and watched the trick for a long time, with delight, and said that Jaslyn was running an extended entrechat, half on, half off, half on, half off, half on.

Later, Claire sat with Gloria on wooden chairs in the back garden, by the plastic pool, near the red fence. They looked so different, Claire in her neat skirt, Gloria in her flowered dress, as if they too were running on different levels of pavement, but in the same body, the two of them combined.

At the luggage carousel, Pino waits beside her. He has no suitcase to pick up. She rubs her hands together, nervously. Why, still, this small feeling of tightness at her core? Not even her own two gin and tonics have done their work. But he too is edgy, she notices, as he moves from foot to foot and adjusts his shoulder bag. She likes his nervousness — it brings him down to earth, makes him solid. He has already suggested that he can share a taxi with her into Manhattan, if she’d like. He is on his way to the Village, wants to hear some jazz.

She wants to tell him that he doesn’t look like a jazz man, that there’s something folk-rock about him, that he might fit well into a Bob Dylan song, or he might be found with the liner notes for Springsteen in his pocket, but jazz doesn’t fit. Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them. If only she could turn to Pino and say that she’ll come with him tonight, to a jazz club, sit at a table with a tasseled lamp, feel the saxophone trill through her, stand and move to the tiny dance floor and align her long body against his, maybe even allow him to rub his lips along her neck.

She watches the line of suitcases tumble from the conveyor belt onto the carousel below: none of them hers. A group of kids on the far side jump on and off the carousel, to the amusement of their parents. She waves across and mugs a face at the youngest, who is perched atop a giant red suitcase.

— Your children, she says as she turns to Pino. Do you have photographs?

A silly, awkward question. She has spoken without thinking, leaned too close to him, asked too much. But he pulls out a cell phone and scrolls through the pictures, shows her a young teenage girl, dark, serious, attractive. He starts to scroll again for a picture of his boy, when a security guard comes right up beside him.

— No cell phone use in the terminal, sir.

— Excuse me?

— No cell phones, no cameras.

— Not your day, she says, smiling, as she leans down to pick up her small traveling bag.

— Maybe, maybe not, he says.

Across the way, a high yelp. The kids riding suitcases on the moving carousel have fallen afoul of the security guard too. She and Pino turn to each other. She feels much younger all of a sudden: the thrill of flirtation, her whole body shot through with lightness.

As they step from the terminal he says that they’ll take the Queensboro Bridge, if that’s okay with her. He will drop her off first and then go downtown.

So he knows the city, she thinks. He’s been here before. This place belongs to him too. Another surprise. She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours.

Sabine Pass and Johnson’s Bayou, Beauregard and Vermilion, Acadia and New Iberia, Merryville and DeRidder, Thibodaux and Port Bolivar, Napoleonville and Slaughter, Point Cadet and Casino Row, Moss Point and Pass Christian, Escambia and Walton, Diamondhead and Jones Mill, Americus, America.

Names in her mind, flooding.

Rain outside the terminal. He stands under a small ledge, pulls a packet of cigarettes from his inside pocket. He tamps the pack with the heel of his hand, shifts a cigarette upward, offers it. She shakes her head no. She used to smoke, not anymore, an old habit from her days at Yale; almost everyone in the theater smoked.

But she likes the fact that he lights up and lets the smoke blow in her direction, that it will get in her hair, that she will own the scent of it later.

The taxi slides through the rain. The last of the storm has blown over the city, a final exhausted bow, an endfall. He hands her a card before the taxi pulls in by the awning on Park Avenue. He scribbles his name and the number of his cell on the back.

— Fancy, he says, surveying the street.

He picks her small bag out of the back of the cab, leans across and kisses her on each cheek. She notices with a smile that he has one foot on, one foot off the curb.

He fumbles in his pocket. She looks away and she hears a sudden click. He has taken her photograph with his cell phone. She is not quite sure how to respond. Erase it, file it, make it his screen saver? She thinks of herself, there, pixelated, alongside his children, carried around in his pocket, to his jazz club, to his clinic, to his home.

She has never done this with a man before, but she takes her own card out and tucks it into his shirt pocket, taps it closed with the palm of her hand. She feels her face tighten again. Too forward. Too flirtatious. Too easy.

It used to bother her terribly, as a teenager, that her mother and grandmother had worked the streets. She thought it might rebound on her someday, that she would find herself too much in love with love. Or that it might be dirty. Or that her friends would find out. Or, worse, that she might ask a boy to pay for it. She was the last of her high school friends to even kiss a boy: a kid in school once called her the Reluctant African Queen. Her first kiss ever was just after science class before social studies. He had a broad face and dark eyes. He held her in the doorway and kept his foot on the frame. Only the constant knocking on the door from a teacher separated them. She walked home with him that day, hand in hand, through the streets of Poughkeepsie. Gloria saw her from the porch of their small house and smiled deeply. She and the boy lasted all the way through college. She had even contemplated marrying him, but he went to Chicago to take a trading job. She went home to Gloria then, wept for a day.

Afterward, Gloria said to her that it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

— So you’ll call me, then? she asks him.

— I’ll call you, yes.

— Really? she asks with arched brow.

— Of course, he replies.

He extends his shoulder playfully. She rocks backward as if in a cartoon, her arms spread wide, flailing. She is not sure why she does it, but for a moment she doesn’t really care — there is an electricity to it, it makes her laugh.

He kisses her again, this time on the lips, quickly, smartly. She almost wishes her co-workers were here, that they could see her, bidding goodbye to an Italian man, a doctor, on Park Avenue, in the dark, in the cold, in the rain, in the wind, in the night. Like there might some secret camera that beams it all back to the offices in Little Rock, everyone looking up from the tax forms to watch her wave good-bye, to see him turn his body in the back of the cab, his arm raised, a shadow on his face, a smile.

She hears the hiss of the taxi tires as the car pulls away. Then she cups her hands out beyond the awning and runs some rainwater through her hair.

The doorman smiles, although it has been years since she’s seen him. A Welshman. He used to sing on Sundays when she, Gloria, and her sister came to visit. She can’t quite recall his name. His mustache has gone gray.

— Miss Jaslyn! Where’ve you been?

And then she remembers: Melvyn. He reaches for the small bag and for a moment she thinks he’s going to say how much she’s grown. But all he says is, in a grateful way: They put me on the night shift.

She is not quite sure if she should kiss his cheek or not — this evening of kissing — but he solves the dilemma by turning away.

— Melvyn, she says, you haven’t changed a bit.

He pats his stomach, smiles. She is wary of elevators, she would like to take the stairs, but a teenage boy is there with his hat and white gloves on.

— Madame, says the elevator boy.

— You staying long, Miss Jaslyn? asks Melvyn, but already the gate is closing.

She smiles at him from the back of the elevator.

— I’ll call up to Mrs. Soderberg’s, he says through the grille, and let them know you’re here.

The elevator boy stares straight ahead. He takes great care with the Otis. He doesn’t engage her in conversation, his head tilted slightly to the ceiling and his body as if it’s counting out rhythm. She gets the sense that he will be here ten years from now, twenty, thirty. She would like to step up behind him and whisper, Boo! in his ear, but she watches the panel and the small circular white lights as they rise.

He pulls the lever, aligns the elevator and the floor perfectly. He slides his foot out to test his workmanship. A young man of precision. — Madame, he says. First door on your right.

The door is opened by a tall Jamaican nurse, a man. They are momentarily confused, as if they should know each other somehow. The exchange is rapid-fire. I’m Mrs. Soderberg’s niece. Oh, I see, come in. Not her niece, really, but she calls me her niece. Please come in. I called earlier. Yes, yes, she’s sleeping now. Step inside. How is she? Well… he says.

And the well is drawn out, a pause, not an affirmative — Claire is not well at all; she is at the bottom of a dark well.

Jaslyn hears the sound of other voices: a radio, perhaps?

The apartment seems as if it has been sunk in aspic. It used to terrify her and her sister as children, on those occasions when they came into the city with Gloria, the dark hallway, the artwork, the smell of old wood. She and her sister held hands as they walked down the corridor. The worst thing was the portrait of the dead man on the wall. The painting had been done in such a way that his eyes seemed to follow them. Claire would talk about him all the time, that Solomon had loved this and Solomon loved that. She had sold some of the other paintings — even her Miró, to help pay the expenses — but the Solomon portrait remained.

The nurse takes her bag and settles it in the corner against the hat stand.

— Please, he says, and he motions her toward the living room.

She is stunned to see six people, most of them her own age, around the table and on the sofa. They are casually dressed but sipping cocktails. Her heart thumps against the wall of her chest. They too freeze at the sight of her. Well, well. The true nieces, nephews, cousins, perhaps? Song of Solomon. He is dead fourteen years but she can see him in their faces. One, almost certainly, is Claire’s niece, with a streak of gray in her hair.

They stare at her. The air like ice around her. She wishes that she had taken Pino upstairs alongside her, so he could help take control, calmly, smoothly, or at least draw attention. She can still feel the kiss on her lips. She touches them with her fingers, as if she can hold the memory of it there.

— Hi, I’m Jaslyn, she says with a wave.

An idiotic wave. Presidential, almost.

— Hi, says a tall brunette.

She feels as if she has been nailed to the floor, but one of the nephews strides across the room. He has something of the petulant college boy about him, chubby face, a white shirt, a blue blazer, a red handkerchief in the breast pocket.

— Tom, he says. Lovely to meet you, Jaslyn, finally.

He says her name like something he wants to flick off his shoe, and the word finally stretches into rebuke. So he knows about her. He has heard. He probably thinks she’s here to dig. So be it. Gold digger. The truth is, she couldn’t care less about the will; if she got anything she would probably give it away.

— A drink?

— I’m fine, thanks.

— We figured that Auntie would’ve wanted us to enjoy ourselves even in the worst of times. He lowers his voice: We’re making Manhattans.

— How is she?

— She’s sleeping.

— It’s late — I’m terribly sorry.

— We have soda too, if you want.

— Is she …?

She cannot finish the sentence. The words hang in the air between her and Tom.

— She’s not well, he says.

That word again. A hollow echo all the way down to the ground. No splash. A constant free fall. Well well.

She dislikes them for drinking, but then she knows she should join them, that she should not be apart. Bring Pino back, let him slide some charm among them, let him take her off into the evening upon his arm, nestled up against his leather jacket.

— Maybe I’ll take a drink, she says.

— And so, says Tom, what exactly brings you here?

— Excuse me?

— I mean, what exactly do you do now? Weren’t you working for the Democrats or something?

She hears a slight giggle from across the room. They are facing her, all of them, watching, as if she has, at last, made it to the stage.

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse. They arrange their lives in front of her, a few sheets of paper, a pay stub, a welfare check, all they have left. She adds up the figures. She knows the tax credits, the loopholes, the exits and entrances, the phone calls that must be made. She tries to nullify mortgage payments on a house that has floated down to the sea. She gets around insurance demands on cars that are at the bottom of the bayou. She tries to stop bills for very small white coffins.

She has seen others from the Little Rock foundation cleave people open immediately, but she has never been able to get to them so quickly. At first they are stilted with her, but she has learned how to listen all the same. After a half hour or so she gets to them.

It’s as if they’re talking to themselves, as if she is a mirror in front of them, giving them another history of themselves.

She is attracted to their darkness, but she likes the moment when they turn again and find some meaning that sideswipes them: I really loved her. I loosened his shirt before he drifted through the floodgates. My husband put the stove on a layaway plan.

And before they know it, their taxes are done, the insurance claim is laid out, the mortgage companies have been noted, the paper is slid across the table for them to sign. Sometimes it takes them an age just to sign, since they have something else to say — they are off and chatting about the cars they bought, the loves they loved. They have a deep need just to talk, just to tell a story, however small or reckless.

Listening to these people is like listening to trees — sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.

There was an old woman about nine months ago — she sat in a Little Rock hotel room, her dress spread out. Jaslyn was trying to figure out payments that the woman wasn’t getting from her pension fund.

— My boy was the mailman, the woman said. Right there in the Ninth. He was a good boy. Twenty-two years old. Used to work late if he had to. And he worked, I ain’t lying. People loved getting his letters. They waited for him. They liked him coming knocking on the door. You listenin’?

— Yes, ma’am.

— And then the storm blowed in. And he didn’t come back. I was waiting. I had his dinner ready. I was living on the third floor then. Waiting. Except nothing happened. So I waited and waited. I went out after two days looking for him, went downstairs. All those helicopters were flying over, ignoring us. I waded out into the street, I was up to my neck, near drowning. I couldn’t find no sign, nothing, ’Til I was down there by the check-cashing store and I found the sack of mail floating and I pulled it in. And I thought, Holy.

The woman’s fingers clamped down, gripping Jasyln’s hand.

— I was sure he’d come floating around the next corner, alive. I looked and looked. But I never did see my boy. I wish I woulda drowned right there and then. I found out two weeks later that he was caught up high in a treetop just rotting in the heat. In his mailman uniform. Imagine that, caught in the tree.

The woman got to her feet, and went across the hotel room, went to a cheap dresser, yanked a drawer open.

— I still got his mail here, see? You can take it if you want it.

Jaslyn held the sack in her hands. None of the envelopes had been touched.

— Take it, please, the woman said. I can’t stand it no more.

She took the sack of letters out to the lake near Natural Steps at the outskirts of Little Rock. The last light of day, she walked on the bank, her shoes sinking in the loam. Birds rose by pairs, bursting upward and wheeling overhead with the sun red on their cupped underwings. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the mail. She sat down on the grass and sorted them out, magazines, flyers, personal letters to be returned with a note: This got lost some time ago. I hope it’s okay to send it on again now.

She burned the bills, all of them. Verizon. Con Ed. The Internal Revenue Service. That grief wouldn’t be needed now, no, not anymore.

She stands by the window, the dark down. A chatter in the room. She is reminded of white birds, flapping. The cocktail glass she holds feels fragile. If she holds it too tight, she thinks, it might shatter.

She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria’s dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Missouri. The smile on Gloria’s face. Her sister, Janice, in the front seat, driving. Playing games with the rearview mirror. Both of them pushing Gloria in a wheelchair along the banks of the river. Up a lazy river where the robin’s song wakes a brand-new morning as we roll along. It was a celebration, that day. They had dug their feet down into happiness and weren’t prepared to let go. They threw sticks into an eddy and watched them circle. Put a blanket down, ate Wonder Bread sandwiches. Later in the afternoon, her sister began crying, like a change in the weather, for no reason except the popping of a wine cork. Jaslyn handed her a wadded tissue. Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Gloria left with a smile on her face. They closed her eyes with the glare of the sun still on them, rolled the wheelchair up the hill, stayed a little while looking out over the land until the insects of evening gathered.

They buried her two days later in a plot near the back of her old house. She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried. A quiet ceremony, just the girls and a preacher. They put Gloria in the ground with one of her father’s old hand-painted signs and a sewing tin she’d kept from her own mother. If there was any good way to go, it was a good way to go.

Yes, she thinks, she would like to stay and be with Claire also, spend a few moments, find some silence, let the moments crawl. She has even brought her pajamas, her toothbrush, her comb. But it is clear to her now that she is not welcome.

She had forgotten that there might be others too, that a life is lived in many ways — so many unopened envelopes.

— May I see her?

— I don’t think she should be disturbed.

— I’ll just pop my head around the door.

— It’s a little late. She’s sleeping. Would you like another drink …?

His voice rises high on the question, unfinished, as if searching for her name. But he knows her name. Idiot. A crass, lumbering fool. He wants to own the grief and throw a party for it.

— Jaslyn, she says and smiles thinly.

— Another drink, Jaslyn?

— Thank you, no, she says, I have a room at the Regis.

— The Regis, awesome.

It’s the fanciest hotel she can think of, the most expensive place. She has no idea even where it is, just somewhere nearby, but the name changes Tom’s face — he smiles and shows his very white teeth.

She wraps a napkin around the bottom of her drink, places it down on the glass coffee table.

— Well, I should say good night. It’s been a pleasure.

— Please, I’ll show you down.

— It’s okay, really.

— No, no, I insist.

He touches her elbow and she cringes. She resists the urge to ask him if he has ever been president of a frat house.

— Really, she says at the elevator, I can let myself out.

He leans forward to kiss her cheek. She allows him her shoulder and she gives a slight nudge against his chin.

— Good-bye, she says with a singsong finality.

Downstairs, Melvyn hails her a cab and soon she is alone again, as if none of the evening has happened at all. She checks in her pocket for the card from Pino. Turns it over in her fingers. It’s as if she can feel the phone already ringing itself out in his pocket.

The only room at the St. Regis costs four hundred and twenty-five dollars for the night. She thinks about trying to find another hotel, even thinks about a phone call to Pino, but then slides her credit card across the counter. Her hands shake: it is almost a month and a half’s rent in Little Rock. The girl behind the desk asks for I.D. Not a moment worth arguing over, though the couple in front of her were not asked for theirs.

The room is tiny. The television sits high on the wall. She clicks on the remote. The end of the storm. No hurricanes this year. Baseball scores, football scores, another six dead in Iraq.

She flops down on the bed, arms behind her head.

She went to Ireland shortly after the attacks on Afghanistan. It was supposed to be a vacation. Her sister was part of the team coordinating the U.S. flights into Shannon Airport. They were spat on in the streets of Gal-way when they were leaving a restaurant. Fucken Yanks go home. It wasn’t as bad as being called a nigger, which happened when they rented a car and ended up on the wrong side of the road.

Ireland surprised her. She had expected backroads of green and high hedges, men with locks of dark hair, isolated white cottages on the hills. Instead she got flyovers and ramps and lectures from heavy-faced drunks on just exactly what world policy meant. She found herself pulling into a shell, unable to listen. She’d heard bits and pieces about the man, Corrigan, who had died alongside her mother. She wanted to know more. Her sister was the opposite — Janice wanted nothing to do with the past. The past embarrassed her. The past was a jet that was coming in with dead bodies from the Middle East.

So she drove to Dublin without her sister. She did not know why but slow tears caught in her eyelashes: she had to squeeze them out to restore her vision of the road. She drew in deep, silent breaths as the roads grew bigger.

It was easy enough to find Corrigan’s brother. He was the CEO of an Internet company in the high glass towers along the Liffey

— Come and see me, he said on the phone.

Dublin was a boomtown. Neon along the river. The seagulls embroidered it. Ciaran was in his early sixties with a small peninsula of hair on his forehead. Half an American accent — his other office, he said, was in Silicon Valley. He was impeccably dressed in a suit and expensive open-necked shirt. Gray chest hair peeking out. They sat in his office and he talked her through a life of his late brother, Corrigan, a life that seemed rare and radical to her.

Outside the window, cranes swung on the skyline. The Irish light seemed lengthy. He took her across the river, to a pub, tucked down an alleyway, a genuine pub, all hardwood and beerscent. A row of silver kegs outside. She ordered a pint of Guinness.

— Was my mother in love with him?

He laughed. Oh, I don’t think so, no.

— Are you sure?

— That day, he was just giving her a lift home, that’s all.

— I see.

— He was in love with another woman. From South America — I can’t remember where, Colombia, I think, or Nicaragua.

— Oh.

She recognized the need for her mother to have been in love at least once.

— That’s a pity, she said, her eyes moistening.

She scoured her sleeve across her eyes. She hated the sight of tears, anytime. Showy and sentimental, the last thing she wanted.

Ciaran had no idea what to do with her. He went outside and called his wife on his cell phone. Jaslyn stayed at the bar and drank another beer, felt warm but light-headed. Maybe Corrigan had secretly loved her mother, maybe they were on their way to a rendezvous, perhaps a deep love had struck them both at the last instant. It occurred to her that her mother would only be forty-five or forty-six years old if she were still alive. They might have been friends. They could have talked about these things, could have sat in a bar together, spent some time, shared a beer. But it was ridiculous, really. How could her mother have crawled away from that life and started anew? How could she have walked away intact? With what, sweeping brooms, dust pans? Here we go, honey, grab my high-heeled boots, put them in the wagon, westward we go. Stupid, she knew. Still. Just one evening. To sit with her mother and watch the way she painted her nails, maybe, or see the way she put coffee in a cup, or watch her kick her shoes off, a single moment of the ordinary. Running the bath. Humming out of tune. Cutting the toast. Anything at all. Up a lazy river, how happy we could be.

Ciaran breezed back into the pub and said to her in a distinctly American accent: Guess who’s coming to dinner?

He drove a brand-new silver Audi. The house was just off the seafront, whitewashed, with roses out front and a dark ironwork fence. It was the same place the brothers had grown up. He had sold it once and had to buy it back for over a million dollars.

— Can you believe it? he said. A million plus.

His wife, Lara, was working in the garden, snipping roses with pruning shears. She was kind, slim, gentle, her gray hair pulled back into a bun. She had the bluest eyes, they looked like small drops of September sky. She pulled her gardening gloves off. There were spatters of color on her hands. She drew Jaslyn close, held her for a moment longer than expected: she smelled of paint.

Inside, there was a lot of artwork on the walls. They wandered around, a glass of crisp white wine for each of them.

She liked the paintings: radical Dublin landscapes, translated as line, shadow, color. Lara had published an art book and managed to sell some in the outdoor art shows in Merrion Square, but she had lost, she said, her American touch.

There was something of the beautiful failure about her.

They ended up in the back garden again, sitting at the patio, a bone of white light in the sky. Ciaran talked of the Dublin real estate market: but really, Jaslyn felt, they were talking about hidden losses, not profits, all the things they had passed by over the years.

After dinner, all three walked along the seafront together, past the Martello Tower and back around. The stars over Dublin sat like paint marks in the sky. The tide was long gone. An enormous stretch of sand disappeared into black.

— That way’s England, said Ciaran, for no reason she could discern.

He put his jacket around her and Lara took her elbow, walked along, wedged between them. She broke free as delicately as she could, drove back to Limerick first thing the next morning. Her sister’s face was glowing. Janice had just met a man. He was on his third tour, she said — imagine that. He wore size-fourteen boots, she added with a wink.

Her sister got shipped to the embassy in Baghdad two years ago. Every now and then she still gets a postcard from her. One of them is a picture of a woman in a burka: Fun in the sun.

The day dawns winter bright. She finds out in the morning that breakfast is not included in her hotel bill. She can only smile. Four hundred and twenty-five dollars, breakfast not included.

Upstairs, she takes all the soaps from the bathroom, the lotion, the shoeshine cloth, but still leaves a tip for the housekeepers.

She walks in the neighborhood for coffee, up north from Fifty-fifth Street.

The whole world a Starbucks, and she can’t find a single one.

She settles on a small deli. Cream in her coffee. A bagel with butter. She circles back around to Claire’s apartment, stands outside, looks up. It is a beautiful building, brickworked and corniced. But it’s too early to stop by yet, she decides. She turns and walks east toward the subway, her small bag slung over her shoulder.

She loves the immediate energy of the Village. It is as if all the guitars have suddenly taken to the fire escapes. Sunlight on the brickwork. Flowerpots in high windows.

She is wearing an open blouse and tight jeans. She feels at ease, as if the streets are releasing her.

A man passes her with a dog inside his shirt. She smiles and watches them go. The dog crawls to the top of the man’s shoulder and looks back at her, its eyes large and tender. She waves, sees the dog disappear down the man’s shirt again.

She finds Pino in a coffee shop on Mercer Street. It is just as easy as she has imagined: she has no idea why, but she was convinced that it would be simple to find him. She could have called him on his cell phone but decided against it. Better to seek him out, find him, in this city of millions. He is alone and hunched over a coffee, reading a copy of La Repubblica. She has the sudden fear that there is a woman somewhere nearby, perhaps even one who is due to join him at any moment, but she doesn’t care.

She buys a coffee, and slides back the chair, joins him at the table. He lifts his reading glasses to the top of his forehead and leans back in the chair, laughs.

— How did you find me?

— My internal GPS. How was your jazz?

— Oh, it was jazz. Your old friend, how is she?

— Not sure. Yet.

— Yet?

— I’ll see her later today. Tell me. Can I ask? Just, well, y’know What brings you here? The city?

— You really want to know? he says.

— I think so, yeah.

— Are you ready?

— As I’ll ever be.

— I’m buying a chess set.

— You what?

— It’s a handmade thing. There’s a craftsman on Thompson Street. I’m picking it up. It’s a bit of an obsession of mine. It’s for my son, actually. It’s a special Canadian wood. And the guy is a master …

— You came all the way from Little Rock to pick up a chess set?

— I suppose I needed to get out for a while.

— No kidding.

— And, well, I’ll bring it to him in Frankfurt. Spend a few days with him, have some fun. Go back to Little Rock, return to work.

— How’s your carbon footprint?

He smiles, drains his coffee. She can already tell that they will spend the morning here, that they will while the time away in the Village, they will have an early lunch, he will lean forward and touch her neck, she will cradle his hand there, they will go to his hotel, they will make love, they will open the curtains, they will tell stories, they will laugh, she will fall asleep again with her hand on his chest, she will kiss him good-bye, and later, back in Arkansas, he will call on her message machine, and she will leave his number on her night desk, to decide.

— Another question?

— Yeah?

— How many pictures of women are on your cell phone?

— Not many, he says with a grin. And you? How many guys?

— Millions, she says.

— Really?

— Billions, in fact.

There was only one time she ever went back to the Deegan. It was ten years ago, when she had just finished college. She wanted to know where it was her mother and grandmother had strolled. She drove a rental from JFK airport, got stopped in traffic, bumper to bumper. At least a half-mile of cars up ahead. In the rearview mirror the traffic pinned her into place. A Bronx sandwich.

So, she was home again, but it didn’t feel like a homecoming.

She hadn’t been in the neighborhood since she was five. She remembered the pale gray corridors and a mailbox stuffed with flyers: that was all.

She put the car in park and was fidgeting with her stereo when she caught a glimpse of movement far up the road. A man was rising out from the top of a limousine, strange and centaurian. She saw his head first, then his torso coming up through the open sunroof. Then the sharp swivel of his head as if he had been shot. She fully expected a spray of blood along his roof. Instead the man extended his arm and pointed as if directing traffic. He swiveled again. Each turn was quicker and quicker. He was like an odd conductor, wearing a suit and tie. The outstretched tie looked like a dial on the roof of the car as he turned. His hands rose on either side of him and he pulled his whole body up through the sunroof and then he was out and standing on top of the limousine, legs splayed wide and his fingers outstretched. Roaring at nearby drivers.

She noticed then that others were out and about, with their arms draped over their open doors, a little row of heads turning in the same direction, like sunflowers. Some secret between them. A nearby woman started beeping her car horn, she heard screaming, and it was then that she noticed the coyote trotting through the traffic.

It looked entirely calm, loping along in the hot sun, stopping and twisting its body, as if it were in some weird wonderland to be marveled at.

The thing was that the coyote was going toward the city, not back out. She remained seated and watched it come toward her. It crossed lanes two cars in front of her, passed alongside her window. It didn’t look up, but she could see the yellow of the eyes.

In the rearview mirror she watched it go. She wanted to scream at it to turn, that it was going the wrong way, it needed to double back, just swivel and sprint free. Far behind her she noticed siren lights turning. Animal control. Three men with nets were circling through the traffic.

When she heard the crack of the rifle shot she thought at first it was just a car backfiring.

She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn’t interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazzlyn was too. They were like strangers on a porch, Gloria and Jazzlyn, with the evening sun going down: they just sat there together and neither could say what the other one knew, so they just kept quiet, and watched the day descend. One of them said good night, while the other waited.

They find each other slowly, tentatively, shyly, drawing apart, merging again, and it strikes her that she has never really known the body of another. Afterward they lie together without speaking, their bodies touching lightly, until she rises and dresses quietly.

The flowers are cheap, she thinks, the moment she buys them. Waxy flower paper, thin blooms, a strange scent to them, like someone in the deli has sprayed them with a false fragrance. Still, she can find no other open florist. And the light is dimming, the evening disappearing. She heads west, toward Park, her body still tingling, his phantom hand at her hip.

In the elevator the cheap scent of the flowers rises. She should have looked around and found a better shop, but it’s too late now. No matter. She gets out on the top floor, her shoes sinking into the soft carpet. There is a newspaper on the ground, by Claire’s door, the slick hysteria of war. Eighteen dead today.

A shiver along her arms.

She rings the doorbell, props the flowers against the frame as she hears the latches click.

It is the Jamaican nurse who opens the door for her again. His face is broad and relaxed. He wears short dreadlocks.

— Oh, hi.

— Is there anyone else here?

— Excuse me? he says.

— Just wondering if there’s anybody else home.

— Her nephew’s in the other room. He’s napping.

— How long has he been here?

— Tom? He spent the night. He’s been here a few days. He’s been having people over.

There is a momentary standoff as if the nurse is trying to figure out just exactly why she has returned, what she wants, how long she’ll stay. He keeps his hand around the doorframe, but then he leans forward and whispers conspiratorially: He brought a couple of real estate people to his parties, y’know.

Jaslyn smiles, shakes her head: it doesn’t matter, she will not allow it to matter.

— Do you think I can see her?

— Be my guest. You know she had a stroke, right?

— Yes.

She stops in the hallway.

— Did she get my card? I sent a big goofy card.

— Oh, that’s yours? says the nurse. That one’s funny. I like that one.

He sweeps his hand along the corridor, points her down toward the room. She moves through the half-dark, as if pushing back a veil. She stops, turns the glass handle on the bedroom door. It clicks. The door swings. She feels as if she is stepping off a ledge. The room looks dark and heavy, a thick tenor to it. A tiny triangle of light where the curtains don’t quite meet.

She stands a moment to let her eyes adjust. Jaslyn wants to part the dark, open the curtains, crack the window, but Claire is asleep, eyelids closed. She pulls up a chair by the bed, beside a saline drip. The drip is not attached. There is a glass on the bedside table. And a straw. And a pencil. And a newspaper. And her card among many other cards. She peers in the dark. Get well soon, you funny old bird. She is not sure now whether it is humorous at all; perhaps she should have bought something cute and demure. You never know. You cannot know.

The rise and fall of Claire’s chest. The body a thin failure now. The shrunken breasts, the deep lids, the striated neck, the intricate articulation. Her life painted on her, receding on her. A brief flutter of her eyelids. Jaslyn leans close. A waft of stale air. An eyelid flutter once more. The eyes open and stare. In the dark, their whites. Claire opens her eyes, wider still, does not smile or say a word.

A pull on the sheets. Jaslyn looks down as Claire moves her left hand. The fingers go up and down as if playing a piano. The yellow rufflework of age. The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.

A clock sounds.

Little else to distract attention from the evening, just a clock, in a time not too distant from the present time, yet a time not too distant from the past, the unaccountable unfolding of consequence into tomorrow’s time, the simple things, the grain of bedwood alive in light, the slight argument of dark still left in the old woman’s hair, the ray of moisture on the plastic lifebag, the curl of the braided flower petal, the chipped edge of a photo frame, the rim of a mug, the mark of a stray tea line along its edge, a crossword puzzle sitting unfinished, the yellow of a pencil dangling over the edge of the table, one end sharpened, the eraser in midair. Fragments of a human order. Jaslyn turns the pencil around to safety, then rises, rounds the far end of the bed, toward the window. Her hands on the windowsill. She parts the curtains a little more, opens the triangle, lifts the window frame minutely, feels the curl of breeze on her skin: the ash, the dust, the light now pressing the dark out of things. We stumble on, now, we drain the light from the dark, to make it last. She lifts the window higher. Sounds outside, growing clearer in the silence, traffic at first, machine hum, cranework, playgrounds, children, the tree branches down on the avenue slapping each other around.

The curtain falls back but still a corridor of brightness has opened up on the carpet. Jaslyn steps to the bed again, takes off her shoes, drops them. Claire parts her lips ever so slightly. Not a word, but a difference in her breathing, a measured grace.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

Quietly, Jaslyn perches on the edge of the bed and then extends her feet, moves her legs across slowly so as not to disturb the mattress. She fixes a pillow, leans, picks a hair out of Claire’s mouth.

Jaslyn thinks again of an apricot — she does not know why, but that’s what she thinks, the skin of it, the savor, the sweetness.

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

She lies on the bed beside Claire, above the sheets. The faint tang of the old woman’s breath on the air. The clock. The fan. The breeze.

The world spinning.