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Gilbert Sorrentino
A Strange Commonplace

I passed through extraordinary places, as vivid as any I ever saw where the storm had broken the barrier and let through a strange commonplace: Long, deserted avenues with unrecognized names at the corners and drunken looking people with completely foreign manners.

— WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

— T. S. ELIOT

Book One

In the Bedroom

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

Success

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

Born Again

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

Lovers

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

Another Story

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

Movies

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

Pair of Deuces

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

In Dreams

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

On the Roof

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

A Familiar Woman

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

In the Diner

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

Happy Days

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

Claire

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

Rockefeller Center

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

Brothers

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

A Small Adventure

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

Another Small Adventure

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

Cold Supper

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

Pearl Gray Homburg

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

An Apartment

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

Saturday Afternoon

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

The Jungle

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

Snow

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

Rain

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

The Alpine

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

A Wake

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