Buddwing

18

A cool wind was blowing in off the East River.

He came down into the street, and deliberately headed into the wind, walking toward the river. His head was throbbing and the long, deserted street ahead of him was double-exposed, the street-lamps swirling into shifting patterns of light, stretches of darkness, and then blurred light again, the wind cool on his cheeks and on his mouth. He needed time to think. He could not think with his head pounding like this. The river wind would cool his face, and the headache would recede, and he would go back to the apartment and talk to her gently through the wooden door, until she turned the bolt, and eased open the door, and let him back into her life. He did not for a moment believe it was all over. They had argued violently a hundred times before, she had slammed a thousand doors in his face, but it could not be over, it could never be over.

It was cold by the river.

The breeze he had sought was a harsh sharp wind that whistled angrily over the water, slapping waves against the shore pilings. He pulled up the collar of his jacket, and thrust his hands into his pockets, and began walking uptown. In the distance, he could see the lights of the Triboro Bridge, hung mistily against the sky. Through his blurred vision, everything had taken on a quality of softness, the bridge lights nuzzling a curiously fuzzy sky, the clouds blending into blackness, Randall’s Island and North Brother losing the perspective of distance, a dredge out on the water pounding in time with the beating pulse at his temple, but silhouetted curiously against nearer blurred lights, Hell Gate hanging on the horizon, shrouded. He walked close to the iron railing bordering the river, shivering from the cold, watching the lights in the distance. There was no fog, but he felt as though he were walking through layers upon layers of mist, each foot coming down gently and easily upon a soft bank of cloud into which he sank knee-deep without effort.

He was alone by the river.

The noises of the city were distant and impersonal. Because his feet sank into deep layers of mist, he did not even hear his own footfalls. Because the pounding at his temple coincided with the steady beat of the dredge, he heard neither, and walked steadily and easily, wafted gently on a mild current of air that carried him without conscious direction to a half-understood goal.

He was going to his grandfather’s tailorshop.

He looked up at the street sign across the East River Drive and saw that he had come as far uptown as 101st Street. He did not quicken his pace. He continued drifting easily and dreamily, the sound of the dredge behind him now, passing Benjamin Franklin High School, and then 116th Street, and knowing the tailorshop was on First Avenue just off 117th Street, but continuing on past 117th and then going as far as 120th Street. He crossed the Drive and walked past Pleasant Avenue and saw P.S. 80 ahead in the middle of the block, and crossed to the side of the street where the school sat hunched in darkness.

He stopped on the sidewalk.

He looked up at the school, and tried to remember himself as a boy there — what had they called him then, what was his name? He could remember Miss Taxton, and the time she took him and another boy in 2A to her house in Larchmont for lunch on a Saturday afternoon; they had bounced a golf ball on the large flagstone terrace behind her house; he had thought it was the biggest house in the world. He could remember Mrs. Flynn, who was tall and string-bean-thin and with whom he had got into a heated argument at the Boys’ Club on 111th Street where the school used to take them to swim every Friday afternoon. He could remember Mrs. Davidstein and the project on Mexico for which he had drawn a picture of a peasant in white sitting against a pale yellow wall taking a noonday siesta, and he could remember learning the words in Spanish to “Cielito Lindo.” Mrs. Harnig had been his favorite, a very tall woman very much like his mother, who would say “Oh hell” whenever anything went wrong, and who took his side in the argument with Mrs. Flynn that day at the Boys’ Club. He could remember all of this, but he could not remember his name. He could remember who he had been — but he could not remember who he was.

He walked past the school and up to First Avenue. He crossed the street and stopped on the corner, looking up toward Second Avenue where the elevated structure used to be. He could barely recognize the street. He turned left on First Avenue (the pasticceria was still there on the corner) and began walking downtown, following the route he used to take from the school each afternoon (the coal station across the street was gone), crossing 119th Street and continuing on down First Avenue until he was almost to 117th Street, and then stopping for the tailorshop. He did not expect to find it there still, but he at least hoped the façade of the shop would be the same, that whether the inside now housed a delicatessen or a butchershop, the outside would still be the same. There would still be the wide front plate-glass window with the hanging light bulb, and the door with the handle he used to reach up to grab.

But he recognized none of the stores in the row; everything seemed to have changed. He stood on the sidewalk staring at the darkened stores. His headache was receding, but his vision was still blurred and for a moment it seemed that one of the shops glowed with a gentle warmth; it seemed for a moment that snowflakes danced on the air, and he could hear the tinkle of the bell over the shop door, and a familiar welcoming voice saying, “Come in, you must be frozen. Annie, make him some nice hot chocolate.” He blinked his eyes. The stores were dark, eyeless in the night.

He began walking again.

When he heard the music, he thought his mind was playing a grotesque trick. His vision was beginning to clear somewhat, but now that the blurred distortion was vanishing, it seemed as though an auditory distortion were taking its place. As he came closer to 116th Street, he realized he was indeed hearing music, and he followed the sound, turning the corner and heading toward the bar in the middle of the block. There was a lighted doorway alongside the bar, with a steep flight of steps leading downstairs, and the music came from somewhere at the bottom of the steps, as though emanating in a burst of light from the center of the earth. A boy of about seventeen, wearing a tuxedo, was standing on the steps with a teen-age girl in a pink gown. Buddwing peered down the steps curiously, and the boy smiled and asked, “You looking for the wedding?” Buddwing smiled and said nothing. “You’d better hurry,” the boy said. “The beer and sandwiches are almost gone.”

He realized all at once that he was ferociously hungry, and he nodded at the boy, and then started down the steps, the girl in the pink gown smiling at him as he went by. The light grew stronger, the music louder; the narrow sharp flight of steps opened suddenly onto a wider mirrored alcove. The man he saw in the mirror did not startle him. He did not know who the man was, but at least the face, the body, were familiar to him; these had not changed since he had first seen himself early this morning at the

Or was that yesterday morning?

Was it tomorrow already?

He turned back toward the steps. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked the boy in the tuxedo.

“Almost two o’clock,” the boy said.

“Thank you,” he answered, and turned again toward the mirror. He had been awake since six o’clock yesterday morning, and it was now two o’clock this morning, and the man in the mirror looked very tired, older perhaps, but certainly not at all wiser. He smiled at himself sadly. Inside the hall, the band had begun a spirited tarantella. He straightened his tie and walked into the brightly lighted room. He searched for the food first because he had the feeling someone would detect him as a crasher and throw him out, and he wanted to make sure he got something to eat before that happened. The reception was still going full tilt, with distant cousins from Red Bank whooping it up in the middle of the floor with relatives from 114th Street and Second Avenue.

“Hey, Dominick,” someone shouted to a bald-headed man dancing vigorously with a young brunette, “Piano, piano! Ti viene una strocca!”

“Una sincope, stupido!” the bald-headed man answered, laughing, and wiped his sweating brow as Buddwing spied the bar across the room and headed quickly toward it. The man behind the bar was obviously a relative or a close friend, because he was wearing a dress shirt with his black bow tie loosened and dangling down his starched front, and with his sleeves rolled up and his arms wet from dipping into the icebox for sodas. His tuxedo jacket was hanging on a peg behind the bar, and he looked up at Buddwing as he approached and then grinned amiably and said, “What’ll it be, friend?”

“What’ve you got?”

“Ham or ham and cheese. Beer or soda.”

“I’ll have a beer and two hams,” Buddwing said.

“You the bride or the groom?” the man asked, and turned toward the keg of beer behind the bar.

“A little of each,” Buddwing said.

“Oh, you know them both, huh?” the man asked, drawing a glass of beer.

“Mmm,” Buddwing said.

“Rosie is my cousin,” the man said.

“She’s a nice girl,” Buddwing answered.

“You telling me? I know her from when she was running around with her pants wet. Now look at her, getting spliced.” The man laughed. “Two hams, right?” he asked, and put the glass of beer on the bar top. “You from this neighborhood?”

“No,” Buddwing said.

“I didn’t think so. I ain’t from around here, either. Well, technically, anyway. I’m from Brooklyn. But my wife lived here, you know. So when we got married, we wound up here.”

“I see,” Buddwing said.

“We were married right in the church on a hun’ fifteenth, matter of fact. Oh, it made my mother sick, believe me. She had to come all the way from Brooklyn, oh, it made her sick.”

“I know what you mean,” Buddwing said, smiling. “My wife’s parents live in Mount Kisco, so any important family function takes place up there.”

“Sure, naturally,” the man said. He reached into the large cardboard box behind the counter, and put two sandwiches in waxed paper bags before Buddwing. “It’s nice up that way, though, ain’t it?”

“Oh, sure,” Buddwing said. He took a swallow of beer. “That’s good beer.”

“It ain’t getting warm, is it?”

“No, it’s just right.”

“The keg’s almost gone. This’ll probably be breaking up soon. Look at them two nuts. They ain’t even left yet.”

Buddwing looked across the hall to where the bride and groom were circulating among the guests, accepting congratulations and good wishes, passing out small white boxes of candied almonds. Like the wedding in Milan, he thought, and then pushed Milan out of his mind.

“Is something wrong?” the man behind the bar asked.

“No, no. Nothing.”

“You keep blinking your eyes.”

“I have a bad headache, that’s all.”

“Why don’t you eat something? Maybe you’re hungry.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Go on. Sit down over there someplace and eat your sandwiches.”

“Thank you,” Buddwing said.

“You sure you feel all right?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Because if you don’t, you see that guy sitting there in the blue suit? That’s Dr. Solomon, he brought Rosie into the world. I mean, if you don’t feel so good.”

“No, I feel fine, thanks.”

“Well, go sit down anyway, why don’t you? You look a little green around the gills.”

“All right, thank you,” Buddwing said, and he nodded and walked away from the bar and to a table at the far side of the hall. The band was playing Vicino il Mare, a mandolin picking out the tune to the accompaniment of piano, drums, and trumpet. Someone cracked a dirty joke to the groom, and he burst out laughing while the bride stood by in becoming blushing innocence. The sound of Italian floated on the air around him, pierced by the pizzicato mandolin, the brittle tinkle of laughter, the pleasant hum of celebrating people. The man behind the bar had said he looked a little green around the gills, and he did feel very weak now as he pulled a chair out from the empty table, felt his knees would fold beneath him at any moment, they had stumbled into the Milanese wedding last summer in the midafternoon, searching for a bar after the suffocating heat on the roof of Il Duomo. On the roof, he had pointed to one of the cherub faces carved into the stone icing and said, “He looks like someone I used to know.” Grace, with her back to the sun, the sun glowing in her hair, brass against brass, had answered, “You look like someone I used to know.”

He took one of the sandwiches from its waxed paper bag and bit into it. The sandwich was dry, no butter, no lettuce, two slices of lean ham on a starchy roll. He washed it down with a swallow of beer. The band was playing a medley of Italian favorites now, Torna a Sorrento and Tra Veglia e Sonno, and Maria, Mari, and finally Luna mezz’ ’o Mare. The laughter around him rose as an old man with a walrus mustache began singing the lyrics at the top of his voice. He was joined by two portly men at another table, and suddenly the hall was ringing with the words, echoing from the walls to assail Buddwing where he sat alone at his table, with a dust-dry sandwich and a glass of flat beer.

She had given him the gold ring with the black stone the day before they left for Europe last summer. He had looked at the inside of the ring and said, “From G.V. Is that all?”

“Those are my initials,” she said, “aren’t they?”

“Yes, but shouldn’t it read ‘From G.V. With Love’?”

She shrugged and said, “The love is understood.”

In Paris, there were a great many business people to meet and talk to, and therefore a great many parties — cocktail, dinner, midnight buffet. They had practiced their French assiduously before the trip, speaking nothing else for days before their flight, and in Paris they had ample opportunity for putting the language to use. It became a little more difficult on the road, where the pure French became somewhat bastardized, making it harder to understand and be understood. From the Esso booklet, he memorized the sentence Faites le plein, s’il vous plaît, et vérifiez l’huile et l’eau, impressing no one but himself, and at a total loss when it came to answering automotive questions put to him by garage attendants.

She was wearing a light plaid topcoat the day they discovered the Roman arena in the small French roadside town. It had been raining all morning, and then the rain stopped abruptly, leaving behind it a cold and gloomy day, more like October than August.

“October always makes me sad,” she said.

“This is August,” he said.

“Still,” she answered.

The arena was not marked in any of the guidebooks, nor had they even remotely suspected that the Romans had ever advanced this far into France. The town, in fact, was a combination of incongruous elements. It seemed to be a typical French country town, but there was undeniably a Roman arena in its center; and beyond the arena, its sign clearly visible from the upper rim of the stadium, was an English tearoom. The sign, moreover, was lettered in English, the black letters centered on a field of white, TEA ROOM, SO that for a moment he felt oddly displaced and wondered exactly where the hell he was, France, Italy, or England.

To further confuse the conglomerate geography, as Buddwing stepped down over the tiers of seats and onto the arena’s turf still wet with the morning’s rain, he had the feeling that he was walking into an American football stadium. He looked back and up at Grace, who was standing on one of the stone tiers, her hands in the pockets of the plaid coat. He grinned and chanted, “Give ’em the ax, give ’em the ax, give ’em the ax...”

“Where?” she said automatically, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere; her eyes were preoccupied.

They drove into Milan on a Saturday, and checked into their hotel at noon. The streets were mercilessly hot, and the lobby of the hotel seemed shaded and almost cool by comparison. The desk clerk took their passports and then looked at Grace in surprise and said, “Credevo che fosse italiana.”

“No,” she replied with a strange pleased mysterious smile, “non sono italiana.”

“Tutti in Italia la prendono per italiana,” Buddwing said.

“Certo, che sembra una settentrionale,” the desk clerk answered, and rang for the bellhop. The room was sleek and modern, with a huge double bed, and a mirrored wall, and a marble bathroom with a dozen mysterious knobs and hoses. But the air conditioner was out of order, and the moment they stepped into the room, they were assailed with a contained heat more formidable than that in the streets outside. Buddwing went to the phone immediately and asked for the desk.

“Questa stanza è impossibile,” he said. “L’aria condizionata non funziona.”

“Si, signore,” the desk clerk answered, “ma non è soltanto la sua stanza, signore, è la stessa cosa in ogni stanza nell’albergo. Qualche cosa è successo al sistema centrale.”

“Mi vuol dire che non c’è neanche una stanza fresca in tutto l’albergo?”

“No, signore. Tutte le stanze sono ad aria condizionata. È soltanto che per il momento il sistema centrale non funziona, e così ci sarà un piccolo ritardo per giungere alla temperatura giusta.”

“What do you mean by a short delay?” he asked in English, and then said, “Ma, quanto ci volere... ci vorrà per accomodarlo?”

“Ci stanno lavorando adesso, signore.”

“Quanto tempo ci vuole?”

“Non dovrebbe essere troppo, signore.”

Buddwing covered the mouthpiece with the palm of his hand and turned to Grace. “What do you think?” he asked. “There’s something wrong with the central cooling system. They’re working on it now.”

“I’m exhausted,” Grace said. “We might as well stay.”

“Va bene, grazie,” Buddwing said into the phone, and hung up. He turned to the waiting bellhop. “Va bene, puo lasciare le valige,” he said, and then tipped him. They stripped to their underwear as soon as the bellhop was gone, and began unpacking their bags. He was carrying a small portable typewriter in a metal case, and he put it on a table near the single large sealed window in the room. Grace went into the bathroom to bathe, and he lay on the bed in his undershorts, sweating profusely, and fished into his wallet for the telephone numbers of his business contacts in the city.

There was no answer at the first number he called, and when he dialed the second number, he got a scatterbrained secretary who could not understand his Italian.

“Vorrei parlare con il signor D’Amore,” he said slowly and patiently.

“Ah, si, si, il signor D’Amore. Ma non è qui proprio adesso.”

“Bene. Dove l’aspettiamo?”

“Scusi?”

“Quando arriveremo?”

“Scusi?”

“Look, for...” He paused, regained his patience, and then calmly said, “Dove si trova il signor D’Amore?”

“Ah, ah! E a Como.”

“Quando ritorna?”

“In una quindicina di giorni,” the secretary said.

“Grazie,” Buddwing said, and hung up.

“What is it?” Grace called from the bathroom.

“D’Amore’s at Lake Como. He won’t be back for two weeks.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Grace said.

“I couldn’t reach Danaro, either.” He looked at the list in his hand. “I guess I’ll try this last one.”

“What?”

“I said I’ll try this last one.”

“All right.” She paused. “This water is brown,” she said. “Ick, it smells like sewer water.”

He dialed the last number on his list and got an answering service that told him Signor Casoscorso had gone with his family to Positano for their yearly summer holiday, could she take a message? He said, “No, thanks, no message,” and hung up. “Well, what the hell do we do now?” he called to the bathroom.

“What do you mean?”

“None of them are here. Why’d we bother coming to Milan?”

“There must be things to see here,” Grace said.

“This leg of the trip was supposed to be business. We didn’t have to come to Milan if we wanted to sightsee.”

“Didn’t you write ahead?”

“Of course I wrote ahead. Damnit, they knew we were coming.”

“The Paris leg was business, too,” Grace said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Grace answered, and then very softly said, “I guess we’re stuck with each other.”

They ate lunch in the hotel dining room and then napped away the afternoon. The air-conditioning system was repaired before they went out for dinner, but not before the sun glaring through the hotel window had partially melted the rubber roller on his typewriter. That evening, they ate green noodles and chicken cacciatore in a restaurant near the Galleria. The city seemed deserted. They had very little to say to each other during the meal.

In the middle of the night, Grace woke up screaming.

“What is it?” he shouted, alarmed.

“The man,” she mumbled, “the man.”

He put his arms around her and held her close. “What man?” he asked gently.

“In the wheelchair,” she said. “He’s looking under my raincoat.”

“All right, honey,” he said, “try to get back to sleep.”

“Why didn’t he let me?” she said, and then rolled away from him, and buried her face in the pillow.

On Sunday they went to see the cathedral.

The roof of Il Duomo was a tangle of intricate arches and buttresses, a sculptured maze that challenged the eye with its interwoven complexity. The sun was dangerously hot, baking the roof of the cathedral, each carving arc of stone fringework casting a narrow unprotective shadow. They walked the roof heavily as though caught in the sticky strands of a giant spider-web. When Grace peered over the edge of the roof to the piazza below, she suddenly swayed back dizzily against him, and it was then that they decided to find a cool bar someplace.

The streets of Milan that Sunday last summer were virtually empty. Every now and then, a lone automobile would cruise past, but for the most part they seemed alone in a city that had been rendered mute and inanimate by the heat. They wandered into the wedding reception by accident, hearing music at the back of a trattoria and entering only to discover that a private party was in progress. Then, because they were Americans and because the heat had generated a desperate sort of camaraderie among those who were foolhardy enough to challenge it, they were invited to sit and have a drink. The bride’s father was an immense sweating man in a black morning coat and striped trousers. He told them he had a brother in Los Angeles, and that he considered their sudden arrival at the wedding an omen of the highest possible good fortune. “Un ottimo augurio,” he said. He introduced them to his daughter, a radiant dark-haired beauty in a satin bridal gown with wet circles of sweat under the sleeves. She was clutching the arm of her groom, a pale smiling youth who continually wiped beads of perspiration from his brow.

They were so young. They were so very young, and chattering in high excited Italian, passing candied almonds among the guests, drinking toasts, listening to the coarse Italian honeymoon jokes, laughing, brimming with plans for the future, shining with youthful dreams. Buddwing and Grace sat at the small table in the outdoor garden of the trattoria, surrounded by festivity. They watched the newlyweds, and an unsettling gloom began to spread over them, a gloom they could not understand until later, when they were back at the hotel.

The air conditioner was working, it hummed serenely, it filled the room with purified, cooled air, it immunized the room against the world outside, providing a sterile cubicle in which they could face each other at last, and see each other.

They had taken off their clothes and Grace was standing in front of the mirrored wall when he padded up beside her. They looked at each other in the mirror, and he said, “You’re really very small,” and she did not answer for a moment because she was staring at this man who had always thought of her as being tall, staring at this man in the mirror and not recognizing him, either. And then, because they both felt simultaneously that the mirror images were lying, that these two people who peered back at them were not really themselves but some falsely distorted representations, they turned from the mirror and faced each other, and looked.

It ended in that moment, he supposed.

Whatever had existed between them until now, whatever thin thread of hope held them to each other, whatever memories of a small park or a crowded French restaurant or a cloistered automobile or a deserted sunny beach or a wedding ceremony in a huge stone church vibrating with the sound of organ and violin, whatever crushed dreams, whatever forgotten youth, all vanished in that moment.

They were staring at strangers.

They stared in shock and surprise because they were naked to each other at last, and embarrassed by their nakedness, and filled with the terrible mutual knowledge that these two people, who looked out of unbelieving eyes at strangers, were strangers to themselves as well.

“Oh, Jesus,” Grace said.

“Grace,” he said in sudden panic, “do you remember—”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said.

“Grace, the times we—”

“We met a million years ago,” she said flatly. “We’re dinosaurs. We’re extinct. We’re dead.” Her voice lowered. “We’re dead.”

“No,” he said.

“We’re dead,” she repeated.

“No,” he said, refusing to accept the words. Who the hell were these pale and naked strangers staring at them from the mirror, crowding into their lives? No, he thought, we’ve come too far for this, we know each other too well, we’ve fought too hard for whatever tiny shred of life we’ve managed to grab, no! This isn’t happening to us, he thought. Grace, there is still something for us.

His eyes met hers in the mirror.

I know you, he thought.

Please. I know you.

Please, we have been through so much together.

Let me see your eyes.

The eyes were pale, drained of color, drained of emotion, drained of hope. He had seen these eyes on a night long ago when they had hoarsely shouted accusations to each other, had seen these same pale and frightened eyes the next day as she sat at the kitchen table in her white raincoat, Grace, what are you doing with your raincoat on?

I tried to kill myself, she said.

Don’t be ridiculous.

Yes, I tried to kill myself.

Honey, honey, and he took her in his arms, and gently she wept against his shoulder. Is this what life means? she asked. Is this what life is about? He did not know, and so he could not tell her. He comforted her, kissing her tear-stained face and holding her close, and putting his cheek against her hand, and like conspirators they whispered the afternoon away and made love afterward and found a strength somewhere. Her eyes came slowly back to life. The color returned, and with it a determination and then something more than that, a resignation, a burning intensity.

Eleven years ago, the boy and girl who had met in a sundrenched secret autumn park when the world was concerned only with Greek mythology and the touch of a hand, eleven years ago the boy and girl who had learned each other’s ways in a city as glittering as the universe, eleven years ago the boy and girl who had solemnly vowed to love, honor and cherish in a huge stone church trembling with the sound of music, eleven years ago the boy and girl who had begun living together with faces clean and bright, eyes hopefully gleaming, who had come through a pregnancy and a miscarriage and all the bitter recriminations that followed, eleven years ago this boy and this girl had fervently whispered their vows anew, reaffirmed their bond, and declared to themselves and to the world that they were one, that they would not be defeated, they would survive, they would endure, they would triumph.

Eleven years ago.

Now in a hotel room in an Italian city, they saw each other after all those years, after all the clever golden people and pretty conversations, after all the cocktails delicately held and whiskey bottles drained, after all the lifted skirts and covetous hands and sly and secret insinuations, after all the deals and propositions, after all the countless necessary homicides, the lies, the petty thefts, the alibis, the threats — after all of this, after all the jazz of everyday living, the jazz that pounded and vibrated and moved away in a dazzling modulation to another distant chord, changing so imperceptibly from chord to chord, from note to note, that the change was not at all visible until now, until this moment when all the autumn leaves of a park outside a school seemed to fall in a simultaneous ear-shattering crackling rush that drowned out even the distorted jazz-throb and left them standing before a mirror in Milan, two sophisticated, intelligent, educated, experienced, successful Americans who suddenly realized they had passed Go once too often — the goddamn game was over and they were bankrupt.

“We’re dead,” Grace said, and this time he did not contradict her.

In Portobello last summer, the street band marched through playing “Midnight in Moscow,” and he bought the clock against her wishes because nothing mattered after Milan. There was a giant smudge on the bass drum where the padded stick repeatedly struck the same spot. The name of the band was lettered in a semicircle on the drum, THE LIMEHOUSE REGULARS. The band marched with a ragged beat, and the music echoed in the crowded street as he bought the clock that would later hang on the living room wall throwing minutes into eternity while he walked with rising dread over the green carpet.

The band was playing “Melancholy Baby.” The bride and groom were saying their farewells discreetly, trying to sneak out of the hall and up to their waiting car. The ham sandwich had stuck in his throat, and he washed it down with the warm beer, and then rose suddenly and walked toward the steps, past the mirrored wall, without looking back at himself.

“They leaving yet?” the teen-age boy in the tuxedo asked. His face was smeared with lipstick.

Buddwing nodded and climbed the steps.

MO 6-2367

Mount Kisco, he thought. Not Monument.

Mount Kisco 6-2367

It was too late to call now.

It was too late to do anything now.

“There’s nothing we can do now,” Dan had said, and that was when they had gone to the movie together.

He began walking.

He did not know who he was, nor did he any longer care. They had both been dead since that Sunday in Milan, and perhaps for years before that, and he didn’t give a damn, he simply didn’t give a damn. He had said that to Dan on the telephone, “I don’t give a damn.” You don’t mean that, Dan had answered. “It was over years ago,” he said. You shouldn’t say that. “It was over years ago,” he repeated.

The house had filled with strangers, and Dan had suggested that they get out of there, take in a movie, there was nothing more they could do now, the arrangements had all been made, Mount Kisco 6-2367, there was nothing more they could do. He had gone back to the silent Sutton Place apartment after he had left Dan. He knew he should sleep, it was very late. He had gone into the bedroom overlooking the Queensboro Bridge, and taken his wallet and change and keys and placed them on the dresser top. He had removed his watch — he never slept with his watch on; she had once said to him, “Take off your watch, for God’s sake! I want you to be naked!” — and then put his handkerchief on the dresser beside his other stuff and then turned and stared at the bed, and simply walked out of the apartment with no intention of ever returning to it.

He was very tired.

It was close to three o’clock in the morning, and New York City was asleep. He walked clear across Italian Harlem and into Spanish Harlem, I once broke the bank in Spanish Harlem, did I ever tell you that story? and then into Central Park. He was not afraid of muggers. The worst they could do was kill him when they discovered he was carrying only a dollar and thirty-six cents. As he entered the park, he reached into his pocket for the money and then suddenly threw it in the air over his head. “Here,” he shouted to the night, “take it! You’ve taken everything else!” The bill fluttered silently down to the path. The coins jingled behind him and then were still.

There was life hidden in the bushes of the park.

There were lips to be kissed, and breasts to be fondled, worlds to be explored. There were assassins lying in wait. He did not care. He was already dead.

He walked the entire length of the park from 110th Street, and then found a bench near the Fifty-ninth Street lake. He was bone weary. He stretched out immediately, and closed his eyes.

He thought at first he was dreaming.

The memory came so swiftly, the pictures flashed into his mind with such clarity, that he thought at first he had fallen asleep at once and begun dreaming instantly, this apartment is too still.

He unlocks the door with his key; this is unusual because he has rung the bell and she usually comes to the door to greet him. He stops in the hallway; there is no sound in the apartment save for a gentle swishing sound somewhere in its secret depths, that and the ticking of the clock on the wall, the one he bought in Portobello. He does not move. He stares at the carpet. And then he places one foot before the other and begins walking in the direction of the swishing sound. He stops outside the bathroom door and again hesitates, and then reaches out for the knob.

He turns the knob.

Something is glittering on the tile near the sink.

He sees the glittering object, but his eyes move up and away from it swiftly, and then he notices that the water tap is turned on, and he realizes without surprise that this is the swishing sound, and he sees her toothbrush lying on the rim of the sink, the open tube of toothpaste beside it, why does she never replace the cap on the toothpaste? He sees the sleeve of her red robe then, the same red cotton robe she has worn since they were married, sees the red sleeve in the open crack of the bathroom door.

He opens the door wider.

For a moment, he cannot move, he cannot think, he cannot scream.

She is wearing her white raincoat.

She has fallen behind the bathroom door, and in an instant of recognition, he realizes she is wearing the raincoat and not her robe. The red sleeve he saw is a sleeve drenched with her own blood. She is lying in a pool of her own blood. There is a trail of blood from the sink, she has opened her wrist at the sink with the glittering razor blade and held it under the water and then weakened and staggered back from the sink and dropped the razor and fallen to the floor behind the door. Her blood spreads over the tiles, her eyes are open wide and staring, her mouth is open, there is blood in her hair and on her naked breasts, he knows he will vomit. He stumbles back against the tiled wall. He shakes his head. His senses return. For a soaring gleeful instant, he thinks, I’m glad! and then suddenly whirls and smashes his bunched fist against the tiled bathroom wall, cracking the stone on his ring. Why did you do this? I love you, why did you do this?

MO 6-2367 was the number of the Mount Kisco funeral home, he was to have called them yesterday morning to tell them how many cars they would need to follow the hearse when they put his dead wife in the ground, when they covered his Grace with earth, when they

“No!” he screamed.

He sat upright on the bench and stared into the darkness. His heart was pounding, his hands were trembling.

“No,” he whispered softly.

In a little while, he fell asleep.

He awoke.

He could not have been asleep for more than a few hours, and yet he felt curiously refreshed, coming instantly awake without passing through that fuzzy borderland he usually associated with rising. He knew exactly where he was. He seemed only mildly surprised to discover he was wearing his street clothes, but then he supposed one did not sleep in pajamas on a wooden bench in Central Park. He sat up and rubbed a hand over his face, not to wash away any weariness — more, he suspected, as a gesture of habit. Then he glanced across the path and beyond the iron railing to where the ground sloped to a small lake. The lake ended in a narrow finger capped by a huge outcropping of primeval rock, the man-made concrete of Fifth Avenue beyond and in the distance, and behind that a pale blue sky.

Who am I? he wondered.