Buddwing

2

The city was beginning to come awake.

It was Saturday morning, and she was a little slow rising, a little tardy in shaking the sleep from her bones. Here and there, as Buddwing walked along Central Park South, a window shade went up slowly and reluctantly. This was Saturday morning, and there was no place to go, no hurry to get anywhere. This was Saturday, and the city came up out of sleep a little too early, through force of habit perhaps, and then heaved an enormous shrug that you could feel clear down to her bowels. Up and down the wide street, steam hissed up from manhole covers. A lone cruising taxicab slowed as the driver spotted Buddwing, but it was too early; the city was still restlessly stirring in a warm bed smelling of Friday night’s musk and Friday night’s liquor and Friday night’s copulation. The cab picked up speed and passed him by; it was too early.

He could hear the sound of birds in the park, a sound you rarely heard in this city. He could hear them chirping in a hundred different voices, could hear their calls echoing among the trees beginning to bud in the first sweet rush of spring, and then re-echoing across the balmy air, touching the bright yellow forsythia blooms ranged like golden asterisks against the park’s stone walls, trilling across the red and pink cornelian cherry shrubs, dissipating on the air, seeming to vanish, and then suddenly replenished and replaced by another bird voice, another sharp trilling chirp, the chirps multiplied and magnified until it seemed a thousand birds, a million birds, were calling to the city, urging her to rise, willing her to rise.

In this enormous city, which had a name but was nonetheless anonymous, in this sprawling New York stirring now to test her early morning muscle, he walked anonymously, a man with a name who was anonymous to himself. And in this anonymity (Christ, how sweet the birds sounded) he felt a sudden joy that was somehow contained within a brittle shell of sympathy for every other anonymous son of a bitch who lived here. He knew this city was his. Whatever else he knew about himself, and he knew precious little, he knew that he had been born in this city, that he belonged in this city, that he felt this city’s pulse as his own pulse, that she held an irrevocable and lifelong claim to his love and his hate, and that she would never let him go as long as he could breathe.

He could not count the number of times he had walked along Central Park South in his life. He tried now to remember other times on this wide street, tried to remember if there had been bird sounds then, tried to remember if he could see the haze slowly burning away over the roof of the Coliseum in the distance, could remember none of it, and yet knew with certainty he had walked this street in winter and summer, spring and fall, that it was as much a part of him as his liver or his heart. The city called to him that Saturday morning. He had found a new face by confronting himself in a mirror at the Plaza, he had stolen a first name from an unknown woman on a telephone, and then requisitioned a surname from a beer and an airplane: Sam Buddwing. And now Sam Buddwing — clean, new, somehow filled with joy and sadness — walked into a city he loved and hated, clean and new, and heard her calling to him.

Deep in her gut, he could feel the rumble of infrequent subway trains growling along subterranean tracks, clattering into nearly deserted station stops. He could visualize, he could hear, a drunk mumbling in his sleep on the platform, a young couple whispering to each other behind one of the pillars, her lipstick smeared, his hair tousled. He could roam this city in his mind, he could turn over every corner of her, inspect her armpits and her crotch, kiss her navel and her throat, plunge his hands deep into the hot spongy interior of her, and come out stinking of honey and blood, loving her, hating her. He could hear the tugs hooting their cry on the Hudson, thousands of miles crosstown, could feel the haze rising from the river, hanging in a veil beneath the George Washington Bridge, rising, rising; you could see the Palisades across the river. How many times had he shrieked on that roller coaster? How many times had he seen the posters for the amusement park, the young girl in her swimsuit standing beside the swimming pool, and known this was the real beginning of summer? How many times had he climbed those mysterious steps, the steps of Aztecs or Mayans or Apaches, leading up to Washington Heights? How many girls had he kissed in Poe Park near the band shell in the summer when Bobby Sherwood was playing “Elks’ Parade” and the lights of Fordham Road danced in the distance? How many skirts had he raised by the banks of the Bronx River where the willows hung suspended over the water and light reflected eerily in blackness? Oh, he knew this city; he loved this city, and he hated her.

He could remember.

He could remember — and he delicately nourished the memory, delicately nurtured it for fear it would vanish completely, leaving him lost again — bicycles, bicycles along a silent summer path; the path wound alongside the river. He could remember her plaid skirt flapping as she pedaled the bicycle, dark hair blowing back and free from her face, a boy’s bicycle, her brother’s, and the flash of thigh and her laugh high and melodious on the still hot air under the viaduct arching overhead, the sudden trees, they parked the bicycles in deep shade. They took them off the path and lay them flat, crushing the new young grass. He explored her mouth, her black hair hung in a curtain over his face, he touched the warm inner softness of her thighs, he could remember.

Who?

A boy, so young.

A girl.

He did not know her name.

He remembered a vague Sam Buddwing, a boy wearing bicycle clips; the bike was black with white trim, he could remember that, but the boy he remembered was unclear and indistinctly formed. He could not see his face, only a thin angular body, and a head held somewhat the way the man in the mirror at the Plaza had held his head, but nothing more than that, and then even that was gone.

The empty city surrounded him.

He could hear the clatter of his own shoes on the pavement. The street was deserted now. He had a sudden desire to step off the curb and into the middle of the street, and run up the white line to Sixth Avenue. The desire paused. The city seemed more silent than ever. Even the birds were hushed. He wondered how he had expected to get into the subway when he had no money, and then an audacious idea came into his head, and he knew instantly that he would try it, and quickened his step to the kiosk. He was grinning broadly now, outraged by the audacity of his plan, knowing he would never have conceived it, never hoped to execute it, if he knew who he really was, if he had a real identity and a real name. But he was Sam Buddwing, and he didn’t know a goddamn soul, and so he hurried down the steps, his eyes searching the ground as he walked.

He would need a piece of cardboard, or a slip of paper, no, cardboard would be better. He could see the change booth up ahead. There was only one man in it at this hour of the morning, and he was probably half asleep. Yes, it would work; he felt certain it would work. He found what he was looking for swept against one of the walls, a piece of white cardboard that had undoubtedly served as the inside backing for a candy bar. He picked it up and looked at it. It seemed wide enough, but perhaps it was a trifle too long. Carefully, he folded three-quarters of an inch from one end, and then cautiously tore the cardboard along the fold. Lifting his head confidently, he walked toward the change booth and then past it. He ignored the turnstiles and walked directly to the gate alongside them. He turned only casually toward the change booth, raised his hand palm outward with the white piece of cardboard cupped in his palm like a transportation pass of some kind, holding it for the change-booth attendant to see. The attendant looked through his bars, gave a brief nod, and went back to whatever he was doing. Buddwing opened the gate and walked on through. He kept walking without looking back, going down the steps to the Uptown platform.

When he reached the platform, he burst out laughing.

He knew the neighborhood Gloria lived in, because it was close to Broadway, and he used to work in a grocery store on Broadway when he was a boy going to high school. What was the name of the man who’d owned the store? It didn’t matter. An Italian name. He had hated the man; the man had worn eyeglasses. He could remember that he had taken the job because he had needed the money for something. It had been a summer job, and he had been about sixteen. What had he needed the money for? Something.

The day he reported to work, the boss (Palumbo or Palumbi or something with a P, something Italian) had explained to him that his job would be primarily the delivery of groceries, but that occasionally he would help out behind the counter. He also told Buddwing that he could eat his lunch in the basement under the store, where all the soda pop was kept, but that he would have to pay him for any soda he drank.

Buddwing thought this was fair until the first day he went down to the basement to have his lunch, and found there a veritable treasure trove of soda pop. Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Seven-Up, Canada Dry Ginger Ale and Orange Soda, Hoffman Cream Soda and Sarsaparilla were stacked in cases that almost reached from floor to ceiling, bottle upon bottle. He correctly figured that if he paid the boss five cents a day, six days a week, for the bottle of pop he had with his lunch each day, the grand and munificent total would come to thirty cents a week. He mused that if he were the owner of a fancy grocery store, he would certainly allow his lowly delivery boy to drink a meager bottle of soda pop once a day every day of the week without charging him for it. The boss, it seemed to him, was being a cheap bastard. Besides, he was earning only twenty-two dollars a week, and the boss could certainly afford to let him have a free bottle of pop each day, or at least a bottle of pop at wholesale, which Buddwing was sure was not five cents a bottle. Nevertheless, even though the boss’s cheapness rankled, he went down to the basement for lunch every day for the first two weeks, and every day he opened a bottle of Coke and drank it with the sandwiches he brought from home, and then went upstairs and gave the boss a nickel.

Then, one morning while he was putting a carton of eggs into the refrigerator, he dropped the carton and broke eight of the eggs, and the boss told him he would deduct the price of those eggs from Buddwing’s salary. That very afternoon, Buddwing went down to the basement to have his lunch as usual. But instead of opening a bottle of Coke, he opened a quart of Hoffman’s Cream Soda and drank the whole quart, and then he opened a quart of Canada Dry Ginger Ale and drank half of that and spilled the rest down the open drain. When he went back after lunch, he paid his boss a nickel for the Coke he had not had. For the rest of the time he worked there, he stole the boss blind. He did not smoke at the time, but he stole cartons of cigarettes and took them home with him, and he opened canned fruits in the basement and had those with his lunch, and he sometimes would open six or seven quarts of soda, each a different flavor, and have a few sips from each bottle, and every day he would go back upstairs and pay the boss a nickel for a bottle of Coke.

He could remember all this, but he could not remember what the cheap bastard’s name was, or what he had done with the stolen cigarettes, though he had a feeling he had given them to a very close friend of his who smoked, and whose name he also could not remember. There was something else he could not or would not remember about that lousy job on Broadway and 91st Street — yes, that was where it had been — something else that troubled him about that job besides the cheap bastard who could not speak English, something else in one of the apartments he delivered to, something. Or maybe a combination of somethings, maybe that. He only knew that he remembered the job with a curious feeling of dread, and that the dread could not have come from the memory of his petty thefts.

He wondered now why he had needed money that summer, and he wondered too why even such a scanty memory of the job seemed to fill him with such dread, and then he stopped wondering. There was simply too much to wonder about, too little he knew. He hesitated in the lobby of Gloria’s building. For a moment, he did not wish to go into the building, did not wish to find Gloria, did not wish to find himself. Coming up Central Park South, listening to the birds, sensing the city around him and inside him, he had felt an anonymity that he instantly equated with freedom. The freedom had caused him to pull his outrageous trick on the change-booth attendant, and to sit in secret glee all the way uptown to 96th Street. But now... now memory of that grocery store job so long ago had triggered a reluctance in him to know anything more about himself. He suddenly felt that knowing himself would simply mean losing this freedom he had newly found. Knowing himself would bring a responsibility that would not allow him to hold up a blank piece of cardboard as a Transit Authority pass. Knowing himself would be frightening, and he did not want to be frightened.

He found himself walking through the lobby and to the mailboxes. He was not at all sure that he would go upstairs once he found out what apartment Gloria was in — he had not asked her on the phone, was that significant? — but there was a burning curiosity inside him that threatened to override both the earlier freedom he had experienced and the shudder of dread that had accompanied his recollection of the grocery store job. As he ran his index finger over the names in the mailboxes, he remembered Gloria’s voice on the telephone, edged with sleep, somewhat breathless, a sensuous voice, and the things she had hinted at, the things she thought he wanted from her. He did not know whether he really wanted these things from her or not, or even whether he had ever had these things from her, and if he had had them whether they were good or bad. But he was curious, and he was also oddly excited by the idea of going into the apartment of a woman with whom he had perhaps been intimate, and not recognizing her but nonetheless knowing that he had perhaps been intimate with her; the idea was very exciting. He could feel a stirring in his groin that had nothing whatever to do with intellectual curiosity. His finger traveled along the name-plates a little quicker, almost passed one of the names by, and then retraced itself and stopped.

He searched the remainder of the row. There were no other Glorias, and no other names with the initial G before them. This, then, was Gloria. Gloria Osborne. Not the G.V. who was inside his ring, not the G.V. from whom the ring had come, whoever he or she was, but Gloria Osborne, whose hair was in curlers and who spoke with a sleep-fuzzed breathless voice, who promised by denial the things that would happen when he entered that apartment, Gloria Osborne.

As he walked out of the small alcove containing the mailboxes and toward the elevator, he found himself becoming more and more excited by what he was now certain awaited him upstairs. He pressed the elevator button and waited while the name Gloria Osborne echoed sensuously in his mind. Apartment 7A, the mailbox had said, Apartment 7A, and Gloria Osborne waiting to tell him who he was, to do with him the things they had doubtless done a thousand times before, Gloria Osborne. He got into the elevator and pressed the button for the seventh floor.

When the elevator stopped, he walked into the corridor and again hesitated. The excitement that had come with his thoughts of Gloria’s voice, of Gloria’s denying promises, suddenly died when he realized she probably would not know him at all. He would knock on her door, and she would open it and look at his face and not know him, and perhaps slam the door, and perhaps call the police; it was after all only six-thirty in the morning! His passion died limply. He stood in the corridor, lonely and drained and discouraged. She would not know him, she would not tell him who he was, she would not offer him her bed and her body and her warmth. He stood with his head bent, undecided, and then he thought, Why shouldn’t she know me? I’m Sam. He pulled back his shoulders and began looking for Apartment 7A. He found it at the end of the hall. He hesitated a moment more before knocking, and then he raised his fist and rapped his knuckles sharply against the door.

“Who is it?” the woman said from inside the apartment.

“It’s me,” he answered. “Sam.”

“Just a second,” she said.

He waited. His heart had begun beating frantically inside his chest. She won’t know me, he thought. Oh Jesus, she won’t know me. It was not important now that he find out who he was; this did not seem important at all. It was only important that she should know who he was, that she should open the door and say, “Sam, oh Sam baby, where you been, honey? Come in,” that she should open her arms and pull him close to her breasts and smother him with warmth and perfume, that she should know him. He waited while she fussed inside the apartment — what was she doing in there? — waited interminably, and then knocked again on the door, and she yelled, “Yes, yes, I’m coming,” and still he waited; what was taking her so damn — the door opened.

Gloria Osborne was a big blond woman wearing curlers in her hair, and a quilted robe around her shoulders. She opened the door wide and peered into the hallway, and her face expressed the same shock that must have been on his the moment the door opened, because Gloria Osborne was perhaps fifty-three years old with pale blue eyes and a wide nose and a mouth that had vanished the moment she had removed her lipstick. He stood staring at her in disappointment and in anger, feeling she had tricked him with her breathless, sleep-edged voice, recognizing that what he had first accepted as breathlessness was really the sound of advancing middle age, hating her for having tricked him, and then seeing that she was staring at him in surprise and waiting for him to speak. Neither said a word. He thought of turning and running for the elevator, and then a horrifying idea rushed into his mind. My mother, he thought. This woman standing here with the machinery of hell in her hair, this woman with watery blue eyes and no mouth, is my goddamn mother!

“Miss... Miss Osborne?” he asked.

“Yes?” The voice was cautious, suspicious.

“Gloria Osborne?”

“Yes?”

“I...” He sighed heavily. “I’m Sam,” he said.

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“You’re not any Sam I know,” she said.

“I just spoke to you on the phone a little while ago,” he answered.

“Yeah,” she said. She was still watching him suspiciously, as though trying to figure out what his game was.

“Your number was in my book.”

“Yeah,” she said.

He could see that she didn’t believe him, so he instantly reached into his jacket pocket and took out the little black book and opened it to the first page and showed the page to her.

“Twice,” she said, and she smiled.

“What?”

“It’s in your book twice.”

“Oh. Yes, I... I wrote it twice.”

“Because you forget things, isn’t that right?” The smile was still on her face, a curious smile he could not read. He was suddenly aware of the heavy scent clinging to her and realized that Gloria Osborne, his breathy-voiced telephone inamorata, had doused herself with perfume upon arising, but had not bothered to put on any lipstick. The implications of such an oversight were frightening.

“Well,” Gloria said, “why don’t you come in?”

“I don’t think I should,” he answered. “You see, I thought you might know me, but apparently you don’t, so I’ll just apologize for waking you up, and—”

“Don’t be silly,” Gloria said. “You’re here, so come on in. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

“Well...”

“Come on.”

“But... I’m not Sam,” he said.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know you’re not Sam?”

“Am I?”

“How do I know?”

“I mean, do you know me?”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“Then I can’t be Sam, can I?”

“You can be whoever you like, baby. Napoleon, if you like. Only make up your mind. We’re going to wake up the whole damn building.” She paused, watching him. “Yes or no? In or out?”

He shrugged. “I guess I can use a cup of coffee,” he said.

Gloria smiled, and said, “Then come on in.”

He followed her into the apartment. The quilted robe was blue, and it spread over a very wide backside which she managed to jiggle ponderously as she walked, rather like a truck horse pulling a brewery wagon. He noticed that she was wearing tiny blue satin slippers with blue pom-pom puffs at each toe. There was a small mirror on the wall just inside the entrance, and she paused to glance at herself, and then turned her head daintily over one shoulder, and said, “Come on,” in a trippingly light voice, slightly teasing, invitational. He would have left her in that moment, were it not for the fact that her number was, after all, in his little black book. He found, as he followed her into the small apartment, that a curious tug of war was going on in his mind, the antagonists in which stood at either end of a memory rope, one trying to pull him deeper into forgetfulness, the other trying to pull him up into complete recognition. He sensed that if he succumbed to either one or the other, he would be completely lost. The key to survival, he reasoned, was to maintain a balance between these two forces tugging at either end of his unconscious. So whereas he wanted to run from this blowzy broad in her blue quilted robe with her blue pom-pom slippers, his instincts told him to stay and hear her out. How had her number come to be in his book in his handwriting in his jacket pocket? He had to know, and yet he did not want to know, and the rope tightened in his mind from the strain at its opposite ends.

He followed her into a small living room furnished in a three-piece suite, one chair done in maroon, a second in gold, and the couch in a deep blue, all with heavily carved mahogany legs, all with antimacassars on the arms and the backs. A framed print of gondolas in Venice was on the wall over the couch, and a framed print of a Spanish lady with a mantilla over her head, strumming a guitar and singing, was on the wall over the maroon chair, which he now sat in. Gloria sat opposite him on the couch, tucking her legs up under her and pulling the flaps of the quilted robe down over her knees. She smiled maternally, and said, “The coffee’s up. It should be ready in a few minutes.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“What’s your name?” she asked. She asked it so casually, so offhandedly, that it seemed not at all like a trap. It seemed for a moment as though he were simply some stranger who had come to the door, whom she had accepted, and whose name she now wanted to know. The conversation on the telephone seemed never to have taken place.

“I don’t know my name,” he said.

“Then why’d you say you were Sam?”

“You said I was Sam.”

“I never said no such thing.”

“Well, what I mean is you thought I was Sam. On the phone.”

“Who gave you my number?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it’s right there in your book, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It seems to be.”

“Seems, hell. It is. Twice.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, who gave it you?”

“I told you. I don’t know.”

“Where are you from?”

“I don’t know.”

“How old are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do you live?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your Social Security number?”

“119...” He stopped.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“I can’t remember the rest.”

“You married?”

“I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

“Are you afraid of me or something?” Gloria asked suddenly.

“No. Why should I be afraid of you?”

“I mean, what’s all this smoke screen for? What did Sam tell you, anyway?”

“What?” he said.

“Come on, mister, let’s cut the crap, huh? You met my husband in some goddamn bar last night, and he gave you my number and told you to call me. Isn’t that what happened? So here you are, so cut the crap and relax.”

“Is... is Sam your husband?”

“Yeah,” she said, “some husband.” She paused. “We’re separated. Didn’t he tell you that?”

“No, I... I don’t remember meeting him.”

“Then how’d you get my number?”

“I don’t know.”

“Somebody must have given it to you, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Were you out drinking last night?”

“I don’t remember where I was last night. I woke up this morning in Central Park, and that’s all I know.”

She stared at him curiously for a moment, her head tilted to one side, and then she said, “I think I hear the coffee,” and rose massively and walked into the kitchen. From the kitchen, she called, “How do you take this, mister?”

He heard her words, and he sat quite still in the ugly maroon chair, and for the first time since he had awakened this morning he felt despair. He sat looking at his clenched hands, his head bent. She came into the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, the coffeepot in one hand, and she said. “Hey, How do you take it?”

He began weeping suddenly. He had not expected to cry, and when he felt the tears rolling down his cheeks, he turned his face away so that she could not see him. But he could not hide the heaving of his chest and shoulders, and she stood in the doorway dumbfounded, staring at him in confusion and sympathy. The tears came steadily, forced from his eyes by the great racking sobs that shook his body. She went into the kitchen briefly to return the pot to the stove, and then she came through the doorway again and walked to the big maroon chair where he sat. She perched on it beside him, and then wrapped both her arms around him and pulled his head onto the vast cushion of her breast, soft beneath the quilted robe, and said, “Hey, hey, baby, what’s the matter? Hey, come on, now, what’s the matter? Come on, now, baby, don’t do this, please, this ain’t right, now come on, baby.”

He sobbed against the comfort of the breast beneath the quilted robe, and he searched for his voice, and when he found it he said, between sobs, “I don’t know how I take it.”

“Huh?” she said, puzzled.

“My coffee,” he answered. “I don’t know how I take it.”

“Huh?” she said.

“My coffee,” he said again, and suddenly she began laughing. The laugh broke from her mouth in a raucous bellow. Her breasts shook, and her belly shook, and his head on her breasts shook, and as each convulsive wave of laughter rocked her body, its seismic echo vibrated through him so that he seemed to be laughing himself by osmosis, and then was laughing himself in actuality. Together they laughed while she hugged him fiercely and protectively to her breast, his laughter coming between the sobs, as though he were uncertain whether to laugh or continue crying, her laughter a warm canopy of sound that fell gently on his ears, that reverberated beneath his cheek where it lay pressed to her giant mother breast.

“Oh, my God!” she said. “You don’t know how you take your coffee!”

“Yeah,” he said, grinning, laughing, crying.

“Oh, my holy sweet mother of God!”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Oh, God,” she said, hugging him, kissing the top of his head, showering laughter and kisses on his face, crying herself now from the force of her own explosive laughter. “Yeah,” he said, and she said, “God,” and he said, “Yeah” again, and then they laughed more quietly for several moments, and then the laughter faded away, and then they were silent. He kept his head cradled on her breast. She stroked his face with her massive left hand. He felt warm and protected against her breast. He wanted to move the quilted robe aside and rest the flesh of his cheek against the flesh of her bosom, but he thought she would misunderstand. And then suddenly he knew that she would not; suddenly he loved this enormous aging Gloria with her hair in curlers and her quilted robe and silly pom-pom slippers and her great warm soft breast holding his head so gently cradled, and her rough left hand softly and caressingly stroking his face. He moved her robe aside, exposing her breasts.

“Yes,” she said, “rest, baby, rest,” and she pulled his head into her soft and yielding flesh, and he closed his eyes and smelled the heavy perfume of her rising from the cleft of her bosom. “What are we going to do about you, baby?” she asked, her voice a whisper now. “You poor dear baby who don’t know who you are, what the hell are we going to do about you?”

“Don’t know,” he murmured.

“You got no idea?” she asked.

“No.”

“Tch,” she said, clucking her tongue, the single sound echoing the despair he had heard in her voice on the telephone when she had thought he was Sam, her husband, calling her because he was drunk again. “You don’t know who you are at all, huh?”

“I don’t even know how I take my coffee,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, and burst out laughing again.

“Yeah,” he said, chuckling against her breast.

“You take it black, maybe? Were you in the service?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because a lot of guys who were in the army or navy, they take it black. Sam was never in nothing, that 4-F bastard, but he takes his black.”

“Then I’ll take mine black,” he said.

“You want me to go get it now?” she asked.

“Stay,” he said, in sudden panic.

“Okay, okay,” she said, and she patted his head gently, and he snuggled deeper into her bosom, closing his eyes again, strangely at peace. The peace did not last very long. The rope of memory that lay slack and limp at the bottom of his mind was suddenly snapped taut again, suddenly pulled tight from opposite ends. If the rope had not regained its tensile life, he knew he could have rested in the haven of her bosom forever, not caring who he was or where he was or why he was. He could have inhaled her cheap perfume and her honest sweat, allowed her smells and her warmth to lull him to sleep, wrapping forgetfulness about him like a warm blanket, curled on the pillow of her bosom. But he recognized all at once, as if it were a new thought of which he had not until now been aware, that he did not know who he was, and that if he stayed here in this woman’s arms, on this woman’s warm breast, he might never find out. So he pulled his head away from her with a start, his cheek suddenly cold. He stared up into her face, as though surprised to find these warm and protective breasts belonged to a person, and he looked up into her sympathetic blue eyes and plaintively said, “You don’t know me?”

She stared at him as if she would begin weeping, as if she wanted nothing more than to tell him she knew him. But she shook her head sadly, and said, “No, baby, I’m sorry. I don’t know you.”

He sighed deeply, and then he got to his feet, moving out of the chair. “I think I’d better go,” he said.

“Where?”

“I’m not sure. But I don’t think it’s any good staying here.”

“Have some coffee,” she said. “It’s all ready to pour.”

“No. Thank you. Gloria... thank you very much. You’re a very nice person.”

“Yeah,” she said in embarrassment.

“You are, Gloria. Thank you. But I have to go. I just have to go.”

“Have you got any money?” she asked, her eyes suddenly narrowing shrewdly.

“Sure,” he said.

She moved off the arm of the chair, and she said, “Wait. Don’t you leave, you hear me?” She went into the other room — the bedroom, he supposed — and came back carrying her handbag. She opened it and held out a five-dollar bill to him. “Here,” she said. “Take it.”

“I couldn’t.”

She did not say another word. She reached over and stuffed it into the breast pocket of his jacket, behind his cigarettes. He looked at her steadily for several moments, and then he said, “Why, Gloria?”

“You’re lost and hungry, ain’t you?” she said, shrugging. “Ain’t that what you told me on the phone?”

He smiled and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I’m lost and hungry.”

“Then go find yourself,” she said.