Fall and Rise

CHAPTER FOUR. The Street

Rain’s stopped. That I saw from the door. But sky seems clear, even a bit of moon to be seen, and feels ten to fifteen degrees warmer than when I went in, almost too much for this coat, unbuttoning it. The man’s wiping his face with a bunch of napkins. “I don’t know — how’d all that happen so fast?” I say. Looks at me, shakes his head commiseratively: more my fault than his; in fact it’s all your fault his pointing finger says, throws the napkins into the street and heads downtown. Napkins quickly picked up by the wind and hover a few feet over the street before four drop and one soars three flights more till I can’t see it anymore. There it is — no, just a pigeon if my fading vision’s not mistaken, and I take out my eyeglasses case. “You — catch it!” Wind also must have blown his hat off because here he is hatless chasing one down the sidewalk toward me. I jump to my right, glasses sliding out of the case same time I stop the hat with my foot, pick it up and my glasses and brush it off where I stepped on it and hand it to him. I hold the glasses up. “Oh no.” One of the lenses seems scratched. I smear a little spit on the lens, wipe it dry and put the glasses on. “Oh nuts. It’ll cost a fortune to get fixed.”

“Why? They don’t look cracked.”

“One of the lenses got scratched through both bifocal parts.”

“So? They buff it down in a jiff and say give me five bucks.”

“When was that? Shit. Instinct — didn’t think. Should’ve known they’d fall out. But if I’d stopped to think I wouldn’t have been able to stop your hat from rolling past.”

He turns the hat around in his hands, scratches the dirt off the brim, puts the hat on. “Lose this honey and a lot more than five bucks. Two new pairs of your glasses I could buy with it and a thorough eye exam, so you have my gratitude for a change and what else? My regrets for your spectacles and monetary loss.”

“Thanks very much.” He’s adjusting the hat to his head. I put on the glasses to see how well I can see with them scratched. Other lens has little nicks in it which when I close my eye behind the scratched lens makes me see spots in the distant-vision part and mostly a blur in the near. Both eyes open I can’t come up with a quick comparison, but my vision through both sections is even worse. But so what? No backups at home so nothing to do but get them fixed soon as I can. Tomorrow to the optician’s: one of the first things before noon. No: get angry, become miserable, curse his hat and the wind and Marjorie and he for doing what they did to make me leave the bar sooner than I would have perhaps and her boss for ordering the sign put out if she wasn’t lying and the rain also because if there had been more customers maybe the man wouldn’t have paid so much attention to me and Marjorie to him and just my deteriorating eyes in general and small savings in particular and Brahms and whatever and whoever influenced him to compose that piece and why not while I’m at it the jukebox manufacturer and whatever brought me into the world besides, plus lots of other things: in general the world, in particular the whatever. No reading to very little for a few days though when I have to I’ll strain my eyes and give in for as long as I can to the pain. No: first thing tomorrow after the quicker-than-usual postreveille rituals and no Times, and if the optician says he can’t have them till next week, insist you want them fixed by the end of the day at the latest since your work depends on it, and if he still says he can’t have them, acquiesce, though tell him day after Tuesday is out of the question and you’ll have to take them somewhere else, which you’ll then have to.

“Well, so long,” the man says.

“Offer to talk’s still open you know,” I say.

“What for? I don’t buy anyone drinks.”

“Now that you asked, I’m not sure. No place to go but home right now I suppose, not that a lot of people wouldn’t be happy with just that. But because I haven’t another pair of these”—putting them in their case—“I can’t really read and don’t feel”—putting the case into my coat pocket—“like going to bed yet and — oh shoot,” my fingers going through a soggy part of the napkin in my pocket, “I still have the pâté,” and I take out the napkin, lick my fingers where they touched it—“Excuse me a second”—don’t see a garbage can around, thinking of throwing it into the street, wrap the pâté up tight in the napkin and put it back into my pocket—“but maybe I will when I get home.”

“What was that in your hand?”

“Some pâté inside from a party.”

“That napkin? Give it here.”

I do. He throws it into the street. Pâté stays inside.

“You shouldn’t have done that.” I get it out of the street.

“What are you doing? This is Pig Avenue. Some of my closest associates are garbagemen and the ones who work this route all tell me that. Pig Avenue we’re standing on, and that at the corner going into it is Pig Street.”

“I don’t like contributing to the mess, what can I say?”

“Then give it back. I don’t mind contributing. Everyone else is a pig, why not us?”

“If I gave it back I’d still be—”

“Then put it in your pocket and squash it without knowing it and send your coat to the cleaners for ten bucks and still not get out the stain.”

“I’ll find a garbage can one of these nights.”

“Good for you. But bed? You were saying something before about bed? You’re still too young to climb into one alone, or young enough after you got old enough to go to bed alone. Get yourself a chickie for the night or what’s considered life. I’ve had them — plenty, too many, but you don’t have to believe that and presumably won’t. But five wives and a child from each of them, none of whom — wives or kids — want to see their boo-boozing me-thuselahing ex-husband and pop, if you’ll allow me such verbal abuse, for I’m obviously with a very cultured man. And now I’m too old to remember what I was saying to you, so I’m finding a cop and going back with him to retrieve my lawful bar seat and maybe create a trifle more excitement in that godawful boring place,” and starts downtown again. He stops at the corner, hand holding the hat to his head, waits for some cars to pass or light to change. Light changes and cars stop at the crosswalk but he goes down the sidestreet and once past the corner building is out of sight.

“Out of my way, you dumb humpky,” I hear him say. “I’ve had a tough enough night for one drunk and also don’t have a cent to my name.”

Derelict comes out of the sidestreet looking back at what I assume is the man. Sees me and limps over. Has shoes. “Say you—”

“No really, wish I could help, have a good night,” turning my back on him.

“Same to you and God bless you,” and I say to him “Same to you and God bless you too,” and go, uptown, thinking I had that last guy wrong all right and that I haven’t said God bless you to anyone for many years except occasionally when someone sneezed, when in front of me I’d say a couple of blocks away there’s this metal and glass crash: two cars, two trucks and a car or something like that, though I doubt a motorcycle or bike was in the crash because of the type of loud tire shrieks and all that shattered glass, and right after I hear it I throw my arms up to my eyes and spin around shoulder slightly raised so with my arms it also protects my face and see the panhandler looking as if oblivious to the noise stopping a woman who’s peering past me to where the sound of the crash was and maybe what she now sees: a car aflame, smoke or human torch in the street, turns to him as if she didn’t see anything unordinary and unlatches her shoulder bag. I turn around and don’t see or hear anything but what I’d think would be normal vehicular traffic for this weather, time and day, though one person is leaning out of a second-story window in the direction of the crash.

“What was that crash?” the woman says.

“Something smashed, dear?” he says. “The ears. They don’t hear from anywheres faraway.” His hand’s out. She puts in it a pamphlet from her shoulder bag and says “Do you mind if I speak frankly, sir?”

“Speak the way you please, dear. I’m a scandal, I’m a dungheap.”

“Not whatsoever. But in this small tract are the world’s wisest and most helpful words—”

“That’s so, dear?” turning it around and over several times, walking away reading it and saying while his finger jabs the air “Mat, flap, trap, frat, aspeduty three, crap tract four, roger, roger.” She sees me looking, I turn thinking “That’s so” for “That’s true” might be better I think, in a few seconds she’s behind me saying “Pardon me, sir, but may I interest you in a timely article on why we’re here eternally and what we’ve to expect?”

“Sure, if just for a minute, but you get around, right, so you’ve any idea why there are so many derelicts, panhandlers and crazies on the street tonight?”

“I believe it’s every day; they’ve let them all out. But if you’re concerned about them, you’ll be concerned about this.” She gives me a pamphlet. I look at it, say “I broke my glasses before so I’ll have to get to it later,” fold it to put away, she opens it in my hand and says “I neglected to mention,” and points to the price on the cover. “My eyes again,” and I give her a quarter, she already has out my dime change, I say “Really, I’m sure it’ll go to a good cause,” she says “We’re taught to get what we’re paid for too,” I say “Truth is I can probably use the dime for a call later on,” and put it into my pocket and she says “Good, already you’re rewarded and I am by your having been. But as an added reward to us both, promise you’ll read the cover article which continues on pages nine and twelve. It’s a warning, from God Almighty, and is perfectly written, no zigzaggy ideas, and ministers to all, rich or poor, sick or well. If there are any questions about it or life that trouble you, there’s a telephone hotline which you can use anytime of the day with your dime, or night”—she turns the pamphlet over and points to the number and address—“and this center to come to for a twice-daily meeting of our society and a free hot lunch.”

“That’s very generous, but it seems — what is this word, ‘Brooklyn’?—a little out of my way.”

“If you need a ride, we’ve the Bible bus. Door to door, no fare and always a seat and a very congenial group of passengers aboard and nothing required inside the center but decorum.”

“Thanks again. I’ll think about it, really. Goodnight.” I put the pamphlet into my coat pocket and pull out of the same pocket the notebook and from my pants my pen. It’s just, well, more accurate vernacular and suitable for that section of his poem: “That’s true that the universe or burst goes slow while we trump and rump along so fast, but aren’t we all or almost trying to make up or do for our own undivined lust time? Oh Hasenai, paltry maker of mephitic fishy poems when you would rather be or could like your dada or older breaders who trained you a rather rich unsolipsistic baker of fish-filled bisquits and pungent buns, crucify those last lines,” though I don’t know about the additional rhymed links or any of them in that linkage of lines. Not in the original for sure. Change it. Keep it. Rearrange it. “Thanks you very much,” the woman says to another man she stopped when he let the pamphlet she gave him fall out of his hand, and she picks it up, blows on it and goes. Just think about it then but jot it down now so you don’t forget and send Jun an aerogram asking if all these liberties with his work will be all right. But he’s already said in a recent Christmas card something like “Do your damndest bestest, Misty Dan, and then some and once more again my favoritest friend who isn’t a fabulist or Japanese, and then any way you sayest dost goes, even to the deez and doze. Hey, I play with your linguini also but not too well, so what about that Joe? And here convey big season’s greetings much too early I know, but Christmas has become a temporal event in Japan also and the post lines in the ensuing weeks are the one lines I want to avoid.”

I write in the notebook “That’s so for that’s true in Last One in is Out, Jun the Souring Shout — Let’s Croak, antepen stanz, and call mom, see and be with her too, and don’t just says, damn yous, dooz!”

Sirens — police, fire or ambulance — heading my way though not necessarily to the crash. I look, still nothing, stop at a florist’s a half-block up I always seem to stop at down here for its original window displays on seasonal or topical themes. This one has a row of Pilgrim’s buckled shoes on the floor with flowers and earth in them and ceiling track-lights highlighting each one. The quick slide changes behind it, from a projector I can’t see but believe is behind the screen, are of the various stages of a turkey: from two mating, to the birth of one, I close my eyes to the slides of a headless turkey running around, to one roasted and dressed on a festive table. Most of the shoe flowers I’ve seen but can’t name though once made an effort to. Exotic, must be from more Southern states at this time — perhaps the florist’s birthplace — or else I don’t get the point. Obsequial? Delphiniums: think that’s them. In the next shoe some sort of orchid: lady’s nose, girlie’s big toe, something close. Someone once started to teach me about them and trees and birds and their songs and leaves, but who? Yes, effort, once did, forgot or got stopped by that old chainsmoking translator what was his name, died of a long-windedly named kidney disease a month ago. Saw the obit and photo. Two columns and a sampler and appreciation of his work and list of the many writers he’d translated and often almost recomposed. Always a relatively poor and brusque though noble and articulate polyhistoric fellow. Loved Iceland for its cheap airfares, migratory birds and heroic prose. His name though. Shvern? Slappern? Slade? Once heard him read at the Y and nearly had to leave because it was in that last-leg delivery so many poets seem to favor when his real voice, when it wasn’t raucous before or after an outpour of cigarette coughs, was sonorous and strong. Like something unguent oozing through, but I was never adept at similes or even much esteemed their use. “A good simile,” Hasenai says in his poem “Look Alike,” which if I don’t find one weaker will be the weakest of all the poems I choose, “is like a computer readout compared to an acceptance letter, meaning rhyme and poetry are better and like acceptance letters can’t be written on a word-processing machine, or so it seems to me.” Deep forehead crease he once in an unusually puckish mood hid a toothpick in or two, but how’s it possible I forgot his of all translators’ names? Snipper, Switter, Stade? Drove a red Rambler I remember with its fenders held together by picture-framing wire and with no reverse or door handles outside or in. “Jump over,” he’d say when he drove us to our walks, or open the door on my side with a screwdriver and I’d sit on what looked like hay. Invariably cigarette ashes on his lap, vest and sleeves, which is such a characteristic cliché, and which he never — and this too — seemed to notice or whisk away, so they’d just float off or fall. And gaunt, worn, tall, with thick rich brown hair, which several people said he dyed, but he was never vain in that way, and close-cropped, and never in need of a shave. “I look like a toy goy in a boy’s play convertible,” he said, “but I doubt they ever fabricated one with a ravaged backseat replete with Flemish newspapers, Praenestine glossary, field guides, Audubon postcards and Low Franconian journals.” And tweeds. Even at breakfast at the colony I met Diana at several years later and where I started to accompany him on what he called his “quotedium post-scrambled egg and prune juice promenade.” And a tie. Rumpled, same one, college stripes and soup spots, shirt collars he ironed without removing the stays. Must remember to attend his memorial service at Columbia next week. Heard that many of the serious East Coast translators will be there instead of anything resembling a family. Lived alone, in a two-room Bronx apartment over a Syrian bakery which before that made bialys and before that Irish sodabread, “which tells you how long I’ve lived there and what rent I pay, place always toasty, except on the respective Sabbaths, even when it was a cold-water flat.” Because he refused to teach, which almost he alone of us got offers to, saying he was as driven to translate poetry as his poets were in delaying to create them, no students at the service except maybe a few who might have read him and venerated his dedication and work. A number of those other translators are what’s been discouraging me from going though I’ll go, but not to talk about possible literature positions anyone might know of at some not-too-distant school and the latest translating grants and awards which Switch, it is, Simon Oliver Stritch, in fact, often got, though far as I know never went to memorials, literary functions and parties to make contacts and get references and inside dope, but what is it I started out to say? Right. Stritch urged me to hold off any but the most utilitarian interest in fauna and flora till I got to around his age and had nothing better to do with my nontranslating time than take trips to bird and seal sanctuaries and go on long art colony nature-walks. He even, after a while, wouldn’t let me accompany him on one and also checked out every colony library book on the subjects, so much did he want me to finish a large body of work before I was forty when he said most promising translators get restless and tired and need to get permanent addresses and partners and, because of their sinking incomes and no eventual pensions, comparatively easy tenure-track teaching jobs. “Send me your next book,” he said when I last saw him, which I did and then another copy care of his publisher, but he never acknowledged receipt. On both I wrote my inscription for that time: “From the poets and me or I,” and added a lie: “To the contemporary master of us all,” hoping he wouldn’t see through the compliment and that he’d write back he essentially liked my translation and would do what he could to get it reviewed and in the future boost my work and grant chances and maybe even help me get a university appointment or let me know of an opening of one, but why couldn’t I remember his name? Shame maybe, that I also thought to use him. More likely some different kind of slip, one with lots of answerable or to some people logical problematical possibilities predicated on something I don’t quite understand now though as far as I’m concerned — But what do I mean by logical possibilities, if I didn’t mean probabilities, or even answerable or problematical or possible or predicational ones? And how can I defend “different kind of slip” when I know damn well when it comes down to it — What I mean is that when I get to the deepest truth of it or something like that the possibility can’t be, what? Just drop this or go back a bit. Shame. That I forgot his name. Simon Oliver something or another — oh shit, can’t believe it — spit, slip, snit, shift, Stritch.

“Like a nice flower, mister?” boy’s voice behind me. I turn. Foot shorter, slim, around fourteen, dark-skinned, seems like black hair, olive skin more like it, Mideastern, smiling, insincerely, continuously, tiny chipped front teeth, gypsy could be, seen plenty but much more aggressively and usually choosing to go after a man holding a woman’s hand or two men doing the same, holding out to me a carnation and I say “No thanks, just window-shopping.”

“Yes, from me,” and sticks it in my hand, closes my fingers around the stem, “Looks nice,” and I say “Christs, what do I do with you?” and he says “Buy it,” and I say “Maybe just to get rid of you,” and think quarter? two? and he says “A dollar please.”

“A dollar please? Thought you were giving them away at first, though figured pretty quickly once it came back to me what city I was still in that — forget it. I’ve really nothing against this city. Don’t want to make generalizations about it either and no doubt because this city doesn’t make it easy to make them, though I knew soon enough I’d have to cough up something to you, but a buck?”

“No, not giving — selling. Beautiful red rose. One no more anywhere like it in the city. True. You shake no but flower is fresh, like new. Smell it.”

“I know what it smells like. And it’s a beautiful red carnation — at least one of those in the caryo I think it is family — and not wilted but certainly not new. But okay. Let me smell one again. I can use a big lift.” I sniff. Nothing much. Harder. I smell car and bus exhaust. Even deeper. Trace of burnt coffee from someplace, but didn’t May say that was toxic to noxious petrochemical fumes drifting over the ridge and river from New Jersey’s gasworks? “Gorgeous. Never smelt a flower that smelt so much like a flower before. Seriously, I’ve a cold in my nose, but thanks,” and I try giving it back to him.

“No, true. Brand-new. And cost me not a dollar each but close.”

“Come on, kid, what do you take me for? This is my city. I used to shine shoes on these streets when I was half your age, but only in the daytime.”

“So what do you say to me this for?”

“So what am I saying?” He nods. “I’m saying, you work this late, it’s not healthy for a kid your age. I’m also saying, up and down Brooklyn’s biggest boulevards I went with my wooden shoeshine box my dad made me pay him back for on time payments, so I’m saying I’ve known the price of things and value of a nickel and dime. So if you paid twenty-five cents, I’m saying finally, for one of these flowers, it was a lot, not that I’m saying anything bad or angry against you, remember that.”

“No, wrong. Ten dollars a dozen to me. Maybe I was cheated, because they tell me where they sell them that Mexico flower fields where they grow are drowned by rain all year. Still, give it to a beautiful lady. Wish her on it. She make you her first mate.”

“Now that’s what I’d like, no horsing around there, but not a dollar. Let’s say fifty cents, since you sure ain’t looking at a pile of money, my friend. And just for the smell and to have held it, because right after I pay I’ll give it back for you to sell to someone else.”

“No, you pay for, you keep. That’s the fair bargain, so a dollar,” and smiling again he sticks out his hand. Hungarian or Basque or even Berber letters though familiar numbers except for what looks like an upside-down nine are tattooed on his palm.

“What language is that?”

“Of what?” Closes his hand.

“Those letters and numbers mean anything? No harm in telling me. Numbers aren’t, except for at the top and bottom of pages, but written words are my business.”

“You want to know?” Opens his palm, presses it over his right eye and closes the left eye. His smile widens. Carious too. Lights flash off them, move. From streetlights, headlights. “They say things only my people know.”

“And what’s that and who are they?”

“Plenty.” Presses the same palm against his left eye and closes the right. “Always many different things to many different people on many different times of the nights and days of the years in the ways only we have in our heads of telling, so only we can say. But they go back thousands before the Roman and Etruscan gods, and no two messages in all time to any two people or to the same person the same.” Takes his hand away, right eye stays closed. “You pay for what it will say to you, only one more dollar, and I am allowed to tell.”

“You’re not saying what language it is then?”

“I haven’t said? Our own. But what people me and my language is from I can only say for that one more dollar, so two.”

“Your people have a poetry?”

“One we talk to only to ourselves and the wise wings of the night and the wolves.”

“You mean real wolves in whatever country you and your language come from, and those wise night-wings are owls?”

“I mean no poetry but what is written into our hands and heads, like everything else in our language. Newspapers. Whole-day tales. You think that funny?” He opens his eye.

“I’m not laughing, I’m listening. This smile’s my regular look.”

“So, also my aunt’s books for cooking too. In the hand and head. Everything. Some on and on on their arms when these words go on too long. Histories. Travels. Lives. But you pay this hand,” which is out again with the letters and numbers on it, “two dollars, one for your message for which and other the language of what and who they are from.”

“Just for the message.” I give him a dollar. “I think I’ve memorized enough of the language on your hand to find out which one it is.”

“Never unless I tell you. But fifty cents more for the flower or language and people then. I’ll do that now. I want to get home soon.”

“Really, I’m just about broke.” I give the flower to him and he drops it into a shopping bag with other flowers. “It’s ruined now, you should pay, but okay. Now for your dollar.” He looks at that palm. “Tonight’s November Twenty-something in your language. I know what day of. Friday. By us, a special alone dog day, one where the tail is down and can’t wag. But you’ve how much age?”

“Forty-two. No, I had a birthday, July. -three.”

“And you lived many years here you said since your shoeshine box a half a boy my age ago, even if I guess now and then you moved. Say it’s not true.”

“Is true.”

“That’s all I must know. Not your father’s name, not your mother’s.” Closes his eyes, presses that palm to his ear, mumbles, opens his eyes on the palm. “It says for you this night in the city you were once very young in that you will stay young in for a while and will stay here for years and make it to be a big long life for a long time, but for now these next five weeks you will make or one time soon — let me count. One, two, three,” with his eyes closed and opens them on his palm. “Make the one, love, two, lot but not that lot of money, and three, keep the head and body strength you have if you still want it to do what work you like to and do best and succeed. But, it says, you must look and good and hard for all three in these next five weeks and not stop till you find, for they will not come out to look and find you. You know what all that means? I don’t so much. I only repeat what I read and now unless you remember it, is gone.”

“That’s it?”

“Not enough?”

“No, more than I ever hoped for.”

“For you don’t like it, I give your dollar back, because I don’t know what else you could wish for. Life forever? That goes for nobody, but if someone like me reads it in his palm for you or says ‘Never sickness,’ tell him he lies.”

“Really, it’s okay,” when he puts his hand in the pocket he put the dollar in. “I thought you were great.”

“Neh, maybe there’s more. I don’t want you to be unhappy with me or think I’m lazy and maybe left some for you behind.” Holds his palm up to his nose and shakes it. Puts it to his forehead and closes his eyes and his lashes start fluttering. Makes a fist, opens it, closes it, opens, closes, opens and opens his eyes, lashes stop fluttering, and looks at it. “If anything is hiding in there it needs sometimes to shake it apart or unlock.” Holds his fist to his ear, says “Wait, I hear, it’s getting closer — here it is I think,” and looks at his palm. “Yes. And it still says it won’t be easy what that message from my hand and head called out to you, but it gives words of advice how to go out and get them and again in numbers of three. One, be not as strong as young teeth, not as weak as old bones, not as quick as quick lips with swift tongues, but someplace inside each of these: easy and hard, fast and slow, throw and catch, the in-between.” He looks up. “That’s all I can say. Even for many more dollars from you, because all there was of the message I read. Now I must go. Time is late. I’m not afraid, but sisters and mother who wait up for me are. And you don’t want beautiful red flower, others along the way might. Goodnight,” and he picks up the shopping bag and goes. “Night,” and get home safe if home’s where you’re going, though bet he can handle himself on the street better than I, and take out my notebook to write down the letters and numbers that were on his palm, but have forgotten everything but a reverse S and the upside-down nine.

Uptown. Shoes and socks seem nearly dry. Shoeshine box. Bit of a lie. Went out a number of times with one my father bought originally for the home, though he wasn’t against me trying to make some money on the street and I was probably around twelve. Said I had to be home before dark and if I broke any part of the box I had to pay for it and also for the shoeshining supplies. But almost everyone I shined for said I gave a lousy shine and most didn’t tip and a few wouldn’t pay the dime. Smeared and maybe stained too many socks and skin and cuffs above them with shoe polish and a few men said something like “You know what the cost of a new pair of socks is compared to this stinking shine?” Soon gave up shining with that box except at home for my uncles and parents’ friends, though free for my father, and later for myself and my father when he was in bed convalescing or in his wheelchair eating or watching TV and I’d take a few pairs of his shoes out of his closet shoe rack and say “Just doing it because the leather’s cracking and for when you’ll be up and around wearing them again,” and in front of him also to have something to do in front of him gave them a good shine.

I go over to two attached pay-phones. Receiver of one hangs by its cord below the shelf. Other’s on its stirrup and I lift it. Operational tone so so far the phone’s fine. I put my dime in and wait for the dial tone. None comes. Dial? Don’t. I start to, stop. But what I got at first was probably the dial tone, even if the sign on the phone says to wait for the operational tone before putting a dime in. I punch out the remaining numbers. Man’s recorded voice says “Your phone requires a ten-cent deposit before dialing. Please hang up and—” I hang up. Coin’s not returned. I press the coin-return lever and coin comes. Other phone? Something tells me the odds are better with this one, and my coin was returned. I try again. Same thing. Same man’s voice imparting self-confidence, forbearance, anyone can make a mistake, next time please try to read the instruction plate first, I am a man who makes his living through his diction and believable tone, lever repeatedly, coin comes. I leave the receiver hanging below the shelf, lift the receiver of the other phone and press its stirrup. Dial or operational tone, dime in, dialing dial tone, punch out the numbers to my mother’s home. Phone’s ringing. Most people I wait a minimum of four rings. My mother, because she might be resting or sleeping or on her breathing machine any time of the day, I usually hang up after the third ring, when she answers with a hello.

“Mom, it’s me, how are you? I have to drag you to the phone?”

“Oh, Dan. I was wondering who’d be calling me so late.”

“I shouldn’t have, right? But I felt I really owed you a call and I tend to forget — Actually I almost never tend to forget, got a memory like a you-know-what, but thought you might be up because you’ve said your hours are so erratic. But did I get you out of bed or from any place inconvenient? Because if you hadn’t answered after the third ring—”

“It’s all right, and good hearing your voice. How are you too? You sound fine. We have no heat you know.”

“Because it’s past eleven?”

“Because we never had heat. For two days. On Thanksgiving, imagine?”

“Thanksgiving? Yesterday? Christ — never called to see what you were doing.”

“I went to your cousin Bernard’s and Dotty’s as I usually do. They again asked if they should invite you but I told them you’d never come. They picked me up and sent me home by hired car.”

“That was very nice of them. How are they?”

“Fine and their kids are wonderful. You eat out last night?”

“Nope. Bought a thick veal steak and a good bottle of bock for the occasion. But your heat.”

“Boiler oil shouldn’t run out. Not at the average old age of the tenants in this building. It’s the landlord who should run and keep running till we never see him again. I wish it weren’t so, but sometimes everything people I don’t normally listen to say about landlords turns out to be true.”

“You used to speak very highly about the ones who owned the building before the current guy. Mrs. Innerstein for instance.”

“She lived in the building so went through what we all did, and think she would jeopardize her cats’ health? Cats like a hot place. Maybe the expense of oil today would make even Mrs. In greedy. They say it’s regulated by computer, the amount of oil the building needs. But either he’s draining our tank to heat his buildings till twelve where the apartments go for more, or he’s finagled with the oil company to once a month let the oil run out on the two most freezing days it takes to bring in a delivery. But do I sound too caustic and paranoid? I try not to be, it’s unhealthy, but occasionally in this building it’s impossible not to. Who knows? Maybe this time the landlord has a pardonable excuse.”

“You sound plenty reasonable, so don’t worry. It must be very uncomfortable without heat.”

“Where you calling from? It sounds like noises on the street.”

“A pay phone. I went to a party and was walking home.”

“It’s safe? You don’t want to take a subway at night, but why not a bus or cab?”

“I’m walking to get air.”

“You drank too much at the party?”

“Mom, will you stop it? I drank a little. Maybe even more than a little, but I’m all right.”

“Thieves see a drunk on the street, they see a target. You have to be careful everyplace today. No matter how big you are, they come at you two and three at a time and can knock and keep any man down. I worry about you alone at night. You’re too quick to leap in if you see any trouble. Maybe yesterday that was okay or you’d end up with only a bop on the nose, but today you can get killed. If they start chasing you and they’re young, they’ll win.”

“Believe me, with all the exercising I do I’m even stronger than I was, but I no longer jump in. I’m as wary as the next guy.”

“Too much exercise at your age and you could be setting yourself up for a heart condition. You ought to do only light things like yoga.”

“Maybe you’re right. I’ll check into it.”

“You’re not just saying?”

“No. I’ll get a check-up, have a stress test — whatever.”

“Good. How long you think we’ve been on the phone?”

“Three minutes. More?”

“I’m surprised the operator hasn’t cut in. Maybe I should call you back before she does.”

“Leave it. So we get a break from the phone company for once. But if I know them they’ll ring me as soon as I hang up, and if you know me you know I’ll pay. But where were we? That you must be very uncomfortable without heat for two days. See how I got a memory?”

“I never doubted. And this time I don’t care how good his excuse is, I’m going to a good hotel and charge them for meals and tips too if this lasts another day.”

“Don’t go to a hotel. My apartment’s small. But if it ever came to your being warm or not and you wanted to avoid the hotel cost, you could always stay at my place alone for as long as you want and I’d find someplace else to stay or you could stay there with me.”

“On the floor?”

“I’d sleep on the floor or in a chair. It’s not bad. I have a sleeping bag, or I’d buy a cot, and I’d come get you.”

“Your apartment must be very small. Anyway, thanks but if I didn’t go to a hotel I’d go to Bernard’s. He also asked me and it’s nearer and roomier. Because I can’t take the cold, Daniel. Nobody here can. I wore three sweaters and would have worn a fourth if I had one. Get me a good wool cardigan for Christmas if you’re thinking of buying me anything. I never asked you for a gift before, but that’s what I need and I don’t know when I’ll have the time to look for a good one. What do you need?”

“For Christmas? Nothing.”

“For anytime what do you need? Don’t say socks.”

“It’s true, socks I can always use. Socks and size thirty-two jockey briefs, next style up from what they call bikini, but not white.”

“They show the stain, I know.”

“I told you? Or you’re getting very bold.”

“You did tell me after I gave you several pairs of white. Black or red, right?”

“Any dark solid color. Size thirty-two or thirty-four. I can get into both. For some reason thirty-two stretches to a thirty-four and thirty-four doesn’t to a thirty-six. Maybe I’m a thirty-four and don’t want to admit it.”

“Get measured.”

“Let’s just say thirty-four.”

“I already have it. Regular dark solid-colored jockey briefs but not the old-man kind, preferably thirty-three if they carry odd sizes, and no artificial materials in them except in the elastic band. Same with the socks? Not the knee-high kind and I know no whites, but what about argyles? They used to be your favorite.”

“In college. But anything. Cotton or wool or a wool blend, they’re all fine. White too, don’t bother yourself about what kind, but not all-nylon if you can avoid it of any design.”

“Like dad used to wear.”

“I find them itchy and ugly.”

“You still have his after all these years?”

“The last pair’s just wearing out.”

“Dad also didn’t spend much on clothes, but look how those socks lasted and some of them didn’t come to you new. Six years.”

“I thought eight.”

“Six. I waited two years before I gave away any of his clothes. You thought that peculiar.”

“Not peculiar.”

“Peculiar, peculiar. You wanted me to throw them on the street or give them to Goodwill, but I couldn’t till after two years. And you finally took his socks and also his bathrobes, and those robes were Viyella, expensive but durable and warm. I bet you still have them.”

“You can’t wear them out.”

“I bought them for him. But let’s not talk about it anymore if you don’t mind. You’re not too cold where you’re calling from?”

“I’ve a coat. One thing before I forget. What color cardigan?”

“Something bright. Blue heather or heather blue. Or a pretty shade in the red family. Red makes me feel warm when it’s cold. And size thirty-eight. Cardigans have to be loose.”

“Good. But you feel fine otherwise and there’ll be heat by tomorrow?”

“This going to be a much longer call? I’m enjoying it, but the operator not coming in worries me. And you didn’t just call to say you’d be stopping by tomorrow or the next day for dinner and then got carried away with all this clothes talk?”

“You want me for dinner tomorrow?”

“It’s been a long time, not that I want to coerce you.”

“No, I want to. Tomorrow.”

“We could make it the following day.”

“No, tomorrow.”

“Good — around five. What should I prepare?”

“If you’re giving me a choice, fish would be fine. Simple — broiled. I could pick it up on the way.”

“You can’t get fresh fish where you are like we get here. But I was thinking of a roast chicken if not a meatloaf. I have both in the freezer and one of these days soon I have to defrost it.”

“I don’t like roast chicken — maybe the only thing of yours I don’t. The idea of it, looking like something I don’t want to be reminded of. I know it’s my problem, but I’m sorry.”

“I’ll cut it up. The carcass will be gone before you get here.”

“Fine then, for what am I going on about? — chicken. I liked it best when you boiled it I think and then I don’t know what you did with the parts — baked or broiled them plain with a little paprika and a single onion slice on top. Just don’t make a big deal. Don’t bake pies. Don’t start cooking early tomorrow morning.”

“Why not? If there’s no heat to very little, it’ll keep the place warm.”

“I’ll bring the wine and bread.”

“Only for you to drink — my system can’t take it. I only have my vodka or two and that’s sufficient. Are we going to speak another minute or more?”

“If you want to. It must be freezing sitting there.”

“I have a bathrobe and blanket around me, so I’m almost warm. Another of dad’s robes you said was ugly, but this one, and am I grateful, you didn’t take. The heater’s on too, so it’s not that bad. I complain way too much. But what was I saying? Nothing. And I hate the operator interrupting, so if we are going to speak a while longer, give me your number and I’ll call back.”

“You have to be sure you want to.”

“I do. I’m feeling very peppy tonight and I love it.”

“You have a pen?”

“I have a memory.”

“Two-four-three, ninety-one twelve.”

“Don’t let anyone take the phone from you. It might get too cold for me waiting if they do. But if you don’t hear from me in a minute it means I forgot your number, so phone back. Bye, dear.” Hangs up. Phone rings a few seconds later.

“Mom?”

“The operator. There’s a ten-cent overtime charge on your last phone call.”

“You never came in and told us.”

“If one of us didn’t, that’s an error on our part, but I have registered here an overtime charge of ten cents.”

“I only have a quarter.”

“We’ll reimburse you by mail.”

“It’ll cost you a twenty-cent stamp, so really wouldn’t be worth it, and I am expecting a call. I in fact probably owe you twenty to thirty-cents overtime for the time I talked.” I put in the quarter. “Thank you, ma’am,” and she says “Have a nice day,” and I hang up. Phone rings several seconds later.

“Hello?”

“Where were you? I asked you not to let anyone use the phone. I also got worried thinking something was wrong — a fight in the booth and the phone turned upside down. Crazy, huh?”

“It was the operator. A bargain: only wanted a dime. But what else is new with you? How’s Goldie?”

“Actually, I am suddenly feeling tired, Daniel, so just tell me how your life is going in other ways, if you don’t want to save it till tomorrow, and then I’ll have to say goodnight.”

“I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.”

“You meet anyone at the party you were at?”

“There were plenty of interesting people there.”

“You know what I mean. Because you should. I don’t want you to be alone all your life. I hope you’re at least still looking.”

“I haven’t been alone. I’ve known many women.”

“A year here, six months there. You’re alone now. And that last one, May. She was very nice, and sweet to me as they come, but for too long I knew she wasn’t your type and you weren’t hers and that it was a lost cause from the start.”

“Funny, but I didn’t think so. And it is strange you ask about tonight, since I did meet someone.”

“Bring her along tomorrow.”

“I only met her briefly.”

“We can postpone dinner a day or two. You get her number?”

“I’ll be calling her. Anyway, it’s too early to talk about and surely too early to invite her for dinner with you.”

“Why? If a woman likes you, nothing’s too early. You once called me a lighthouse, so listen to the light. If you call her early tomorrow, say you’re going to your mother’s for the first time in months and would she like to come along. That way she won’t from the start think you’re a momma’s boy, which you’re not. And when she does see us together she’ll like the idea of someone being so joking and outspoken with his mother, and if she’s from out of town the idea of going to a good family dinner way out here might appeal to her too. A lot of people have heard of this neighborhood and think it’s special.”

“She’s from the city. Anyway, I want to see you alone so we can talk.”

“What will we say that we haven’t tonight?”

“My work. What you’ve been doing. Politics. Plenty.”

“How is your work going?”

“Fine. But tomorrow. Anything else I can bring? In fact I know exactly what. An electric blanket.”

“You have one?”

“Two. Could you use the extra?”

“They’re supposed to keep you warm for relatively little electricity, so if it’s not your only working one.”

“I don’t have one good or bad but I’ll get you one tomorrow. I knew you’d say no if I said I’d buy it.”

“I don’t need one.”

“I’m bringing it, but ripping up the label and receipt before I get there.”

“Then you should have kept me fooled. The whole thing was too calculating for you.”

“Come on, will you, that’s what I am.”

“No you’re not. Think more highly of yourself. When it comes to qualities — But before we hang up, what’s this new woman’s name?”

“Helene, but for who-knows-what reasons she might not want to see me or be able to for weeks or months. It’s happened. So enough about her unless something materializes, since I don’t want to be explaining for the next year about what ever happened to this woman.”

“She’ll want to see you. If she gave you her number, she will, and I bet in a hurry, and she’ll take to you too. Everyone does.”

“You’re my mother, so you’re saying this. And the truth is I think I sometimes need that kind of talk, much as I go out of my way to say I don’t. But don’t get your hopes up there’ll be any new woman in my life. What I’m saying is that if I was really feeling bad about myself now, which I’m not, then I’d say that if there’s any way to ruin it with any new woman I meet, you can be sure I’ll do it instinctively or find out how.”

“Then I shouldn’t get out my chiffon gown yet, that it? As you wish. Goodnight, dear.”

“Wait. Oh jeez. I sound like a moron sometimes, don’t I?”

“No. Who said so?”

“Then I didn’t make you feel awful just then?”

“No, and you didn’t plan to, did you? So stop worrying. But I am very tired, so I hope to see you tomorrow. Thanks for calling.”

“Thanks for what?” but she’s hung up.

Walking up Sixth I think I shouldn’t have said a lot of the things I said to her about myself and also should have told her of something I read in the paper this week about how anyone seventy-five or seventy and older shouldn’t have his room thermostat set lower than seventy or seventy-five degrees. Which? She’s over and her apartment temperature’s much lower, but over seventy on the thermostat for anyone under or over any age other than for someone, let’s say, seventy to seventy-five days or ill in a number of different ways sounds too high. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but the reasons the article writer gave for the warning were something about the gradual deterioration and collapse — but I’d only be making up most of that about the effects on the various body organs and tracts. But something like “Contrary to current scientific and popular layman belief and recent federal guidelines for residential and office buildings’ air conditioning and heat, any temperature lower over a prolonged period…acute hypothermia…very elderly and infirmed…”

I haven’t another coin. Easily enough achieved, considering the mission, but what would she say? “Please — the government — let me sleep.” No, that’s what she’d think. She’d say “What is it, darling, something you forgot to say that couldn’t wait?” I’d say “Damn, woke you up again,” and she’d say “Anyone else I might mind, but I’m sure coming from you it’s for a good reason,” since she knows I want nothing more for her than to be healthy and safe. Content too, of course, but there’s just so much an only alone son with a weighty workload and in another borough and with a welter of excuses and all those outside willful and fortuitous abuses can do. Damn landlords sometimes. Damn city. Damn geographical location, figmental extrapolation. Damn countries and oil and gas companies and international bickering and national trickstering and so on. Too tangled for me to understand. My damn density and dumb damnedness sometimes too, and all right for me to dig-in during this kind of crisis, but my mother? I don’t want her going to—

Car shrieks, startling me. Pedestrian almost hit. Leg inches away from the bumper, exhibiting her fist. Standing in front of the cab at the corner, fist shaking, pigtails waving, boot raised to boot the bumper, stumps the ground. “You shit.” Cabby waits, seems to me resignedly. No fare in the cab, for her to finish and go away. Sits back, pushes his hat back, scratches his back, ah that felt good, tugs on his nose and looks behind him, can’t back up and then go around her because a truck’s there. “You goon,” she says. Records on his clipboard. Let me see: Fiftieth to Broome and West Broadway, next pickup on Prince to Greenwich and Sixth — Truck honks, he points in front and honks back. You back up, then I can back up, because she won’t back up, and we can both go. “You dope. Yes, dopo, moronico, maniaco, cause you won’t be happy till you run over some poor dildo which you’ve no doubt done a hundred and 0 times before. At least say the fuck you’re sorry.” It’d seem he was in the right, had the light, maybe driving too fast, that I didn’t see, but she was walking against it. Light turns red for him. “Suck,” and smacks his hood and crosses the street. He opens his window, wouldn’t I love to with you honey, hell with her, closes it, truck and cars behind him honk. Raises his arms without turning around: what do you want me to do, be as dumb as that broad and run the light? Lights up a pipe and puffs on it. Match must have stayed lit where he threw it on the floor, for he suddenly ducks below the dashboard. Green, cars honk, trucker just shakes his head not believing this, cabby pops up, oh the light, what do you think but the light? honks, beeps, from farther down the street my dog has fleas, makes a left, truck and cars behind him, where was I? Woman seems stoned. Nursing home. Don’t want my mom in one. Shaking her fist or waving a kerchief at the cab as it passes, for my eyes can’t focalize from so far. Her getting chronically sicker and weaker, one of my worst fears. Like my dad his last two years: incontinent, sometimes defecating in bed, “Looked like afterbirth,” my mother once said, “Bedsores muffins could fit in,” nothing she or the visiting nurses could do about them, her worst fears too. How could we afford it for one thing? Not foremost but one. For another I just don’t want her in one of those homes even if we could afford it or through Medicare or — card, whichever gives the applicable aid, not do I ever want to visit her in one, though if she had to be there I of course would. But what would we do or say? Walk her around the halls, sit in the solarium sun, how’s the food, what’d you do today? Me, what could I be doing here that’s new? Nothing’s new. Please drop me in the nearest grave. “Whatever you do,” she once told me, “don’t stick me in one of those old-age places. I didn’t to your father, and he never even asked me not to. Fact is he told me to do what was easiest for me with him, but what could I do but help while I still had my strength and health, and taking care of him I also have to admit gave me something very useful and engrossing to do and improve on. The second most urgent thing I’m asking you to do if you can’t the first is just before you send me to one, give me all the sleeping pills you can lay your hands on that it’ll take to kill me in one night. You won’t have to be home. Just give me them and say goodnight and I’ll take them alone.” I told her not to think or say such things and she almost screamed at me that she was serious so what was I going to do? I told her I’d have to think it over and she said “Think about it quick — one never knows.” I said “Why, is there something about your health you just found out that I don’t know?” and she said “No, it’s up and down as ever, but let’s be realistic — at my age and condition anything can go to pot overnight,” and a week later phoned and said “You remember what I asked you about promising me something extremely important to do?” and I said “No, wait, what, afraid I forgot, sorry, but how are you?” and she said “You remember — you got a head screwed on you tighter than a vise and certainly for something like that, but maybe we should drop it till you tell me you remember or want me to help retrieve your memory for you — do you?” and I said “Sure, if that’s what you want, but better another day, because right now — well, I had to have a translation in by noon if I wanted to get paid, so I stayed up all night and am now feeling sick from it besides very tired — anyway, how are you?” and she told me how she was and Goldie and Ray and that was the last time she spoke to me about sleeping pills.

I wait for the light. Other night I dreamed. Car beeps, big-dog barks from far off, someone scraping a metal garbage can along the sidewalk, waterlogged car transmission squeaks. Of my mother and jarring that dream, as I start to cross the street.

“Watch it,” a man says, Walkman wires in his ears, running against traffic and nearly clipping me.

“You should’ve,” I yell and he gives me the finger as he runs. “At least get a bell. And if you do, ding the damn thing, you dumb id—,” because he still has his finger in the air, but forget it. In one and out if he can even hear me and why start trouble? He could come back, but being a runner I doubt it, as others have when I went on too long. Light’s green. What was it I dreamed? Seemed important, one with both my folks. Jolted me out of sleep and kept me sitting up and thinking about it till I thought it had seeped in deep enough for me to go back to sleep and bring it back easily when I woke for the day. Often told myself to keep a pen and pad — Anyway, the dream. She’d locked herself in the bathroom. “My hair is white,” she said through the door, “overnight,” when in real life it’s steel gray. And something about her bones pushing through her face. “My weight’s down to seventy-eight”—her age? “My back’s so bent I can never again stand straight. I just saw my image in the light.” Apartment was dark. Crack under the door showed the bathroom was black. “Don’t stare at me,” she screamed from behind the closed door. Maybe she was talking to herself. “I’m ancienter and mangier than our goldanged race,” though at the time I felt she was talking to me. I said something like “Get yourself something to read, Ma, that’s all you need. I’ll find a good book if you open the door.” Good book could be the Bible but what would that or the rest of what I said mean? We were never a religious family. Ceremonial dinners once or twice a year and inexact observances of the high holy days. They let me fast for a day and skip school those holidays because the other Jewish kids did. But it wasn’t till my sister got very sick that she put a cloth napkin on her head once a week and lit memorial candles and mumbled a prayer. Bible at funeral? I tried the doorknob but it was locked. “Don’t! I’ll open it at my own speed.” Knob turned from the inside and door creaked open an inch. Creaking part from old ghost movies I saw as a boy and radio mystery shows. Suspense Presents — one of those. “Not yet,” I said. “Wait till I get you that book.” Said that because I was afraid to see her so old, decrepit and sick. In another room my father rose from a coffin on his hospital bed and stretched. He was naked and scrawny, his room dark and stuffy, only a little light from somewhere on him and his hair hung as it never did over his shoulders from only a few places in his head. He released the railing, climbed out of bed and lumbered to me dragging strung bones and a long iron chain. “Drag something imaginative,” I said. “And put something on, for crying out loud,” and covered my eyes and opened them on him wearing a loincloth opened at his genitals and dragging the bones and chain. In real life he died in his sleep in a hospital gown in a hospital bed in the apartment my mother lives in now. In the dream his testicles were twice their normal size and low-slung and swung as he walked and his penis peed like a horse’s. “Come quick,” my mother said when I came into their apartment as I did almost every morning to see them and give him his shot and help her in any way I could, “I can’t get from dad a single heartbeat or breath.” Bathroom door was wide open and there was daylight on her from a bathroom window she doesn’t have. Rattling and clanking from the bones and chain got louder. My mother looked as she’d said she would and said to me “Where’s your book? Don’t lose your eyes. If anyone should be reading,” pointing to my father coming into the room completely naked but done peeing, “It’s him. Sol, you need a cover. I love you. Sol, you need to be fed and dressed. Your son will assist you, but come to me first, you big clown,” and she went to him with her arms out. He spun around once, looked lost, dropped the bones and chain, defecated as he stepped toward her but the excrement which had smeared his thighs and was heaped on the floor, disappeared, fell to one knee and she took him into her arms. His eyes stayed shut through all this. I sniffed hard and wondered how come no shit smell. He was wearing an old bathrobe that I now own. It was open below the waist and his testicles rested on the floor. Scrotum, my thought then, looking like a sleeping white Chinese-porcelain cat squeezed up for warmth. She smiled when she first hugged him, was crying, lips on his brow. His hair was now thick, bouncy and brown. That’s all I recall. It could have ended then. Awoke in a sweat, sat up fast. If my mother ever got, how should I put it, incapacitatingly sick or was declared terminal, if declared’s the term medical people use, and asked me to take care of her or her doctor did and it was possible for me to, I think I’d do it till I couldn’t anymore at her apartment or mine, with a visiting nurse or without, depending what the governments could afford, because what else could I do? I’d work at home while I nursed. Live partly off her Social Security if I couldn’t earn enough on my own. That wouldn’t be wrong, since I’ve nothing but a few hundred saved. Maybe for the first time look for book reviews to do if it took that to manage it without dipping into her funds, but ones that pay reasonably well. So it’s all resolved? “Mothers grow old and sick, fathers die, I don’t like it one bit,” Hasenai says in a poem I chose, “but I’ll try.” I know what he means? Thought so then. If I’m still uncertain tomorrow I’ll write Hasenai for advice, since I always make sure to get the author’s meant intention if it’s anything but pure sound, which in his case I’ve tried but can’t duplicate.

I jot down in my notebook: “Last stanza for clarity’s sake ‘Old Folks Leaving Home.’ Include in collect whatever you do even if it takes phone calls & transpacif cabes to make it precise, & maybe even make concluding poem, since that’s how deep you feel about it & good you think it is at least now. Listen. Ambulanc passing op way other emerg vehics passed half hr ago. Just looked but am now back to jot down this nite of Di’s part, meeting Helene, snow-rain-umbrel blown out of my hand, woman walking like a sleeping bag, no perf word-words for it so far color Helenes hair, Hel looking at me at her across room and then thumping her umb open on Di’s steps, short order dwarf no sport intended intentionally reading unrecognizing me on the sub & tho ironic what he read I forget what, dresser-cat feeding on a sock, do it forget dinner with mom tomor 5 & bring elect blank & if poss bot of one of the best foreign vodks, broke-soaked poor guys in Wash Par & tif over unclean fingers was it in class music bar & berber-basque boy or so with wrong roses & now on my way to my apar (cant see exact what streets Im between because my pocketed scarred specs but somewhere in the teens) & falling on my face before & not jus the snowrain (t for the) & jus fort Jun sound of it now my lack also befor of something/another grace (no that didnt work), tho now thinking so jettisonly-clear, wha? & someone on t cot inside & someone in white seated beside & whirling red atop making wet images etc on t st & siren whining moo-mah moo-mop prob like do it say it yl regret it t incoming inpatients heart & for a sec jus now making me recolect t halfdoz emerg times rushed pop to hosp. & my decis about work & nurs mom if disabled or selfunable becaus of her ilness old or new &/or age (o for or) & realization (cdnt think shorter word on t spu o how to contract rlztion) about pure sound when I duplicate in Juns o realy any japanes poets case almos impos to translat, tho aboutface thos at(e)s. So now — tho how you rlly feeling now pal? Huh? Come on, once in yr life, heres yr chanc, rly tel. Whys it impor & whats this one biz for Ive sporadly told? Never on memo. Thats ridic. Then nevr to friends. I hav, much of it. Then nev to me. Tha cd be tru I think but who ar u? Thn to complet this diar of yr nite & one so memorabl. T diar? T nit? Wha maks it so & who writs thos? U shld so whn u get back home — wel u kno, look bk whn u gt bk yl think bk ‘Oh so thas wha happed & I rly felt tha partic nit so memobl becau so many eventfl events & all t dif things I fel, I remem now.’ No, for deeper reas. Wha? Reasons, deepr, on paper, so mayb som of t sam of wha u said, but whas rly trubling me & mayb somethings i dint kno o wdnt excep thru my probe now wer there, y not? & mayb nows t tim to do it for now Im thinking of it so mayb now I shd, rt? So cmon thn, out wit em, no mor excuses, digresons, questons o jokes — how u feel, whas deep insid, not jus yr mom & work but yr soco lif too, want to mak lov? Me, wit u? U kno wha I mean & I said no mo digres, ques o joes. Sur think, u bet, tho hope nobo ever sees this notebo, not tha I cnt rip it up, rt? tho I want mo than mak lov, now thas t tru. Yes? Yes, tis so. So? So yes, ok, no mo digres, caus here comes, penpal gt yr undrlining pen set: so lonly, longing, yernng, me, hart smartg, partly frm litl work recgniton & almo no doe, but deepst down mos trublng me is Im alo, wan to b wit He or somone lik her — o, o — wit a fe bod in bed tonit & me screeng in betwee, liqidy syrpy ros petl lips — who 1st wro somthg lik it? — strapy wrapy legs, arms al aroun, ruty souns aboun, to hold, to clutch, to click, 2 nuz, 2 dic, 2 lov, tug & kis, 2 cover b covrd, 2 b flatend by her flat 2 big brests (2 for to forget), 2 jus agreeably b wit for a nit, 2 go 2 sleep wit for l nit, 2 wak up wit nxt momg as I wnt 2 slee wit, as befor wnt 2 sle wit is wha I ment wit, meang talkg lovg befor wnt 2 sle wit, holdg/jokg wit, serious/unseros wit, 2 jus b simply o simly b wit a responsv xcitg mind as wel as bod is wha I mos want 2 b wit tonit & if pos 4 a long lng tim, tho Im sur I hvnt made myslf clear here, but anythg els wit? Tot wit perhaps in tim, but mayb I mentond tha, tho not here. Marag wit perhps, tho tha too tho nt hre. But anythg els wit? No nt rt now tho wha I jus wro wasnt awful enuf? Nt ‘awfl’ tho if awfl thn aft meang banal, sily, imatur, nt so muc thos but u kno, tho wha? O u kno or (no mo o for or now but jus fo oh) can fil in tomor or whaevr tim if I kee this tha lng, so now en clos ths joebo & cap pen wich, caus I dint refil befo I lef hom cd b runng dry, I mt latr nee fo mo impo thngs, meang relatd 2 trnsltd, 2 writ (& mt fo mite). But enuf, genug & yah. Hu? Wel, tel me whoevr sd I mus ma sens 2 myslf — who? Nu? O Go, stop go, tho whas tha supo 2 mea tha OG, sto go? Ju 2 sto wrtg rt no, go ho, lo at ths tomo, thn ter it ou of t memobo and up. I mea ‘& up.’”

I put away the notebook and look up. Something’s doing on the next block. Take out the book, look at it, put it away. Car commotion, people in the street, but what was I looking for second time I opened the book? Did it so quick I forgot to look for what I started out to and now I forget what that was. Memo to someone — myself? An anagor — somewhere, whatever the word is? Realization, reclamation, recognition of my own situation, nature and character — something like that? I take out the book, look at what I wrote. Last stanza, include whatever you do, even to concluding with, etcet etcet, snow and rain, dinner at five tomor, pop in hosp, what the heck’s hart smarting? and I cross it out with my pen till I can’t read it. Here and now feelings, meeting Helene, just to be with someone tonight, etcet etcet — makes sense but’s nothing new. I cross out all those too, worried someone one day might see what I wrote and wonder what was with him. I write “Anorisis or anagisis or some other an-isis or — asis — look it up. Word’s in Web’s 3rd.” First stumbled on it when? Was looking up anagoge not long back, fourth time it seemed in as many weeks. Some words are like that with me. Heuristic’s another — why can’t I remember what it means? “Anagoge & heuristic,” I write. “Lk em up & how to pronounc anagog again.” Pen runs dry on “n”. I unscrew it, squeeze the bladder, nothing inside. Ink’s one of the only things one can’t borrow from a passerby. Plenty of things, but I know what I mean. I put the pen away. Strapy wrapy legs — oh so po. My eyes already ache. Ruty souns aboun is abysmal, abominable — quick, which, if forced to make an instant deadline printing decision between those two, would read better and would I choose? I close the nobook — abandonable — and put it in my coat. Of course. What I wanted to do and was in that book was that love buzwax, marag, tot. Maybe then, with an adjective adjective woman, one who makes trenchant observations about me I’ve been unable to hit upon on my own, things would change for me somewhat. Woman who unscrews me, presses my bladder, I don’t know if the latter act works, till I run dry. Who holds me and let me hold her while I sleep. No lets, we just do: hold each other going into and in sleep and when we wake up. To know when I’ve awakened that I’ve held her and am holding her. Of course I’d know I’m holding her because I’d have waked up. But that’s what I want or something like: woman and bed simultaneously. Right now. This sec. I want to snap my fingers and open my eyes to it. I believe in miracles? Will if this one now comes true. I snap my fingers, close my eyes, say to myself, but maybe I should have first closed my eyes, snapped my fingers, said to myself, anyway I close my eyes again, snap my fingers, say to myself “Me with Helene in Helene’s bed what I want right now, please.” Forget the please. Too much like when I used to pray to God out of fear every night before I fell asleep. God please this, please that, God please keep my mommy well, sister unsick, daddy making money and alive, God no awful war, enemy soldiers landing ashore, please God I beg, wish, swear I’ll be a good boy from now on and pray to you as much as you like, and please if there’s anything I’m doing or not doing you’re not pleased with, please let me know. Close my eyes, snap my fingers, say to myself “Me with Helene in really any nice clean bed right now,” open them. I liked it when she used the word scoot. And way she moved. As well as what she didn’t say and do. What do I mean “way she moved”? She moved normally, naturally, unaffectedly, but athletically, though not muscleboundly, as if as a girl she used to seriously tap dance or take some after-school classical or modern dance or early-on had exceptionally agile legs as if she’d run and won or second-placed in dashes and long-distance races in grade school and beat when they let her compete most boys her age, and also how she flew downstairs at Diana’s so sure she didn’t even think that flying down so fast she could have fallen on her face. Or just fallen, forget the face. Tripped but not gotten hurt. And “as well as what she didn’t say and do”? So subdued. That’s not the word. But something I liked. Not edgy, testy, overpeppy, sloppy, noisy, coarse, raucous, smoky, talky, scowly, mousy, so on. That she whacked the umbrella open: in notebook too. “Okay, Mr. Krin, now I must scoot.” “I’ve got to.” “Now I got to.” Or “have to.” But definitely “scoot.” This one I truly mustn’t ruin. Meaning she: I shouldn’t. Though with those phone calls? No, lots of apologies as I said. “Um, just joking, I was, but not the best jest-joking, no?” No, no more jesting in joking. “I didn’t think my call would wreak so much harm.” Or truth: “I was a little high. Not a little. Let me tell the truth: a lot. But you also should know that’s unusual for me to get so high. No it’s not. Truth is, if I’m gonna tell it, or going to, cause that’s, I mean because that’s or those are just another language affectation or digression I use to direct attention to what I say and away from what I do: I get high. Don’t want to but I do. No, truth, I do want to, because lots of times I’ve nothing else to do or think I don’t or just don’t want to think about doing anything else, so about once every three weeks I get high, but not as high as I got that night, is the truth. Usually by myself high. A solitary tippler mostly. I don’t like it though do when I’m doing it or planning to. If things changed for me in ways I’ve gone over with myself, I’d probably change that drinking habit as well as stop drinking a little too much almost every night of the week while I read and often just to get to sleep, and that’s also the truth. Doesn’t interfere with my work though. Wake up, regular time, no alarm clock, exercise, coffee, newspaper, maybe a shower and in an hour I’m ready to go, or almost, though ten to fifteen times a year or so when I get high the previous night, mornings till around noon will be slow. And God knows why I feel compelled to tell all this in my first call to you when you certainly didn’t want to hear it, right? Look: right, wrong, truth or not, and maybe half of that was, since I tend to distort as well as affect and digress — well, maybe not as well as, though I am a pretty effective distorter too — just see me, okay? You’ve no reason to even speak to me I guess, but what but an hour or less do you have to lose? Meet me I mean, not see, for coffee, tea or even a drink, because what I didn’t want you to think before, and I swear I’m not trying now to affect, digress or distort, is that drink’s any kind of problem with me. Those ten to fifteen mornings-after a year perhaps, but usually when I start work late I work later into the day than I usually do, and because I’m so tired from having worked late and maybe also from the evening before, that late day is usually one of the ten to fifteen days a year I don’t drink or hardly at all. And meet not tonight if you don’t like. Now that I think of it we can’t, since tonight, and what I’m going to say isn’t going to be said so you’ll think something like how nice that he’s such a good son, I’m going to visit my mother, but maybe in the coming week, so what do you say? Even a couple of drinks or dinner or both for two on me. You can’t? You won’t? You never will? You’ll meet? Great. Time and date and see you at yours or you at mine or just at the meeting place.” I want to hold her face in my hands and bring it toward mine and lean over the two to three inches I think it’d take if what I’m remembering now is right about her height and if she doesn’t raise herself on her toes to kiss. I want to. Yes. Very much. To open my eyes and find hers closed. Then open them again and find them open. Hers. Her to smile when I find her eyes open when I open mine. Her to take my face in her hands and bring it down to hers and kiss my lips. Want to. I. Lie my head on a pillow beside hers on a pillow or both ours on the same pillow and our lips almost touching but not speaking and then touching and our eyes closing, though I don’t know why not speaking. Sure we can be speaking. Softly, moderately, I suppose any way but loudly, crudely, though even there too. So we’re kissing and holding and possibly speaking and possibly crudely but not loudly and doing the rest. Doing the best. To have done the rest. To shut the light and her to turn over and face away from me or the light’s already off and we’ve done the rest and her to turn over and I press up from behind while my nose is in her hair or lips are on her shoulder or neck and penis against her behind or between her thighs. I’m sure I can get out of that window scene and calls to her service some way. Lots of apologies. But not to act oafish on the phone. She’s a bright woman. She’ll probably respect the work I do. She looks like she likes poetry. Courses she gives. Plenty of poetry in there and that she’ll respect what I do I didn’t mean makes her bright. But all could be so nice. Live at her place if it’s big enough if first we worked out. Two bedrooms, one for her to work in, I’d set up and tear down the living room table every day or some other unused day space. I’d mind but adapt. All I need’s one drawer and a long shelf. Two incomes, not rents, how else can a representative couple like us afford to live in this city without a struggle, and 600 block of West Hundred-tenth could be along Riverside Drive or close. Maybe she overlooks the Hudson. Tugs would pass. Summertime Circle Line trippers. Columbia area may be near as she can safely live to City College did Diana say? If so my alma I’ll tell her next time we speak. Pre-med, then pre-dent, but I’d frequently feel queasy when I entered the bio and chem buildings because of the formaldehyde and rotten eggs smells and couldn’t learn the formulas and laws or dissect the baby pig or earthworms. Wasn’t a smart student — I can get part of this into the phone call some way, maybe just to say I thought she taught at City but then remembered it was a college upstate. Now makes me wonder why she lives around Columbia: went there or to City for her postgraduate work and got a cheap flat and stayed? Someone cut them up and labeled the parts for me and in exchange I took the requisite swimming test for him in gym under his name. Never got a post-B. A. I’ll say. Not boasting of course. They wouldn’t believe him when he said he sinks when he jumps in. Got interested in Japanese language and lit through a deeply moving Japanese movie about Japanese prisoners of war when I was nearly thirty and waiting tables at a beach resort. But more from the book it was based on that I later read and took a quick Berlitz thinking that would be it and then private lessons from an elderly Japanese businessman I taught English to and cooked dinner for in return. He also taught me the sake and tea ceremonies and how to disembowel myself and make paper insects and birds. Started translating poetry on my own and for a while brought my literal translations to this man. “Hasenai,” he once said, pushing my other poets aside. “I buried his grandfather’s sister. He be the one you should assist and do. What if I say without saying why or when of then, if you’ll allow me, that I owe his grandaunt a grave favor,” and by heart he recited in Japanese the end of one of Jun’s earliest poems and first I ever heard: “Juvenile, goose-fed, young junk, halfcocked bloom. Pardon me, exceedable fathers, but I’ve got to make rot and humor and doom.” She might appreciate some of that. An ill-mannered autodidact. Hardworking, a bit self-deprecating, humble origins, funny-boned. Had enough of her stuffed pedants, pedagogues and preppies and might be drawn to a literary roughneck. But I’m not that ill-mannered or much of a roughneck and her men friends probably aren’t pedantic or stuffy and I’d love to get a pedagogical job. I want to say goodnight to her from behind while she lies on her side and she to turn her face toward mine and barely be able to reach my lips and turn away from me again and my face in one of those places I mentioned and hand on her breast, hip or thigh and other arm under a pillow or holding her shoulder or hand and to fall asleep like that, penis pressed, legs and chest. Sure there’d be problems but. Two bedrooms, not two beds. Two of us working in the same apartment. Two typewriters going at the same time but a door or two closed between them to shut out the noise. Two pens or minds or pairs of eyes going at the same time and the doors to shut out the quietness. Only one living room and bedroom and when she passes me on her way to the kitchen for coffee or tea, what? To brush her hand across my shoulder or head or back of my chair. For the phone to ring and both of us to go for it. Door or doors to her bedroom suddenly opened to get the phone in the living room. Or if it’s in the bedroom her phone, for her to say “It’s for you, Dan” or “Sweetie, it sounds like Dick or Jane — the phone,” and for me to go to the bedroom and touch or brush up against her or her chair and smile at her when she hands me the receiver if she didn’t leave it on the bed. Or she might have a long extension cord and bring the phone to me from the bedroom or even past the living room to the kitchen where I could be boiling water for coffee or tea. Or it could ring and I could answer it and it’s for her, her mother or last lover, her colleague or student or friend, and I’d bring the phone into the bedroom where she’s working. Or just for her to be in the kitchen around noon and say “I’m toasting a roll, want me to toast one for you too?” Or come in crunching a carrot and say “Want me to peel you one too?” Or hold a carrot or roll up and say “You want one too?” Or hold both up and say “You want these two too?” Or to hear her chewing or crunching a carrot or radish or celery stick in the kitchen. She’s in the kitchen, I’m in the living room. I want it to disturb my work enough for me to say “You make a hell of a racket with your crunching” or “chewing,” and she could say “Why, does it bother you?” or “Why does it bother you?” but she’d say “I’m sorry, does it bother you?” and I’d say yes and take the carrot or what’s left of the radish or celery out of her hand and even out of her mouth if the carrot or celery’s sticking out of it and bite into it loudly or take all three if she’s holding them and bite into each loudly and chew more loudly than she and she could take back the carrot, radish or celery stick, though I doubt anything would be left of the radish by then, or even the toasted roll or a toasted or three-day-old bagel and bite into it or two of those three and we could chew loudly simultaneously. I’ve done things like that. Or I want to have egg salad on my lips after taking a forkful from a bowl of egg salad she just made and to look at her and suddenly want to kiss her and she could say “This is a childhood fear I once had — to have a boy with egg salad on his lips try to kiss me.” Something like that happened to May with chicken salad I think, but I want something like that to happen to Helene with me. That’s silly but true but I want much much more to. To go to France with her for a month to drink, eat, serious sightseeing and sleep and especially for a week the prehistoric caves. To go back to my roots — wrong. To return, at least in my mind — skip it. Or to spend, if we didn’t have the loot for France, a couple of summer months in a remote bay area of Gaspé let’s say. Way up. Northern lights and deep in woods. Fireplace going every night. Fog, some days I want plenty of fog and most nights sky swarming with stars clear as whatever simile and for a while during that time not only northern lights but meteorites clear as that same simile too. And even if I heard and saw them all before I want her to tell me which star is which and when combined their constellations or parts and yarns. She looks a lot like a woman I knew who knew a lot about stars and sailed. Also with a cheery bright face, long full frame, long white neck, straight bright teeth, long light hair, but wavy and blond, not red and I think straight, long strong legs and little feet, which with Helene’s long skirt I couldn’t see, little to no makeup around the eyes and on the lips and cheeks, and who nuzzled and made love only when it was most expedient to and it seemed had little to do with me and wrote poem after poem on beach after beach, but shortly after I last saw her on one wrote she’s turning me loose and giving up writing poetry and living off her family to just write critically for the time being and study, read and teach. But this time with Helene or someone much like, meaning with a bright full mind, hard worker, no snob, someone I’m sexually drawn to and who’s similarly drawn to me, and with substantially a cheerful disposition and strong sense of fairness and constancy, I want it to be much different than the rest and to start happening soon. I want to love and be loved and be called my love and beloved and make love with my beloved and call out love love love while we do. To take long beach walks and bike rides and go berry-picking along country roads. All that and then some I want unabashedly. Berries. Together. To pick. Rasp-, straw-, black-, blue- and even cran- and goose- in a mutual quart-basket or two, one for me, with the black-, straw-, rasp- and blue-, two for it, gibt here ein kiss, fourth for you, something I once did too. Was when? Eight or so years ago with a woman where? Coastal Maine and someone other than May or that star-and-sail woman whose name I can’t recall and did that for a week and fell ears over heels for her for several days and she a little with me she said, though we both later said it could only have been because of the sea, fog, stars, fresh vegs and berry pickings and knew beforehand I was only bussing up to escape the hot city and make lots of love with someone and she at the time was the one woman I knew who, just as she’d said on the phone she’d been alone too long with her foxgloves and Muscovy ducks and wanted someone to bike, beach, pick and make love with too, “So come come come, it’s a long trip but not much fare and I’ll go in half on it and if this is any inducement, I’m as sticky as your city and as needy to be relieved.” I want to rowboat out with her or canoe which I did with that Maine woman too. Her name was Lale, star-and-sail woman Sue. Want her to catch a fish from the boat’s aft with last night’s fish as bait while I paddle or row. Want her to troll. Want to get blisters on my hands first time I row and for her to say next day “You’ve blisters, I’ll row, you troll,” or “I’ll paddle, you fish,” but this is too ridic. Even if it is. What I want. To sit facing her in the boat and look at her tightened thighs spread apart in her swim bottoms or jeans and that bulge where’s the vulv as she struggles against wind, current or tide. Want her to wear a sun hat out there and her hair to hang salty and loose. Want to make afternoon love. On a sunny porch or on top of a sleeping bag beside the fired-up fireplace with all our clothes but her socks and watch off if there’s rain or cold fog. Want to make love before breakfast on a quilted bedspread just after we get up and start to dress. Want it to come to us like that. Slap-bang, I want to, you do, down again. Want to take the hook out of a fish’s mouth first time for me and maybe gut the fish with her instructions and fry my fish whole with its eye looking up at me adverbially first time for that too. I don’t know why I want all those but I do. Watch because it’s racy. Want to lie there after with my ear unwittingly near her wrist and listen to its tick. Want to nudge those socks off with my big toes. Want the crazy colors and cushiness of the quilt. Sleeping bag so we can be sloppy. Fishing line out of stick and string because it’s simple. Want us to drift in the boat or canoe and catch another half hour of sunset. Want us to suddenly get fogged or rained on but close to shore and dripping wet. Want us to dry off in the house, cottage or bungalow and start to make love by that fired-up fireplace again while, just as we were, or something, about to put our clothes or robes on. Want us one dusk to plan out our lives together in that drifting boat with the sun half-past setting and mackerel or some other fish jumping and things in the air buzzing and loons crooning or wooing or whatever they’re doing in the water and maybe a lobsterman’s boat from far off motoring and a buoy from not so far off bonging, but other than those and some other unimposing sea and sky things I can’t think of right now like cormorants diving, nothing. Want the water to be clear, don’t want any biting bugs out there. No water skiers, moving or moored speedboats or low-flying planes. No planes. No beer cans, oil slicks, human feces, toilet paper, cigarette butts or filters from filtertips floating past. Want perfection in a setting other than in one with just clouds and sun or as close to one as I can get. Then I want to row or be rowed back and beach the boat and tie the line to a shore rope with a lobsterman’s knot and walk up to the house, cottage or bungalow though no tent, don’t want no matter how roomy, protective and complex a tent, and the house, cottage or bungalow not to be more than a few hundred feet from the beach and the path to it if it’s uphill not too steep and this structure should be wooded outside and in and shielded by tall shading undiseased trees and in the bedroom a little breeze and I want us to make love on top of or underneath a bedspread or quilt or just to throw the covers off and do it on a clean bottom sheet. Want her to later say she wants to have my baby. “I know you do or at least want to have one too,” and I can then say, could, could, and I would “Very much so, and maybe this’ll sound silly when I say it, though in some other way how could it? only with you.” First time it’d be for me too if something like that happened, other than with — but with her I was never sure it was true. Believed she conceived for sure but not for sure from me. Some woman other than May, Lale or Sue who said she was having and then had had mine but who was living with her husband and year-old child at the time and said he knew but because he’d become involved with two other people and one she intimated a man, even encouraged her to, but of course not to have another man’s child. So both he and I wanted it aborted but she’d always wanted two and close enough in age where they’d play together almost like twins which she said would take some of the drudgery of motherhood off her hands, and after she gave birth to the first her husband couldn’t get erect whenever he did join her in bed. In fact, saw them all together, and only time I met him, at a party when she was visibly pregnant supposedly from me and I was still seeing her once a week, something I regret now and would never do again with any man’s lover or wife no matter what the circumstances between them, unless let’s say they got married just so he could get U.S. citizenship or a work permit and weren’t living together as husband and wife, simply because, well, life’s tough enough, that sort of stuff, don’t want to hurt the other guy when he for certain doesn’t deserve it and I can so easily avoid it, and having no cohabitational sex for weeks or even months doesn’t mean as much to me as it once did. But he said after he’d said “I think we should have a little chat about the burps and beats,” and taken my arm and clapping me hard on the back though by his face to anyone else it must have seemed good naturedly escorted me into an empty room, that I mustn’t think unhighly of him despite anything Penny might have said, that he’s always had a very high opinion of me from everything she’s said including some of the things she said she dislikes about me, though she was only twenty-six he urged her to have this pioneer amniotic fluid test but only to see if anything was amiss with my genes, and he’s pleased as probably I should be to report I’m a hundred percent clean, that finally they’ve decided they never want the child to know its genetic father was anyone but him and hoped I wouldn’t do anything in my life, or help anything from happening after it like putting my paternity into possibly publishable poetry or fiction or journals I might keep, to crimp their plans. “I wouldn’t, why would I?” I said and that I think he’s a fine fellow and Penny’s never said anything but the nicest things about him and I’ve never written nor do I ever intend to write poetry, fiction, journals, plays or an autobiography of any kind so along those lines he has nothing to fear too. Then we shook hands, I think he asked what had been in my glass and got me another drink, called it a night for both of them though Penny wasn’t in the room, and I never saw her again though she did call a few months later to say she’d had a healthy baby in the last five days and that Marc, that’s right, Marc, as much as he liked me didn’t want her to see me again or at least for the next ten years if they stayed married that long. When I asked what sex the baby was she said “If you have to know, it rhymes with whirl,” and when I asked what name they gave her she said something like, well, it’s all something like, “I’m sure you’ll hate it and mock us for such a floricultural name so I’m not saying, goodbye.” For a few years after that I’d write and this except when forced to in grade school was the only time in my life and only when I was lonely and drunk some nights, long lonely drunken nighttime paragraphs I then called poems and later threw away in one trash bag because they were so stilted, formless, derivative, just bad, and I don’t write poetry, about my weanling I’d never hold nor see and who’d never know nor unknowingly pee on me…my year-old, two-year-old, three-year-old child who could resemble but would never tremble at my paternity…my little no-good nudnick kid whose folks should know my folks are prone to neurofibromatosis and diabetes…my young alloy, whose gender rhymes with ploy, whose name might be Troy or Roy, whom I’ll never live to enjoy or destroy, noy woy I knoy whether it ever reseeds my soy…my mine me moans thy mind I phones thine line chimes drones…all starts or parts of some of my “Me my poems.” Penny had the girl around eleven years ago, they emigrated to New Zealand the next year, one of their friends I bumped into a couple-years back said he’d heard Marc had drowned in the Pacific but wasn’t sure where or when and didn’t know anyone who was and even forgot where he got the information from or what when I asked were the children’s names. And Penny? I said and he said for all he or anyone else she knew knows she was still living somewhere in the South Seas with her girls, but she cut everyone off when they left and no one if anyone was going to the Pacific and wanted to look her up remembers where in Canada Marc was born and her parents were long dead. Some nights, when the drink’s gone to my head and I’m feeling sentimental and a bit self-pitying, I think this girl’s going to ring my doorbell one day and say something like “I just wanted to see how your nose and earlobes stacked up against mine.” Also thought if I ever wrote another poetical paragraph or paragraphless poem it’d be about a man who falls in love with this daughter without knowing who the genetic father is and maybe even gets her pregnant, even if the theme’s been done and done and for millenniums before. But Helene or whoever it might be though for now she seems my best remote hope. Want her to get pregnant on the bedspread, quilt or sheet or if we do it in front of the fired-up fireplace then on the floor. To teach school while she’s pregnant if it is Helene with me that summer and whatever summer that’ll be though I hope some summer soon. This one, at least the next one. Want my mother to visit us for a week that summer wherever it’ll be though I hope someplace uncrowded and Northeast and near but not on a secluded but unhumid shore. Her parents or mother or sibling to come for a week if she wants or friend or student if it’s Helene and she has favorite students and if it isn’t then if this woman’s also a college teacher, and to have the time for all this she’d almost have to be or a self-supporting artist of some sort, to come for a night or two. Want to move in with whoever this woman will be when we return. To vacate my place the previous June and go to France with her for a month and then Maine for the rest of the summer or just Maine or someplace secluded and cool for two months since we probably couldn’t afford, I know I couldn’t by this summer, a trip abroad. Want my name on her mailbox if it’s her place I do move in to. Not taped onto it but stamped if her name’s also stamped into the nameplate. And maybe not for her to be pregnant this summer in Maine or wherever it’ll be but reasonably soon. I can also see where some to a lot of this could happen or something comparable to. No, ridiculous, all of it, I don’t know what it is, sure it is, maybe it’s not, because I think she gave me a look and said some expression that suggested some of this could start happening and not unreasonably soon. Something like: not tonight, give it time, I’m talking about us, don’t rush, you seemed a bit interested in me, I seemed a bit interested in you, so? no harm there, just don’t ruin. I don’t think I’m fooling myself. Ask yourself if you are. Are I? Am I? I don’t think so. So no. Because I really do think I saw and heard things from her that suggested he’s a bit odd, that guy, or maybe spontaneous is the word or extemporaneous to be truly fair, but I think I could get to like him if it got that far, so I hope he calls but if he doesn’t then he didn’t and it wouldn’t be I don’t think because of anything I did or didn’t do. But I won’t call him if he doesn’t me, since that’s not what I do. Least not with a man I just met and am not bowled over by. But if — This how I think she speaks? Not quite but go on. But if he calls I’ll see him I guess unless he acts drunk or moronic, vulgar or worse, for that sort of behavior’s another story, one I quickly put down with a vow never to pick up again, no matter how short. But if he does call and we get together and I’m right about him, it might turn out to be a good thing. For I like a man who’s straightforward and just a bit aggressive but who still stays at the beginning and maybe for all time somewhat ungainly and shy. I think that was him. I liked it that he pursued me, continued to eye me, getting up close and just as he was about to say something, backing off, then catching me at the door. He could have let me leave, got my phone number from Diana or got Diana to phone me to say she has this friend who’d like to meet me, or just forgotten it. Party fantasies usually end when the party fantasized goes out the door. Wish I had a little more of that go-after-what-you-want stuff. But men are men — that’s what they do, are good for, trained to from puppyhood — the hare is loose: release the hounds — no matter how shy and ungainly or up to a point. Eyed me a bit too desirously sometimes but I liked it in a way for it said “I’m interested and if you are you can say so by looking at me from time to time in a certain though certainly less interested way,” or I at least didn’t mind his occasional desirous look or not that much. He didn’t at least goo-goo his eyes and lick his teeth for all to see and say absolutely the wrong things and too loudly, embarrassing me. Ah, but that balcony scene — he couldn’t have spared me? But he wasn’t that physically attractive to me, which isn’t to say I didn’t like his face. It was all right, nothing great, nothing to lob my eyes back to him and think “Hmm, quite the striker that guy,” but that’s okay. Better the looks most times, worse the insecurities and ego, or that’s been my experience, not that I wouldn’t see a man just because he was extremely handsome as long as he had many of the other qualities I like. And he seemed to have an adequate physique — adequately slim and straight, for his age, no pot or blobbiness or weightlifter’s stuffed muscles and sun-stiffened skin or with no ass which, unkind, limiting and even shallow as that might make me, I’m afraid I do mind, but I guess I could live with the big biceps and that kind of skin and behind. He was also at least two inches taller than I when I don’t wear shoes. I like that difference and to be taller than the man when I want to too. His hair was okay, not entirely gray, not a mop or blown-dry, which makes even the most gifted Latinist look like the most nitwitted TV sportscaster, and sufficiently trim and seemingly clean. But the way he spoke. It at least wasn’t a dull and dumb voice and one where I had to tug out my ear to hear. Smart but not arched is the best way I’d put it now. None of that “Now that’s good for a laugh, haw haw haw.” I think I’m remembering this right, but the history of my considerations and positions, though much less in literary things, tells me I can be quite wrong. But there had to be something I liked about him to propose when he said he’d like to speak to me again that he call me and I think it might have been a couple of things but particularly his voice. I didn’t do it just to later shake him off. Diana did seem chummy with him and she’s said she never becomes friends with any man who isn’t interesting, talented, lively and bright. She sends the others packing, she’s said, to forestall boredom, and not just lovers, unless they can do something immediate for her career and books, and even if he looked the helpful type, it seemed he was having a tough enough time keeping afloat on his own. But if he was up there at that colony of theirs he must be doing something fairly interesting in whatever field his is. Did he say? Don’t think so or didn’t hear, but then our talk was so short. What did he speak about? Nothing to give much of a clue what he does when he isn’t shooting down drinks and food and scrutinizing the calves and backsides of girls. We talked about the wedding reception I was off to. The kind of work I don’t do. How long I’ve been at the party. That I don’t like going to weddings or their receptions and he does. Mostly because he likes the accompanying food and booze? That we both thought it’d be nice to speak to the other again, but me a bit less than he and he since he first saw me, which could have been when I came in. At least I noticed him then, but not looking at me. What was he doing? I forget. But we first looked at the other when? Near the food table and bar again, when I was talking with a friend and he was with some people but seemed infinitely more interested in me. Each of us had a wineglass in hand. He stared at me I don’t know how long, seconds, then looked away. Why didn’t I look away first? Well, someone has to look away first, but why didn’t I? Wanted I believe to give him the incentive or excuse to walk over and speak to me or meet me at the food table or some place if he was too bashful or reserved to say “How do you do?” or “Do I know you?” or “Rooty-Kazoo says kerchoo to you too” while I was with someone else. Caught him staring at me the next time I looked. He smiled, I smiled, or maybe we smiled at the same time, but now I remember I smiled first. Why? Well, why not? No, wanted to let him know the first time wasn’t a mistake. Then it was my turn to look away but hoped I’d made my point and one I wouldn’t make again, which was to speak to me before I leave even if I’m with someone to the end. I also couldn’t just continue to smile and what expression do you make after you stop? So I had to look away, but while I was smiling. Why didn’t he first? I suppose because I smiled first and he didn’t want to be impolite. Besides, I was still talking to someone, while he was alone, so it was easier for him to hold his smile on me than it was for me on him. We also talked about marriage: that he’d never been and that I’d gone to my friend’s wedding under false pretenses. Did I get in my pitch for the institution? Maybe my face said it, for it’s how I feel. So he’s been single for all of his around forty years. If he’s over forty or even right on it, and he didn’t seem to be doing anything not to look it, that would put him in the oh point five percentile of his sex. He’s either lived a number of times with women, would be my guess, or for a while was strictly gay, but everything I quickly took in about him makes me doubt that. But just by the way he so eagerly and almost desperately followed me to the door makes me believe he’s the type who gets involved with a woman too fast when it’s clear to nearly everyone including the woman that he shouldn’t, and suffers a great deal when it doesn’t go the way he wants, which usually turns out to be the case. Therapy? Why’d I bring up that? Why even go into why, for I don’t want to once more go so far off the track. But I’m sure he scorns it but seriously feels he needs it and has been told so by most of his old girlfriends the last ten years, which could be the main reason he scorns it so much. Why do I think I know? Oh, some theory I have about men his age who do relatively little to enhance their appearance and in fact do what they can, short of drawing even more attention to themselves, to detract from it, as he seemed to, that makes me think they’ve not only never been in therapy, which if anything would increase their self-esteem, but also repudiate therapy, because they fear the changes it would bring or are just too lazy to begin or can only think of the long-term financial cost of it, which is justifiable within means, and of course several other things. Now that’s a psychological headful but what I’ve come to believe after knowing a number of men pretty deeply over the years, though my own therapist disagrees with my theory. What does she say? She says her male patients come in all sizes, colors, faces, ages and shapes and some wear five-hundred-dollar suits and go to beauticians twice a week for their hair and nails, and others cut their own hair with nailclippers they never think to use on their nails and bathe every third week and have never bought a sports jacket in their lives. Mothers, she’s said. Some men dress like slobs because their mothers always dressed them like princes and others dress like princes because their mothers dressed them like slobs. Or some dress like slobs because their mothers always dressed them like slobs and they haven’t much changed their ways and others dress like princes because when they were young their mothers dressed them like princes or they want their mothers to be drawn to them in some other than normal mother-son way or because, unprincelike and self-reliant as these men might be in every other way, their mothers still buy them their princely clothes. And women? I said. What makes them dress like princesses and slobs? and she said For all the same reasons, though substitute fathers for mothers for them, and in some in stances you can also substitute fathers for mothers for the way men dress and also mothers for fathers for the women. Anyway, I like a man better dressed than Mr. Krin and a tie would have been right for Diana’s party what with he should have known would be a preponderance of properly dressed people there, and what the heck, being suitably dressed for the occasion does more for you than not I’d guess. But I’m sure he has good reasons for dressing the way he did and I suspect the overriding one is his lack of means. Still, there was something I found sensual about him too. In the eyes, and I haven’t yet gone on about his smile, in that he didn’t footsy around and try to reach me by phone through Diana, in that he committed himself somewhat by pursuing me into the hall and saying right out his wish to speak to me again, but I don’t know or am not quite sure if sensuality and perseverance necessarily correlate. My experience, not vast but I think comprehensive with men, tells me they do, but that can’t always be the case. Of course it isn’t always or even very often and in fact they don’t, that’s all, so what am I talking about? — but that shout out the window of his, now that needs some thinking into. Really, if there was any one thing anyone I’d just met could do to make me immediately recoil from him, that shout was it. What was on his mind? I don’t know. Give it a try. Impulsion, self-destruction, sudden liking, perhaps desire. Perhaps deep desire. Or he needed attention, from me on the street and perhaps the people at the party, but I don’t think that was it. Then what? I give up. It probably wasn’t that embarrassing to me only because I was in too much of a rush to get to the reception to think about it, but he couldn’t have known that. Rush he knew but not that I couldn’t think that much about his shout. Anyway, looking at it in a different light, that shout could also mean that here is a man who will suddenly, and this I usually wouldn’t mind with someone I really liked, grab you on the street when you’re walking with him and hug you till you almost can’t breathe. Or kiss you squarely on the lips because he also suddenly feels like it — on the street or in a movie theater or even at a party filled with familiar people and that he’s also a person who screams when he squirts. Who twice a year or so despite his age will lift you off the bed with him in you and walk you around the room making these crazy carnal sounds, all of which I might like, that’s not the problem, but bounce you up and down in that standing-up position till you have to shout Put me down, you idiot, you’ll get a heart attack or trip and we’ll both be seriously hurt. Who doesn’t turn away from you after — I felt that. Who in fact turns in to you after. Who wipes the sweat off your face and chest after. Who keeps a handkerchief by his bedside for each of you to wipe his own pubic area with after, though the woman first. Well, I don’t see how I can say that. Who falls asleep with his arms around you after. Who when he does turn over loves it when you turn over too and press your body into his back and backside and squeeze his penis briefly and cover your toes with his and stroke and hold his thigh. Who you can talk to before and after and he’ll listen and his comments about most things about you will be reasonable too. Who jokes. Who always carries a pad and pen with him which I bet he also keeps by his bedside for sudden knocked-out-of-sleep thoughts about his work but not about his life. Someone who can quote a thousand poems. Who probably has a few interesting interests and friends. Who brings his interests and problems to his best woman friend and lets her share the interests and help solve his problems too. Forget the last, but someone I can have some fun with. Even be kind of dippy with — la la. The window incident showed that. Nuts as it was, to me it did. Let’s face it, he’s probably a bit lonely too. How do I know? Well, he just seemed to be. By what he said and did there and after, but I can’t be expected to remember everything or so early go beyond much more than how I felt. But he came with no one, didn’t seem to know anyone there but Diana, didn’t seem to have the greatest success meeting anyone there but me, and even there he nearly flubbed it when he had a much better chance of meeting me than I think he knew, and I bet he also had no one to go home to in anyone’s home so I bet he also wants to ultimately have a long-lasting something with someone and in the long run share an apartment and get married and have a child some day with that long-lasting someone or even sooner than that and when he does, well, this is pushing it of course, but when he does, well, by that time if things have gone as well as they can sometimes when both people are ready and available for it and what have you — when the timing’s right, that old standby — I think I’d want one too. All that too. Yes, I’d really like that: living with someone, a second marriage and first child. I don’t want to wait much longer. I’m at an age where I’ve got to begin thinking I can’t afford to. That the baby can’t afford to wait much longer too. No, things happen like this. This is how they really happen. You go to a party you don’t especially want to and certainly don’t have the time to, but you go and maybe you do actually want to but you most definitely don’t have the time to, or you do have the time, maybe an hour, not much but enough to have a good time at the party or get a feel of it and what you’ll miss by leaving early or what you’re glad you’ll miss, but you meet someone you at first don’t want to, though that isn’t what happened to me, and even if he does act a bit odd at first — when you first speak to him, not when you first see him — well, that can show shyness and reserve, but you’re often a bit shy, reserved and nervous yourself, though you weren’t when you met him, so, well so what, you meet someone briefly, you’re somewhat attracted to him in a strange way you can’t quite explain and you give him your phone number or let him know how to get it, all of which is normal, and you see him again for a drink or coffee and if it still feels good and goes well between you you see him again and again and then what do you know but you’re in bed with him, which shouldn’t come as a surprise with a man you’ve seen three times since you first met him and whom you’ve been continually and maybe even increasingly attracted to, and all that’s very nice, you like to sleep with a man you like to sleep with but not one you think might just want to sleep with you once or twice, so all that’s quite normal too. In fact all that is great, just great, what you want and said for a long time you’ve wanted. Or you even, or rather he even kisses you as he leaves the apartment the second time you see him since the party, and your apartment of course, he couldn’t be leaving you in his. But he could if he was going out for something he or you or you both thought one or the other of you or you both needed — a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, a bar of soap or roll of toilet paper — but this happens as he’s leaving your apartment for the night, so your apartment that second time you see him since the party, which probably was for dinner at a neighborhood restaurant — your neighborhood, his, no real difference — he picked you up at your apartment or you met him at his or some outside place like one of those neighborhood restaurants, but he escorted you home — and then he’s gone, you’ve kissed and he’s gone and you know something’s happened between you but you don’t know what or you do, you know what’s happened but you can’t quite explain what or you can and you look forward to the next time you see him which just a few minutes ago you arranged, and then almost before you know anything else the next time and which you sort of expected or knew would happen he’s in bed with you and it’s quick, the two of you getting into your bed or his is quick, for you invited him to your apartment for dinner or he invited you for dinner to his, so maybe you didn’t finish dinner or you did and getting into bed wasn’t that quick, and you drank wine with it, maybe too much wine, but you didn’t have the dessert you or he bought or made or got from either of your mothers or you did, you ate everything, appetizer if you had one and main course and side dish or dishes and salad and dessert and even these little cheese or quiche things with your pre-dinner drinks, and you drank nearly everything also, hard liquor drinks before and wine with dinner and brandy after or just a bottle of wine or two before, during and after dinner if neither of you that night wanted hard drinks, and then you’re kissing for the first time since the last time at your door, and holding hands and squeezing and rubbing fingers and he runs his free hand up your back or whatever he does and you run your free hand along his side or whatever you do and he says “Is it all right if we go to bed?” or you say “Why don’t we just go to bed?” or “take off our clothes and go to bed?” or just “go to bed?” for it’s much more exciting the first time taking off the other’s clothes in bed and you do, or neither of you says anything, you just take his hand if you don’t already hold it or he does that with you or you or he points a free hand or a head and you both go to your or his bed and you’re in bed that third time you meet since the party and next time you see each other or even the next morning if one or the other of you stayed overnight and no reason why you or he shouldn’t, since I don’t like, and not many times have I been in bed with someone for any other reason, when I’m in bed with someone I really like and have to leave it early the next morning and especially after the first night or he feels he has to leave mine, but anyway — without even a brief breakfast or just toast and coffee I mean — but anyway, next time you’re with him, either the next time you meet or the very next morning after you wake up together or when you’re having that first breakfast, you know there are going to be some problems with the relationship, there always are, so that’s no real problem, but that it’s going to be a long-lasting one — how long? well, maybe, no, it’s impossible to say — and a good one too. No, these things happen, they have happened, with me with my ex-husband and later with several men including my ex-husband who I thought might be my second, and I wonder if it hasn’t started to happen with this man too. I suppose I should just wait and find out and if it does, of course just wait and find out, but if it does prove to have happened or just happens, simple as that, well, all to the good. So far it seems okay. I’ll call Diana tomorrow or the next day if she doesn’t call me, but what will I say? First of all, since she has had a number of involvements with men I never knew of till they were over with, “Just how friendly are you with this man?” No, I’ll save that for later if it doesn’t come out in our conversation one way or the other or she doesn’t volunteer. If it comes out she’s seeing him now or had been and is still a little to a lot serious about him or it isn’t quite over with but is getting there and my seeing him would hurt her or compromise our friendship or complicate their breakup further or the situation between them in any way, I won’t see him till that’s completely over with or resolved in her mind and maybe not even after that, depending on how he acted to her if he was the one who broke it up or just in their relationship. But if none of that comes out I’ll say I met a man at her party, “You know who, one at the door just before I left, and he said he’d call, hasn’t yet, not that I’m worried he won’t, he doesn’t he doesn’t and it’s quite possible he had a change of mind, though it didn’t seem he would, but if he does, call I mean, what can you tell me about him, I’m of course talking about Daniel Krin, and if he calls you about me I won’t feel put off in the least if you keep our call just between us, though don’t hesitate to tell me of his if you wish, because for the brief time I said ‘Hello, got to go,’ he seemed okay.” If she says don’t go near him, he’s a flirt, worse, wants to slip it up every third skirt, even worse, mean and periodically very strange and even deranged, and that’s not just hearsay, dear, what will I do? If I ask why she thinks he’s strange and possibly deranged and mean, since being a flirt and so on about skirts could be interpreted several ways and if it’s just that he likes women and sex with them more than most men, that might make him even more recommendable to me, and she gives good reasons for everything else she said, well, Diana’s proven to be no liar and fool, so I’d take her word. But if it’s just that he’s an unreliable or moody person, for example, or occasionally acts half his age but not in an endearing way, or he’s temperamental, weak, cheap, petty, insincere and so on. No backbone — haven’t heard that one for a while, nor “cold as ice.” Solemn, introverted, old-maidish — flip-flops from this project to that. Finishes most of what he starts but has to know beforehand what almost everyone else seems to know afterwards that although all his works or the ones I’ve read or scanned, since I have only known him for a few months, are worthwhile to a degree and done competently, none are that dislodging or completing or advancing to make them important or exciting in even a tiny way. What am I saying? you could say. That he never shoots for anything monumental in the themes and authors he selects so he can at least wind up with something relatively original and big. Has brains and good intentions to spare, I’m not saying no, but also considerable self-defeatism. But, to finish up with him, since you did ask, didn’t you? he sometimes lives like an indigent too, which, if you’re a person like me who likes to split a check down the middle rather than feel called upon to pick it up, can put a hitch in your friendship. Not that he isn’t always clean and well fed and neatly dressed, though I suspect most of his clothes, even if I’ve nothing to base this on except their ampleness and style, come from his late father’s closets and drawers and much of his nourishment and even some of his income come from his mother, little as he’s said she has to live on herself. But maybe in this day and age, and excuse me for the cliché but this is only a phone conversation, of haywire mass-consumerism, if that is the right phrase, and imagine not being able to quote a simple cliché correctly or even quasily, and don’t tell me because I know I just did something not unconscionably but nonsensically wrong there neogeologically or what have you — and I honestly forgot that noun ending in ism with a hyphenless neo as its prefix for neo-words — he’s to be, and I hope you’re still able to follow me, congratulated and perhaps even emulated for living such a thrifty, stripped-down unupwardly mobile existence, if that last one, turned around a tad, is what they say. He does though have this awfully polished way of ticking people off who could do useful things for him if he’d only pay them the modicum of respect they think they deserve because of their professional status, pull and accomplished work, which leads me to believe he’s a mite jealous of other people’s success and their adeptness at living rather well off their teaching, reviewing, readings and books. But he says he’s plugging along on the project of his life now, but to me it sounds like another losing calling, so maybe things will improve appreciably for him the next few years. I hope so, because despite everything I might have said about him, I like the guy, so of course wish for him the best. As for your seeing him, and I care much less than you what gets back to him if you two do ever get close enough to confide and confess, he seems the type who has one affair after the next because, and I’ve a good idea what the reasons are but don’t think either of us has the time, he can’t sustain one for very long, and I’m referring to his affairs. Or else, or perhaps in addition to, he’s able to charm the pants off women at first if they don’t happen to be wearing skirts, and everyone should be permitted one poor joke per long phone call, though for all I know I might have succeeded there when while I was making it I thought it was bad, but can’t hold them because after a while they see straight through his delusions and the inadequacies I mentioned and know he doesn’t want a stable or permanent relationship. Having one would mean he’d have to change the kind of life he’s been used to for going on thirty adult years, which would put a damper or hamstring or even a diaper, and I’m sure that joke was bad, on all his excuses for the brevity of his affairs and his lack of professional success and other unhappy things. Now if you only want to go out with him once or twice because you’ve nothing better to do, I can’t see the harm. He can be very pleasant, appealing and entertaining, but don’t drag the evenings out too long. If Diana says some of that and at the end suggests I don’t see him but says nothing about him being mentally ill or socially or emotionally repulsive in any unmistakable way or a devastating combination of those defects, I’ll see him for a coffee or a drink. So far he seems reasonably interesting and okay. Not my ideal man in looks but not that hard to take. Besides, it’d only be for an hour or so one afternoon or night, and I also liked his smile. Maybe that more than anything, open and something else, and also his height, build and once he got over the jitters, his straightforwardness. But it’s way too early to be considering all this and I should do just what? Forget it for now or forever if he doesn’t call and definitely not call Diana unless he calls me and if he doesn’t, well, think about calling him. What would there be to lose? He could say no, I’m busy, engaged, about to be, lied and am actually married with child, have children, we do, two, three, she does but I’m her faithful live-in, I’m afraid I can’t see you because I’m this, I’m that, I’m the other thing, some new element recently arose in my life or just today or yes, I’m sorry I didn’t call, I was going to, this very moment in fact, you won’t believe this but I had my hand on the receiver just now and your number on my lips, receiver to my ear and had dialed the first five digits but forgot the sixth, phonebook open to Winburn, Windbreaker, Winermiss, was just running my finger down your phonebook page, so you could say that in a minute or so, but really now since that’s about how long we’ve been on the phone since you called, you would have heard my rings, now what do you say to that concatenation of events? I dialed you just before you rang but your line was busy, possibly because you were dialing me, now how about that for some kind of simultaneity of minds? I dialed you but hung up just before my call got through, if it would have which is to say if your line or even your exchange wasn’t tied up or momentarily on the fritz, because I thought you’d be out — I don’t know why, just something that popped to mind and seemed right at the time — and I can’t stand talking to anyone’s answering service, something I seem to have in common with half my acquaintances and friends including half the ones with that kind of service. Look, I couldn’t get myself to even fetch the phonebook to look up your name, though let me say straight off before you say anything more, if I haven’t already said it a dozen times, and of course I haven’t since this is the first time we’ve spoken since we met, first time unless you’ve kept since then a rigorous speechlessness, how much I wanted to open my phonebook and look up your number, wanted to dial you and have you answer, speak to you and ask if you’d like to go out with me and soon, and I’m not putting or trying to one over on you, but just thought that well, after my yelling out Diana’s window at you I felt, well, after my messages to your answering service that night I felt, well, even after we finished speaking on Diana’s landing and you went down the stairs I felt, well, but I had to be wrong, right? in what I thought you thought about me because here you are calling me unless it’s to tell me, and I don’t see how this can be so but you never know for if anything hasn’t happened to me once it doesn’t mean it won’t the next moment, not to call you, so what would you say — what I mean is you certainly didn’t call me to tell me not to call you, right? — so what would you say — and what am I now saying? — so what do you say I’m saying to seeing me for coffee or dinner or a drink, and how soon, since I’d love for it to be an hour or two from now or at the most tomorrow around noon. That’s what he could be thinking, she could be thinking. That’s what I at least hope she’s thinking or will. But I’m sure — not sure, but almost sure she hasn’t thought of me once, and if once then I’m sure or almost sure or just sort of sure she just thought of me briefly, and if briefly, then very briefly, almost subliminally if what I think is subliminal thinking is right: she saw the D in the Don’t Walk sign for instance and for a subliminal instance the D in the Don’t stood for Dan — since about a minute or so after she turned away from my waving at the window and went up the street to that wedding reception she said she was going or wherever she was going to — possibly to a friend’s apartment, perhaps to a lover’s, maybe directly home to be with a friend or lover or sick pet or just alone, not that anything I’ve done or find out about her is going to stop me from calling her at least once and probably in the next few days, not that I’m going to do anything more such as trying to find out anything more about her from now on till that call, simply because I’ve done more than enough already to snuff out what I suppose could be called a potential relationship, though she didn’t at all seem like the kind of person who feels she has to lie in any way to get out of an uncomfortable situation, if my stopping her on the stairs and talking to her was one, of that I’m, well, almost sure.