The Angel on the Roof

Success Story

After high school, I attended an Ivy League college for less than one term. A year later, I was married and living in central Florida. This was 1958 and ’59. General Dwight Eisenhower was our President, and Dr. Fidel Castro, hunkered down in the mountain passes southeast of Havana, was getting praised for his integrity and good looks by Time magazine and Reader’s Digest.

I’d been a whiz kid in high school, rewarded for it with an academic scholarship. In this Ivy League school, however, among the elegant, brutal sons of the captains of industry, I was only that year’s token poor kid, imported from a small New Hampshire mill town like an exotic herb, a dash of mace for the vichyssoise. It was a status that perplexed and intimidated and finally defeated me, so that, after nine weeks of it, I fled in the night.

Literally. On a snowy December night, alone in my dormitory room (they had not thought it appropriate for me to have a roommate, or no one’s profile matched mine), I packed my clothes and few books into a canvas duffle, waited until nearly all the lights on campus were out, and sneaked down the hallway, passed through the service entrance, and walked straight down the hill from the eighteenth-century cut-stone dormitories and classroom buildings to the wide boulevard below, where huge, neoclassical fraternity houses lounged beneath high, ancient elms. At the foot of the hill, I turned south and jogged through unplowed snow, shifting my heavy duffle from one shoulder to the other every twenty or thirty yards, until I passed out of the valley town into darkness and found myself walking through a heavy snowstorm on a winding, narrow road.

A month later — with the holidays over and my distraught mother and bewildered younger brother and sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all my friends and neighbors and high school teachers, as well as the dean and director of admissions at the Ivy League college, convinced that I not only had ruined my life but may have done something terrible to theirs, too — I turned up in St. Petersburg, Florida, with seven dollars in my pocket, my duffle on my shoulder, and my resolve to join Castro in the Sierra Maestra seriously weakening.

I’d spent Christmas and New Year’s at home, working days and nights as a salesman in a local men’s clothing store, trying hard to behave as if nothing had happened. My mother seemed always to be red-eyed from weeping, and my friends from high school treated me coolly, distantly, as if I had dropped out of college because of a social disease. In some ways, my family was a civic reclamation project — the bright and pretty children and pathetic wife of a brute who, nearly a decade ago, had disappeared into the northern woods with a woman from the post office, never to be heard from again. As the oldest male victim of this abandonment, I was expected by everyone who knew the story to avenge the crime, mainly by making myself visibly successful, by rising above my station, and in that paradoxical way show the criminal how meaningless his crime had been. For reasons I was only dimly aware of, my story was important to everyone.

Leaving them behind, then, abandoning my fatherless family in a tenement and my old friends and the town I had been raised in, was an exquisite pleasure, like falling into bed and deep sleep after having been pushed beyond exhaustion. Now, I thought the morning I left — stepping onto the ramp to Route 93 in Catamount, showing my thumb to the cars headed south—now I can start to dream my own dreams, not everyone else’s.

The particular dream of joining Castro died easily. It started dying the moment I got out of the big, blue Buick sedan with Maryland plates that had carted me straight through all the way from Norfolk, Virginia, to Coquina Key in St. Petersburg, where the elderly man who drove the car had a “fiancée,” he told me, with a suite in the Coquina Key Hotel.

“You, you’re a smart kid,” he said to me, as I slid from the car and hauled out my duffle from the back. “You’ll do all right here. You’ll catch on.” He was a ruddy, white-haired man with a brush cut that he liked to touch with the flat of his hand, as if patting a strange dog. “Forget Cuba, though. No sense getting yourself killed for somebody else’s country.” He was a retired U.S. Army captain, named Knox, “like the fort,” he’d said, and he gave advice as if he expected it to be taken. “Kid like you,” he said, peering across at me from the driver’s seat, “smart, good-looking, good personality, you can make a million bucks here. This place,” he said, looking warmly around him at the marina, the palm trees, the acres of lawn, the flashy bougainvillea blossoms, the large new cars with out-of-state plates, the tall, pink Coquina Key Hotel with the dark red canopy leading from the street to the front entrance, “this place is made for a kid like you!”

“Yeah. Well, I got plenty of time for that.” I took a step away from the car, and Knox leaned farther across the front seat. I said to him, “I don’t need to make a pile of money just yet.”

“No? How much you got?”

“Not much. Enough.” I lifted my duffle to my shoulder and gave the man a wave.

“If you don’t need money, kid, what do you need, then?”

“Experience, I guess.” I tried to smile knowingly.

“Listen. I’ve been coming down here every goddamned winter for eight years now, ever since I retired. I’ve got experience, and lemme tell you, this place is gonna be a boom town. It already is. All these old people from the North, and there’s gonna be more of ’em, son, not less, and all of ’em got money to spend, and here you are on the ground floor. I’d give all my experience for your youth. Son, forget Cuba. Stay in St. Pete, you’ll be a millionaire before you’re twenty-five.”

I was sorry now that I’d told Knox the truth back in Virginia, when he’d asked me where I was going. I’d said Cuba, and he’d laughed and asked why, and I had tried to tell him, but all I could say was that I wanted to help the Cuban people liberate themselves from a cruel and corrupt dictator. We both knew how that sounded, and neither of us had spoken of Cuba again, until now.

I stepped away from the car to the curb. “Well, thanks. Thanks for the advice. And the ride. Good meeting you,” I said.

He called me by my name. I hadn’t thought he’d caught it. “Look, if you need some help, just give me a call,” he said and stuck a small white card out the window on the passenger’s side.

I took the card and read his first name, Dewey, his address back in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and a post office box here in St. Petersburg. “Thanks,” I said.

“I stay at the hotel,” Knox said, nodding toward the high, pink, stuccoed building. “With my fiancée. Her name’s Sturgis, Bea Sturgis. Bea’s here all the time, year round. Nice woman. Give a call anytime.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Really. I know what I’m doing.”

He smiled. “No,” he said. “You don’t.” Then he waved good-bye, dropped the Buick into gear, and moved off slowly toward the hotel garage.

It was not quite nine in the morning, and it was already hot. I peeled off my jacket, tied it to the duffle, and strolled across the street to the park by the marina and sat down on a bench facing the street. Behind me, charter fishing boats and yachts rocked tenderly against the narrow dock, where pelicans perched somberly on the bollards. Across the street, men and women in short-sleeved, pastel-colored blouses and shirts and plaid Bermuda shorts drifted in and out of the hotel. New cars and taxis and limousines drove people by and let people off and picked people up. A light breeze riffled quietly through the royal palm trees that lined the street. Everyone and everything belonged exactly where it was.

I was suddenly hungry and realized that I hadn’t eaten since the night before at a Stuckeys in North Carolina. A few minutes passed, and then I saw Knox emerge from the parking garage at the left of the hotel and walk briskly along the sidewalk toward the hotel, his gaze straight ahead of him, businesslike. He reached the canopy, turned under it, and entered the building, nodding agreeably to the doorman as he passed through the glass doors to the dark, cool interior.

I stood up slowly, grabbed my duffle, crossed the street, and followed him.

I never saw Knox again. I called him from the house phone in the lobby, and he laughed and called the manager, who met me at the front desk and gave me a note to take to the concierge, who put me to work that very day as a furniture mover.

I was the youngest and the healthiest of a gang of seven or eight men who set up tables and chairs for meeting rooms and convention halls, decorated ballrooms for wedding receptions, moved pianos from one dining room to another, dragged king-sized mattresses from suite to suite, unloaded supplies from trucks, delivered carts of dirty linen to the basement laundry, lugged sofas, lamps, cribs, and carpets from one end of the hotel to the other. Paid less than thirty dollars a week for six ten-hour days a week, we worked staggered shifts and were on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. We were given room and board and ate in a bare room off the hotel kitchen with the dishwashers and slept two to a tiny, cell-like room in a cinder-block dormitory behind the hotel.

Most of the kitchen help was black and went home, or somewhere, at night. We furniture movers were to a man white and, except for me, over forty, terminally alcoholic, physically fragile, and itinerant. It took me a few days to realize that we were all a type of migrant worker, vagrants, wanderers down from the cold cities and railroad yards of the North, and that the day after payday most of this week’s crew would be gone, replaced the next day by a new group of men, who, a week later, would leave, too, for Miami, New Orleans, or Los Angeles. No one else wanted our jobs, and we couldn’t get any other. We were underpaid, overworked, and looked down upon by chambermaids, elevator operators, and doormen. Like certain plumbing tools, we were not thought to exist until we were needed.

Even so, less than two weeks into this line of work, I decided to succeed at it. Which was like deciding to succeed at being a prisoner of war, deciding to become a good prisoner of war. I believed that I could become so good at moving furniture that I’d be irreplaceable and shortly thereafter would be made boss of the furniture movers, and then my talent for organization, my affection for the hotel, and the warmth of my personality would be recognized by the concierge, who would promote me, would make me his assistant, and from there I’d go on to concierge itself, then assistant manager, until, before long, why not manager? In the distant future, I saw a chain of hotels linking every major city on the Gulf of Mexico (a body of water I had not actually seen yet) that I would control from a bank of telephones here on my desk in St. Petersburg at the Coquina Key, which, since it was where I got my start, would become the central jewel in my necklace of hotels and resorts, my diadem, a modest man’s point of understandable pride. I would entertain world leaders here — Dr. Fidel Castro, President Dwight Eisenhower, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. People would congratulate me for having dropped out of an Ivy League college after less than one term, and my mother and brother and sister would now realize the wisdom of my decision, and friends from high school would call me up, begging for jobs in one of my many hotels. Late at night, lying in my narrow bunk, my temporary roommate snoring in the bunk below, I imagined testimonial dinners at which I would single out my old friend Dewey Knox from Chevy Chase. He’d be seated alongside his lady, Bea Sturgis, at the head table, just beyond the mayor of St. Petersburg and the governor of Florida. “It all started with Knox,” I’d say. “He told me this place was made for a guy like me, and he was right!”

Furniture movers came and went, but I stayed. The fourth person in five weeks with whom I shared my grim cell was named Bob O’Neil, from Chicago, and when he found out that I’d been a furniture mover at the Coquina Key for longer than a month, he told me I was crazy. I’d come back from setting up a VFW luncheon in the Oleander Room, hoping to sneak a few hours’ sleep, as I’d been up most of the night before, taking down the tables and chairs and cleaning up the hall after an all-state sports award banquet. My previous roommate, Fred from Columbus, a fat, morosely silent man whose hands trembled while he read religious tracts, which he wordlessly passed on to me, had got his first week’s pay two days before and had taken off for Phoenix, he said, where his sister lived.

My new roommate, when I arrived, had already claimed the bottom bunk and removed my magazines and was now lying stretched out on it. I closed the door, and he sat up, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Bob, and I’m an alcoholic.” He was in his early or late forties; it was hard to tell which. His face was broad and blotched, with broken veins crisscrossing his cheeks and large red nose. He was bright-eyed and had a cheerful, loose mouth and a wash of thin, sandy-gray hair.

I removed his open, nearly empty, cardboard suitcase from the only chair in the room and sat down. I said, “How come you tell people you’re an alcoholic, Bob?” and he explained that he was required to by Alcoholics Anonymous, which he said he had joined just yesterday, after years of considering it.

“That’s what you got to say,” he said. “You got to admit to the world that you’re an alcoholic. Put it right out there. First step to recovery, kid.”

“How long before you’re cured?” I asked. “And don’t have to go around introducing yourself like that?”

“Never,” he said. “Never. It’s like … a condition. Like diabetes or your height. I’m allergic to booze, to alcohol. Simple as that.”

“So you can’t touch the stuff?”

“Right. Not unless I want to die.” He swung his feet around to the floor and lit a cigarette. “Smoke?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “The bottom bunk’s mine.”

“You’re kidding me,” he said, smiling broadly. “Look at you — what’re you, eighteen? Twenty?”

“Eighteen. Almost nineteen.”

“Eighteen. Right. And here I am, an old, sick man, an alcoholic, and you can jump up there like a pole vaulter. And you’re saying that bottom bunk’s yours.” He sighed, coughed, lay back down, and closed his eyes. “You’re right. It’s yours.”

“No, go ahead. I’ll sleep on top.”

“No, no, no! You’re right, you got here before me. First come, first served. That’s the law of the land. I understand, kid.”

I climbed up the rickety ladder at the end of the bunk and flung myself face-forward onto the bed.

“You sure you don’t mind?” he asked, sticking his head out and peering up at me.

“No.”

“How long you been here, anyhow?”

“Little over five weeks,” I said. More than half as long as I went to college, I noticed.

“Five weeks!” He laughed and told me I was crazy, said it in a high, amused voice. “Well,” he said, yawning, “you must be getting real good at it.”

“Yeah.”

Nobody worked these jobs more than a week or at the most two, he explained. “You’re like a prisoner, never see the light of day, never make enough money to make a difference in your life, so what you gotta do, you just gotta get your pay and leave. Get the hell out. Find a place or a job that does make a difference. Smart, good-looking kid like you,” he said, “you can do better than this. This is America, for Christ’s sake. You can do real good for yourself. How much money you got saved up?”

“Not much. Little over sixty bucks.”

“Well, there you go,” he said, as if presenting a self-evident truth.

I thanked him for the advice, explained that I was tired and needed sleep. I was on the night shift that week and had been told to fill in for a guy who’d left the morning crew, something that was happening with increasing frequency, which I had taken as a sure sign of imminent success.

Over the next few days, whenever we talked, which was often, as he was garrulous and I was lonely, we talked about Bob’s alcoholism and my refusal to take his advice, which was to leave the hotel immediately, rent a room in town, get a job in a restaurant or a store, where people could see me, as Bob explained, because, according to him, I had the kind of face people trusted. “An honest face,” he said, as if it communicated more than merely a commitment to telling the truth, as if intelligence, reliability, sensitivity, personal cleanliness, and high ambition all went with it. “You got an honest face, kid. You should get the hell out there in the real world, where you can use it.”

For my part, I advised him to keep going to his AA meetings, which he said he did. He was tempted daily to drink, I knew, by the flask toters in our crew, and often he’d come into the room trembling, on the verge of tears, and he’d grab me by the shoulders and beg me not to let him do it. “Don’t let me give in, kid! Don’t let the bastards get to me. Talk to me, kid,” he’d beg, and I’d talk to him, remind him of all he’d told me — his broken marriages, his lost jobs, his penniless wanderings between Florida and Chicago, his waking up sick in filthy flophouses and pan-handling on street corners — until at last he’d calm down and feel a new determination to resist temptation. I could see that it was hard on him physically. He seemed to be losing weight, and his skin, despite the red blotches and broken veins, had taken on a dull gray pallor, and he never seemed to sleep. We were both on the night shift that week, and all day long, except when he went out for what he said were his AA meetings, I’d hear him in the bunk below, tossing his body from side to side in the dim afternoon light as he struggled to fall asleep, eventually giving up, lighting a cigarette, going out for a walk, returning to try and fail again.

One afternoon, a few days before his first payday, he reached up to my bunk and woke me. “Listen, kid, I can’t sleep. Loan me a couple bucks, willya? I got to go get a bottle.” His voice was unusually firm, clear. He’d made a decision.

“Bob, don’t! You don’t want that. Stick it out.”

“Don’t lecture me, kid, just loan me a coupla bucks.” This time he was giving me an order, not making a request.

I looked into his eyes for a few seconds and saw my own stare back. “No,” I said and turned over and went defiantly to sleep.

When I woke, it was growing dark, and I knew I’d almost missed supper, so I rushed from the room and down the long tunnel that connected the dormitory to the hotel kitchen, where the night dishwashers and furniture movers were already eating. Bob wasn’t there, and no one had seen him.

“He’s working tonight!” I said. “He’s got to work tonight!”

They shrugged and went on eating. No one cared.

A half dozen rooms on the fourteenth floor were being painted, and we spent the night moving furniture out and storing it in the basement, and there was a chamber of commerce breakfast that we had to set up in the Crepe Myrtle Room. By the time I got back to my room, it was daylight. Bob was there, sound asleep in the bottom bunk.

I looked around the room, checked the tin trash can, even peered into the dresser drawers, but found no bottle. He heard me and rolled over and watched.

“Lookin’ for something?”

“You know what.”

“A bottle?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Sorry, kid.”

“You didn’t drink?”

“Nope.” He sat up and smiled. He looked rested for the first time, and his color had returned. He lit a cigarette. “Nope, I didn’t break. Close, though,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling, and he held his thumb and index finger a pencil width apart. “Close.”

I grinned, as if his triumph were mine. “You really got through it, huh? What’d you do? Where were you all night?”

“Right here. While you were working, I was sleeping like a baby. I got back here late from the AA meeting. It was a long one, and I was burnt, man. So I just told ’em I was sick, they could dock my pay, and then I came back here and slept the night away.”

“Wow! That’s great!” I shook his hand. “See, man, that’s what I’ve been telling you! You got to keep going to those AA meetings!”

He smiled tolerantly, rubbed out his cigarette, and lay back down. I pulled off my shirt and trousers, climbed up to my bed, and when I heard Bob snoring, I fell asleep.

That afternoon, when I woke, Bob was gone again. I got down from my bed and noticed that his cardboard suitcase was gone, too. His drawer in the dresser was empty, and when I looked into the medicine cabinet above the tiny sink in the corner, I saw that he’d taken his shaving kit. He’d moved out.

I was confused and suddenly, unexpectedly, sad. I stood in front of the mirror and shaved, the first time in three days, and tried to figure it all out — Bob’s alcoholism, which did indeed seem as much a part of him as his height or the color of his eyes, and my caring about it; his persistent advice to me, and mine to him; his vain dream of not drinking, my dream of … what? Success? Forgiveness? Revenge? Somehow, Bob and I were alike, I thought, especially now that he had fled from the hotel. The thought scared me. It was the first time since that snowy night I left the college on the hill that I’d been scared.

I wiped off the scraps of shaving cream, washed my razor, and opened the cabinet for my bottle of Aqua Velva. Gone. A wave of anger swirled around me and passed quickly on. I sighed. Oh, what the hell, let him have it. The man left without even one week’s pay; a morning splash of aftershave would make him feel successful for at least a minute or two. The rest of the day he’ll feel like what he is, I thought, a failure.

I picked up my shirt and pants and slowly got dressed, when, leaning down to tie my shoe, I saw the pale blue bottle in the tin trash can between the dresser and the bed. I reached in, drew it out, and saw that it was empty.

Chucking it back, as if it were a dead animal, I looked around the gray room, and I saw its pathetic poverty for the first time — the spindly furniture, the bare cinder-block walls and linoleum floor, the small window that faced the yellow-brick side of the parking garage next door. Knox’s blue Buick was probably still parked there. I looked at my half dozen paperback books on the dresser — mysteries, a Stendhal novel, an anthology of Great American Short Stories—and my papers, a short stack of letters from home, a sketchbook, a journal I was planning to write in soon. I’d brought it for Cuba. Then I pulled my old canvas duffle out from under the bed and began shoving clothes inside.

I rented a room from an old lady who owned a small house off Central Avenue in downtown St. Petersburg, a quiet neighborhood of bungalows and tree-lined streets that was beginning to be devoured at the edges by glass-and-concrete buildings housing condominiums, insurance companies, and banks. The room was small, but bright and clean, in the back off the kitchen, with its own bathroom and separate entrance. With the room went kitchen privileges, but I would have to eat in my bedroom. There were strict house rules that I eagerly agreed to: no visitors, by which I knew she meant women; no smoking; no drinking. I’d been meaning to give up smoking anyhow, and since the only way I could drink was more or less illegally, it seemed more or less a luxury to me. Especially after Bob O’Neil. As for women in my room, based on my experience so far, the old lady might as well have said no Martians.

“I’m a Christian,” she said, “and this is a Christian home.” Her name was Mrs. Treworgy. She was tiny, half my size, and pink — pink hair, pink skin, pink rims around her watery eyes.

“I’m a Christian too,” I assured her.

“What church?”

I hesitated. “Methodist?”

She smiled, relieved, and told me where the nearest Methodist church was located; not far, as it turned out. She herself was a Baptist, which meant that she had to walk ten blocks each way on Sundays. “But the preaching’s worth it,” she said. “And our choir is much better than the Methodist choir.”

“I’m sure.”

“Maybe you’d like to come with me some Sunday.”

“Oh, yes, I would,” I said. “But I’ll probably try the Methodist church first. You know, it being what I’m used to and all.” What I was used to was sleeping till noon on Sundays, and before that, back when my mother made me go, dozing through mass.

“Yes, of course.” Then she asked for the first and last months’ rent in advance. Eighty dollars.

“All I’ve got to my name is sixty-seven dollars,” I said and confessed, as if to a crime, that I had just quit my job at the Coquina Key Hotel and briefly described the conditions there, as if they were extenuating circumstances. “It was a very … unsavory atmosphere,” I said, looking at the floor of her living room. The room was small, crowded with large, dark furniture and portraits of Jesus, close-ups and long shots, seated by a rock at prayer and ascending like Superman into heaven.

She looked at me carefully. “You have an honest face,” she pronounced. “And I’m sure you’ll find a new job right away. Whyn’t you just pay me the first month’s rent, forty dollars, and we’ll go from there.”

“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Treworgy. Thank you. And you wait,” I said, “I’ll have a job by tomorrow!”

Which I did. Following at last the advice of my ex-roommate Bob O’Neil, I applied for a job where I could be seen, as a menswear salesman at the fashionable downtown Maas Brothers Department Store. On the application form, however, under hobbies, I wrote “drawing and painting” and was instead hired to work in the Display Department as an assistant window trimmer.

The Display Department was located in the basement of the large, modern building, and as an assistant I was expected to build and paint the backdrops for the interior and window displays designed and installed by a tall, thin, Georgia man named, appropriately, Art, and a bulky, middle-aged, black-haired woman named Sukey, who wore turquoise and silver Indian jewelry and hand-printed muumuus. Art was an agreeable man in his forties who’d worked in advertising in Atlanta until a decade ago, when his ulcers erupted and sent him to the hospital for the third time in one year, after which he’d quit and moved to Florida. He popped antacid tablets all day, and his mouth was perpetually dry and white-lipped, but he joked and smiled easily, teased Sukey for her artistic pretensions, me for my youth and ignorance, and Ray, the obese, bald sign painter, for his weight and baldness.

It was a cheerful, easygoing place, especially after the Coquina Key Hotel, and I enjoyed the work, which was not difficult. I built lightweight wood frames, usually four feet by eight feet, covered them with colored paper or foil, painted screens and backdrops, cleaned brushes and swept the floor of the shop. Afternoons, I delivered signs for Ray to the department heads upstairs, ate lunch with the salespeople and the rest of the staff in the company cafeteria on the first floor, and after work went out for beers with Art, Sukey, and Ray, and then walked whistling back to my room at Mrs. Treworgy’s, where, after supper, I drew pictures, usually somber self-portraits, read, and prepared to write in my journal.

I turned nineteen that spring, and there were pink, white, and yellow hibiscus blossoms everywhere and sweet-smelling jasmine, oleander, and poinciana trees in bloom. Palm trees fluttered in the warm breezes off the Gulf, and tamarind trees clacked their long dark pods, while citrus trees in backyards produced huge, juicy oranges for the plucking. I wore short-sleeved shirts, light cotton trousers, sandals, and felt my body gradually cease cringing from the remembered New England cold and begin to expand and move out to meet this strange new world. I was tanned and well fed, muscular and extremely healthy, and my mind, naturally, began turning obsessively to thoughts of women.

Even though it was only a respite, for the first time since the previous December I felt free of guilt for having failed at life without having first tried to succeed. Freed from such a complex, burdensome guilt, I was trapped instantly by lust. Not ordinary lust, but late-adolescent, New England virginal lust, lust engendered by chemistry crossed with curiosity, lust with no memory to restrain and train it, lust that seeks not merely to satisfy and deplete itself, but to avenge itself as well. For the first time in my life, I seemed to be happy and consequently wanted only to make up for lost time and lost opportunities, to get even with all those Catholic schoolgirls who’d said, “Stop,” and I stopped, all those passionate plunges frozen in agonizing positions in midair over car seats, sofas, daybeds, carpeted living room floors, beach blankets, and hammocks, all those semen-stained throw pillows on the asbestos tile floors of pine-paneled basement dens. This was lust with a vengeance.

The male of the species ceased to exist. Walking to work in the morning, I saw only women and girls getting on and off buses, stepping from parked cars, long brown legs drawing skirts tightly against tender thighs, blouses whose sole function seemed to be to draw my attention to breasts. At lunch in the cafeteria, I looked watery-eyed and swollen across the food counter at the black women, the first I’d seen up close, all shades of brown and black, from pale gold and coffee to maple red and mahogany, their dark eyes looking straight through me, as if I were invisible, and when I tried to smile, to be seen, and now and then succeeded, I quickly dropped my eyes and moved down the line to the cash register, where, as I paid, I searched the cafeteria for the girl who’d been standing next to me in line, a salesgirl I’d once heard talking to Sukey in the basement shop about eye makeup and had watched from then on every chance I got, always from a safe distance, however, as she had strawberry blond, wavy, shoulder-length hair that made my hands open and close involuntarily, large green eyes that made my lips dry out, a soft Southern accent that made my breath come in tiny packets.

It was as if my awareness of my surroundings were determined by a glandular condition. After work, I sat with Art, Sukey, and Ray in the bar on the corner across from the store, and while they spoke to one another and to me, I watched, like a panther about to pounce, the girls from the store, watched them smoke their cigarettes and talk, slender wrists flicking, gold bracelets catching light and bouncing it through smoke off the walls, moist red lips nipping at the air, parting for white teeth, pink wet tongues, little cries of laughter. I began to wonder what Sukey looked like under her throat-to-ground muumuu and pictured hot loaves of flesh. Delivering signs for Ray to swimwear on the second floor, I rode the escalator up from the first and sniffed the air eagerly and caught the scent of perfume, lipstick, shaved underarms, and nearly tripped at the top. I went to church with Mrs. Treworgy, got lost watching the teenage girls in the choir, and as we left I inadvertently crossed myself, which I knew Protestants did not do, though I told Mrs. Treworgy that we Methodists sometimes did. I was invited by Art to have dinner with him and his wife, and throughout the meal wondered how Art would take it if I had a brief love affair with his dark, bouffant-haired wife, who asked me if people from New England really did say, “Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd,” and if so, why didn’t I talk that way? I told her they did and I did, and for the rest of the evening I did.

To save myself from abject humiliation and worse, I did what men usually do in this situation. I went back to guilt and became obsessed with my work. I decided to succeed in this new trade, to become the best assistant window trimmer that had ever worked at Maas Brothers. It was time, I decided, for me to make my move. In my room at night, I drew window displays — anything to keep my mind and hands busy at the same time. Some of the designs were for windows that exhibited spring dresses, but more often they portrayed less agitating merchandise, like air conditioners, men’s shoes, lawn mowers, and lamps. Many of them were inventive and well-drawn designs that the next day I left lying around Art’s workbench and Sukey’s easel, even leaving my pad open next to Ray’s brushes when I went upstairs for his midmorning snack. I figured that once I was permitted to design and install my own window, my talent would be recognized and I’d be promoted. On my way. With a new kid hired to replace me as assistant, Art or Sukey would be moved to the larger store in Tampa or shifted to the Maas Brothers about to open in Miami. I’d follow a few years later, only to pass them by, moving swiftly up the ladder of window trimming to where the only moves left would be horizontal, into management, vice president in charge of advertising, and on up from there.

Then it happened. One morning in May, I came whistling cheerfully into the shop, as was my habit, and Art called me aside and said that there was going to be a fashion show in swimwear that afternoon and they needed a tropical-island floor display right away. “Sukey and me’re all tied up getting them damned Memorial Day windows done,” he drawled. “Whyn’t you-all try your hand on the tropical island?”

“Why, sure,” I said. I flipped open my sketchbook. “What’ve you got in mind, Art? I’ll work up some sketches.”

“Just some kind of backdrop, some grass or sand, a mannequin in a swimsuit, maybe a coupla colored spots. You can do it. I seen your drawings lying around. Now’s your opportunity to show us what you can do on your own.” He smiled down at me and winked.

I made my sketches, a four-by-eight-foot panel with broad streaks of rose, silver, and orange to signify a tropical sunset, three or four long palm fronds on the upper left corner of the panel, and two women, one standing, looking mournfully out to sea, her hands at her eyes, as if watching eagerly for her lover’s return, the other seated, resigned to his absence, contemplating the pink and white gauze blossoms that I planned to scatter over the earth. The two faces of Penelope, thought, waiting for Odysseus, me.

I cut two-by-fours for the frame, instead of the usual one-by-twos, nailed them together with eightpenny nails, cross-braced it horizontally and vertically, cut and nailed on plywood triangles to square the corners, and covered both sides with tautly drawn metallic paper, stapling back and hiding the seams neatly, so that, finished, it resembled nothing so much as a solid block of sea blue steel. They’ll use this panel for years, I gloated, and indeed, when I stood the panel up, it was like a well-made house, an oak tree, a piece of public sculpture that would outlive the culture that had produced it.

The others went up to lunch, but I stayed down in the shop, painting streaks of cloud and sunlight on my panel. “Don’t fuss with that thing too long now,” Art called back. “You got to have that display done and installed by two. The fashion show starts up at two.”

“No sweat!” I hollered. I had everything I needed out and arranged neatly before me: the two mannequins, wigs, one blond, one brunette, gauze blossoms, palm fronds, colored spots and extension cords, and the tools I’d need to set them up — hammer, screwdriver, screws, and angle iron to fasten the panel to the island, tape, staple gun, and so on. All I needed now was the bathing suits.

I telephoned swimwear from Art’s office. One of the salesgirls answered, and instantly, though she said nothing more than “Swimwear,” I recognized the voice. Two notes, and I knew the entire tune. It was the girl I’d overheard talking to Sukey about eye makeup, the strawberry blond I’d studied from a distance in the cafeteria, the green-eyed beauty in the crowd at whom I’d aimed my hunter’s gaze from the corner booth after work.

I cleared my throat and stammered that I needed a pair of bathing suits for the fashion show display.

“Okay,” she sang. “We’re trying on bathing suits right now, for the show and all, so whyn’t you come on up and just pick out what you-all want?”

“Sure, fine. Sure, that’s great, a great idea. Ah … who’ll I ask for? What’s your name?”

“Eleanor,” she said, and the word rose in my mind like an elegant seabird against a silver moon over dark Caribbean waters.

“Sure. Fine. Eleanor, then. Okay, then…”

“G’bye,” her voice chimed in my ear.

I put down the phone and decided to take my panel to the second floor right away, to set it up first and then see which bathing suits matched the colors of my sunset before I made my selection. It was surprisingly heavy. In fact, I could barely lift it. I tipped it, got leverage, lifted, and carried the panel out of the shop, ducking at the door to keep it from scraping, and managed to get it all the way up the wide stairs from the basement to the first floor, before I had to stop and rest a minute. The store was jammed with lunch-hour shoppers, women mostly, many of whom gazed with what I took to be admiration at my blue panel, which I now regarded as very nearly a work of art.

The escalators were located at the center of the large, crowded floor, where the ceiling swooped and opened up to reveal the second floor as a kind of mezzanine. I could see young women strolling about in bathing suits up there, bare shoulders, naked arms and legs, bare feet, pink arches, toes.

I hefted my panel, got it balanced, and moved carefully through the throng of shoppers to the escalator and got in line. By the time I stepped onto the metal stairs, the panel had grown heavy again, so I set it down, placing one corner on the step. I peered around it and up and caught a glimpse of the girl named Eleanor, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, blood red it was, and very revealing, for in that instant I saw that she had large, high breasts, and a navel, my God, a female navel — when I noticed something falling lightly past my face like sprinkles of dust. I heard a loud, grinding noise from overhead, screams from below, and debris started falling all about me. I looked up and saw that the top edge of my panel was digging a trench into the ceiling, a gouge that ripped away plaster, wires, pipes, and tubes, and the higher we rode on the escalator, my panel and I, the deeper into the ceiling it dug, relentlessly, as if with rage, while women above and below me, pushing and grabbing one another in fear, shrieked and ran to escape falling chunks of ceiling.

I let go of the panel, but it held there, rigid, like a plow blade, jammed now between the metal tread of the escalator and the ceiling above, which curved lower and lower as we neared the second floor, until the ceiling was almost low enough for me to reach up and touch, when the top of the panel ground against the reinforced-concrete floor of the mezzanine itself, and promptly the metal stair began to give. The panel, however, refused to give. It creaked, bowed a little, but it held. The escalator kept on moving, while the noise level rose — screams, shouts, cries for help, falling debris, wood grinding against concrete, metal bending under wood — until, at last, the ceiling curved up and away from the stairwell, and my panel sprung free, rising like a main-sail, floating over the rail, and tumbling onto the adjacent down escalator, where people ran in horror as it bounced heavily end over end toward glass counters filled with cosmetics, notions, jewelry, perfumes.

Up above, still riding the escalator, I watched with almost scientific detachment as the stair, bent by the panel into a shallow V, neared the slot in the floor where the stairs in front of it one by one flattened neatly and slid away. I saw the bent stair hit the slot, felt the whole escalator beneath my feet buckle and jump, heard the motor grind on stubbornly, until at last it stopped.

All the electricity in the building had gone off. We were in a dusky haze, as if after a terrorist’s attack. It was silent, with smoke and dust hovering in the air. A chunk of rubble rolled into a corner. Water splashed aimlessly from a broken pipe. A fluorescent light fixture held by a single wire broke loose and fell to the floor. A woman sobbed. A mother called her child.

I was at the top of the stairs, facing swimwear. Before me stood several girls in bathing suits, their hands fisted in horror before open mouths, their eyes wild with fear. One or two wept quietly. I saw the girl named Eleanor among them, and I turned and ran blindly back down the way I had just ridden to the top, leaping over rubble and shoving my way past terrified shoppers, stunned men in business suits, janitors, salesgirls, crunching over broken glass toward the door and away from the crowd that had emerged from the cafeteria, past a white-faced Art and Sukey, and out, finally, to the street. My chest heaved furiously, my ears rang, and still I ran, charging through traffic without looking, as fire trucks and police cars with sirens wailing pulled up at the store.

I was in a small park, walking slower and slower along a white crushed-stone pathway that curved around flower beds. There were live oak trees overhead with Spanish moss hanging down, and small birds flitted in and out of the pale green leaves. Finally, I stopped. I sat down on a bench and put my head in my hands. I believed that my life had all but ended. I was wrapped entirely in shame, as if in a shroud. It was a new feeling, a horrible one, for it surrounded me, enveloping my mind and body totally.

There was no way out of it. In those few moments in the park in St. Petersburg, immolated by endless shame, I was every man who had failed, who had run out on job, family, children, friends — who had run out on opportunity. I was Bob O’Neil, drunk and lying about it in Florida; I was my father, silent and withdrawn in northern New Hampshire. I was the boy who went up the hill and then, inexplicably, turned around and came back empty-handed. I was Little Boy Blue asleep with his horn, while the sheep roamed the meadow, and the cows ate the corn. I was ashamed for all of us, every one.

Then, gradually, I felt the presence of a hand on my shoulder. I sat up and turned and followed the delicate, white hand on my shoulder out to a woman’s arm. It was Eleanor’s, and her green eyes were filled with pity, endless pity that matched perfectly my endless shame. She was wearing the dark red bathing suit that I had loved, and she reached forward and placed her naked arms around my chest and laid her head on my shoulder. I smelled her hair, felt her smooth skin against mine.

We stayed like that for a long time, I on the bench, she standing behind me, both of us weeping silently, me in shame and she in pity, until it was almost dark. And that is how I met my first wife, and why I married her.