Time to Go

The Bench

Each year when spring comes I do a lot of handyman work for the row houses that line Wilmin Park Drive on the 2900 to 3300 blocks. Across from the 3100 block is a park bench and this spring for about a month on the nice days I see this man push a stroller with a baby in it to the bench and stay there for an hour or two around the same time every afternoon. Sometimes he reads for a few minutes or eats an orange while the baby sleeps or is quiet, but usually he has the baby in his lap or stands it up on his thighs or holds it in the air or feeds it some bottle or baby-jar food or keeps it sitting up on the bench but always with a wide bonnet on or its face out of the sun and he kisses and hugs it a lot and smiles and talks to it a lot too, words I never hear, this baby of around six to nine months. I’ve never seen a man so affectionate to his baby, maybe not even a woman to her baby too. I mention him a few times to some of the people I work for. Several times when he looks our way as we talk or just my way if I’m working alone then and sees us or me looking at him, he waves and we wave back or I wave back alone and then he goes back to being so affectionate to the baby.

Then one day he doesn’t show up, but a nice sunny day, one I’d think he would. And not the next nice day and the next nice day after that. When he doesn’t show up on the nice days for a couple of weeks, I mention it to the homeowner I’m working for that day. “Remember that man with the baby on the bench — he was pretty tall and had kind of sandy hair — but there almost every afternoon or at least every afternoon when I worked around here?” and she says “Most certainly do. Hasn’t been around for awhile, I know. Something terrible — almost unspeakable — happened.” I say “Yes?” and she says “He got mad one day, but I mean stark raving crazy mad — I got this from a woman I know who lives on his street and knew he spent some time on our park bench almost every day. Anyway, he got so mad that he shot his wife — because she made him mad or as a result of his getting that way — and killed her instantly — in their home — and is now up for trial and the baby’s with his wife’s sister. I didn’t read anything about it in the papers, but this woman friend said it absolutely happened and that everything bad like that that happens in the city doesn’t appear in the news. I thought I spoke about this with you.”

“No, really — I’m shocked and surprised. I didn’t think he’d do anything like that to his worst possible enemy. He had so much to lose, with that baby, and seemed so peaceful and affectionate; and with those spontaneous waves of his, to other people and myself, very nice.”

A week later, the man I’m trimming bushes for says “Howard, you recall that strange man who used to spend the end of almost every pleasant afternoon on the bench there?” and I say “Yes sir. I heard something awful happened to his wife and child.” “Something awful indeed. For a few weeks I was wondering why we didn’t see him anymore — he had practically become a fixture on the drive. Then — I’m talking to Bill Schechter”—someone else I work for—”but about something entirely different, when he says that the man’s wife suddenly got very sick and died in less than a month. And the man got so upset over it that he couldn’t function normally and had to be institutionalized, and the baby, until the authorities can find a relative of the husband and wife willing to take her in, had to be placed in a temporary home.”

“No,” I say, “that’s terrible. And the baby’s a girl? I heard something much different happened, but both things couldn’t be worse.” “What did you hear?” he says and I tell him and he says “Oh no, Bill Schechter’s brother lives two doors away from the family and that’s what Bill’s brother said.”

About a month later in the supermarket I bump into one of the people I work for on Wilmin Park Drive. We start talking general-like and then she says “By the way, do you remember the young very neatly dressed man on the bench right across from my house who used to wave to us from time to time?” and I say “The one who was so nice to his baby — kissing and hugging her all the time? I heard.” “Isn’t it something? Because rarely do you see a man so openly adoring and attentive to his child, so you can just imagine how he, and of course his wife, felt after. And at the baby’s funeral — my God.” I say “What funeral? — I didn’t hear about any baby dying,” and she says “Oh yes. Bertha Arnold saw it in the Evening Sun and over TV. She put two and two together quite easily, she said, when she saw the photo of the man and read their address and the baby’s age. He and his wife and their baby were in a rowboat they rented at Loch Maiden and the man’s wife stood up, it was never said for what, and the boat capsized and the baby drowned.”

I don’t tell her what I’ve already heard about the man and his family, just look very shocked when I’m really not feeling that way because I’m wondering more what really did happen.

Just a few days later I’m doing work for a couple who live a block down from Mrs. Larkin who told me the drowning story. I ask if they’ve heard about the man who used to bring his baby to the park every spring day for about a month and who we talked about a couple of times and Mr. Radderman says “We thought you out of anyone would have known what happened to them because you get around so much,” and I say “No sir, nothing, though I am curious, because when you see a man and his baby almost the exact same time almost every day and especially when he—” “His wife left him for a friend of his and took the baby with her. They lived just a short walk from him and after he went over there a few times to take the baby back, they took off and disappeared. We heard it from our top-floor tenant, who’s a graduate student in the same department the man teaches in. He knew him and in fact from his window he used to see him sit on the bench with Olivia, the baby daughter, on some of those days. It’s so sad. The professor must be heartbroken — not for his wife so much but the baby. Because in your life, Howard, have you ever seen a man so attached to his child? Sometimes, I was telling Mrs. Radderman, but just a silly joke, of course, it looked almost incestuous.” I say “Never,” and go back to fixing their front steps, looking out to talk to their tenant who might show, but he never does.

Two months later when I’m painting the porch deck of Mrs. Cottrell, who lives a few doors down from Mrs. Larkin, I see what I’m sure is the same man on the bench. He’s alone, no stroller, a book and paper bag next to him on the bench, staring at the ground for about an hour or so or maybe asleep, because either his eyes are naturally very narrow — I forget from two months ago — or closed. When he gets up and from the park side of the street passes the house, I want to wave to him but he doesn’t look my way.

He’s there the same time the next day, which is around the same time he used to come with his daughter. Now the sun’s higher up and much stronger than it was in the spring, which could be why he wears one of those white sailing caps today, not realizing yesterday he had to. But everything else is much the same as it was when he came here in the spring: has a book, though this time he reads it for an hour, which I don’t ever remember him doing then, and takes an orange out of a paper bag instead of the tote bag he had attached to the stroller. He looks up at the sun and a passing plane a few times, but mostly just stares at the trees some distance across from him and occasionally at the cars and joggers and the few people who stop in the park to let their dogs loose.

He comes back the next day. I’m at the top of a ladder against Mrs. Cottrell’s house, trimming the second — floor window, frames. Suddenly she’s looking out the bedroom window I’m working on, checking to see how good a job I’m doing, I suppose, or just making sure I’m working at what she’s paying me for. I nod to her, she starts speaking to me while pointing to the park, then she mouths “Wait,” since I can’t hear her through the closed window, and leaves the room. Next she’s standing at the foot of the ladder and says “Howard, excuse me for interrupting you, but what I was saying upstairs was isn’t that man on the park bench the one who used to come months ago with his baby every day — the baby who I was told was in a car crash with the man’s wife where they both died?” I say “Is that what they say happened, Mrs. C.? Because I’ve heard a half-dozen stories about what happened to him and his family,” and she says “What else did you hear?” and I say “Too many to remember, but all different,” and she says “Oh, if I only had the nerve to ask him. Not pointblank but around it. But pity no matter what it was, don’t you think? Of course you do, because he loved that little darling. That was obvious in every one of his gestures.”

She goes into the house, I go back to my trimming, but by now I’m so curious about what really did happen if anything that when the man gets off the bench and starts for the street in my direction, I put down my brush and climb down the ladder, not so much to ask him anything directly but just to get a sense of what happened by what he might say in passing or the way he looks. I take off my gloves as if I’m done for the time being, scratch some dried paint off my arms, and as he’s passing the house I look up and say “Hey there, how’s it going?”

“Can’t complain,” he says, still walking.

“And how’s that lovely little daughter of yours?” and he stops and says “What lovely little daughter?”

“Well, I don’t know if it was a daughter or son — all I’m saying is the baby you used to come to that park bench with almost every nice spring day for a month. We all admired you for the way—”

“I never had a baby,” and I say “You didn’t?”

“Never even came close to having one. I was engaged once — a century ago — but we didn’t get married and certainly never had a child.”

“This is really funny, but you didn’t used to bring a little baby there — no more than six to nine months old at the time? In a yellow snowsuit she had when it was still a bit cool out? And then in just pants”—he’s shaking his head—”or some outfit I don’t know what it’s called, where the feet don’t come out of it and it zippers all the way up, and a sun bonnet and white sweater and maybe a little blanket?”

“Never.”

“In a stroller. Rolled her there, stayed for about two hours, usually put her back in it when you were leaving or sometimes carried her while you pushed the stroller? I mean, I never saw anyone who looked after and was so affectionate to his baby, that’s the only reason I’m mentioning it.”

“Honestly, you have the wrong man.”

“I’d almost swear it was you. I’m not saying it was now, but even Mrs. C. who owns this house and who just saw you would swear, I’m almost sure, that that man with the baby was you.”

“It sounds very nice. In ways I wish I were him. But I never had a child. And since I don’t plan to get married, I doubt I ever will have one, I’m afraid. Nice talking to you.”

I look for him the next day and then a couple of days the next week when I’m working on the drive, and then for the one or two days a week I work around the drive till the fall, but I don’t see him again. I suppose I can get the real story somehow by asking a few people on the drive what else this man’s university student or neighbor or brother of a neighbor or whoever it was who knew him might have heard about him. But after that last talk with him, and because I feel I did enough damage by maybe forcing him away from this part of the park, I decide I’ve been nosy enough.

For a Man Your Age

I’m twenty years older than you,” she says. “I mean twenty years younger. I don’t know if it’s a problem for you but for me it is.”

“Isn’t for me.”

“That’s what I said. That it wouldn’t be — might not. And it’s not that I don’t like you.”

“Or that I love you.”

“See? That particularly scares me. Because I know you do. While I don’t love you. Like you, yes. But twenty years. More. Almost twenty-one. You were born in May, I’m in November.”

“Let’s call it an even twenty-one.”

“Even twenty-one. It’s so much. Tell me what you really think about it.“

“What do you think? That I wish it wasn’t a problem with you and that we should continue seeing each other despite the difference of our ages.”

“See each other perhaps but not sleep with each other.”

“See and sleep both. Or only sleep with each other. We can do everything in the dark.”

“Don’t joke. I’m in no mood.”

“No, listen. You can come to my apartment or I to yours. The lights will be out in either. Let’s say you come and ring my bell. Lights totally out, place pitch black, I’ll open the door and you’ll come in. If you don’t remember the terrain I’ll take your hand and guide you in and shut the door so no light from the stairway comes in. And then kiss you or we’ll kiss and talk perhaps or no talk if that’s not part of the bargain and then go to bed, everything in the absolute dark as it can get. That way we won’t have to see each other.”

“What about the public hallway light?”

“Okay. You ring my bell and shut your eyes. I’ll shut mine, we’ll both put out our hands, and I’ll bring you in and shut the door. Then we’ll go through what I said before till it’s over and you can leave in the dark or in the light with our backs towards one another. Or I will if it’s your apartment where all this is taking place.”

“Doesn’t sound like a bad idea, for a fantasy, but it won’t work.”

“Why, you don’t like my lovemaking anymore?”

“No I do, I do.”

“Then not in the dark”

“No. Dark, light or one of those mini-watters on with a red shirt over the globe, our lovemaking was good. But you’re forty-two, I’m not even twenty-one. I’m a half year from being twenty-one. So that’s actually twenty-one and a half years difference, not twenty. Why’d I always think it was only twenty?”

“Maybe because I was always referring to it as twenty. Not to make it less. Only because what the hell’s a year and a half mean in all that?”

“And if you were forty-three and a half to my twenty and a half, or I was nineteen and no half to your forty-two, that wouldn’t make any more of a difference to you?”

“There is probably an extreme somewhere in age differences between couples. Thirty years difference when the woman or man’s twenty. Again thirty years difference when the woman or man’s thirty. So I suppose thirty years difference is the beginning of the extreme, except if the younger person’s fifteen, boy or girl. Then it’s probably five or ten years difference, and if the younger person’s thirteen or fourteen, three or four years difference, though even with any of those I’m not sure.”

“I don’t agree. And I think that from tonight — I know that from tonight onwards — it has to be over with us, all right? “

“What can I say to complain?”

“Then you won’t phone me, write or any of those things?”

“So it’s both? No sleep or see? You don’t even want to be friends?”

“Friends if we really need one another — in six months, maybe more. But I won’t need you. I’ve my parents, and good friends. And you’re a very nice man, very desirable too. There must be lots of women ten to fifteen years younger or older than you or the same age who’d love to have you as their lover, husband or friend. You should even get married and have the baby you say you always wanted so much before it’s too late.”

“Men can be fathers into their sixties and seventies.”

“Not if your prostate’s removed before then. Besides, you don’t want your five-year-old kid wheeling you around an old age home. You want to get down on the floor with it, run and play sports with it, dance with it at its wedding and so on, if it’s a girl, and maybe even later playa little with your grandchild.”

“Don’t worry about me — I’m going to stay active until I’m eighty. I’ll also dance with my son at his wedding if we feel like it. It just doesn’t have to be a girl.”

“No matter what, I can’t get married and have a baby for at least six or eight years. I’ve too many things to do before then. I have to graduate college first. After that I want to move to New York ‘and get a job as an editorial assistant in a publishing house somewhere while I write myself sick on weekends and early weekday mornings and late at night. I want to do all that while I’m young. I have to. Then, if one of my books sell or lots of my stories and some money’s coming in or I’m starting to get established, I’ll maybe settle in with someone and have a baby. So when I’m twenty-eight or twenty-nine. But no matter what happens, certainly not sooner.”

“It could happen sooner. You could fall in love and the pressures from him might be too great. Who knows?”

“I won’t. But if I do, and actually I probably will several times, I still won’t get married or have a baby. I’ll get rid of him, no matter how much it hurts, because I want to know many men. I want to be able to say ‘All right, I’m experienced, or as much as I want to be before it starts working against me.’ I also want to travel, but not where it takes too much time away from my writing, and not necessarily with a man. That I can always do ten years from now.”

“If you stayed with me you could do all of those.”

“You’re lying to yourself.”

“You’re probably right.”

“You’re already jealous of other guys I see and sometimes when I’m just doing nothing alone away from you, and we weren’t really that serious as lovers.” “We almost were. Maybe for a while we definitely were. Obviously now we’re not, but what is it?”

“Excuse me, but what is what?”

“You think I look too old for you? Act too old also, or both those or more?”

“No. You act young enough. Maybe too young for your age, but not for mine. Actually, sometimes the young way you acted kind of embarrassed me, though I’m sure it didn’t bother anybody else.”

“So I’ll act older. Not as old as your father or like your father, but just older.”

“I don’t want you acting any way but what you are, not that you could be any other way. As for your looks, well, you don’t look forty-two but you do look thirty-six or so, though don’t ask me what’s the difference. And your physique is good, but for a thirty-five-year-old man. Not one twenty-five or even thirty, which I think, if you want my preference, is the maximum age I’d like my man’s body to look now.”

“I don’t get it. What could be the difference? “

“Your upper arm muscles, for instance, are huge, as are your pectoral and whatever those muscles are in back — the ones like water wings when they’re flexed. But all of them, hard as they are and maybe too overdeveloped, like your pects, which if you continue exercising as you do will in a year be grotesque, are sagging somewhat. That disturbs me, what can I say? As great a shape as you’re in, your body still seems to be starting to fall apart because of your age.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s true. Look at any twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old man at a pool next time, or even thirty-five, but not one overweight. Their pects, even when they’re not developed, are a little higher, and if you see them in the shower, so are their testes by a bit. You can’t stop that.”

“Say you’re right, which I’m not saying you are, how come you never said anything about it before?”

“How come? You kidding? Because I didn’t want to mention it. I thought of it though, occasionally. Your body’s the body of a man desperately trying to stay in shape and look much younger than he is, and that makes me sad in a way. Also your hair.”

“I’m nearly bald, okay, but so are lots of twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year-old men. Blame my father. Even if when he was my age, though he said it came from wearing tight religious caps when he was a boy, he was completely bald on top.”

“Baldness I can live with. Though again, everything else being equal and you gave me my choice of men, why wouldn’t I choose one with a head full of thick hair? Wouldn’t you if you had your choice of women who were in every respect alike except one who was much more beautiful than the rest?”

“I don’t see how any two women could in every respect be alike except for being very beautiful.”

“For argument’s sake.”

“For argument’s sake, yes.”

“Anyway, what I was talking before about your hair was the gray.”

“So I’ve a little on my sides, so what?”

“On your back, shoulders, chest and also around your groin. There more than anyplace disturbs me about your hair. I don’t know why. Maybe because I think that’d be the last place someone getting gray would get gray. And soon you’ll be totally gray allover or close to it and it would seem strange in a way going with someone who’s all gray, bald and desperately trying to make his body look like the body of a young man who lifts too many weights. You’ll probably even get a heart attack from it.”

“Chances are a lot better that I won’t. I run and enough miles a day so that my heart and lungs are probably as good as any man who’s twenty-five.”

“Heart and lungs I can’t see, the body I can. Anyway, why would you want to continue seeing a woman who thought all these awful things about you?”

“Why? Very simple, I’ll tell you.”

“Don’t bother, because why wouldn’t you want to see me? I’m twenty, no, twenty-one plus years younger than you. Even if I don’t work out, my body is still great. I haven’t a line or sag on my face or anyplace. I’m still growing in fact. This year alone so far I’ve grown a quarter of an inch. I haven’t a gray hair. No reading glasses either just because I might’ve reached thirty-five, nor a tooth missing besides.”

“That’s because your dentin’s impenetrable, which you were born with, so thank your genes and stars. As for my eyes, I’m lucky that’s all that’s wrong with them with the reading chores I’ve put them through in thirty years.”

“Okay. Maybe you’re right there. But everything about me is young and in perfect shape — that’s my argument. There’s no way I’ll die of a heart attack in twenty years. My liver has to be a beautiful pink and its proper size because I’ve hardly taken a drink to your, what, maybe twenty-five years of drinking too much wine and liquor and some years heavily you said. I’m even so young that I still get pimples about once a month.”

“There. Ask me why I’d go with a woman who still gets pimples.”

“Because it means I’m still physically growing and changing, my glandular system particularly, and to a man your age, that might be attractive and even exciting. But you go on about my skin, I could talk more about yours and also your hair. It’s aging, getting brittle, while mine is still soft and bouncy, even if I don’t brush it for days. I know all this must sound shallow to you, but I find what a person physically feels and looks like to be important. But there are other things.”

“Sex.”

“You’re very experienced, but you’re not a young man in bed.

You make love the way you do because you have to because of your age. One time and that’s usually it, right? But a young man, if he ejaculates too quickly, can be right back at it. Maybe not with your experience or cooperativeness, though I’ve known some who have been as experienced as you or acted like it, but at least he’s ready for more in fifteen minutes and right now that’s the type I want to be sleeping with. Young, energetic, wants to try lots of things, and more in tune with my own energy, curiosity, stamina and so forth. Does all that make any sense?”

“Sure it does. I wish you would’ve complained sooner. It would’ve made this whole discussion unnecessary.”

“I’m not complaining. I loved making love with you and have gotten as excited with you as I have with any man I’ve made love with who I didn’t love. But I’ve lots of’ years before I want to settle in with someone who makes love like you.”

“Anything else?”

“What I said wasn’t enough?”

“My feet? Do they stink? My breath. Is it smellier than a man’s half my age or even ten years younger?”

“No. You take good care of your teeth — a plus for you compared to some of the younger men I know — and you don’t smoke anything and know how to get rid of the horrible alcohol breath. Your body smells nice too. Maybe you’ve more hair on your body than a younger man, which can catch the perspiration more, but you’re clean, so it’s no real problem. But you also in a way make me feel dumb at times — at least ignorant or near to because of everything you know from books and life and just reading the newspapers for twenty-five years. But then I get sort of exuberant when I think that in ten to twenty years I’ll know as much if not more than you, and maybe for one reason because by that time your brains will have started to forget.”

“It’s a possibility. Though if I stay active and creative and don’t drown my head in alcohol and have no serious accidents up there, I don’t see why my brain capacities shouldn’t even grow.”

“Another thing is that I sometimes feel you think you’ve seen and felt it all or almost. I don’t want to be intermittently tugging at your sleeve and saying ‘Ooh wee, you ever see anything like it in the world?’ knowing you probably have and then pretending, for my sake, it is interesting or exciting what I’m looking at or experiencing for the first or second time. Also—”

“There’s more?”

“You said you wanted to, but I’ll stop.”

“No, let’s finish. Honesty? Facts of life? That’s what I want? Sure I do, or at least how much can it hurt?”

“Well, all those cultural things you try to turn me on to. I wanted to turn you on to things too, but you were so set with everything you liked that it was nearly impossible. Music and films for instance.”

“If you mean your new music — that heavy electric guitar and tom-tom stuff that’s been increasingly crowding the atmosphere for the last fifteen years with its untrained bombastic voices and illiterate lyrics, most of it’s worthless. Worthless.”

“But I don’t think it is. I think a lot of it is great, as good as the best ever, and outside of the younger teenage music, appealing and meaningful and even poignant to people my or any age.”

“Maybe it is, I don’t want to be unfair. But I’m sure you’d appreciate my music more if you’d had some grounding in the classical and really serious modern works. But that’s my preference, I don’t see why it should be yours, and obviously one of the big differences between us. As for films, I thought our tastes were pretty much the same.”

“They are. I forgot. Though for you it’s mostly just entertainment while for me a lot of it is art. But I used to love when we were in a theater and I’d turn to you or you to me and we’d with just a look know we both didn’t like the movie or stage show and get up and go before it was over. That kind of silent likemindedness happened so many times there and the pity’s that it didn’t in most other things we did.”

“Like reading.”

“I love writers you hate. And I know it’s because they’re writing about things closer to my age and past experience, and same with your writers to you. Some we both like, but they’re masters or poets, so easy to like, or writing about eternal questions or the few things we both experienced or want to know more about.”

“We forgot food.”.

“What about it? I think we both like the same kinds, except for the meats I won’t eat and you do, but that was never a problem. You’re also a lot less into the junk thing than me, though you think it’s cute that I am. Really, I was partly raised on it, while you grew up when there was almost no junk food and your mother, you even said, strained your vegetables with a hand strainer, which of course my mother, who’s almost your age, never would.”

“But junk food’s bad for you.”

“They taste good though. But that sort of represents another thing we disagree on. You’re so much into health in your own way and I simply haven’t come to that point except for my staying away from chemically filled carcasses and dead crap like that.”

“I’ll give up all my meat for you.”

“I know you’re joking. But there is some truth in it, isn’t there? and that’s that you’d give up things you like for your woman while I don’t want to give up anything for any man yet. But another thing is your mother. Nice as she is to me, she seems like my grand or great-grand—”

“Don’t go overboard. ‘Grandparent’ should suffice. Just ‘parent’ would suffice also if you considered that some adults, like the possibility of myself, have children at a later age.”

“Your possibly becoming a parent I don’t want to go into. But I do want my man’s parent to be around the same age as mine, so she can get along better or whatever the reason. Though how can she be when the man I’m with is the same age as my father minus two years? And talking about that, people have sometimes looked strangely at us because of it. I know I shouldn’t be bothered by such things — that it’s so bourgeois as you say for them to think that way. But I do get bothered by it sometimes, probably because I am young and as a result still unsure of myself in some ways, and I want to avoid those looks and talk.”

“Those looks you can get walking with any man. Though I can see how it could bother you if you’re in no way in love with that person.”

“Listen, what it comes down to is I want to give myself more of a chance and time, okay? You seem more desperate to be mated now and from everything I said today, I’m not, agreed? And it’s not only what I said but all the other things I didn’t, all right? And I don’t want to talk anymore about it, I just don’t. It was nice, different, we had some terrific times, etcetera, and I know the break will be a lot more painful for you than me, but what can I say? You feel more deeply about me than I do you, that’s all. And maybe I don’t or couldn’t because of the age difference — well of course that’s one of the main reasons because that’s what I’ve been saying all along, true? And I know I’ve contradicted myself a hundred times in almost everything I said, but in a discussion like this, who doesn’t? And — excuse me but what was I saying before I started talking about contradicting myself?”

“I forgot,”

“Your memory’s not too hot also, but I’m only kidding.”

“And yours? You’re the one who forgot what you were saying after you got into that topic about deep and no feelings for me.”

“Oh yes. I was saying that the break, more painful than you, etcetera, and I know why. You think because of your age you’ll have little chance of meeting someone new. But for all I know there are many women and even some my age and maybe even younger who might want to be with you because of your age. Sure there are — plenty. But to me your real obstacle in future relationships is that because you’ve had so many affairs and breakups, you’ve become cynical about them and women and so they’ll never work out or almost.”

“Not so.”

“Believe me, it’s so. And maybe you really don’t want, no matter what you claim, a longtime relationship — one ending in marriage and a baby.”

“How can you say that? I’d marry you today and conceive with you tonight if you wanted and we could.”

“You say you would but if I said yes, I’m sure you’d change your mind.”

“Say yes then. Go on, say it.”

“You know I won’t. Not to you or any man, as I said, for six to eight years or more. Not that when I get married a man will have to ask me to. I can just as well ask also, right? Or that person and I will just naturally slide into marriage, but a happy slide, without either of us asking the other. But what was I saying again? Oh yes. I really believe that deep inside you want to live alone for the rest of your life. That’s why you’ve lived alone all these years and all your relationships have failed, except for a couple of unsuccessful living arrangements with women — relationships which eventually failed because of the very living alone reason I gave.”

“Okay, say what you said is true. All of it, right from since we started talking. But now I want to stop that pattern for good.”

“Then do, but with someone else, not me. It will in fact have to never be me. Because when I get to that age where I only might want to get married, you’ll be forty-eight or fifty-two or whatever then and so still way too old for me. So you see, it can never change. There’s no reason in the world for you to think it can change. At forty-five I might not find a man sixty-six or so that unappealing, but that’s so ridiculously far away and I also, if I was going to have a baby, would have had one long before that age. So from this point on the relationship and everything we have to talk about it has to end, okay?”

“Not even as friends?”

“You know that’s not all you’d want, and besides, I really have more friends than I can deal with now, but thanks.”

“All right then, goodnight.”

“Goodbye.”

“Right. Goodbye, goodnight and the rest of the goods. I’ll see you.”

“Okay,” and hangs up.

I hang up, tell myself to stay calm, it’s happened before, though it hasn’t happened and hurt so much with someone in a couple of years, pick up the receiver to call her back, put it on my lap and think what am I going on about, because she’s right, I am too old for her though her reasoning against my age is mostly bull and my arguments against her reasons are just as full of it, when the phone starts making its off-the-cradle noise and I put the receiver back on.

Meeting Aline

I dreamt of her. That’s nothing unusual. Dreamt of her plenty of times before. About every four months or so since I last saw her three years ago. Since I walked out on her after she asked me to. “Walk out. I want you to,” she said. “Walk. Really. It’s no good. For too long it hasn’t been good. It’ll never be good.” Other things she said. I walked, got another apartment that day, a cheap enough place, hotel I still live in, residential hotel, so I didn’t have to bring or buy any furniture. Called her the next day and said I’d like to pick up all my things and she said she’ll send them to me with a friend, where am I? I told her. She sent them. Some things I wanted weren’t in the cartons and valises. I never called back and asked her for them. That phone call was our last communication. I’ve thought of her many times since. Haven’t pined for her though. I don’t mourn for her and never did. I was glad it was over. I loved her when I left her but knew we were never going to work out too. But tonight I dreamt of her. It was a good dream. She was very nice to me in it. She was nude too. Right from the beginning of the dream. Had a darker suntan than she ever got when I knew her. The white marks of a brief bathing suit’s top and bottom showed. It must’ve been summer. The windows were wide open. It was very bright in the room. We were high up, overlooked a river, in a bedroom I didn’t and still don’t recognize. She smiled, we talked, I forget about what. Something about how you doing, how are you doing, I’m doing fine, I’m doing fine too, “Why don’t you take your clothes off?” she then said and when I said “Well, I really don’t know,” wondering if the pleasure I’d probably get would be worth the problems I might have to go through later because of it, she took them off for me, or started to. I let her. I wanted to make love very much. Her body was smoother and stronger than when I knew her, though when I knew her her body was very good. Her body in the dream was exceptional. Smaller waist, larger breasts, firmer buttocks, longer slimmer legs. She used to say — said it several times, usually when we were naked on top of the bed covers—”If I’d been stretched on a rack when I was fourteen, which was when I stopped developing, I’d have a perfect body, one, not that I’d want to be there, good enough for a centerfold.” I never had any complaints. In the dream we made love twice. I was very satisfied in the dream. She seemed to be too. I woke up with an erection, played with myself, lost it. How many times have I had an orgasm in a dream? — forget two, which was how many I had in this one. Maybe once. A few years ago. I vaguely remember it. I forget who it was with but I don’t think it. was her.

I do some exercises, dress, make breakfast and leave for work. On my lunch hour I see her. It was sunny and warm when I left the office building and I took off my sweater and jacket and carried them. I took a sandwich and coffee I bought at a sandwich shop to one of the midtown pocketparks. All the tables and chairs were filled. I sat on one of the long concrete benches that run the entire lengths of the park. I’d finished half my egg salad sandwich and was wiping my mouth with the napkin when I saw her. She’s with a woman. They’re looking for available chairs it seems. I want to shout her name but then think wait awhile. If they start to leave, go after her and invite them to sit with you along the wall. That is, if they don’t find two chairs or don’t after they don’t find two chairs decide to sit against the wall. If they decide to sit against the wall, wave to her as they approach, if it’s this wall, and if it’s the other wall, go over to them without your sweater and jacket, and food if you haven’t finished by then, and ask if she’d mind you joining them. If she does mind, say sorry and leave. If she doesn’t mind, go back to where you were sitting, get your things and sit with them. If they find chairs, go over to them. If she sees you before they find chairs or head for one of the walls or start to leave, wave to her as if you just saw her and get up and start over to her. I wrap the second half of the sandwich in the paper it came in, just in case they want something to eat, though there is a small food shop in the turret at the park’s entrance, or if they don’t have food in their handbags.

Look at her. This morning I’m making love to her in a dream, five hours later I see her in this little park off Fifth. How do you really feel about her? She looks good. That’s not answering the question. She points to a table a couple are getting up from and she and the woman start for it. She hasn’t seen me yet. I don’t know the woman she’s with. Aline’s blouse is the one I remember from her closet when we lived together and which she never wore during those four years. I once asked her why she never wore it. “My husband gave it to me,” she said. “I don’t know why I kept it. I got rid of everything else he gave me except some of the books he didn’t inscribe. Besides, it’s not me.” They sit and both open their handbags and pull out brown paper bags. Containers come out of the paper bags first. The woman points to the waterfall at the far end of the park and they start talking about it it seems as they pull off the container tops. I look at the fall. It makes a nice sound, drowning out the surrounding traffic and construction noises. They take out wrapped sandwiches and half — or quarter — pound containers and plastic forks from the paper bags. Cole slaw, potato or noodle salad, something like that inside these containers. They unwrap the sandwiches and pull off the container tops. They eat, drink and talk. Her companion faces me. Aline has her back to me and I can only see a little of her profile now and then. She seems the same. Suppose she saw you, came over to you and said “Hey, let’s cab to my apartment and make love for a halfhour — a quickie like we used to do when we were in a rush,” what would you do? She wouldn’t do that. It’s absurd to think about. Though just thinking about it — well, that says something. Though we often weren’t compatible, our sex till the last month was usually very good. I don’t see a woman now, haven’t been serious with one since Aline, though I’ve gone with several women since. One for six months, another for three. I went to Europe with one for a month, spent two weeks with another on a Virginia beach. Suppose she said “Call me,” what would you do? I’d say I don’t know. I don’t think I want to be with her again. But she wouldn’t say that. Or maybe she would, just so we could later talk. “Let’s have dinner one night,” she could say, “or lunch, just to catch up on what we’ve been doing the last three years.” I’ve no idea what she’s been doing. I don’t see anyone we both knew from that time. I did for a year. Then the man we both knew moved to Utah and the woman we both knew died. I went to the funeral, Aline didn’t. In that first year after we split up, Aline had a lover both those people said. She might still have him. She might be married to him or to someone else and have a child. I’d like to know. I should go over to her. I wanted to marry her and have a child but she kept putting it off. Strange that I dreamt of her this morning and see her now. Stranger that I made love to her in the dream. Stranger still that we made love so much in the dream and I was so satisfied. If I speak to her should I tell her I dreamt of her this morning? Would she even believe me? She used to say I exaggerate too much, that it was one of my problems. Tell her, why not? It’s interesting. Somewhat, not very. It’s coincidental. It’d also be interesting to see her reaction. I wouldn’t volunteer that we made love in the dream. If she asked what were we doing and where were we in the dream — she liked to ask that after I said I dreamt of us — I think I’d be cagey. That I’d rather not go into it, or would I say I forgot? No, I’d tell her. What’s to lose? I’d say something like “Strangely enough, we were making love. That’s the absolute truth. I’m not saying it for effect or making it up. I’ve nothing to gain or lose by saying it. I know you used to say I exaggerated a lot, but I don’t anymore. I’ve other problems, but not that. So that’s why I mentioned the dream. Because it was only hours ago and first one about you in months and here we are now.” If she asked me to go further into it, I’d say we had orgasms — at least I did: two. “Never in my life have I had two in a dream — not even in any number of dreams in a month.” If she wanted to know what she said in the dream and what her sex was like, I’d mention her wanting me to take my clothes off and that her last words in the dream after our lovemaking was over were “That was very good for me, I’m sure it was for you.” That’s what she said. I remember it now. But I wouldn’t go that far in describing the dream. If I said we made love in the dream, she wouldn’t ask me anything further about it and I wouldn’t volunteer. I think I know enough about her to know what she wouldn’t ask. Though it’s been three years, I’ve changed somewhat, so I don’t see why I should be that sure about her.

The waterfall stops for a few seconds, starts. Aline and the woman have finished their food and are drinking from their containers. I stand up to go over to her, sit. I’m nervous. My stomach aches a little. It’s been a long time. I think I’m afraid of a brushoff. No, I’m sure she’ll be polite and probably interested to speak to me. I feel my hair. It’s standing up in places and I comb it back flat as I can get it. I’m almost sure she’ll be glad to see me. After three years she’ll have forgotten or just won’t care what went wrong between us. I have. We’ll be like two old friends meeting by surprise after a long time, so with none of our defenses prepared, or something like that. It’s happened before with others. Only a few people keep that wall up for all occasions, but she’s not like that or wasn’t. That doesn’t change. I look at my nails. Clean enough though the cuticles could use clipping. She used to say I didn’t take care of my nails, but I started to soon after we started seeing one another. Continued to also, but I probably haven’t paid attention to them the last few days. Try nibbling the worst of the ragged cuticles off and they’d start bleeding. If I don’t go over I’ll regret it. I’ll do something stupid later on, like calling her tonight, if she’s still at her old address or in the phonebook. I’ll say something on the phone like “I saw you today, I’m sure you didn’t me, but I didn’t have the courage to go over to you. I was nervous, what can I tell you?” If she then said she also saw me but didn’t have the courage to speak to me or whatever, I don’t know what I’d say. It’d be a departure point for more conversation though. No. I wouldn’t call, though I’d certainly think about doing it. I have to go over. I get up. I carry my sweater and jacket and the paper bag, look for a trash can to throw it in, don’t see one, and approach the table. Her friend sees me approaching, pulls herself closer to the table to make more room for me to pass. “No no,” I say, “I just wanted to say hello to Aline.”

Aline starts to turn to me. “Oh no,” she says, covering her eyes with her hands and turning back to her friend, “I don’t believe it — I won’t. Ty. Oh God, Ty.”

“Yes,” I say. “How are you?”

“I still don’t believe it,” Her eyes are still covered. “Oh God, I knew this would happen one day. What did I tell myself to do if it did? I forget. Well, it’s a nice place for it to happen, but I don’t want it to happen. Deborah, this is going to seem nuts to you, even embarrassing, but this is Ty whom you know about and I don’t want to see him, so put up with me for a few minutes? Ty,” her hands still over her eyes, “I don’t want to see you. I have my reasons. Believe me I do. I told myself the day I last saw you, whenever that was—”

“Three years ago. Three and a half, even.”

“Whenever, that if I bumped into you — now I remember. Told myself several times and never changed what I said I’d do, that I would do my damndest not to speak to you and to do everything I could to get away quick as I could from you. You know why. No, you probably forgot. No — with your mind? — you know why, though watch, watch, you’re now probably going to ask why I’m acting this way.”

“That’s right. I’m standing here wondering—”

“You probably think after so long a time that we could just meet and talk and joke and shake hands and ask after each other — well you know, right? Don’t answer,” when I’m about to say yes. Deborah’s not believing this. She says “If you want me to leave, Aline?”

“You crazy? Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. You stay. We’re both leaving here together,” Hands still over her eyes, back towards me. People at other tables are looking at us. Almost everyone at the surrounding tables. My stomach hurts worse than before. I don’t understand why she’s doing this. “Think I’m crazy,” Aline says to me, hands, back, the same way. “Think anything, but what you did will take six more years to make me bump in to you normally and say hello and how is the family and your mother who I hope is still living and healthy—”

“She is.”

“And your sister and nephew and what you’ve been doing and so on and so on. Six more years. But not now. And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I—”

“If you don’t it’s because you don’t want to. Because, if you’re not lying, you’ve pushed the whole thing out of your head because you’re so goddamned ashamed of it. But this,” she says, “this,” turning to me and tapping her nose, “just remember this. Deborah, please help me out of here. If my feet make it I’ll be very surprised.” she stands. Deborah stands, holding their drink containers. “Leave them. I’ll buy us two new ones somewhere. Or a drink. A real drink. I’ll need one. I don’t care if I come back to work high.”

“What do you mean ‘This, this, remember this’?” I say. “Deb, please, lead me out.” She holds out her hand. “What about our garbage?” Deborah says.

“Leave everything. Sometimes you just have to go. Please.” She shakes her hand in the air. Deborah takes it and starts leading her out.

“You’ve really embarrassed me,” I say. “You’re embarrassing me and you’re embarrassing yourself and your friend. Why couldn’t you have just said, hello and goodbye and be done with it?” Deborah leads her around several tables and chairs, lets go of her hand when they’re in the clear, and they leave the park. I don’t understand why she acted like that. And that “This, this, remember this.” People around me are looking at me or doing their best not to. I don’t know what to do. To leave the park or sit someplace in it away from this spot. Right next to the waterfall to think. I leave the park, go the opposite way they went, the longer way for me but I don’t want to bump into her again today. I go back to work trying to figure out why she acted that way. She asked me to leave then and I did. I phoned the next day or a few days later I now remember and asked if I could pick up my things. She said they were already packed and she’d send a friend over with them. Okay. That friend came. A man. Man and woman, actually — they said someone else was waiting in their car downstairs. Their child, that’s right, and Aline had said the man was an old school friend from out of town. I asked them, I think — yes, I did, if Aline was very depressed, because she sounded so over the phone, and they said yes or one of them did, but both looked at me as if I was the worst person they ever met. So what did I do then to make them look at me that way and Aline to act as she did today? I hit her the day I left. That’s right. I didn’t want to leave, she wanted me to, we got into an argument, and I hit her in the face. Probably in the nose. Then she screamed, at me or because of the pain, and I turned around, opened the door, slammed it shut and called maybe a week later it was, maybe two, and asked for my things. Her friends came. I never apologized to her. Never asked if I’d hurt her. All right. I forgot the whole thing.

At night I think of calling her. To say I forgot, that I’m sorry for what happened three years ago, that I didn’t want to bring it up again now but I had to, that she was right about me today, that I now understand why she got so upset. But she’ll probably hang up before I can say a few words. I look for her name in the phone book. I’ve looked it up before — last year. And the year before that. Her name was at the same address those two times. I looked it up then and maybe more times than that to see if she was still living there. Her name’s still at that address. The heck with it, I’ll call. If she screams on the phone, hangs up, then that will be the end of ever calling her. Maybe then I could write her an apology for hitting her three years ago and an explanation for today. I dial her. She answers with a hello. I hang up. I didn’t have the nerve. She’ll know it’s me unless someone else has been doing that to her lately. Then she’ll only think that perhaps it’s me, or maybe not. I get out the book I’ve been reading, make myself a brandy and soda. I have four brandy and sodas while I read and then feel tired and go to bed. Tomorrow’s work.

I wake up around three to go to the bathroom. I go back to sleep and dream about her. She’s clothed. I’m sitting on our old bed in her apartment now without any clothes. She sits beside me, says “Open your mouth, I want to kiss you.” She kisses me as I’ve never been kissed in a dream. It’s the longest kiss I’ve ever had in a dream or out of one. I almost faint in the dream during that kiss. The dream ends when she takes her lips off mine and says “That was a good kiss, wasn’t it? I know it was for you. You lovely man. We know how to kiss.” I don’t go back to sleep. I try but can’t. I think about the dream and that it was a very exciting one but what does it mean? As far as I know, I don’t long for her. I no longer love her. Obviously the kiss dream is tied in with seeing her and dreaming about her yesterday, or is it? Because what about my lovemaking dream with her yesterday? What’s that tied to? It doesn’t matter. Dreams are dreams. They mean one thing, they mean another, they mean many things. I’m not much for interpreting my dreams. I like them when they’re good. I wouldn’t mind dreaming of her every night if I could always have such exciting dreams. Now, if I saw her today on the street or somewhere, that would be different. Then I’d think that maybe my dreams mean something important. That suddenly they’ve begun to predict when I’m going to bump into someone, or at least her. I can’t get back to sleep. I turn on the light and read till about the time I usually get out of bed on a workday.

I wash, shave, do my morning things, go to work. I spend my lunch hour sitting by the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. I sort of look for her while I’m there and on the street, but don’t see her. I go back to work, finish for the day, go home. I think of calling up a friend if she wants to have dinner here tonight, but I don’t feel I’ll be good company. I make a salad, finish the book I’ve been reading and start another. I have several brandy and sodas. I get very tired and go to bed. I wouldn’t mind having another exciting dream with her tonight. I go to sleep and wake up around eight without being aware of having had any dreams at all.

Don

His father came home from the army a year after V-J day to the day. Don waited for him at the Columbus Avenue corner of their block but his father came up from the Amsterdam Avenue corner and was home an hour before Don gave up his wait.

“We’ve a little baby,” Don said on the phone. “Well, of course, little. Well, not of course ‘little.’ It could’ve been a big baby — big for a newborn baby. In other words — ah, I’m too excited to talk. Just that you’re a grandmother again and of a girl. Now I have to phone Lucy’s folks.”

It rained heavily the night his wife left. He said when she was at the door and the taxi was honking downstairs “This is a lot like a lot of the novels I used to read in my twenties and some of those movies too and which now turn up on TV. When the wife or husband leaves or the lover or newborn baby dies, it often poured and the hero would walk out of the hospital that night into the driving rain.” His wife said “Sometimes life is like that, sometimes it isn’t. I suppose in those books and movies the rain was supposed to add drama, but here it’s just anticlimactic.” “What do you mean?” he said but she said “Just don’t walk in it after I leave — you’ll catch a bad cold,” and grabbed her valise and opened the door. His two daughters and father-in-law were waiting in the cab.

“I love you,” a girlfriend said to him. “I can’t believe this. You’re such a screwy mixed-up angry guy and not at all goodlooking, though you got a perfect physique, or with much of a future ahead of you from what I can see — and in dancing no less; what will people think? But I love you. What does that make me: screwy, mixed-up and angry too? Who cares right now. Prove you’re no pansy. Do me.”

“God be with you,” the beggar said on the street today when Don gave him a dollar. “And if he doesn’t get with you, get mean with him. That’s what I do. Yell at him, scream, say ‘God, what’s with you today, man, huh, huh?’ It works.”

When he was a boy and there was lightning out as there is tonight and he was asleep, he’d wake up in a panic and crawl under the bed with his covers and clamp the pillow over his head and in the morning wake up and wonder for a minute how he got there.

He remembers when his sister came home from the hospital when she was born. The buzzer from the building’s vestibule rang. His babysitter rang back whoever it was and Don opened the door. His parents and brothers were walking up the stairs, his father holding his sister. “Here she is,” his father said, “a present for you. Now you’re no longer the youngest,” and he put Rita into Dan’s arms.

After they were called out for the last time, he didn’t know what to think. Either I did well, very well, or I’m fooling myself and I just did adequately and maybe even poorly, because the audience goes wild on premiere night and especially for a young dancer who replaces the not-so-popular soloist at only a few hours’ notice.

The cats whined and rubbed up against his ankles and he fed them for what he thought would be the last time. About ten minutes later, while they were licking each other’s faces, his wife called from the corner phone booth and he put the cats into their traveling case and carried them and their kitty litter box and what was left in the kitty litter bag downstairs.

He met a woman in a theater lobby. They talked during the two intermissions and after the, ballet she suggested he come home with her for lots of “wine, wooing and womance.” They took a cab to her apartment and after they had some wine he tried to kiss her and she held him at arm’s length and said “Not now, not tomorrow, not ever if you mind it with a guy who’s better at part of it than any woman can be and who’s going in for an operation next month to complete the job.” “Goodnight,” Don said, and the man started to cry.

He goes over to the dinner table, looks at the elaborate salad he prepared and main and side dishes he cooked for three hours tonight, and goes into the bedroom with a bottle of wine and a juice glass and shuts the door and turns on the TV.

“Oh, you’re having another girl, aren’t you?” the nurse said to them at the obstetrician’s office. “Oh, I wasn’t supposed to say that, since you didn’t want to know the sex of your baby, did you?”

His mother called and said “What’s this I hear you’re going out with a black girl?” “I don’t know how you could’ve heard it so fast,” he said, “as I’ve only known her for a week.” “Someone saw you two walking in the street and said she was short and not even pretty.” “Look, I don’t want to get cross with you, but what I do and who I go out with is my own business,” and she said “Not if it touches on the lives of your father, brothers and sister and even your only grandparent who can’t see, hear and can barely think.”

His father never went to a doctor till he was seventy-seven and three months after that died at home in his sleep. The City doctor who did the post-mortem later said “He died of old age; otherwise, he was in perfect health. I’m not joking. After what you said about him, I don’t understand how someone could be that age and stay so healthy yet drink the way he did and never exercise or eat the right foods for all his life.” “Let’s not go into it any further,” Don said, and the doctor said “What’re you so worried and upset about? It means you carry some great genes.”

His sister dropped by. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” she said. He said “As long as you’re here I suppose you should be the first to know. This is Lucy. I met her last Friday, proposed to her this morning, and we’re getting married, if we can get the blood tests and license and all in that time, Saturday of next week.” “I’m glad to meet you, Lucy, and to know I’ll have such a beautiful sister-in-law, but what,” she said to Don, “happened to my best friend and your fiancée Susan who you were in love with so much till last week?”

His wife called and said “If you have a moment I’d like to speak to you.” “I have to rush to an important union meeting, I’ll call back.” “You don’t know where I am,” she said. “You’re not at your mother’s?” and she said no. “Nor at one of the women’s departments in Bloomingdale’s?” and she said “Don’t be such an ass.” “Or at either of your two lovers?” and she said “One I haven’t seen for a month and the other’s on a business trip.” “Oh, I’ll find you,” and he hung up.

His wife brought him flowers in bed on one of his birthdays. He said “The hell with those, I want you,” and lunged for her. She jumped out of his reach; he fell out of bed and landed on top of the flowers. She said “I’m leaving you,” and he asked why. “The way you treat me and the way you treat flowers.” He said” Ah, you both like to be treated rough, don’t tell me, and besides, on my birthday I can get what I want and act any way I please. It’s an unwritten law or maybe even in the Talmud,” and he kicked the flowers under the bed. She packed but didn’t leave.

His daughter lost her first tooth. He said “Go to sleep, put it under your pillow.” She said “First I have to put it under my pillow, then I go to sleep.” “Oh, you’ve done this before?” “How could I — this is my first lost tooth? I know all about it though. I put it under my pillow, make a wish to the good fairy and go to sleep and you or mommy put money under my pillow and take the tooth away.” “No. We take the tooth away while you’re asleep, inspect it, see what it’s worth as a tooth, if anything, and then put money under your pillow according to the tooth’s value. This one — I don’t know. It looks a little rotted. In the long run, eating all those sweets doesn’t pay.” She said “I don’t eat so many. I want my tooth’s money.” “Oh sweetie,” he said, hugging her and wiping away her tears. “I’m sorry. For your first tooth we’ll try to make an exception.”

His mother liked to say he was born in a taxi. Actually, his head appeared out of her vagina just as the cab was pulling up at the hospital. The driver and Dan’s father carried her inside and she delivered unassisted in the elevator going up to the delivery room. “Yours, except for the fact that I thought they might drop me carrying me to the lobby, was the easiest birth of all my kids.”

His second oldest brother died in an air crash. One hundred and seven people, including the crew, died in the plane with him. One person survived. He floated down about three thousand feet inside the tail section and escaped with minor injuries. Don had wanted to phone him and ask what he remembered last about his brother, since they were both actors going to Los Angeles to work in the same film and had sat a few rows from one another, but he never did. He wrote him once about it, care of the film company, but never got a reply.

“Help,” his nextdoor neighbor yelled through the walls, “I’m being attacked by two black panthers.” It was the third time this week she was attacked by a wild animal; the last one was a lion. He rang her doorbell and asked if there was anything wrong and she said “Go away, I’m okay,” and resumed yelling about panthers and, calling for help. He spoke to two other neighbors about it and they said he should call the landlord. He did, saying his neighbor was going crazy or drinking too much and having hallucinations or maybe it was drugs — but she definitely needed help, though not from what she said. His landlord said “If I could get her out I would. She’s only paying one-thirty for an apartment I could get four-fifty for easy, but in this city the tenants have all the rights. You look after her — you seem to do that well for the whole building and block. But as long as she pays the rent, which her lawyer always does for her on the first of the month, there’s nothing I can do. Be the one to get her out for me though and I’ll give you a month’s rent gratis and a complete paint job even before your lease is up.”

His oldest brother seemed to set the standard for the rest of the children. He was very political and social conscious, the rest of them became that way. He listened to classical music, they all listened to nothing but classical music. He married out of his religion, so did the others who got married. He became a sculptor, the rest of them ended up in various creative and artistic fields, though his parents had wanted them all to be doctors, lawyers, dentists, university professors. His father once said to Irv when the whole family got together for a Thanksgiving Day dinner “I blame you alone for ruining your brothers and sister. They’ll all wind up making peanuts and being Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guys to the detriment of themselves and their pocketbooks, just like you.”

His daughter knocked on their bedroom door, said “Mommy, I can’t sleep.” “Tell her she has to sleep in her own room tonight,” he said. His wife said “Maybe she’s not feeling well — let’s find out first. All right, Carole, come in.” She came in, crawled in bed with them on his wife’s side. “Can I sleep between you and dad?” “No,” he said. One of his great pleasures in life was holding his wife while he slept, the two of them on their sides, his genitals pressed into her buttocks and his hand holding her breast or thigh.

During a biology practicum at college his professor came up behind him and said “What do you have in your hand?” “My pencil,” Don said. “Your left hand.” “Nothing.” “Then please open it?” “Why should I?” “Because I think you have something in that hand other than sweat and air.” The whole class watched them. “Go back to the practicum,” the teacher said. “How can they?” Don said. “Then open your hand so they can go back, as they’ve only ten minutes left to this part of the exam.” “Oh, the hell with it,” and he threw the crib notes into the air. They came down on top of the teacher and Don’s lab table. “Get out of this room!” “Save your breath,” Don said, “I’m already gone,”

Their first cat jumped out of their apartment window five stories up and, after two days at the vet’s, had to be put to sleep. His wife and daughter and he made the decision in the vet’s office and that was the first time they all cried together. Only other time was when he slapped his wife in the face. She cried, then their daughter came into the room and cried, then he cried and said he was sorry to both of them. “Not to me — only to mommy,” their daughter said. “Okay, I’m only sorry to mommy, but also to you for slapping your mommy, though thank God I didn’t do it in front of you, and I swear it won’t happen again,” “It does and I’m leaving you for good,” his wife said and she and their daughter started to cry again and he just stared stupefyingly at his wife. She’d never said anything like that to him before.

His sister got a rare form of cancer when she was nineteen and suffered horribly for a year before she died. The entire family stood around her bed in the hospital and watched her pass away, while the nurse and aide tried to get them out of the room. Every time they got two of them out of the room and came back to get the others, the two who’d left came back. Finally the doctor came in and said “All right, though it’s against hospital policy, let the young woman succumb in front of her family — we’re outnumbered and they seem decided,” His parents and brothers and he were advised to go for checkups and body scannings twice a year after that for the rest of their lives, since the disease she died of was supposed to be hereditary, even if no one on either side of the family for three generations back had had it. The first woman he asked to marry refused him because she said their children might get his family’s hereditary disease. “I’m sorry but with your luck it’s almost bound to hit you or one of our children, which I just don’t have the guts to take.”

He couldn’t make himself verbally understood to any adults till he was four and a half. He talked an almost incomprehensible baby talk that only his brothers understood, and they translated it to his parents and other people for him. His pediatrician used to make fun of him when he was brought to his office. He’d say “Donny bonny, still can’t say a word but mmm mmm dadda momma poo-poo too?” He told his parents that mimicking their son would ultimately shame him into talking complete coherent sentences. Then on one visit, his mother said, Don spoke his first recognizable sentence to an adult. The doctor spoke baby talk to him again and Don said to him “Doctor Brandon, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

Only one teacher in his entire education ever showed any affection for him. It was in the fifth grade. She’d put him on her lap in front of the class whenever the students had been disruptive, and say “This is the nicest, quietest, gentlest and politest student in the class, and that goes as well for the girls. Why can’t you all be like him?” It embarrassed him but he enjoyed it and she gave him the highest grades he ever got at any school.

His mother enrolled him at ballet school when he was nine to improve his physical coordination. He liked ballet but stopped taking it because his friends said it was only for sissies, and resumed classes when he was twelve and had moved to a different neighborhood. His ballet teacher then said it was too late for him to take it seriously, so suggested he shouldn’t take it at all. He quit and got interested again four years later when he was going out with a girl who was studying ballet. He got so good at it that he switched to a city high school that concentrated on the performing arts, and got a chorus job in a Washington ballet company when he was eighteen. He was considered a promising soloist with a New York company at the age of twenty-one when he broke an ankle crossing a street. He leaped out of the way of a bicycle going in the wrong direction and fell over the pedestrian next to him. His ankle never healed right and he had to stop dancing professionally. He tried choreography, wasn’t very good at it, went to college to eventually become a dentist, flunked most of his predent courses, switched to a degree in political science and became a social studies teacher in junior high school, which he does today. He got a master’s in education and has failed the assistant principal’s test twice. He still limps a little from the street accident and occasionally does a few positions, jetés or parts of dances he danced on the stage or choreographed, for his children or when he’s by himself. He never dances at social occasions, except for a slow simple fox trot, because most partners and observers expect too much from him on the floor.

His wife said on their fifteenth wedding anniversary “The first five years were the pits, the second got a little better, the last five have been almost brilliant. I can’t explain it, can you?” “No,” he said. “Maybe we’re just slowing down” she said, “or getting used to one another, but those reasons sound like gross clichés. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ve really begun to like one another — oh this is going to sound trivial, the cliché of clichés, but it’s what I feel.” “Say it then,” he said, “because I’d also like to know why.” “It could be our having the children and because you are a good father and provider and you’ve mellowed a lot since I first knew you — maybe all those are it. You let me love you now when before you held back. Cliché? Trite? Even if they are, so what? But I never thought I’d stay with you after the first year and then every year after that for the next four. Then we had Carole and I thought what the heck, I have to stay with him till she’s at least in the first grade. Now she’s in the fifth grade and we have Celia and I’m very much in love with you and you seem to be with me and it’s great together most of the time, as a couple, individuals, and a family — am I talking like a schmuck or what?” “No, you’re right. I hate my work but I love you and the kids. And the sex is still good, isn’t it?” “Better than ever,” she said, “I forgot that. Let’s do it now, in fact. My anniversary present to you, or my morning one.” “Celia might get up and want to have breakfast.” “We’ll say we’re still asleep,” and she got up and locked their door.

His mother’s condition got worse. His oldest brother called him from the hospital and said “You better get here right away.” He went into the principal’s office and said “I have to leave immediately — could you send someone to cover for me?” “I’ve no one,” the principal said. “Stay for another period. Then Diamant will be free and he can cover for you.” “I can’t stay another two minutes. My mother’s dying — that’s what that emergency call was about.” “You have to stay. I have no one to cover. We had ten regulars call in absent today and could only get four substitutes.” “You cover for me.” “Me? I don’t cover for teachers no matter what the emergency. I run this school. I have to look after ten things at once.” “Then the girl I appointed to take over my lesson while I’m in here will cover for me.” “I’ll have you fired,” the principal said. “You’re crazy,” Don said and went back to his room, said to the class: “Listen, you’re to be on your best behavior for the rest of the period. My mother’s dying and I have to see her in the hospital and the principal can’t get anyone to take over the class. Please don’t be rowdy or do anything to embarrass me or yourselves. Please, if I ever asked for anything, it’s to be better behaved than you ever were in my class, do you understand? Now finish the assignment and then do schoolwork, homework or sit quietly and read or just think. But damnit, be considerate and mature,” and he left the room. He wasn’t three steps past the door when he heard something smash against his blackboard and then a window break and the class cheer.

When he was a boy his father insisted that all his children kiss him when he got home from work and kiss him when they went to sleep and kiss him first thing when they saw him in the morning. “I kissed my father every day of my life till the day he died and I expect the same treatment from my kids.”

His sister one night scratched his face and pulled his hair and ripped the shirt off his back because she said each of the boys in the family got more things bought for them than the girl.

He met his wife at a party on New Year’s Eve. She was sitting on a couch, looked sick. He sat down next to her and said “Excuse me, but you don’t look well, is there anything I can do?” She said “You can get me two aspirins if you don’t mind,” and he brought them back with a glass of water. She said “That was very nice of you. I didn’t ask for water — not because I forgot — I like to swallow my aspirins whole — but you thought of it for me. If it wouldn’t also be a bother, and because I trust you now and think you have a good pragmatic head for such things, could you walk me to the bathroom and hold my waist from behind while I throw up? I usually do it so violently that I throw my shoulders out of joint.”

His father was a pharmacist and everyone called him Doc. Don had three best friends over the years whose fathers were pharmacists and all their acquaintances and customers called them Doc. Don’s father was the only one of the four who brought most of his pharmaceutical samples home, leaving very little closet space for anyone else in the apartment. After he died, Don’s mother asked Don to sort the good samples from the bad, but he just put them all into about a dozen big plastic garbage bags and threw them out.

He met a woman in England when he was in college, corresponded with her during the school year and the following summer hitchhiked with her from her home in South Africa to Cairo. It took them four months. They were in love when they started out and hated each other by the time they reached the Sudan. He saw her off at the Cairo airport and her next to last words to him were “What did I ever see in you I wonder?” His last words to her were “If we’d time I’d remind you, but as for me I used to love the way you looked, acted and talked and that you answered and so intelligently and lengthily a letter of mine every other week and that you thought there was nothing better in life for you to do than become a hospital nurse and that you once sent me a nine by twelve inch photo of yourself in a skimpy swimsuit and that you hailed from Estcourt, Natal, and summered when I wintered and that when we lived in our native countries we never saw the same stars.” “Is that true about the stars I wonder?” and she went up the ramp to the plane. He was broke and the American embassy wouldn’t loan him money so he called his folks collect for the fare home.

His sister was Gretel to his Hansel in a summer camp play. He wanted a girl closer in age to him to play the part but the drama counselor said their being brother and sister would make the play more realistic and endearing to the audience. The camp photographer took pictures of the performance and till his sister died his mother loved to bring them out and show them to the women friends he’d ask over for dinner or drinks.

He was playing ring-a-levio one night on his block. A girl named Mary, who lived on the next block, was hiding in the same brownstone walkway with him. They were kneeling close together, their shoulders and arms touched. She had on a short skirt and when she looked over the walkway wall to see if the person who was “it” was anywhere near them, he looked up between her legs, hoping to see her vagina or maybe some hair if she had any there yet but only saw the ends of her buttocks sticking out of her panties. Later, as a prisoner, it seemed his underpants were wet. He felt down inside them, thinking he might have made. His penis and the pants around it were sticky. He got scared for a second, then remembered the dirty part of a book he’d recently read and something some boy had said, and thought Holy Christ, for the first time in my life I’ve spermed.

“Touch me again and I’ll call the cops,” a woman friend said to him. She got dressed, left his apartment and he never spoke to her after that till he bumped into her in a museum garden a few years later. She said hello and smiled, then must have remembered what he did that night and walked past him into the museum. He started after her, wanted to ask what it was he did that night — he’d completely forgotten or had blocked it out — so he could apologize again or for the first time. “I don’t care how bad it was, I want to know,” he wanted to say, but the museum was crowded and he couldn’t find her. That evening he wanted to call her and apologize for whatever he’d done that time years ago, but her name wasn’t in the phonebook. He knew a couple of people who might know her or how to find her, but then thought it’s all right, you can have a few harmless enemies in this world and still sleep well and live through a normal day every day. In time you’ll straighten it out with her, if it was that important.

For the last two months, when he brushed his hair on the right side, his head hurt. He went to a doctor, something he hadn’t done in about a dozen years, and pointed to the spot. The doctor felt it, looked into his eyes with a penlight, took his blood pressure and said “I know you must be worried it’s brain cancer or some form of brain damage or anything resembling those, but that you’re definitely on your way out of this beautiful world, but it’s not so. You’re healthier than you almost should be for your age; when you’re approaching fifty you should begin conducting yourself as if you are. You must have hit your head hard two months back and it hasn’t healed fully.” He was relieved when he left her office, didn’t feel any pain the next day when he brushed his hair or pressed down on that spot, but has felt the same pain and even worse every day since for the last two weeks. He was worried about it again but more worried what a neurologist might do to try to find the reason behind the pain, so for the time being he’d avoid brushing that part of his head and pretend to believe the pain would ultimately go away.

His wife was playing with his penis when she said “Good God, you’ve blood coming out of the hole.” He went to a doctor, afraid he had something serious. His wife went with him, saying “Don’t get excited, it’s probably nothing. People always think they have the worst when they should think that nine times out of ten they have nothing, and if they do have something, it can usually be cured simply and quickly.” The doctor said it was a minor case of prostatitis and prescribed pills that would clear up the infection in two weeks. “Can I have sex during this time?” he asked and the doctor said “By all means — it’s good for the prostate gland. Only thing to stop you from it now is if your wife for the next few days minds a drop or two of your blood.”

For a year his uncle showed him a lot of attention. He took him to professional baseball and hockey games every other week, took him to first-run movies or Broadway plays at night, let him stay with him an entire summer month at his beach house, gave him a hundred dollars on his birthday and told him to buy what he liked with it. They were never close before then, and after the year his uncle stopped calling or coming by. He’d call his uncle and his uncle would say “I’m busy this weekend, kid. I’ll see you next Saturday or Sunday,” and the next weekend he wouldn’t call or show up either. Finally Don’s mother told him “I think my brother’s going through some change-of-life crisis — don’t feel it’s your fault he doesn’t act the way he used to with you.” Ten years later his mother called and said “Uncle Nat died in Miami last night — a heart attack. I’m flying down with Dad — can you look after my plants?” He said “I’d like to come too,” and she said “What for? — you two were never close.”

His wife said “Let’s renew our marriage vows, just together, Carole can stay with my mother. We’ll write the ceremony ourselves, be our own witnesses and judge, go on the Caribbean honeymoon we never took, not tell anyone what we’ve done and only my mother where we’re going — it’ll be our one secret we’ll keep from everyone for life.” “Let me think about it,” he said, and that was the last they spoke of it.

He was thumbing through the phone directory looking for the zip code page when his wife said “Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you if you’re doing anything important, but would you like to go to bed for fifteen minutes?” “I just want to find this,” he said and she said “What are you looking for? A zip code; for Christ sakes. Forget my proposal,” and he said “No no, I have it now just let me mark it down,” and she said “Next time I should try to catch you when you’re reading page five of the Post, because I’m not asking too much, am I?” and he said “No, I can always do it; just it might take a little more time.”

His wife said “Please don’t take it — it can’t be good for you. The others here are all heads and know how to handle the stuff,” and he said “I always wanted to take a trip — now’s my chance, and I swear I’ll be okay,” and swallowed the LSD tab. First they were all gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus and his wife, who hadn’t taken any, said “If this is all it’s going to be, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all,” and he said “Drop another grape in my mouth and then come kiss me, you lovely beast — oh God, I love you,” But soon after that he became a famous black gospel singer and sang gospels in her voice and then he went outdoors to embrace all of nature and crawled low in the snow because he thought one of the other LSD takers was trying to kill him with a rifle and then he was in a circle with three other naked people in a dungeon, all with their heads yoked between the thighs of the person in front of them and turning a horizontal wheel for what would be an eternity and then he was a bug on the dungeon floor and human feet were trying to smash him. He was given a strong tranquilizer and while he was coming down he told his wife he had gone mad and nothing would ever make him sane again and he’d be completely dependent on her or in a squalid institution for life, “so listen, your friend with the gun before, get him to put it to my head and shoot perfectly.” Then he fell asleep and the next morning his wife said to him “I know how you hate I told-you-so’s but I wish you’d listen to me on things like this,” and he said “You’re right, no need to hedge around it, but I’ve seen the darkest I can become and nothing so much before has made me appreciate sanity and day-to-day sameness and simple sleep and just sitting here with you, for instance, and admitting any of this.”

“You’re being hired for your musculature and height, not your potential to teach,” the assistant principal said to him, and an hour later, after he introduced himself to the class as the new permanent sub and asked the students to one by one tell him their names, a boy stood up, the first student to ever respond to him in his own class, and said “I’m not taking orders from any white man,” and left the room. “Come back,” he said, “you come back.”

He was in college, dating a girl from New Jersey. He took the bus from Port Authority and was walking in the rain along the street to her house when she jumped out from behind a tree just to the side of him and said “Boo,” He looked at her from about ten feet away, sheepish grin on her face, body still partly hidden by the tree trunk. That was the single happiest moment of his life. Other than that he was in love with her and had looked forward to seeing her that day, he can’t really explain it beyond that. He went over to her, they hugged and kissed, but the most rhapsodic part of the experience was over for him.

He finished The Idiot, thought it the best book he read and wanted to talk to someone about it. No one he knew had read it, not even his brothers and mother who among them seemed to have read everything. A couple of high school friends said if the book was that great they’d start reading it right away, but he said by the time they finished he’d probably have forgotten most of it. “I need someone to talk about it with now. Maybe someone in your family,” and one friend reported back that his father had started it in college but couldn’t get past the first fifty pages.

He sent away ten cents and a box top and every Saturday after that waited for the mail in the building’s vestibule or on weekdays rushed home around lunchtime when the mail was often delivered. His mother said “It takes time,” but he said “Maybe this company just wanted to steal my dime.” Two months later the mailman said “I think this is for you. I could’ve left it by your letter box yesterday hut I knew the contents were especially precious to you,” and he gave him the small package. He opened it in his room, put the ring on his finger, adjusted the band, blew the ring’s whistle, peered into its sight, learned where north and south were in the room, held the ring under a light and then went into a dark closet, shut the door and brought the ring up close to his face and was able to make out the ring and the knuckle of his ring finger.

His mother took his sister and him to see Macy’s Santa Claus.

Santa’s helper ran the specially decorated elevator, other helpers led them down and around a dark corridor that looked like a funhouse’s and at the end of it gave them each a brown paper bag of Christmas candy. When his turn came, Santa sat him on his lap, called him “a skinny lad” and asked what he wanted for Christmas. “An electric train set and the right to change my name to Toby Tyler.”

His father was drafted. For a while Don slept in the same bed with his mother because she was afraid to sleep alone. But he kicked too much and occasionally wet himself, so she put him back in the boys’ room. Years later he mentioned this and she denied he’d ever slept in the same bed with her even when he was sick, so he stopped talking about it or even bringing up that time when his father was in the service.

His parents were on their double bed. He crawled into the room, stood up by holding the bedspread, wondered how they got into the bed. They must use a ladder and he imagined a ladder against the side of the bed and his parents climbing up it. He raised his arms and shook them and his father lifted him up and dropped him between them.

He was sitting at his favorite bar drinking a beer. A man sat next to him, said “Beer is it? Another beer for this young man and a daiquiri for me,” and then said to Don “So what are your credentials or would you like me to first give mine?” and put his hand on Dan’s knee and rubbed it. Don said “Excuse me, take your hand off, I don’t swing that way,” but must have said it louder than he intended to, for the man saw some other drinkers staring at him, got up, though the drinks he’d ordered were just now set down, and headed for the door. “What am I to do with your drinks, you goddamn fag?” the bartender said, but the man was outside. “You attract the wrong types,” the bartender said to Don. “Gain some weight.”

It was around 4 p.m., a school day, he went with about eight of his friends and one of them yelled from the street “Herminia, Herminia, it’s Jack,” and when she opened the window on the third floor, he said “Can we come upstairs?” “Too many of you,” she said. “Not so many,” Jack said, “and we all pay.” “Okay, come up.” They went up the smelly stairs, all sat in the living room with her brother, she said, while her mother and daughter stayed in the bathroom. “You have to pee,” Herminia said to the boys, “go outside someplace.” Jack went into her room first. There was cat feces in the middle of the room and her brother took out a knife and threw it at it but always missed, maybe intentionally, though the blade always stuck in the floor. Jack came out, said to the rest of them “Have your two bucks ready and do what she says, not what you want.” One boy said he was too far back in line and went downstairs. Don was fifth or sixth. He gave her the money, she put it in a cigar box, took off her bathrobe, told him to get undressed quick, got on the bed, spit into her hand and wiped it between her legs and said “Now please, mister, fast.” It was his first time. After he was done he said he was leaking, did she have a tissue or something, and she threw him a soiled dishrag. He zippered up without using it. “Again, nice, but alone or with no more than two next time,” she said to him just before he left the room, “and five dollars, five, this time only special favor for Jack.” He waited with the others till the next two were done and then they all went downstairs. “How was it?” Jack asked him outside and he said “Awful, but I’m glad I did it already,” and for a month after that thought he had a venereal disease.

A friend knew of a prostitute on 85th Street. They went right to her door, she said through it “Come back in fifteen minutes,” they came back and she said “Who goes first?” “Only he wants it tonight,” his friend said when he saw she was pregnant and Don said to him “I do very much — I don’t care.” He went to bed with her, she charged five dollars, and after it was over she asked for a two dollar tip “because I did a little extra for you and, stomach and all, you can’t say it was bad.” He was already dressed, she was putting on her clothes, and he reached over to the dresser to put two dollars on it but grabbed his five off it and ran for the door. She yelled “Stop, that’s mine now,” and grabbed his shirt and pulled his hair. He turned around, pulled her hands off him and pushed her in the chest and she fell to the floor. “Oh Jesus,” she said, holding her stomach, and sucked in some air, blew it out, opened her eyes on him again and started to get up and he ran out the door. “Help, a man robbed me,” she yelled into the hallway and two men came out of the door next to hers and chased him down the three flights of stairs, one waving a bottle it seemed. His friend was waiting on the stoop. “Get going,” Don said, running past him and they ran down the block, looked back, didn’t see anyone chasing them and got a cab. His friend said “What happened? The time I went to her she was nothing but sweet,” “She wanted another five after and I just didn’t think that was fair,” “Next time give it to her or you’ll get us both killed. I’m crossing her off my list, even for six months from now,” and he took out his address book and crossed out her name and number.

He didn’t shave the week after his father died. His mother said on the third day of their mourning period “You look dirty — stop grieving so hard. Shave for me,” He said “I can’t seem to raise the razor to my face,” and she said “Go to a barber,” “I can get hepatitis from one and besides, for some reason I don’t think it’s right to go to a barber right now or even to go outside,” “I’ll shave you, or one of your brothers,” and he said “Right now I’m feeling a little disturbed so I’d trust someone else’s hand even less than my own, even with an electric razor in it. It might give me a shock or explode. But don’t worry. I’m not planning to grow a beard and as long as I don’t slash my clothes and throw things, everyone should be able to respect me for the time being.”

He got his draft notice and went to the army center for the physical. He passed all the physical tests, though he tried his best not to, and then intentionally answered the psychological test wrong in several places and was sent in to see the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said “You checked here you have nightmares, then crossed it off and checked you don’t — which is it, and if you do have them, how bad are they?” “I do have them, but didn’t want to give you any excuse for keeping me out the army, but it’s okay, because they come and go, nothing serious, and one of these days, not that I’m claiming I know when, I know they’ll all be gone and I’ll sleep completely peacefully again,” “Do you have many male friends?” and he said “Some, but not for very long any more, and certainly not as many as when I was younger — three, four years ago, but okay, people change, I do, you do, we all have to, right? We go through certain things, not that what I went through was so bad — in fact it wasn’t when you compare yourself to the rest of the world. It’s just that my friends got to be different than me, in interests and things, so they didn’t understand me anymore or didn’t try to and I just didn’t like what they were doing with their lives and told them so, that’s all. I speak my mind, sometimes without anyone asking and when I know what I say might hurt, but so do a lot of people, so is that so bad?” “What about women — do you go out with them much?” and he said “Very much, or at least I want to, and I used to go out much more too — in high school and when I was a dancer. But it’s either they’re not attracted to me as they used to be or I just don’t find that many to my liking in many ways — intellectually, spiritually, and that they’re always pampering themselves so much, which I used to appreciate when I was in the ballet, more really for professional reasons, but now find it a little too self-centered and stupid. I do have one good woman friend though, but just to talk to,” “What do you talk about with her?” and he said “Things we don’t like — our problems, but not mental ones. Just what we think about various people and daily life. And she in a way is like me, which is probably why we get along so well and can speak so freely to one another. She also had plenty of girl friends and went out a lot with men and now she doesn’t and for many of the same reasons as me. Anyway, it’s easier to talk to her than to anyone else, including, right now, my family,” “But you get along with your family — you checked a yes for that here,” and he said “Oh yes, we’re a very close bunch and always have been, just at the moment everyone’s gone off some place and my sister, who’s really too immature for me to speak to deeply, well we don’t get along that well.” “Why do you want to be in the army?” and he said “Because of everything I talked about so far — why else? To make new friends and maybe to get away from college and home for a while and because if I’m not let in — not that you saw me volunteering, you know — my brothers will think something’s wrong with me, since the two oldest served honorably and my father was in World War Two, though he only ran a pharmacy at an Arizona base.” “How would you describe your relationship with your father other than what you checked off on the test?” and he said “Close, or somewhat, though he was much older than most fathers of boys my age when I was growing up, which might explain some things, But I really didn’t know how close I was to him till after he died. Don’t misunderstand me. What I mean is I didn’t know how much I loved and missed him till after he died, Before that, like I suppose most boys and young men to their fathers, you just take the relationship and his presence for granted and never think he’s going to die.” “What would you say if I told you that I think for the present time you and the army are incompatible?” and he said “No we’re not. If you think we are, then you’re dead wrong and you should send me to someone else here to examine me — anyone you want, I don’t care — because I’m just nervous now in front of you, that’s the way I always get with tests and then when I try to explain why I didn’t do well on them.” “No, perhaps in a year from now the army will send you another draft notice; but for now you’ll have to be temporarily deferred,” and he said “My family’s not going to like it, I don’t like it, and I insist you let me see another psychiatrist, because I don’t see how anyone person by himself can make such an important and maybe career threatening decision on someone else.” His brothers all said he was wrong to pretend he was disturbed and he said “I just didn’t want to clean out any stove grease with my bare hands, which I hear some country sergeant always makes the city boy do, or train with live bullets over my head or even hold a loaded gun,” and they said he could have avoided the training and sadistic sergeant and guns by using the same intelligence and cunning he used to get out of the army and he said “Maybe, but at the time it seemed the only solution and now it’s too late. Maybe I’ll be called up in a year as the doctor said,” but he never was.

Two men tried to rob him on the street. He went crazy, screamed “You can’t do this to me or anyone else in this neighborhood,” and started to swing wildly and one went down and stayed down after his knife flew into the street and he ran after the second one, caught him and picked him up and threw him through a store window and then punched and kicked him till the man said “Please, I give up, get a rag for my neck,” and held them both on the ground till the police came. The newspapers wrote about it the next day. “Male dancer beats up toughs,” the headline of one article said.

“I have to stop teaching,” he told his wife. “I know we need the money and health insurance but I can’t take another week of it no matter how good the kids might be some days.” She said “Just stick in there, you’re only going through a bad period in your work, and in ten years you can retire at half pay and still be young enough to do what the hell you want for the rest of your life and with never a complaint about it from me.” “Maybe I can take up painting now,” he said, “or classical piano playing. Creativeness runs in my family, or did.”

His dead brother has showed up in his dreams about once a month for the last five years. Usually he was guiding or lecturing him. “You’re not loving enough to your wife…You don’t pay enough attention to your daughters…Be more tolerant of mom, she’s getting old…Go back to choreography if you can’t think of anything else — you never really gave yourself a chance.” “How is it where you are?” he asked the last time and his brother said “Don’t get nervous about it — it’s fine for everyone, but do what you can to take the normal time and beyond to get here.”

One image keeps on coming back to him. He could be anywhere, on a subway, lying in a bed, in his classroom or listening to music, and it just drops into his head. It’s of his mother drying him off and powdering him after he was through taking his own bath.

His older daughter gave him a tie for his last two birthdays and the last Christmas. His wife had a big laugh over the last one. “Don’t you know what it means?” she said and he said “I don’t believe in that stuff or not that much. She just knows I always stain or wrinkle my ties but thinks I look handsome in them.”

He got an anonymous typewritten note from a student. “You are my favorite teacher ever and I’ll tell you why. Some teachers study to teach, you were born into it so didn’t have to study. A born into it teacher is both smart, patient and kind and something else no one can define. Thank you. Signed: a student (female, but that’s not important) but a lifelong friend.”

Today’s his birthday and his watch stopped on the morning hour his mother said he was born. He wound it up but it didn’t start again.

That was when he thought about the hour and day he was born. He took it to a watchmaker who said it would cost more to repair than if he bought the watch new. “The parts now are worth more than the whole. Buy the new nonwindup kind — quartz, the only thing today. Those watches will eventually put me out of business, but they’ll save you a lot of trouble.” “No, I’m an old fogy on things like that — sell me a good windup watch.” The watchmaker said “You have a birthday coming up?” and he said no. “You have a wife though, right?” and he said “Divorced.” “Children?” and he said “Two daughters.” “Old enough to buy a watch?” and he said “The oldest might be, if I wanted a cheap watch, but the youngest is only five.” “A girl friend then?” and he said “None and none in sight.” “I was only suggesting all these because no man should buy his own watch.” “I don’t believe that. Just give me a round one that’ll work even better than the last and which has numerals and has to be wound once a day.”

Encountering Revolution

Georgia and I are getting our son dressed to go to the dentist when the doorbell rings. Jimmy wants to wear shorts and Georgia’s insisting he wear slacks and I’m saying as I go to the door that I don’t care what he wears so long as she gets him out of here and I can continue practicing for my recital tonight.

It’s our landlady, Mrs. Longmore, who says “Quickly, hurry, turn on your radios, turn up the TVs, war’s been declared, the whole country’s going to ruins.”

Mrs. Longmore has been known to use any excuse or lie to get into one of her apartments to see if the tenant’s installed a new heavy appliance without notifying her for the surcharge on the rent, so I tell her to calm herself, the only war currently raging is between our son and his folks, and to quiet my own nerves I turn on the radio to a classical music station which at this hour only plays Baroque.

The announcer’s speaking only a little less hysterically than Mrs. Longmore about a civil war taking place. I figure it’s this very station’s radio play about a war that’s disturbing her. I switch stations to prove my point, but they’re all giving the same kind of news.

The insurrection, as the newscaster I settle on puts it, began last night in a northeast college community when a band of students beat up three policemen who the students said had for no reason clubbed a friend of theirs, though the police claim the student they clubbed had first beaten up an elderly park employee who had courteously informed the student of the park’s curfew law. Though opinions differ on how the disturbance started, the police then called for reinforcements, who came with the suburb’s one armored car. The police tried breaking up the students’ demonstration in the park with nightsticks, the students beat them back with rocks and chemical sprays, the police fired tear gas canisters, and when these were hurled back with makeshift fire bombs, rifles, and two students were killed. Hundreds of enraged students on campus banded into an armed mob and overwhelmed the police guarding the park, with several fatalities on both sides, and used the cannon in the armored car to blow up the police barracks. They then seized the local radio station and broad casted appeals to students and workers to join them in the streets to rid the area of its homicidal police and those public servants who use these police for private self-serving ends. The radio station was destroyed by armored cars summoned from nearby suburbs, though by this time thousands of students and some workers were battling guardsmen and police in the area and eventually throughout the Northeast Region. Students in many university communities in the North and Southwest Regions learned of the fighting and also rebelled. Over commandeered radio stations they declared a national revolt in the name of sanity and peace against all institutions, groups and persons who opposed the revolt, and that they soon hoped to meet their Eastern and Central revolutionary comrades to form a united provisional government that would coordinate the postwar effort if they won, or else all underground activities if the open rebellion failed.

Georgia, Jimmy and Mrs. Longmore huddle around me when the newscaster says the president’s about to make an address of unprecedented importance from his emergency headquarters. We turn on the television and stare at the president’s seal for a while. Then the president appears, looking no more harried than he was in all his previous heralded addresses of proven unimportance, and says his historical residence, Defense and Justice Buildings and National Art Museum have been shelled and nearly taken this morning, but the Capitol and entire Central Region surrounding it are now back under complete government control. “By late today, or early tomorrow, this so-called rebellion by university thugs, high school toughs, innocent dupes seduced by the slogans of strife, and those alien agitators working for the countries most likely to gain by the collapse of our political and economic system, will have ended. And then that part of the world still in chains though ever hopeful of future freedom, and those allied nations not in chains only because of the military might behind our country’s freedom, will once more breathe easier knowing our nation is at peace again.”

He’s suddenly cut off. There’s nothing on the screen now but the jittery specks we usually only get with bad reception. Then the word “liberated” appears, followed by a voiceover saying “In the name of the common people of this country and those, via television satellite, of the world.”

A young man in work clothes and with a rifle strapped to his back faces the camera from behind a lectern. He says he’s the regional spokesman for the national revolution and gives a report of the war up to now. Guerrilla units are fighting counterrevolutionary forces in all Northern and Southern regions, and despite what the president just said, in the Central Region and Capitol as well. Many large sections of small major cities and many small sections of large major cities are in the hands of the revolutionaries. The battle for the country’s principal war-works city was lost at a cost of hundreds of lives to both armies, though military production there has been set back for years. “By tomorrow evening, or the evening after, half the population will be under rebel control. And once all five regions and the Capitol have been completely liberated, and it can only be with a second successful revolution here that the first real world revolution can begin, we will help all the common people of this globe free themselves from the international political-economic arrangement that is keeping them hungry and enslaved and the world perpetually on the verge of war and total annihilation. For a new day of eternal peace and freedom is fast approaching us,” he says, when he collapses from a bullet fired off-camera. Two soldiers in recognizable military dress drag him out by his hair. His cameraman’s ordered to stand before the camera with his arms raised. A third revolutionary — the director of the newscast — is rifle-butted to the ground for reaching for a concealed weapon, though she gave ample warning to studio guards and home audience that she was going to search through her pockets for a handkerchief because she was about to sneeze.

An army officer kicks over the lectern and sits behind a desk.

He says the country’s first widespread internal armed conflict in a hundred years has all but concluded and that every annexed radio and television station will be returned to its rightful ownership by tonight. He reviews the counterrevolution in progress. All sections of cities the revolutionary spokesman said were in rebel hands have been recaptured and pacified. Guerrilla units are rapidly being smoked out and eliminated and no longer pose a national or regional threat. The president is returning to a thoroughly becalmed Capitol and will spend the evening in his historical residence. The country’s leading defense industry city will resume normal production at the start of the regular work day tomorrow. “All citizens in this area are urged to return to their homes till further notice, as an indefinite curfew begins in two hours. Stay tuned to this or any of your other legitimately run stations for a continuation of the president’s address and important news bulletins, advisements, and information regarding the country’s planned victory celebration.” Then there’s an unusually long series of commercials followed by the soap opera Mrs. Longmore says she always puts on at this hour. She returns to her apartment to watch it.

“I guess this means Jimmy’s dental appointment is canceled,” Georgia says, “and it took two months to get. And what about your recital, Phil? You’ll have rented a hall nobody’s allowed to come to. And Dad!” meaning her father who lives with us and spends every day in the park’s chess house downtown. We run to the window, but he isn’t on the street. At the windows of brownstones across the street and on either side of us are people anxiously eyeing the pedestrians hurrying to get home or to buy goods before the curfew begins.

“Check the refrigerator,” I say.

“Forget the refrigerator. We’ve got to find Dad.”

I yell out the window if anyone’s heard if our city and particularly the park has been physically touched by the war. But it seems the people in the buildings don’t want to be distracted from catching sight of their close ones and the people in the street are in too much of a hurry to answer me.

I switch to every radio and television station to see if there’s any news about the city’s involvement in the war. All the radio keeps saying is for everyone to stay tuned to his television, and the only television programs are the ones normally on, with messages moving at the bottom of the screen urging all viewers to remain home or return home but stay tuned because important news bulletins will follow.

I dial the chess house, parks department, police, newspaper and the two cronies my father-in-law always meets at the chess house and then the telephone operator as to why I can’t reach any of these numbers, but right after each dialing a recorded voice tells me the number I’m calling is temporarily out of service and that I should stay tuned to my television set because important news bulletins are going to be made.

I ring the doorbells of all my neighbors. The only person who’ll tear himself away from his television long enough to speak to me briefly through the door says he hasn’t heard anything about the city’s part in the war. “Though there was an announcement just before that tomorrow and the next day will be wage-paid holidays for all workers and government-subsidized ones for all businesses because the rebellion was crushed. And that all TV programs will be preempted in a few minutes for a four-hour special on the revolt, with live coverage of the most damaged areas in the country, videotape highlights of the last bloody battles, and the president conducting a walking tour of the partially ravaged Capitol.”

Georgia pleads with me to try to find her father in the hour we have left before the curfew. “That way I’ll always know we did everything possible to find him.”

I leave the building. The weather’s clear and the neighborhood as peaceful as on an average summer Sunday: stores grated and locked, most of the apartment windows shaded and closed, an occasional car or motorcycle driving past, a solitary couple at a bus stop. They know less than I about what’s happened in this city, as their television broke down an hour ago and they’re going to a friend’s house to watch the special.

I start to jog to the park’s chess house. Little by little I see signs that perhaps a minor disturbance took place. A broken car window…an abandoned bike…a row of garbage cans turned over…a speeding police car and army truck with their emergency lights on. Then that a riot if not a fierce battle took place, with stores without windows…buildings without walls…streets without buildings, and smoke, flames, bodies, limbs, teeth, hair…I head home. This time across the park, which was bombed and strafed. Past the gutted chess house. Through several residential neighborhoods: now smoldering mounds of debris. My own street’s been torn up while I was gone, my building blown apart. Only the old-fashioned marble staircase remains, ending in the sky. “Georgia,” I scream. “Jimmy!” I shout their names repeatedly as I dig and pick away at the rubble.

The super comes out of a hole in the ground where the entrance to his basement apartment was. “No use wasting your energy and voice doing that, Mr. Devine. Whole building’s occupants either been wiped out or buried under or went scrambling out of here between the time the explosions started and the place caved in. Really can’t say who was responsible for it all. Either the revolutionaries who rushed into the building and for one strategic reason or another set it off, or else the government tanks that came up the street chasing them. Didn’t see any of your family leave, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t. I just know nobody else is around but my wife and me. We were the lucky ones, living so deep in the ground with no floor to fall from. All our friends used to say ‘Why do you want to live in a dungeon like that? Steam pipes all over your ceilings and no view but the next building’s blank wall.’ Now they know. Because I always felt this would happen one day, which is why I took this place and job. What do you think you’re going to do now?”

I haven’t been back in this city for nine years. First thing on arriving I go to our former street. Twenty-to thirty-story apartment buildings have gone up where our five-story buildings used to be. There are trees and shrubbery on the sidewalks now, and all the stores have become so sophisticated with their wares and window displays and exorbitantly priced: ours was a neighborhood of apparently poorer workingmen.

I check the tenant directory in the apartment house where our building and several others once stood. Only name I recognize from the old days is the super’s and I ring his bell.

“Who is it?” he says over the intercom. He can’t quite place the name so I say “You know: Georgia, Phil and Little and Big limbo from number thirty before it was blown up.” Now he remembers and he tells me to take the apartments A to L elevator to basement two.

“So how goes?” he says in the basement corridor. “And did you ever find any of your pretty family and your wife’s dad?”

“Nope. They just never turned up or were found. How’s your wife, father-in-law and son?”

“First wife cracked up, got a new one now, and I never had any in-laws or son. You must be mistaking me for another super.”

“How do you like your new building?”

“The walls are like cardboard, most of the plumbing and wiring’s already shot, and it’s either way overheated or drafty and cold. But it’s a more cheerful looking and social place. And there are no rounded hallways and big staircases and high ceilings and such like the old one, which makes it easier for my staff and me to clean. Well, it’s been good talking to you, Mr. Devine. And every bit of luck in your future living, okay?”

I press the elevator button for the lobby, but it takes me to the floor we lived on. Our hallway floor was made of a lively terrazzo and at the end of it was a casement window we threw open on the warmer days. On the walls were forged iron fixtures with light bulbs. This door would be where our thick oak one was if this was still our third floor. Georgia would be home now preparing dinner, and instead of using my keys today I think I’d ring the bell. She’d say “who’s there, please?” and when I’d tell her, though first posing as a special delivery postman with a message about her missing husband or maybe just a grocery boy, she’d open the door and say how unusual it is for me to forget my keys. I’d kiss her lips, ask where’s our son. She’d yell out the window “Jimmy, your father’s home,” or “Dinner’s ready,” or “Come quick — the surprise of your life is here.” The front door would still be open. I’d hear him run upstairs. He could take the elevator of this new building, but like me he likes racing up rounded stairways. But I’m getting confused. Our building was destroyed, this one went up in its place. The same super’s downstairs — that’s true: ten years older and with a different wife, though he said he never had an in-law or son. If Georgia’s on this floor it’s because she moved in some time after the building was constructed, and because of a number of errors, neither of us was told the other was alive, and the super might not have told me she’s here because over the years he’s developed mental blocks about certain people, events and times. I’d knock on the door. I’d knock because I don’t live in this building and never had the keys. She’d open the door. Jimmy would be there and they’d be overjoyed at seeing me, we’d all kiss and hug. I’d tell them how neither my hands and then the most advanced digging equipment could turn up any of their remains. How I stayed in the city for a year, each day canvassing all the police stations for some word of them, till I was told to give up or at least stop pestering the police, so I got a job with a Central Region orchestra, remarried, had two children, Laurel and Rose. Then a revolution started in Central. I was on tour, my wife and children were at home, they too were never found. We had the basement apartment — I’d taken that safeguard of my former super’s just in case there would be another revolution — but this time the building fell on top of it rather than around. The revolution ended as quickly as the last one. One of the sides won. The other side is now in power. It seems there’s going to be another revolution there, which is why I came to this city. I’d heard that because of the extensive death and devastation of the last revolution here, this region had become the most peaceful of the five. She’d tell me her story. While I was searching for her father, she and Jimmy were watching the television special when suddenly all the electricity went and seconds later the building fell apart. Both were quickly hospitalized in different cities and were incoherent for a year till a relief agency brought them together again. “No, that’s not how it happened,” Jimmy would say. “I was in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, when the tap stopped running and then the windows and walls went. Just as I was looking at Mom through the space where the living room wall used to be, the floor under me went also. Then I don’t remember anything but a lot of tumbling, and next thing I know it’s a year later and Mom’s holding me.”

I get on the elevator and press the button for the lobby, but the door opens on a penthouse floor and then on the super dragging a garbage bag in the basement.

“Say, I was hoping you hadn’t left and might drop by again. My wife says I was very rude not asking you in before. She says I forgot how much you lost ten years ago and how much I was personally spared. So come on in now to meet the missus and also for a stiff apologetic drink.”

I go into his apartment. It’s almost palatial compared to his old basement flat. The television set is on. He hands me a drink. A woman comes out of the kitchen carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

“My wife, Gerta. We had two kids, something the first wife didn’t want, but they were snatched up from us during one of those harsh flus. Drink strong enough for you, Phil? And where you planning to bed down for the night if I can ask?”

“In a hotel downtown. I’ll find one, thanks.”

“Lots of nice hotels in town.”

“Most are too expensive for the ordinary man,” Gerta says. “Expensive for us, maybe, but I don’t believe for him. But what do you know about hotels here? You ever stay in one?”

“Our friends have told us about them.”

“She’s right. Visiting friends who come through not so much to see us as a whole slew of people. I forgot about them.”

“I wish you wouldn’t forget that maybe I don’t forget.”

“I’m sorry. It seems all I’m telling people today is I’m sorry, but I am. To both of you for what I didn’t remember and should have done.”

The television program concerns a hospital resident who wants to operate on a woman before she takes her first flight to Earth. This series about a traveling space hospital has been running a long time or perhaps this is a rerun, as I remember my daughters watching it. The patient says “Honestly, Doctor, is it plausible for me to think I’ll ever reach my affianced alive?” The doctor bites his thumb. The super asks me how I like the set’s reception. “Real sharp,” he says. “Like real life, if not clearer.”

“Sets have certainly progressed in the last few years,” Gerta says.

“Remember old lady Longmore, Phil? How she got the first giant color set in the building? Cost her a fortune it did, and she was never found either. All those unmarked graves under this building. All-tolled I’d say a few hundred.”

“Well, that’s not very much for a new set,” Gerta says. “People. I meant people.”

“Lon!”

“Okay. She doesn’t like me talking about it so I won’t. But it has been ten years since it happened, which should be time enough to mention it without someone else getting upset.”

“I’d think so,” I say.

“You see?’” He refills my glass. The doctor says “Everything will go smoothly — I swear.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” the patient says. She’s put on a stretcher, wheeled through the hospital’s many halls. Through a window in the operating room, Earth and passing spaceships and comets can be seen. A nurse fastens a surgical mask over the doctor’s mouth, another nurse slaps a scalpel into his hand. “Gently does it now,” the doctor says, when the screen goes blank. “Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice says. “We are having difficulty with our transmitters, so please stand by,” A sign on the screen says the regularly scheduled program will resume shortly. Court music from another century and country is played. Just as I’m beginning to enjoy a rare flute and double bassoon duet, the music stops and an army officer stares at the audience from behind a desk. “It’s just like our first revolution here,” I say to Lon, “except this guy’s got a pistol in his hand instead of a pointer. And much like my last region’s revolution three years ago, except then there were two officers from different military branches sharing a stand-up mike.”

“This is not a television drama or news documentary,” the officer says. “I am the designated communications spokesman for the national government in power. Minor revolutionary activity has broken out on both sides of the border of this and the Central regions. All noncombatant citizens are ordered to evacuate any outdoor areas and stay in their business, living or shopping quarters till the conflict has ended. Most of the rebels have been defeated, tried and executed, but hundreds more need to be caught and exterminated before the two regions can be considered safe from siege and slaughter and the country at large free from similar outbreaks and bloodshed.”

A second officer appears on the now split screen. He says the president and his military staff will give a report soon from their permanent underground building, and then gives specific instructions to people in this region. “Though there’s little chance the hostilities will increase or spread, go to the bottom of whatever building you’re in or nearest to. Lie flat with your body against a wall till the all-clear sirens are sounded. If the sirens aren’t working, then the signals may also be heard on your radios and TVs. If the radio and TV stations aren’t operating, the all-clear will be delivered over bullhorns by servicemen dispatched to all populated areas.”

A message “Go to your building’s lowest floor” flashes on the screen till it’s replaced by the title and credits of a film dramatization of what people should do from the time they learn of a local armed disturbance till the moment the all-clear signal is made. Actors, carrying portable televisions and supplies, take elevators and stairs to their building’s basement, undo their top buttons, buckles, laces, ties and belts, and lie face-down on the floor with their hands behind their heads—”But as far away from any wall with a window in it,” one child actress stands up to demonstrate and say, “because of the danger of flying glass.”

“If this position becomes unendurable,” an actor says, “try mine as a substitute,” He removes his shoes, empties his pockets of eyeglasses and sharp objects such as pens and keys, crouches down on his shins, crosses his feet, sticks his head between his chest and forearms—”Which in this position should be as huddled up to your knees as you can get them.”

“Looks like we’ve again got no place to go down to,” the super says. “And seems you’ll have to stick it out with us, Phil, unless you think you can make it to a hotel in time.”

“Nonsense,” Gerta says. “Mr. Devine will stay here and think of it as his home till the city’s no longer threatened.”

We hear faint reports of what seem like distant explosions and buildings crumbling to the ground.

“There it is,” the super says. “You hear it once you never forget.

Oh how I’m reminded from the last time when just our simple brownstone went. Remember, Phil? There we were, Gerta — my first wife and I having ourselves a fine old supper, when all of a sudden—”

“I thought it was around lunchtime when you said the first rumblings came.”

“Then a fine old lunch, which in those days were as big as our suppers are today, when all of a sudden — but why don’t I stand you both to another drink?”

“Might as well,” Gerta says. “Mr. Devine — the same?”

Should I run up and get Georgia and Jimmy? Warn them at least, because maybe their television’s on the blink and for some reason they didn’t hear those explosions and cave-ins before, if that’s what those sounds were. I start for the door.

“You don’t want to be leaving now,” Gerta says.

“If he thinks he’s got some better place to go to, let him. He’s experienced and of age.”

“But it can’t be safe out there. In fact, it’s — Mr. Devine, where, you going?”

Outside their apartment people are lying on the floor, pressed against the walls, most in either of the two positions suggested in that film: mothers and fathers lying on their younger children, the elderly and sick with their medicines close-by, piles of food and beverages in communal out-of-the-way corners and in unbreakable containers, several televisions on showing that army communications officer with the anchor persons of the country’s leading network news shows.

“Because of the thousands of skeptical phone calls we’ve received regarding the authenticity of the government’s reports,” the officer says, “I’ve asked these people to appear with me to verify that a revolution is indeed taking place.”

I ring for the elevator. But it’ll be bouncing me back and forth between penthouses and basements if it does come, so I run up the service steps, race down the hallway. I search for my keys. Hang the keys, and I rap on the door and ring the bell. Georgia says through it “Who’s there, please?” and then “You lose your keys a second time today, Phil? That’s so unlike you — really so rare,” and she opens the door.

“Who’s it, hon?” a man says from somewhere inside. “Who’s here with you besides Jimmy?” I ask her. “Beg your pardon, sir?” an elderly woman says.

“Excuse me, Miss, I mean, Ma’am, but I took it on my own to hurry all the tenants to the shelter below. There’s a good chance the entire city’s going to be directly involved in the war.”

“No picnic — we heard,” a man says, coming to the door. “But at least they didn’t throw the bull this time, which — bad as the situation is — is the way we like it. ‘All civilians,’ this spokesman guy said, ‘must take every precaution against antigovernment attack and cooperate with the government in every possible way,’ which is how it should’ve been worded in that last revolt here: full of facts and open and aboveboard.”

“Ready?” the woman says to him. They leave, carrying supplies and a cat in a carrier.

I enter the apartment. It’s much different than the one we had on the third floor. Smaller rooms, many more home appliances, recessed spotlights in the ceilings and linoleum looking like parquetry on the living and dining room floors. From the windows the neighborhood seems calm: no moving vehicles, only a trio of singing drunks walking in the middle of the street, though a mile or so downtown I see lots of smoke and what looks like fire.

A television’s on in the bedroom. The picture focuses in on the president sitting at a long table with about forty military men. “Once again,” he says.

I get a beer and sit in front of the set. I prefer their thick carpet to the single prayer rug we had in our room. The sounds of gunfire, explosions and buildings collapsing get louder. They can’t be coming from the television, as what’s on now is the president introducing his family to us from what he previously described as his noise-and bombproof bunker.

I go to the window. A few foot soldiers are shooting at some civilians in the street. The civilians, who first seemed unarmed, fire back. A tank moves into the street from the avenue and machineguns what I suppose are the revolutionaries. Though maybe the revolutionaries captured the tank and the people in civilian dress are government soldiers made up to look like ordinary pedestrians so they can get closer to the tank to retake it or blow it up. A woman climbs on top of the tank, shoves something through a turret slit and jumps off as the tank explodes. Six tanks enter the block single file. I look back at the television set and see the same scene I just saw happening on the street continue to happen on the screen. The woman and several other people run into an apartment house. The lead tank swivels around and moves after them. I think this must be live or taped coverage of the fighting on in another city or maybe in a section of this city that looks very much like this one, till I recognize the number of this building’s awning and the nymph statue in the middle of the working fountain in front, which I was admiring from inside the lobby just before I rang the super’s bell.

“Georgia,” I shout. “Regina. Hurry up, and bring the kids. There’s the wildest television show on you’ve ever seen. It’s a street battle. Our street. With the tank cannons pointed straight at our lobby doors. Either the government or the revolutionaries have a mobile camera team outside, showing one of the armies destroying its enemies right there live for us on our TV screen.”

“I’ll be right there,” Georgia says.

“In a second, love,” Regina says. They all come into the bedroom. Georgia and Regina sit on opposite sides of me on the floor — Georgia, as she likes to do, with her arm around my waist and fingers tucked into my belt, Regina with her head on my lap. Jimmy and Rose sit in front of us holding up Laurel, who’s too young to stand on her own yet.

“I don’t like this program,” Jimmy says. “Too gory.”

“Neither do I,” I say and I reach over the heads of the children.

But the television’s a remote control unit and I can’t find the little command box to shut it off or lower the sound.

Goodbye to Goodbye

Goodbye,” and she goes. I stay there, holding the gift I was about to give her. Had told her I was giving her. This afternoon, on the phone. I said “I’d like to come over with something for you.” She said “How come?” I said “Your birthday.” She said “You know I don’t like to be reminded of those, but come ahead if you want, around seven, okay?” I came. She answered the door. From the door I could see a man sitting on a couch in the living room. She said “Come in.” I came in, gave her my coat, had the gift in a shopping bag the woman’s store had put it in. “I have a friend here, I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Me? Mind? Don’t be silly — but how good a friend?” “My business,” she said, “do you mind?” “No, of course not, why should I? Because you’re right, it is your business.” We went into the living room. The man got up. “Don’t get up,” I said. “It’s no bother,” he said. “How do you do? Mike Sliven,” and he stuck out his hand. “Jules Dorsey,” and I stuck out mine. “Like a drink, Jules?” she said, as we shook hands, and I said “Yes, what do you have?” “Beer, wine, a little brandy, but I’d like to save that if you don’t mind.” “Why should I mind? Though something hard is what I think I’d like. Beer.” “Light or dark?” she said. “Whatever you have most of,” I said. “I have six-packs of both.” “Then…dark,” I said. “I feel like a dark. Suddenly I feel very dark. Only kidding, of course,” I said to Mike and then turned to her so she’d also see I was only kidding. She went to the kitchen. Mike said “Now I remember your name. Arlene’s spoken of you.” “I’m sure she had only the very best things to say of me too.” “She did and she didn’t,” he said, “but you’re kidding again, no doubt,” “Oh, I’m kidding, all right, or maybe I’m not. Say, who the hell are you anyway and what the hell you doing here? I thought Arlene was still only seeing me,” and I grabbed him off the couch. He was much bigger than I, but didn’t protest. “Where’s your coat and hat?” I said and he said “I didn’t come with a hat and my coat’s over there, in the closet.” “Then we’re going to get it and you’re going to leave with it,” I clutched his elbow and started walking him to the closet. Arlene came into the living room and said “Jules, what are you doing? — and where are you going, Mike?” “I think out,” he said. “Out,” I said. “I came over to give you a gift and take you to dinner for your birthday and later to spend the night with you here or at my place or even at a great hotel if you wish, and goddamnit that’s what I’m going to do,” “What is it with you, Jules? — I’ve never heard you talk like that before.” “Do you mind?” I said. “No, I kind of like it. And Mike. Are you going to leave when someone tells you to, just like that?” “I think I have to,” he said, “since if there’s one thing I don’t like to do in life it’s to get into or even put up a fight, especially when I see there’s no chance of winning it.” I opened the closet. He got his coat. I opened the front door and he left. I locked the door. Bolted it, just in case he already had the keys. Then I turned around. Arlene was standing in the living room holding my glass of beer. She came into the foyer with it. I didn’t move, just let her come. “You still want this?” she said. “No, the cognac,” I said. “It’s brandy but good imported brandy,” “Then the brandy,” I said. “How do you want it?” “With ice.” “Coming right up,” and she went back to the kitchen. I followed her. She was reaching for the brandy on a cupboard shelf above her, had her back to me. I got up behind her — she didn’t seem to know I was there — put my arms around her, pressed into her. She turned her head around, kissed me. We kissed. I started to undress her right there.

That’s not the way it happened, of course. The way it happened was like this. I did come over with a gift, it wasn’t her birthday, a man named Mike was there when I thought she’d be alone, she said he was a good friend, “in fact, the man I’m sleeping with now,” “Oh,” I said. “Well, I still have this gift for you so you might as well take it,” She said “Really, it wouldn’t be fair.” Mike came into the foyer, introduced himself. “Mike Ivory,” he said. “Jules Dorsey,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t stay.” “No, Jules, come in and have a drink. What’ll you have?” “What do you got?” I said. “I don’t know. What do we have?” he said to Arlene. She said “Beer — light and dark — wine — red and white — scotch, vodka, rye, bourbon, gin, brandy and I think a little of that cognac left, and all the mixers to go with them, besides other nonalcoholic stuff if you’re suddenly into that.” “Come on, Jules drinks his share,” Mike said, “or at least will with us here.” “I drink, all right,” I said, “though not that much. But tonight I’d like a double of that cognac you said you have, if you’ve enough for a double.” “Why not — right, Arlene? Want me to get it?” “It’s okay, I’ll get it,” she said, “but what’s a double?” “Just double whatever you normally pour,” he said. “If there’s so little in the bottle that you don’t have enough to double what you normally pour, empty the whole thing in his glass.” “I just usually pour, I don’t know how much,” she said. “So do it that way,” he said, “but double it.” “Fill half a regular juice glass,” I said, “and then put some ice in it, if you don’t mind?” “Ice in one of the best cognacs there is?” he said. “No way, sir. Sorry.” “Then make it your worst cognac,” I said, “but ice in it, please. I feel like a cognac and I feel like a double and I feel like I want that double cognac ice-cold.” “Sorry — really,” he said. “We only have one cognac and it’s one of the rarest there is. Gin, vodka, bourbon, scotch, even the beer, light or dark, I’ll put ice in for you, and the wine, either one, too. But not that cognac or even the brandy. They’re both too good. I’m telling you the truth when I say I couldn’t sleep right tonight if I knew I was instrumental or helpful in any way or even allowed it, just stood by and allowed ice in cognac or brandy when I knew just by saying something I might be able to stop it.” “Listen, you,” I said and grabbed his neck with one hand. He swung at me. I ducked and hit him in the stomach, he fell forward and I clipped him on the back. He went down. I put my foot under his chest and nudged him with it and he turned himself over on his back. I looked at Arlene. Her hands covered her eyes but she seemed to be peeking through the finger cracks. I said to Mike “Probably Arlene won’t like this but I’m going to give you to ten to get your coat and hat and—” “I didn’t come with a coat and hat,” he said. “Then ten just to get the hell out of here.” “Jules, this is awful,” Arlene said, not looking alarmed or frightened or really upset or anything like that. “I don’t care. It’s what I suddenly felt like doing even if I didn’t feel that right about doing it so that’s what I did. Now get, buddy,” I said to Mike. “One, two, three…” He got up, held his stomach as he went to the front door. By the count of eight he was out of the apartment. She said “I hate when anyone does that to people, but I think deep inside I loved it when you did it to him. Not because it was Mike. He’s very nice. It’s just that you were, well — I’ve never seen you like that before. I don’t know what that makes me, but come here, you rat.” I came to her. She mussed my hair, with her other hand slipped off one and then the other of her shoes. “Shall we do it here or in the bedroom?” “Here,” I said, “or the opening part of it, but first let me lock the front door.”

That’s not the way it happened either. It happened like this. Arlene’s my wife. We’ve been married for three years. We lived together for two years before that. We have a nine-month-old son. During dinner Arlene said she wanted a divorce. Our son was asleep in his room. I’d just put the main dish and side courses on the table. I dropped my fork. I was in what could be called a state of shock. I don’t like that term but for now it’ll have to do. Figuratively and maybe in some way literally — technically, scientifically — I was in a state of shock. I didn’t move for I don’t know how long. A minute, two, three. Just stared at my fork on my plate. Till the moment she told me this I thought that though we had some problems in our marriage, they were manageable and correctable and not untypical and that we were serious at working them out. All in all I felt we were very compatible in most ways and that the marriage was a successful one and getting better all the time. Arlene had said it several times — many times — too. About once a month she used to tell me that she loved me and loved being married to me, and about once a month, and not just after she told me this, I’d tell her the same thing. I meant it and felt she meant it. I had no reason to believe she didn’t mean it. This is the truth. Sometimes out of the blue she’d say “I love you, Jules.” Sometimes I’d answer “You do?” and she’d say “Truly love you.”

We could be in a taxi and she’d turn to me and say it. Or walking to a movie theater or in front of a theater during the intermission of a play and she’d break off whatever either of us was saying to say it. At that dinner, which I cooked — it was a good dinner, a chicken dish, rice cooked to perfection — something she taught me how to do — a baked zuccini dish, a great salad, a good bottle of wine, crabmeat cocktail to begin with, two drinks with cheese on crackers before we sat down, we had made love the previous night and we both said later on that it was one of the best acts of lovemaking we’d ever had, our son was wonderful and we loved being parents though admitted it was tough and tiring at times, both of us were making a pretty good income for the first time in our marriage so as a family we were financially sound, nothing was wrong or just about nothing, everything or just about everything was right, so that’s why I say I was suddenly in a state of shock. “You want a divorce?” I finally said after she said “So what do you have to say about what I said before?” “Yes,” she said, “a divorce.” “Whatever for?” “Because I don’t love you anymore,” she said. “But just last week or the week before that you said you loved me more than you ever have, or as much as you ever have, you said.” “I was lying.” “You wouldn’t lie about something like that.” “I’m telling you, I was lying,” she said. “Why don’t you love me anymore?” “Because I love someone else.” “You love someone else?” “That’s what I said, I love someone else.” “Since when?” I said. “Since months.” “And you stopped loving me the minute you started loving him?” “No, a couple of months earlier.” “Why?” “I don’t know. I asked myself the same thing lots of times and all I could come up with was that I felt rather than knew why. You fall in, you fall out. You fall out, you fall in. Though this time I’m sure I’ve fallen in forever, since the feeling has never been stronger.” “I can’t believe it,” I said. “Believe it. I’ve been having the most intense affair possible with a man I met at work — someone you don’t know — and he’s married but will get a divorce to be with me, just as I’m going to get a divorce to be with him.” “But the children, I mean the child,” I said. “We’ll work it out. We were always good at working things out in the past that most other couples never could, and we’ll work this out too. I’ll take Kenneth for the time being and when he’s completely weaned you can have him whenever you like as long as you like so long as it doesn’t disrupt his life too much.” “But just leaving me, divorcing me, breaking up this family, will disrupt his life,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to, I in fact tried not to, but the force of the feeling I have for this man and he for me—” “What’s his name?” “What’s the difference?” “Just tell me his name? Maybe I do know him.” “Even if you did, which you don’t, nothing you could do or say—” “His name, please, his name? I just want to know what and whom I’m up against.” “What could you know by just his name? If it was Butch or Spike or Mike, would it make you feel more or less confident that I’m not very much in love with him and that I’m not going to divorce you to marry him?” “Is it Mike?” “It isn’t, but you know that wasn’t my point. — All right, it is Mike,” when I continued to stare at her as if I’d caught her fibbing, “but so what? Mickey, Michael or Mike, it’s just a given name’” “Mike what?” I said. “Now that’s enough, Jules. I don’t want you starting trouble.” “I won’t start anything. I just want to know the man’s full name. That way I can begin saying to myself you’re leaving and divorcing me and breaking up our family for Mike So-and-So and not just a shadow. I’m not sure why, but it’ll make it seem realer to me and so will be much easier to workout in my head.” “Spiniker,” she said. “Mike Spiniker’” “With an ‘i,’ ‘a’ or ‘e’ or even a ‘u’ on the second half of his last name?” “Now you’re going too far,” she said. “Anyway, good — I have enough. I got up, got the phonebook off the phone stand in the living room. “What are you doing?” she said. “Can’t be too many Mike Spinikers in the book with an ‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘u’ or second ‘i.’” I looked up his name. “One, a Michael, with two i’s, on Third Avenue.” I dialed him. “Stop that,” she said. “He lives in another city, commutes here.” A woman answered. “Is Michael Spiniker in?” I said. “Who’s speaking?” the woman said. “Lionel Messer. I’m his stocks and bonds man.” “Mike has stocks and bonds? That’s news to me.” “He has a huge portfolio of them and I’ve something very urgent to tell him about them if he doesn’t want to go broke by midnight tonight.” “I’ll get him, hold on.” She put down the phone. “Stop wasting your time,” Arlene said on the bedroom extension. “Hang up. It can’t be him. I’m telling you, he lives fifty miles from here.” “Hey what’s this about stocks and bonds?” Mike said. “Hello, Mr. Spiniker. Do you know Arlene Dorsey? Arlene Chernoff Dorsey — she goes professionally by Chernoff.” “Sure I do. We work in the same office building. But anything wrong? Because I thought this was about some stocks and bonds I don’t have.” “You seem very concerned about Ms. Chernoff. Are you?” “Sure I’m concerned. By your tone, who wouldn’t be? What’s happened?” “You sound as if you’re in love with Ms. Chernoff, Mr. Spiniker. Are you?” “Listen, who is this? And what kind of jerky call is this? You either dialed the wrong Spiniker or you’re crazy and not making any sense, but I’ll have to hang up.” “This is her husband, wise guy, and you better stop seeing her or I’m going to break your neck with my bare hands. If that doesn’t work, I’ll put a bullet through your broken neck. I have the means. And I don’t just mean a weapon or two or people to do it for me — I’ll do it gladly myself. I can. I have. Now do you read me?” “I read you, brother. Okay, fine. You have the right number and you’re not crazy and you’re probably right on target in everything you said, so my deepest apologies for getting excited at you. But let’s say there must be two Michael Spinikers in this city, because I have no stocks and bonds broker and after what you told me, I don’t ever plan to do anything with my money but keep it in the bank, okay?” “Got you,” I said and hung up. Arlene came running back to the living room. “You’d do that for me? You’d really go that far?” “I wasn’t just threatening for effect or because I knew you were on the line. The way I see our marriage is that until it’s clearly impossible to stay together, we’re stuck together for life. Of course I only feel this way because of the kid.” “I bet. You know, awful as this must seem about me, I think my feelings have come around another hundred and eighty degrees. What a husband I now realize I have. And what a weakling and pig that guy was for taking it the way he did, even if you weren’t all bluff, after all he swore the other day about how he’d stand with me against you and his wife when it finally came down to this. I’m sorry, Jules. So sorry, I want to beat my brains in against this chair. If my saying I love you very much isn’t enough, what else can I say or do to prove what I just said is true and that, I never want to stop being married to you?” “You can take my clothes off and carry me to bed.” “Will do if I can.” She put her arms around my waist and tried to lift me. “Oof, what a load. Instead of carrying you, which I no can do, what would you say to my just taking your clothes off and we do whatever you want us to right here on the floor or couch?” “Fine by me,” I said and she grabbed my shirt by the two collar ends and tore it off me.

That’s ridiculous also and never happened. Why not say what really did happen and be done with it? It was all very simple and fast. We were eating dinner when she said she was leaving me for a man named Mike. We had no child, we’d been married for eight years. I said I wouldn’t try to stop her. I could see it’d be useless and I did only want her to be happy. If she couldn’t be happy with me, I was glad she was with someone she could be happy with. She said she was thankful I was taking it so well and in such a decent civilized way. I asked about him. She said he worked in a law office on the same floor as hers. They’d been carrying on for six months. He was divorced, had two children. That night Arlene and I slept in separate rooms for the first time in our marriage, or for the first time when one of us wasn’t very angry at the other or wasn’t so ill that he or she needed to sleep alone. We just thought it best to sleep separately till she moved out. They rented a new apartment together the following month. I helped her pack and bring her belongings to the van she rented and drove. I told her I wouldn’t mind if Mike came and helped, since she had several vanfuls of stuff to move. She said she felt I shouldn’t meet him till much later on: when they were married, perhaps; maybe a year into their marriage when I could come by with my new woman who she said she knew I’d have by then. “You’ll be as much in love with someone else in a few months as I am now with Mike.” I said “I hope you’re right. It’ll certainly be what I want.” So she was gone. I thought I was taking it well but I wasn’t. I couldn’t take it, in fact. Every night I’d get drunk thinking about her. I read her old adoring notes and letters to me and looked at her photos and would slam the wall or table with my fists and shout and cry. I couldn’t stand thinking of her being with another man, kissing him, whispering to him, making love with him, doing all those private things with him, confiding to him, telling him what happened to her at the store that day, asking him if he’d like to see such and such movie or play that week, meeting him for lunch, going away with him some weekend, visiting friends, maybe even planning to have a child. It also distressed me that they were in the same profession. I knew that’d make them even closer, all those professional matters they could discuss and look up and share. A month after she left me I showed up in front of their office building at around the time I knew they’d be finished for the day. They walked out of the building fifteen minutes later, holding hands, chatting animatedly. I had a wrench with me. I pulled it out of my jacket, ran up to him and screamed “Meet Jules, her husband, you bastard,” and hit him in the hand he threw up to protect his head from the wrench. He grabbed that hand, turned to run and I hit him in the back of the head with the wrench. He went down. I kept yelling “I’ll never let her be with anyone else, you bastard, never. I love her too much. I’ll love her forever,” and swung the wrench over his face but didn’t hit him again. The police came. I didn’t try to get away. I don’t know what Arlene was doing at the time. I was arrested. Mike was taken away in an ambulance. Later he pressed charges against me. I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years. That means I’ll serve around three and a half years if I don’t cause any trouble in prison. Arlene visits me every day she’s allowed to and stays the maximum time. It’s six hours by bus for her round trip but she says she doesn’t mind. Twice in my first half year here we were allowed to walk around the prison garden for an hour. She broke off with Mike and he’s already moved in with another woman. “So much for his professed eternal devotion,” Arlene said, “not that I would want it now.” She’s said several times that she’ll never again be with another man but me. She hated my hitting Mike with the wrench, but sees now it was probably the only way I could ever get through to her how much I loved her and wanted to get her back. “In some oddball way,” she said, “it made me fall for you all over again. Maybe also because what I did and the way I did it forced you to lose control and try to kill him and I’m trying to make up for that too. But it’ll all be different from now on. I can’t wait to be back home with you, my arms around you, in bed with you, I can’t wait.” At certain designated spots in the garden we’re allowed to hug and kiss for a half-minute, which we always did past the time limit till one of the guards ordered us to stop.

That’s not it. This is it. There wasn’t a wrench. There is a Mike.

My wife fell in love with him and told me this at breakfast, not dinner. She said she didn’t want to tell me at night because she wanted to give me plenty of time to adjust to it before I went to bed and also time for her to get her things out of the apartment and move in with a friend. We have no child. We tried for a while but couldn’t. Then I had a corrective operation and we could have a child, but she said the marriage wasn’t as good as it used to be and she wanted to be sure it was a very good marriage before we had a child. That was three years ago. She’s had several affairs since then. She told me about them while she was having them. I didn’t like her having them but put up with it because I didn’t want her to leave me. I don’t know why I mentioned anything about a gift. Maybe because her birthday’s in two weeks and I’ve been thinking recently about what to get her. A bracelet, I thought. But that’s out. This morning she said she realizes this is the third or fourth serious affair she’s had in three years. She’s had one or two others but they were quick and not so serious. She doesn’t want to continue having affairs while she’s married or at least still living with me. It isn’t fair to me, she said. She also said I shouldn’t put up with it and shouldn’t have in the past. Not that if I had told her to stop she would have, she said. But I should tell her to get the hell out of the house and should have two to three years ago. Since I won’t, she’ll have to leave me. That means divorce, she said. The marriage isn’t working out. What’s she talking about? she said. The marriage is so bad that she doesn’t think it’ll ever work out — it never will, that’s all, never. And because she wants to have children, maybe two, maybe three, but with someone she’s very much in love with, she’ll have to end our marriage and eventually get married to someone else. Maybe it’ll be with Mike but she doubts it. He’s married, but about to separate from his wife, and has indicated he never wants to marry again. He also has two children from a previous marriage and has expressed no interest in having more. Anyway, she said, it’s fairer if I stay here and she goes, since she’s the one breaking up the marriage. Of course, if I want to leave, she said, then she’ll be more than happy to stay, since it’s a great apartment and one she can afford and she’ll never be able to get anything like it at twice the rent. “If you don’t mind,” I said, “I think I’d like to keep the apartment. Losing you and also having to find a new place might be a little too much for me.” “I don’t mind,” she said, “why should I mind? I already said the apartment’s yours if you want. So, do you mind if I start to pack up now to go?” “No, go right ahead.

I’d love for you to stay forever, naturally, but what could I do to stop you from going? Nothing, I guess, right?” “Right.” She went to the bedroom. I brought the dishes into the kitchen, washed them, sat down at the small table there and looked at the river. She came into the living room an hour later with two suitcases and a duffel bag. “This ought to do it for now,” she said. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll arrange with a friend to come by for the rest of my stuff some other time.” “Sure,” I said. “You moving in with this Mike?” “No, I told you, he’s married, still living with his wife. I’ll be staying with Elena for now. If you want to reach me for anything, you can get me there or at work. You have her number?” “I can look it up.” “But you won’t call me at either place for very personal reasons, will you? Such as saying how much you miss me or things like that and you want me back? Because I’ve definitely made up my mind, Jules. The marriage is finished.” “I understand that. I mean, I don’t understand why it’s so definitely finished, but I do understand that you definitely feel it is. But I can’t make just one more pitch? There’s nothing I can do or say or promise to help you change your mind?” “Nothing.” “Then goodbye,” I said. “I’ll miss you terribly. I love you tremendously. I’ll be as sad as any man can be over a thing like this for I don’t know how long. But that’s my problem, not yours, I guess, and eventually I’ll work it out.” “I’m glad you’re taking it like this. Not that you’ll be sad — I don’t want you to be like that — but at least that you see the situation for what it is and that in the long run you’ll be able to handle it. Because it’ll make it much easier — it already is — for both of us. You’ll see. You’ll get over me before you know it.” “Not on your life,” I said. “Yes you will.” “I’m telling you. Never.” “No, I know you will. Goodbye.” She opened the door, put the suitcases right outside it, said “I’ll be back for these in a minute,” and carried the duffel bag downstairs. “I’ll help you with the suitcases,” I yelled down the stairs. “No need to.” she said. “It’d actually be better if you closed the door so we won’t have to say goodbye again.” I shut the door.

Come on a Coming

So come on up,” and I say “Okay” and start climbing. But not enough what for my feet and hands? Places, ledges, perches, niches, nooks, holes or whatever they’re called to put my feet in or on and my hands to get a good grip on to climb up more than eight to ten feet on this wall. My hands are holding on but I can feel them about to slide off.

“I can’t make it up this way,” and one of them says “Sure you can, don’t give up now. Climb. All you got to do is climb.”

I try to but can’t find anything higher to stick my foot in or on or anything also for my hands to hold on.

“No, I can’t make it up another inch,” and one of them says “Then drop down and we’ll throw you a rope.”

“I might break an ankle or something if I drop,” and one of them says “From that height? Don’t be a baby. Just drop.”

I drop, landing on both feet and hurting one around the ankle.

“I knew I shouldn’t have,” and one of them says “Shouldn’t have what? What happened, you hurt your foot?”

“Not the whole foot, just the ankle. What I said before. What I told myself not to. From now on I’ll stick to taking my own advice.”

“Could be you didn’t fall right. But watch it — here it comes,” and the rope drops from the top of the wall to the ground.

I pull on the rope. Seems a bit slack. “You sure you have it real tight up there — I mean, where it won’t fall down when I climb? Secure, I mean.”

“Secure, sure — you think we’d take someone’s life in our hands?”

I pull on it again. It still feels slack and I say “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel that secure. What do you have it tied around?”

“We have it around this and that and something else. Not only do we have it secure but this rope’s the best you can get for climbing. You coming or not, for if not we’ll pull up the rope and leave.”

“But it’s secure,” and one of them says “Secure as it’ll ever be. I’m telling you, it’s taut.”

I grab hold of the rope with both hands. I’ve climbed ropes before. In high school: not very well but it was a start. In college, where we still had to take, at least in my college, four physical science courses they called them then to graduate. One of those courses had rope climbing in it. Twenty feet to the ceiling I think we had to climb. Maybe thirty, because it was in the same gym the college basketball team played in — and then with our feet wrapped around the rope in some way, we slid down. I remember the physical science teacher saying when I got down “You ought to be a genie.” I remember saying to him—

“Hey, you coming or not? We only have so much time.” “Coming, coming,” and I start climbing. It all comes back to me as I hoped it would. As my hands pull, my feet and knees push. Something like that. I’m about fifteen feet up when the rope suddenly feels loose in my hands and I yell “It’s coming loose,” and someone on top says “Where? What?” and just then the rope comes off whatever it was around above and I fall.

I come down hard. This time I know I sprained a foot, maybe broke one. It certainly hurts.

“Didn’t I tell you to check the rope?” and someone says “You didn’t say to check it. You asked if it was secure and we said it was. Anyway, we did check it. You must have been too heavy for it. What do you weigh?”

“You said that was the best rope around for climbing, so what does it matter what I weigh? If I weighed three hundred pounds it should’ve been able to hold me.”

“You weigh three hundred pounds?” and I say “No, but that’s not the point.”

“It would be if you weighed that much. This rope might be the best, but it only holds till around two-fifty, maybe two seventy-five. What do you weigh?”

“Less than two hundred, way less. Oh, forget it. I’ll never be able to get up there no matter what I do, and certainly not with a broken or sprained ankle, so I’ll be seeing you all.”

“Sure, give up. That’s what you do. That’s what almost all you guys who want to come over do, though it hardly seems the attitude to take if you’re sincere about being in here. Look, if you want, we can throw you a rope ladder.”

“Rope ladder attached to what? No thanks. You have a regular ladder — wooden, aluminum? But wait. What do you mean all us guys? That rope wasn’t my fault but yours. What were you giving me, some kind of test?”

“No. And I was only talking for all of us here about hundreds like you. ‘I want to come up.’ ‘I want to be over.’ ‘I want to be in there,’ and so on, right? But give them two good shots at it and when they fail for their own reasons—”.

“My own reasons?”

“—then that’s it, they give up, but don’t you worry about it, because when they get home they’ll complain we’re keeping them out, we don’t want them in, we’re only playing with them, and so on, right? You wait and see. You’ll be just like the others.”

“Okay, throw over the rope ladder. But secure it, will you?” and he says “Don’t worry, it’ll be secure. We want you here. We’ve nothing against you or the others. But we can’t just let everyone in, can we? People who don’t even want to make an effort? Believe me, you get in, you’ll feel just like us. So make the effort. Climb. We might be serious but we don’t play tricks,” and he throws the rope ladder down.

I pull on it. It’s tight. “It’s tight,” and one of them says “You mean good and tight. Start climbing.”

“Because of my foot it might take me a little longer than usual, but I’m on my way. You have someone to fix a foot there?”

“We have everything. Someone to fix a foot, someone to make a new foot if you want. Anything you want with feet, arms, head — any part or anyone thing in the world. Maybe the one thing we haven’t got so much of right now, or at least for you, is time, so come on.”

“Right,” and I start climbing. The foot really hurts, but what they said makes it seem worth the pain. Once on top they’ll probably give me something to ease it, and it also should be much easier getting down the other side. Who know how they work it? Maybe they’ve a sliding pond. Or more rope ladders or wooden ladders or steps, even. Probably steps. They take good care of themselves. They have the means and ingenuity. Whatever it is, they got. Probably steps or maybe even some motorized car. An elevator or funicular or seat car or whatever it’s called that’s used in skiing to go up and down a mountain — a chair lift. Anyway, they want me now. Want me? I’ll say they’re still interested in having me, but if I don’t make it now, then that’ll be the end of their interest for a while. It first came in the mail. “You’re invited,” it said. To such and such place, “which you’ll have to get out to on your own. We know you want to be with us and will be excited at receiving this. Now we’re inviting you to be with us. It won’t be easy for you, but we also don’t think it’ll be that hard. In other words, you’ve more than proven to us because of your past deeds, industry, sincerity, perseverance and honesty that you’re the kind of material we want and could even use here, so come on a coming.” That’s what the letter said. “Come on a coming. We’ll be waiting,” and it gave the directions, time and date and said to wear my work clothes. So I came. When I got here and looked around and didn’t see anyone or anything but this wall, one of them said from on top of it “You there — up here.” “Where’s the door?” and one of them said “Door? You have to climb up, old friend, up up up.” “With what?” and someone else said “Your hands.” I tried, couldn’t make it. Tried the rope, couldn’t make it. So now I’m climbing the ladder. Seems easy enough despite the ankle pain. They didn’t make it that tough for me. Probably some sort of initiation, those first two. Though I just about knew I couldn’t make it by hand or rope. I went through both figuring that falling ten to fifteen feet each time would prove even more to them how sincere and persevering and so on I am. It worked. I’m not sure that’s how I felt those two times, but they have given me a third chance and this ladder is relatively easy to climb.

The strut — no, what’s it called? — the ring, the rung, though maybe also the strut, or even the crosspiece, beneath my bottom foot feels loose. I climb a step higher and the next strut, rung or crosspiece is loose, so now both feet are on loose crosspieces, I’ll say. I climb a step higher and that one splits in two, so now one foot’s on a loose crosspiece and the other’s dangling in the air. I’m twenty feet up and have about fifteen feet to go and the crosspiece in my top hand is loose too. I climb a step higher and the crosspiece above the broken crosspiece splits in two and the next crosspiece my top hand grabs is loose, so now I’m dangling there, two feet in the air, hands holding on to two loose crosspieces I’m sure are going to split, and I don’t know what to do.

“Help, please, the ladder crosspieces are breaking or coming loose,” and someone yells “Hey, what’s happening down there? We know you’ve a bad ankle or two, even a broken one, but we got to get down our side of this thing one of these days too.”

“Do something, I’m about to fall,” and one of them says “Fall?

From where you are? You’ll be hurt. Look, you’ve fewer feet to climb up than down, so I’d advise, and I think I can say this for everyone here — yes, they’re all saying I can — that you just come on a coming, because there’s nothing else we can do for you now.”

“You can quickly pull the ladder up,” and one of them says “Okay, good idea, that’s what we’ll do, that’s really thinking, sorry we didn’t come up with the idea ourselves,” when the crosspieces I’m holding split in two and I fall to the ground, my feet breaking every crosspiece along the way.

“Hey down there, how do you feel?”

I’m lying on the ground, hurting all over, and for all I know I was out for a few seconds or even minutes.

“Hey, hello down there, I said how do you feel? Any broken bones? You alive? Answer us. Anything we can do?”

“I think I definitely broke a foot this time and I think also my arm which I landed on. Yeah, it’s limp, won’t move. What kind of ladder did you give me?”

“The best kind,” and I say “If it was the best it would’ve had secure crosspieces or rungs or whatever you call those damn bars.”

“Both will do. In fact, all three are good. And they were secure till you started going through them. How much you say you weigh? Less than two hundred? Don’t try to fool us. Anyway, you can’t do anything. Okay, you followed our directions and got yourself out here, but what have you done since? You can’t scale a wall on your own. You don’t know how to use a rope. We give you a perfectly good rope ladder a child could climb, a person twice or even three times your age could climb—”

“Nobody could be three times my age. And anyone twice my age who could climb it would have to be in extraordinary shape and have a ladder whose bars are strong. But the bars on my ladder were weak, once I got up around twenty-five feet—”

“Twenty at the most. Don’t exaggerate.”

“Twenty then. But after I got up that high, all the bars were either very loose or splitting the second I stepped on them, and I didn’t step on them hard, nor pull on them hard either. That ladder was defective.”

“If it wasn’t, it certainly is now. Look, I’m sorry, we like you and you’re a nice guy and all that — sincere too, which I think is what we said in our invite to you. And you come with good recommendations, though maybe in the future we’ll have to check everyone’s recommendations a little deeper, seeing what yours came to. But it just doesn’t seem you really want to be in here.”

“What are you talking about — I do.”

“You still do?” and I say “Sure, why not? I heard great things about the place, and it’d be a terrific achievement for me and I think a big improvement over what I have now. So yes, I absolutely still do.”

“Okay, then you’re in. We only wanted to see how much you’d take before you quit. But it doesn’t seem anything’s going to break you, which is just the kind of material we want and need, so come on in. Door into here might look like part of the wall from where you are. But if you look close about ten feet to your left, you’ll see it and a latch to pull, which will let you in easier than any other way. Congratulations.”

“You mean it?” and one of them says “Mean every word we just said,” and I say “Why thanks,” I get up, fall, my right foot is useless for the time being, and I say “You sure you have someone to fix a broken, or if that seems like an exaggeration, then a badly sprained foot and arm?” and someone says “Everything, just like we said. We have every kind of doctor and profession and healing art and all the other disciplines and arts and whatever you want and the very very best. But show us again how much you want to come in, by not having us come out to get you, though if you’re really that hurt, we will.”

“I’ll show you, don’t you worry,” and I crawl to the place they said the door was, but don’t see any outline of one or a latch. “Say, you said ten or so feet to my left, correct? So I’m here, looking at nine and eleven feet to my left also, and I don’t see any kind of anything that looks like a door or a latch, handle, lever, button or whatever it might be to open it.”

Nobody answers. I can’t see anyone on top, maybe because I’m so close to the wall, and I say “Any of you still up there?” Nobody answers. I crawl around, cover every inch of the wall I can see from one to twenty feet to the left and right from where I fell, but always crawling because of my broken foot, and I’m sure it’s broken. Crawling’s made even more difficult because of what I’m also sure is a broken arm, but there’s no latch, door seam, nothing but a wall.

“Say, I don’t see anything resembling what you said would be here, so give me some more instructions how to get in, though don’t forget to take into consideration my bad foot and arm.”

I yell and look for another half-hour. By this time it’s dark. I wouldn’t try to make it to the road to get the bus back the way I am, so I just sit against the wall, roll down the sleeves of my sweater and shirt, and to help keep out the cold, roll my socks up far as they’ll go and button the top shirt button and buttons of my shirt cuffs. In the morning I should probably be rested and strong enough to not only yell to those people inside what I think of them, but to limp or just crawl to the bus stop.

The Package Store

Larry said “Rose, listen, I’ve decided, something very important — we have to get out of the store. We can’t take it anymore. For once we have to do something like this for ourselves.”

Rose said “Go back to sleep. It’s too early. It’s still dark. The birds aren’t even chirping. I’m not kidding, Larry. I’m too tired to talk.”

“Okay, but tomorrow we’ll have to talk about it. Today — later this morning I mean. We have to get out of that store. Sell it for what we can get. Hopefully we can sell it for something high. The price. I’m also confused now because I’m sleepy, but you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. But you can’t be sleepier than I. You woke me up. Worse, you’re keeping me up. Sell it for high, sell it for low — right now I don’t care but I’m sure tomorrow I will. But that’s it for now — no poking me awake again — all right?”

“For now, maybe, but not later today. I’ve been lying here thinking about it for hours.”

“I’m sleeping, Larry. I’m fast asleep, or would be.”

Later that morning when they were dressing, Larry said “Remember what I spoke to you about the store and our lives earlier before?”

“No, reacquaint me.”

“You’d have to remember, but I said I wanted us to sell the store and I don’t know what we’d do next, but that we definitely have to start looking out for ourselves.”

“Now I remember. Yes, I heard you. I thought you forgot that nonsense by the time you woke up. Hurry up dressing or you won’t have time for breakfast.”

“I didn’t forget it. And this is way more important than breakfast. I meant it and I mean it now. We have to sell out. We already had too many robberies. The security guards we get are only good against petty thieves with their clubs but can do nothing against guns. We can’t take any more of this at our age. Everyone who comes in but a few college kids and their professors look like robbers to us and I bet half of them are. I get sick of it every day till closing and half the nights I can’t sleep. I’m sick of it for you and just as sick of it for me. I’d kill myself if someone shot you. But that’s what could happen. One day someone will come in with a gun and that time we won’t be so lucky. He won’t just say ‘Stick ‘em up, shut your mouths, give me all your money.’ He’ll say nothing but bam — bam with his gun and take our money and leave us and the guard dead on the floor.”

“So you’re that worried?” Rose said.

“I’m that worried, for you and me and all the innocent bystanders.”

“What about if we also got an attack dog?”

“They’d kill the dog just as fast and probably first.”

“Then all right, we’ll go ahead like your brother once suggested and get that glass partition separating us from the customers — why not?”

“I don’t want any partition. I don’t want to be separated. I don’t like having to use a guard either, but that I had to accept. What I want is a store where I can talk to my customers more. Where I’m a lighthearted person, not someone afraid. I want a happy store like it used to be. Where the customers come in and talk to us awhile if they have time, and then ask for what they want or just take it out of the cooler or off the shelves, and where I gladly ring up whatever it is and they give me money or even a check like we used to accept when people didn’t cheat us on them every day. And where they’d say goodbye and we’d say goodbye and if their packages are too heavy, I gladly run to the door to hold it open for them till they get outside, though without my looking right and left on the sidewalk to see which thief’s going to come in next.”

“That kind of business you won’t find anymore in this city and maybe not even in the state. Maybe only in a little village in Spain you’ll find it, or one in Japan, or in all of Japan for all I know, but too many people just don’t behave that kind of way in stores anymore. Besides, we have it pretty good. Even behind bulletproof glass, God help us from what it’ll cost us, we’ll have a good business. You can still smile behind glass, can’t you? And maybe even smile more so now because you’ll feel safe behind there and because our insurance rates for the store and our lives will go down once we put in that glass.”

“And then go right up again,” Larry said, “because the thieves will manage to steal from us behind that glass too. Who do you think we’re dealing with, unsophisticated amateurs? They’ll inject gas or some inflammable stuff through the exchange hole in the glass and then threaten to throw a lit match in after the gas if we don’t throw all our money out. I’ve heard how it’s done. I’ve read it to you from the papers myself, and not just to package stores. Groceries. Butcher shops. Cleaning stores.”

“Cleaning stores can’t have that glass. Not for the big dry-cleaned clothes.”

“They. do. One up on Greenmount. A special turnaround glass carousel or whatever you want to call it that turns the cleaned clothes around on their hangers to the customer once the customer’s paid the bill. Look, we just can’t manage it anymore. Partitions, guard dogs or not, if we don’t get shot at in this store inside of a year the way things are going in this city and have already happened to us, we should consider ourselves fortunate.”

“Tell me more over breakfast. It’s not that I’m not concerned. But I’m hungry, you have to be too, and if we fritter away one more minute in here, we’ll be opening the store late.”

“I don’t want to open at all.”

“Don’t talk silly.” She raised her finger to him. “And I’m telling you this in all seriousness. Talking about it and maybe making a compromise on it is one thing, but not coming to the store and leaving me there alone because you suddenly don’t want to go in, is another. You want to do that? Because I’m driving to the store in half an hour whether you go with me or not.”

“I’ll go with you, what do you think? But later we have to talk about it some more.”

They read the newspaper while they had breakfast, then in the car going to the store he said “Okay, we had our little rest period, so now we have to decide what we’re going to do.”

“If you’re referring to the store again, you know where I stand.”

“No, no glass partitions. It’s either we sell the store or nothing.”

“Then nothing.”

“No, no nothing — we sell the store.”

“Oh,” Rose said, “first you give me a choice, then you take it away? That the way you operate? No. Glass partitions or if you want, an armed security guard, but that’s as far as I’ll go, and not both. Maybe in five years, when we’ve put away a lot more savings and you still want to with the same idea, we’ll think about selling it. So is it a deal? The partitions?”

“No.”

“You care that little about my life? What I’m saying is if what you say’s true about what we should expect, you want to see me in there alone get shot or both of us get shot if we don’t put the partitions in?”

“What about the gasoline they could squirt in to blow us up?”

“That’s a rarity. I don’t think it happened in this city for a total of more than once or twice in all kinds of banks and stores.”

“I also heard they have some sort of dynamite arrangement where they stick it half in half out of the hole and threaten the store owner with to blow up.” “They got that dynamite in the hole, how they think we’ll get the money through to them?”

“They take it out. They give you a few seconds. They maybe even light it right there on a long fuse and hold it up so we can see and maybe even set it against the partition when the fuse gets down and leave the store and blow us up. Those partitions say bulletproof but they don’t say bombproof. We’d die like soldiers killed with hand grenades dropped into their tanks.”

“It’d never happen. I believe people can be that cruel, but not that clever. Besides, the glass partitions will work. Once more, though you don’t have to answer me now if you don’t want, do we do nothing about the store or do we make inquiries about getting the protection of that glass?”

“I don’t know.”

“Say yes so we can settle it.”

“Okay,” he said.

They got several estimates for the partition that week and the next week had them installed.

About a year later Rose nudged Larry in bed and said “Larry, Larry, I want you to get up and awake enough to talk with me about something. I think we have to get that glass in the store removed.”

“What glass?”

“The partitions. Those cell bars. That see-through wall we’ve created between our customers and ourselves.”

“I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

“I haven’t told you I didn’t like it a hundred times before?”

“But you never said you wanted them removed. You intimated. You alluded to. But you never said ‘removed,’ Let me sleep, though. I worked hard today. You worked hard today. The whole world did. But I can only sleep for myself.”

“First hear my reasons when I’ve got a clear head of them and then see if you don’t agree that the partitions have to go. Mind if I turn on the light on my side?”

“I can see I don’t have a chance now to do anything I want including to mind, but hold it a second,” and he covered his eyes with his hands, said “Okay, I’m ready, turn it on.”

She turned on the light. “Before—”

“Oh, before,” he said.

“Yes, before, I’m saying, and let me finish some more before you speak. Before the partitions were put in — well, maybe up till around five years ago — we had an excellent business and wonderful customers who we communicated with on a first-name basis with almost every one of them. They knew us, we knew them, and something about each other’s families and lives. Then the neighborhood changed. Lots of transients or people who didn’t want conversation started buying from us and most of the ones we knew and liked moved out. Just about the only people in the last five years we could really still talk to were some of the university teachers and students who still lived around here because they were fairly poor themselves or didn’t know better we’ll say or just desperate for a place, and who always like to talk to us a lot too. You know it for a fact yourself. Well say something, because you have to admit what I’ve said so far is true.”

“I can speak now?” he said.

“Sure, why not?”

“So far nothing you’ve said is really that new or worth my staying awake for that much — I’m sorry.”

“That’s not so. Anyway, to go on, one new student or teacher would come in and either you or I, and not planned either or to make a steady customer, would say to him or her something like ‘I bet you’re from the university there,’ and then ask what subject he studied or taught and what city and state and even country he came from and how they liked living in Baltimore and so on.”

“Please get to the point.”

“The point is we enjoyed talking to them, these last interesting people who were left. And showing them our wine selection and giving them favored treatment in a way and a percentage off if they buy by the case, because they were very nice people who spoke to us like we were more than just store owners with only something to sell and nothing to say. But now?”

“Now we can’t talk to them so much because of the glass. I know.”

“Not only is it we can’t. It’s that these same university people won’t even come in anymore because of it. They think it’s not human or uncivilized but definitely something awful where it does something to them inside and that they’d walk or drive five to ten streets more for a bottle of wine of even a lesser kind for the same or even more money and nothing off on the case, just to avoid that dehumanizing glass. That’s what one of them said when I met him by accident downtown. The Reynolds boy from Idaho, a premed, remember? Dehumanizing, he said. ‘I like to browse,’ he said, ‘—pick up the wine, look at the label and see where it comes from and not feel I’m buying it from a pressure tank or fish tank or whatever he called it, ‘and not with the next robber outside about to come in and hit me on the head.’ Not even some of the customers we never spoke two words to like to order now through that horrible speaking hole. So I don’t care anymore—”

“You want it removed,” he said. “Four times we’re attempted or robbed by knife or gunpoint in the year before we put in that glass and not a robbery or attempt since, but you want it removed. Brilliant.”

“You like it?”

“The glass? I hate it like the plague. But what do you want me to do, risk our lives again without it? To tell you the truth, while you were just thinking before about getting the partitions removed, I was thinking of from now on or starting sometime soon, working one hour less a day. That’s all I want.”

“All right. Work one hour less. We’ll close earlier.”

“I was thinking of opening up later.”

“Both. We’ll open an hour later and close an hour earlier. But we’ll give ourselves two more hours of nonwork a day.”

“Wait. I was only thinking it, I wasn’t so much saying we have to do it. Let’s talk about it this week some more.”

“No. It’s a terrific idea. We’re going to do it. Better for our health. Certainly better for your health, because you’re way too heavy and also can’t take the long hours so much anymore. So, done. We work ten to seven starting tomorrow. When Donald hears it he’ll love you for making that decision and making it so decisively. He’s always wanted us to work much less.”

“He wants us to give up the store entirely.”

“Easy for, him to say when he has a wonderful job and sun all year and a gorgeous home which he got from his good education that we paid for out of money that only came from the store.”

“You’re going to fault him for that?” he said. “Our only child? He didn’t deserve to get the best we could afford and more?”

“Yes he did. I wasn’t saying that. Anyway, starting tomorrow — even starting today if you want to sleep late, we open the store at ten and close at seven. So we make a little less money, but it’ll be nice having a normal dinner for a change that isn’t on Sunday. Now what about taking down the glass too?”

“And putting up what in its place?”

“Nothing. Air. Listen, both of us are miserable behind the glass, so why keep it up?”

“Because we have to. The thieves see us taking it down, they’ll think we’ve lost our senses or are just feeling cocky and in one day they’ll cure us of that. Next time they hit us we might not be so lucky.”

“Don’t talk like that. We’ll always be lucky. We were lucky when we got together and even luckier when we had such a nice boy. A little bad luck but mostly it was good. And neither of us has been very sick since we got married, thank God,” and she tapped the headboard, “and Donald almost never sick too. And we have a little money put away and a paid-up house and neighbors who like us, and better family relations nobody could have more. So we’ll be lucky and we’ll be happy with the partitions down too. We’ll bring out the wine again and show customers around. We’ll breathe better if maybe not as lightly for a while. Besides, the neighborhood’s improving.”

“It’s the same it was a year ago and maybe worse. And our insurance rates will go up again.”

“So they’ll go up. So we’ll take that in stride and make up for what we lose with the new insurance rates by gaining in the sale of more wine and beer. And milk. What person in his right mind wants to buy milk through a glass partition?”

“Lots have.”

“But more will with the partitions down. And those college kids and their professors. I want them back. I miss talking and being educated by them. Please, Larry. I haven’t asked for much. I didn’t want those partitions, but I gave in.”

“It was a compromise.”

“Please, Larry. Nothing bad will happen again in the store — I know it.”

“Something will happen. A robbery.”

“Then let’s sell the store and buy another in a better neighborhood.”

“We’d get almost nothing for it except for the stock and I couldn’t start over some place else.”

“Then the partitions have to come down and we hope for the best. Really, it’s that or my not working there anymore. It’s driving me crazy as you can see, and I know it’s driving you crazy too.”

“It’s driving me, all right. But let me think.” He lay his head back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. A few minutes later he said “Rose, you up?”

“Sure, I’ve been waiting.”

“Okay, the glass comes down. But we still open the store an hour later once we get all set up, okay?”

“I thought closing an hour earlier too.”

“No, one thing at a time. We want to see how things work out.”

The partitions were taken down that week, the entire store was painted and brighter lights were put in. They hired a security guard to be in the store all day. They were a little frightened when they opened the store again, but both began feeling much easier when they learned from several new customers that some of the more dilapidated buildings in the neighborhood had been bought by young people in the last few months and that nobody had heard of a store being robbed by someone with a knife or gun in almost half a year.

The students and professors became their customers again and Larry and Rose acted as they always had with them: learning their names, asking where they came from, talking about their own son and how well he had done at that same university, escorting them around the store and pointing out two or three wines that were particularly good for the price and which that person might be interested in by the bottle or the case. Then a month later two men came in, showed their pistols, one on the guard and the other back and forth on Larry and Rose, and demanded all the money in the cash register and safe.

Larry, taking the money out of the safe, said “I thought you guys were gone for good.” The man said “shut up — not another word — or get a bullet through your nose.”

The men got all the money from the store and from Larry’s and the guard’s wallets and Rose’s pocketbook, and left. Larry phoned the police, locked the door and put the “Closed” sign up and said “I think for maybe the first time in my life, or maybe since that first or second robbery here, I’m going to break the law in our store and open a bottle of scotch and have a shot. Rose?” She shook her head. He opened a bottle, the best scotch they had. The guard was still shaking. Larry said “Excuse me, I was just thinking of myself, but I think you need one too.”

“No, I never drink,” the guard said. “Just like I told you when I got the job. A glass of milk will do me if you want someone to drink with, and I think my stomach can use it.”

Larry drank several shots, the guard drank from a milk carton, Rose said she was still so nervous that maybe she’d have a little scotch from Larry’s glass. The police came, reports were filled out, the police said they’d do their best in trying to find the robbers but for Larry and Rose not to get their hopes up, and left. The guard helped Larry put the gates up on the front of the store, then said “So what time you want me in tomorrow — same as usual?”

“No, better you not come in at all,” Larry said. “Nothing personal, but I’ve some thinking to do. No partition glass, too many robberies, our lives in danger and same with yours — what’s a store owner to do? If I need you and you’re not working in some other store by the time I call, I’ll try to get you back.”

During the car ride home Rose said to Larry “So what are we going to do?”

“I was about to ask you.”

“Risk our lives again with no glass of course. What do you say?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“I was only kidding. One of us has to have a sense of humor about this. But no partitions again, Larry. I couldn’t live with them a week.”

“Same here. But what else — an armed guard? One with a gun who’ll try to stop them?”

“First, can we afford one? No. They make almost twice as much as the club guards, plus carry more insurance, and you can’t get one to stay for more than seven working hours a day and only five days a week. And a robber comes in and one not afraid of a guard with a gun, and there are some, then we got fireworks and maybe with us and a customer in between.”

“Then we have to sell the store. You know we’ll practically have to give it away.”

“The stock’s worth a lot.”

“It’s worth more than a lot. But what kind of package store will we have without stock?”

“We’ll open something else.”

“I don’t want to open anything else. At this point in my life I only want to open what I know.”

“Well, open a package store almost anywhere else in the city, and if we don’t have those partitions again they’ll come in and get us once a month. I say we give up the whole thing, invest the money from the sale of the store and stock, and both of us go work for someone else.”

“What about just my working for someone else and you can stay home and sleep late and do what you want and everything you ever deserved. Cooking more. Meetings. Being with your sister and developing some close friends. Going to school and getting as smart as you could have got if you didn’t thirty years ago feel you had to go waste your life by working in the store with me.”

“I worked in it because you wanted to work with someone honest and you wanted my company.”

“That’s true,” he said. “And it wasn’t a waste. But what do you say? You always wanted more time for yourself and to visit Donald where he is and to go to school. We’ll live maybe not as well as we have, but I’ll get a job only in the safest of stores, so we’ll at least live knowing we’ll be alive the next day. I don’t think there’s anything else we can do, unless you insist on getting a job too.”

“Actually, the way you present it makes it sound very nice. Maybe I’ll even be taught by some of the professors who come into the store.”

“I don’t think so. They only teach students for credit.”

“Some of them said they also teach in the adult division for extra cash.”

“If that’s the case, then you will. And they’ll know you and give you good marks.”

“They don’t give marks in adult education.”

“Why not? For all the tuition and work you put in, you ‘ll be cheated if you don’t get them. But that’s what we’ll settle on, okay? Unless you can come up with something better.”

“A dinner tonight in a restaurant would be nice,” she said.

“I’m still so shaken inside from the robbery, I think it’d be wasted on me. I just want to have a small quiet dinner, a little television and then go to bed.”

“After dinner all I want is to read and read, because tomorrow I can sleep as late as I want.”

“We have a lot to do though.”

“We can give ourselves a day.”

“We’re still paying rent on the store, and the utilities. And soon as we sell everything, I have to get a good job.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. They pulled into their street.

“You know what else I think I’ll start doing with all my free time if I also don’t get a job? Inviting some of those students and professors from the store for dinner at our house. Some of them are very lonely. I’m sure they’ll like it.”

“If you do, those nights I’d be sure to get home for dinner on time.”

He parked the car, squeezed her hand, they went into the house.