FICTION

It’s 1996, and you’re in New York City.

You snort some heroin and catch a cab uptown to visit J.B. and Sister Alice. The cabbie tells you that white people don’t belong there at night.

You tell him that on this very day in 1943 a train carrying 2,800 Greek Jews arrived at Auschwitz. “And they’re pretty much dead. So yeah.”

The cabbie meets your eyes in the mirror. You start singing, “People Who Need People.” He looks away.

You take a hit of Jack Daniel’s. You snort another wallop of heroin. Your brain begins dissolving down the back of your neck, and the next thing you know the paramedics are slapping you awake.

You sit in the back of the ambulance, watching the lights sweep across the sidewalk while the paramedics check your pulse and blood pressure. You convince them that you’re just a little drunk, and that’s the end of it. The ambulance zips off, leaving you standing there on the sidewalk, woozy and free.

You think, Huh.


________________

The universe yields only one truly knowable fact: life gets more and more dangerous the farther you get from your own bathroom.
_________________


Back in your studio apartment, you wash your hands, smoke some crack, and call Natalie. She’s living in D.C. with her new boyfriend, who works for the Justice Department and is not afraid of germs.

She asks you about film school. You start to sweat and tell her about your movie.

“It’s an homage to Taxi Driver,” you say. “I’m calling it Deli Worker. It’s about a deli worker who knifes a mean guy to save an innocent young woman. I plan on playing the guy. There’s still a lot of stuff I’m not sure about. But the deli guy will live alone and have a cat. I mean, duh, right? And the stabbing will be subtle. I’ll use a Godfather style cross-cut, cutting back and forth between a cat eating a mouse and me—I mean, deli worker—stabbing the mean guy, who will hopefully look like the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. Or at least like Adolph Eichman. For the musical score, I’m thinking a snippet from Verdi’s La Forza Del Destino, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Black Dog,’—you know, ‘Hey, hey mama, said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove’—and anything from Kenny G’s Christmas album.”

She says, “Wow,” and laughs a little, reviving the teensy weensiest bit of hope. This is bad.

You ask her why she’s whispering. She tells you that Tom’s preparing for a major anti-trust trial, so he really, really needs his rest. You hang up and go into the bathroom.

“Look,” you tell your reflection, “I’d really love to, but I’ve got to prepare for a major anti-trust trial. Major.”

You try it with your Cary Grant look, a sly half-smirk and one eyebrow raised. You try it with your I’m-in-so-much-pain-but-I’m-also-a-dangerous-intense-misunderstood-artist-who-if-called-upon-could-have-sex-right-now look. You try it with a Thurston Howell III accent.

You keep sweating.

You paid five grand to make short, silent films with Europeans who struggle with English and the children of South American aristocrats whose English is better than yours.

You’re just taking a little break. The course—it’s not really a school—will be over in eight weeks. Then you’re going back to Colorado to practice law. Really, you are.


The evening’s possibilities stretch themselves out in front of you.

You can grab a bottle and sit on the sidewalk, looking at the stars between the buildings, thinking how great New York is because you don’t need a car and when you nearly overdose, the laissez-faire paramedics let you traipse off into the balmy autumn night.

You can go to O’Fallon’s, drink scotch and sodas, and get into a long conversation with the woman next to you about hypoallergenic lotions and how you would have graduated in the top ten percent, really you would have, if you hadn’t gotten C-minuses in Evidence and Bankruptcy until you look down at your ashtray and forget her name and what she looks like. You will look at her and it will all come back: Julia, jutting chin, works at Kiehl’s, wants to go to medical school. Or be a massage therapist. Or something. But your heart will empty out, and you will leave, telling her that you have to drop off some toys at the orphanage. This is one of your wittier exit lines.

You can bring a street hooker back to your apartment. When you buy condoms, the Egyptian guy at the deli will say, “You need a small, right?” And laugh. He loves that joke. The hooker will end up being pregnant, and you’ll end up telling her about your movie and what happened on this day in the Holocaust. She will smoke your pot, steal your cigarettes, and tell you that your time is up.

Or you can sit in your apartment, looking out the window onto the low roof of the next building, and think about your life. You won’t be lonely: you’ll have your Holocaust book, your hand washing rituals, and your fantasies about being interviewed by Charlie Rose. (“Tonight a conversation with Nicholas Canter. Lawyer, filmmaker, iconoclast, bon vivant. Nicholas Canter. For the hour.” You will be endlessly fascinating.)

You have options, oodles and oodles of options. Because you live in New York. And you are very, very exciting.


You decide to catch another cab uptown. You tell the driver about the Greek Jews.

Sister Alice’s and J.B.’s building has a buzzer, but during the couple of months that you’re hanging around it never works. The elevator is spray painted and smells of urine. Bits of tinfoil and broken beer bottles are scattered on the floor. A turd is in the corner.

Sister Alice lets you in. She’s a withered black woman with the frame of an anorexic eleven year old. She and J.B. have been squatting in their apartment for a year; God has blinded the landlord to their existence.

You give J.B. a handful of cash. He gets his walker and edges out the door.

Alice’s daughter—you keep forgetting her name—is watching the Yankees on a black and white TV with the Puerto Rican guy who’s been hanging around lately. You sit on the floor next to a table made out of milk crates and the front side panel of a Buick. You take a few swigs off your pint and light a cigarette.

Sister Alice rests her leathery hand on yours and tells you that cigarettes are poison, another curse of the white man. Then she lowers her head in contemplation.

“Something is missing in your life,” she says. “I can feel it. Yes, the Lord is telling me.”

She opens her eyes and looks at you. Her eyes are moist.

“It’s pussy,” she says. “You need so much more pussy in your life.”

She squeezes your hand, her white knuckles looking like they’re about to rip through her skin.

“My God,” you say. “You are so, so right.” You’re getting a little teary eyed too. She pats your hand.

“The Lord will provide,” she says.

J.B. comes back, and the ritual begins. He gives you the stash, and you, in turn, put a few bindles of heroin and some rock in Sister Alice’s palm. She hugs her hands to her chest and looks at you, beatific.

“Bless you, my son,” she says. “You bear witness to the gentle grace of the Lord.”


J.B. is settled into the stained brown couch, wearing his red and white-striped track suit. He looks like he could die right there.

“The M.S. is flaring up,” he says, sticking a needle in his arm. “But I’ll be just fine. I’m giving myself the best pain reliever known to man.”

You snort some heroin off the Buick.

“Thank the Lord for needles,” Sister Alice says, poking a needle in the vein running along the top of her foot. “In prison we could only get the tar, and we couldn’t snort that, so to really get off, we had to rub it into our assholes.”

The electricity goes out. You get a beat on your surroundings from the lighter and the crack pipe, which flares like the beacon of a tiny light house. When J.B. takes a hit, all you see is a jumble of wiry, gray hair and facial welts.


Your mind is always flopping around. One moment your consciousness is cradled in a reassuring nest of inspirational Helen Keller quotes. The next moment you see only one way to avoid an infinite extension of a brutal and unfixable present: a mug of bourbon, a mouthful of Percocets, and a really big carbon monoxide induced nap.

The universe yields only one truly knowable fact: life gets more and more dangerous the farther you get from your own bathroom.

So you grab at any bit of control.

When you wax your ears and see the little ear hairs stuck to the wax strips, you almost swoon with a sense of accomplishment, of having responded to life.

When you buy seventy-two rolls of Sassy Baby toilet paper and see them stacked altar-like on the toilet basin, you feel a security generally reserved for messianic cult leaders and well-fed, well-loved golden retrievers.

You meet Brenda at the Met. You’ve been going to the after-work receptions they have in the gallery of the Egyptian Temple of Dendur. You used to bring a notebook to jot down shot lists for your movie, hoping that someone would ask you what you were doing. No one ever did.

So you’re at the bar, eyeing the crowd, thinking how you’d be more comfortable inside the Temple than with these hard-core smilers, when she comes up to you.

“Great suit,” she says, touching your lapel. You’re wearing your hand-tailored double-breasted pinstriped suit, the one that Natalie thinks makes you look like a gangster. You secretly hope that it imbues you with a vague Cary Grant essence—gallant in the face of troubled women and public toilets.

She’s wearing a slinky black cocktail dress with spaghetti straps. Black hair curls up under her jaw, making parentheses around her face.

You buy her a gibson. When she smiles and looks away, you see a thin scar running down the side of her face.

She tells you that she’s an actress. You tell her that you’re a lawyer, but right now you’re making a movie. The gin is softening the corners of your vision and making you feel thin. And more and more like Cary Grant.

“Really,” she says, “about what?”

“It’s called Heydrich’s List. It’s about the six million Jews who did die in the Holocaust.”

“Maybe I could be in it.”

“Sure. What number do you want to be?”

“Well,” she says, “aren’t you snappy.” You give her your wry Cary Grant smile.

She sips her drink, evaluating you. She asks what you do for money.

“I’m all right,” you say. “I’m no Rockefeller, but I’m okay. For now, anyway.”

You excuse yourself and slip into the bathroom, so the concept of your money has time to marinate in her consciousness. You really, really want someone to like you for your money. Looking at yourself in the mirror while you wash your hands, you narrow your eyes to give yourself more of an I’m-trying-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-chapter-nine look.

Back at the bar, you buy another round. The swelling crowd pushes you up against her. Your nose grazes her hair, which smells of cigarette smoke, and her neck looks so kissable.

“So,” she says, smiling and cocking her head to one side, “Wow me.”

“Well,” you say, “I think the Supreme Court’s emphasis on coercion in its Establishment Clause Jurisprudence has troubling majoritarian implications.”

She nods.

“I’m against guns,” you continue, “but I know how to use one—and not just a BB gun. And I have excellent grammar.”

She nods again. “Wow indeed.”

“Your turn,” you say.

Holding your gaze, she says, “God has blessed me with a variety of sordid sexual experiences.”

Now it’s your turn to nod. “Okey dokey artichokey,” you say.

You buy another round. The bartender puts down the drinks, and she says, “Hey, let’s get out of here.” The bartender meets your eye. You gulp your gibson in two swallows.

Outside, it’s that hollow part of the day, not afternoon, not night, when the evening is sucking up the sun and the energy is changing. Wind is whipping around the banners for the Pre-Columbian pottery exhibition.

She leans into you. You give her your overcoat, your life manifesting the movie playing in your head: you, a pinstriped, gibson-drinking resurrection of Cary Grant with an Ingrid Bergmanish woman on your arm who is pretty enough to rub in Natalie’s face.

You grab a cab to your apartment. In the back seat she kisses you hard, and you forget to tell the cab driver about the Birkenau revolt that got crushed on this very day in 1944.


She pulls her black dress over her head in one grand sweep of a motion.

As you unbutton your shirt, she says, “Cash?”

You say, “Sorry?”

“You know,” she says, “money, l’argent, dinero, moola.”

“I thought you were an actress.”

“I am. Money?” she says, putting out a cupped palm, like a small-breasted, topless woman about to receive communion.

“Well, I don’t really know how to use a gun. Except a BB gun. So there.” You give her the money.


“Watch out for my nipples,” she says. “They can put an eye out.”

Her vagina is shaved and pierced with two little rings. Fingering them, she says, “I can play jingle bells on these things.”

As usual, you don’t orgasm—too many prescription and non-prescription drugs. So after awhile, she uses a Budweiser to wash the latex taste out of her mouth and goes into the bathroom.

Over the sound of running water, she says, “So maybe we could work something out?”

You light a joint, thinking about Rosa Robota who withstood torture and was hanged with three other factory workers, all girls, because she helped get the explosives for the Birkenau revolt.

Brenda comes out of the bathroom, her hair held up on top of her head in a short, samurai-style ponytail.

“Well?” she says, shifting her weight, her breasts swaying a little. “Maybe you let me crash here, and maybe I doink you every now and then?”

“Look,” you say, passing her the joint, your voice choked with smoke, “I’d love to, but I’m preparing for a major anti-trust trial.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Two words. May. Jor.”


You and Brenda are lying in bed. Her duffel bag is in the corner.

“I just need to save enough money for my new titties,” she says. “Then I could start making some serious cash. And fly places. Some women get flown all over the place. Then fuck the corporate world. As it were.” She pauses, then: “Have you ever noticed that you can add ‘as it were’ to almost any little phrase and it makes you sound snappy, like you understand something that other people are just too stupid to get?”

You ask her how she got her scar.

“Oh no. No, no, no. Don’t do the sensitive guy con. It’s so manipulative.”

“There was a brothel in Auschwitz,” you say. “On the first floor of Cell Block 24, beside the main gate. It was Himmler’s idea. Prisoners that the Nazis really liked, like their cooks or hairdressers, were given vouchers to the brothel as a kind of fringe benefit. It was verboten for the Jews, though. I mean, duh, right? Not much is really known about the women. So chew on that.”

She goes to the T.V.

“I just need to save enough for my new tits,” she says, snorting some heroin off the top of the T.V. “As it were.”

You call Natalie. You ask her if she wants to know what happened on this day during the Holocaust. She tells you that she can’t talk because Tom is training for a marathon and needs his rest.

“What a coinquieedink,” you say, tapping your cigarette ash into a beer can. “So am I. It’s so hard.”


You hang up and take a hit of crack. In a smoke-choked voice, you say, “Look, Brenda, I’ve really got to start training for my marathon.”

“As it were,” Brenda says.

You blow out the smoke. Your chest is about to explode, so you slug back some peppermint schnapps and snort a blast of heroin. Your body feels okay, but your mind is still a little twitchy.

Then you read about the Holocaust, pop some Prozac, wash your hands, and take Brenda shopping.


When you come out of your building, a goateed young guy wearing a backwards baseball cap stops you. He’s part of a film crew from the television show Friends. The film crew is shooting b-roll, those street scenes you see before they cut to the apartment or the coffee shop or whatever.

They film the two of you walking up the sidewalk, arm in arm. They shoot several takes. On the last take, you sing,

I’ve got an itch in my heart
that’s tearing me apart.
Sure I feel smart,
but why can’t I make a start
on LIIIIIIFFFFE!

Brenda laughs. The film crew laughs. You are so very, very witty.

You dive into a cab, like an airplane plunging out of heavy turbulence.

You tell the cab driver about Lilka. “In 1943, the Germans were doing a little housekeeping, cleaning out the remaining Jews in Czestochowa. The intelligentsia, doctors and the like, who had avoided earlier deportations, were taken with their families to the cemetery and shot. Lilka was one of the kids who was shot. She was in kindergarten, and that day she wore a blue velvet dress. Her kindergarten class put on a play about brotherhood of nations. Lilka sang and danced and laughed. Then, that afternoon, she and her family were shot. Oh, and it was her birthday.”

Brenda says, “Oh I get it; you’re a total whack job.”

You nod. “Yeah.”


You swoop into Barney’s and buy a fedora, so, as you tell the sales clerk, your soul won’t ooze out your bald spot. You view this as one of the most profound comments ever made on the intersection of consumerism and spirituality. You also buy a yellow ascot and a black, velvet smoking jacket with overly embroidered sleeves and lapels.
________________
You discover that anyone can be made into a doll. George Plimpton, Kaiser Wilhelm, Nietzsche. You’re eyeing Gandhi, who is leaning on a walking stick next to Henry Kissinger, when the sales clerk asks you if you’ve seen the collection of first ladies.
________________

You buy Brenda a flowing pink, silk robe with plush, fuzzy lining.

You buy an ornately carved walking stick and three Hermès scarves.

Your sales clerk, a thin, mustached, balding man, cocks an eyebrow as he hands you your credit card.

“If I were making a movie,” you say, “I’d cast you as the waiter.”


At FAO Schwartz, Brenda gets bedazzled by the World of Sweets. She elbows Japanese tourists and fills bags of Gummy Bears by the pound, Gummy Bears in flavors ranging from Apricot to Wasabi.

And chocolate. Bricks of chocolate—white chocolate from Venezuela, milk chocolate from Belgium, dark chocolate from Poland.

“Poland,” Brenda says. “First vodka, now chocolate. A real up and comer. As it were.”

You discover that anyone can be made into a doll. George Plimpton, Kaiser Wilhelm, Nietzsche. You’re eyeing Gandhi, who is leaning on a walking stick next to Henry Kissinger, when the sales clerk asks you if you’ve seen the collection of first ladies.

“It’s really topnotch,” she says. You’re intrigued, but her attentive smile—all tobacco stained teeth and rougey jowls—gives you the heebie-jeebies. And your hands feel contaminated, so you excuse yourself and head for the men’s room. Washing your hands, fortifying yourself against the sales clerk’s smile, you get a look at yourself in the mirror. Your I-have-a-touch-of-the-plague look makes you picture yourself as a doll—no penis, but thin, a really great complexion, and wow, what a chin.

Back with the aggressively friendly sales clerk, you bypass Eleanor Roosevelt—too much of the sexpot. Grace Coolidge and Abigail Fillmore, lonely and neglected, catch your attention, but you ultimately settle on Pat Nixon and, what the hey, Eva Peron.

You and Brenda sneak into the women’s bathroom. Snorting heroin off the toilet seat, she sings, “Welcome to our world, welcome to our world, welcome to our world of toys.” You both take a couple of slugs of peppermint schnapps.

You open the door, and a Japanese girl is standing there.

You put a finger to your mouth and giggle, tiptoeing out of the bathroom.

“I bet I’d be a really fun parent,” you say.


At Tiffany’s you gravitate toward the silver—a silver monkey, a silver donkey, a silver baseball, and a silver pill box shaped like a Chinese food container. You also buy a manners book with gold-edged pages.

The sales woman cocks an eyebrow.

“If I were making a movie,” you say, “I’d cast you as the sales clerk who dies alone in her apartment.”

“And your body isn’t found for a week,” Brenda says. “And when the super opens the door, the stench is unbearable, so your cats make a headlong dash for fresh air. See, in the end, even they will abandon you.”

On the sidewalk, Brenda kisses your cheek and laughs. The couple in front of you turns and smiles, and for a moment you feel like you might actually exist.

Maybe, you think, this is what Jack Nicholson feels like all the time.


You are Scott and Zelda, Nick and Nora, Harold and Maude.

You will glide through life sipping martinis and lounging in bathrobes, glamorously unbalanced. You will swim in fountains. Solve crimes. Hang out at funerals.

You share your thoughts with Brenda.

She says, “Let’s not rush into anything,” and empties a few bindles of heroin into the silver Chinese food container pill box.

You tell the cab driver about Canada. “‘Canada’ was the name given to the warehouses where the Germans stashed the stuff they’d stolen from their victims. Towards the end of the war the Germans tried to destroy the Canada warehouses, but they couldn’t get rid of them all. The six that weren’t destroyed contained 349,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s outfits, 38,000 pairs of men’s shoes, 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes, almost 14,000 rugs, and, of course, a bunch of false teeth and glasses.”


At the apartment, you spread Pat Nixon’s legs, pull her dress up, and put her on top of the T.V. You lay Eva Peron down so that her face is between Pat Nixon’s legs. Brenda puts the silver donkey and the silver monkey on either side of them, like they’re watching.


Brenda watches you scrub your hands. She’s wearing the fluffy, pink bathrobe.

“Performing surgery?” she says.

You keep scrubbing.

“So, like, what would happen if you didn’t do that? Would you die or something?”

You turn to her, water running, hands soapy. Sweat is forming on your brow.

“No,” you say, “I wouldn’t die. Not at first. At first, my brain would spin at vertigo-inducing speeds, my heart would pound, alternating between a big thumping, collapsing kind of beat and a shallow, skittish, trembling sort of flutter. I would sweat for a month, my left eye would twitch uncontrollably, and the thought that I am contaminated and killing children with my deadly germs would assault me until I went insane. The top of my head may or may not pop off. Then maybe I would die.”

You stick your hands back under the scalding water.

“Please,” you say. “Please stop looking at me.”

She hugs you from behind, her hands clasped across your stomach and the fluffy silk bathrobe soft on your back.


You call Natalie and tell her about your movie.

“It’s about a guy who robs banks and gives the proceeds to crack addicts. I’m calling it The Miracle Worker. I plan on playing the guy, you know, the Miracle Worker.”

She tells you not to call so late.

“Okay, how about this one? It’s about a guy who embezzles from a huge corporation and uses the money to pay a bunch of porn stars to give sexual favors to terminally ill patients. I’m calling it The Giver. I plan on playing the Giver.”

She says, “Huh.”

You tell her that you have a girlfriend. She is supportive. You hate that.

When you hang up, you turn Eva Peron’s and Pat Nixon’s faces towards you, so it looks like they just got caught.


Somewhere along the line you and Brenda have forgotten about sex.

It’s just too hard, as it were.

It has the appeal of cleaning chicken.

Your penis is merely honorary.


In the manners book you read that, when eating bouillon, one need not use a spoon; it’s fully acceptable to sip directly from the cup. If, however, the bouillon contains solid objects, those objects should first be eaten with a spoon.

________________
She ties off her ankle with the Hermès scarf and shoots heroin into her foot. She takes the scarf off her ankle and wraps it around her head, like a pirate. She lies down on the floor and recites the Twenty-third Psalm. Then the Lord’s Prayer. Then she fades out.
_________________

In the Holocaust book you read that women who gave birth in the concentration camps were thrown into the ovens alive—along with their babies. So to give the mothers a chance at survival, the inmates killed the newborns.


You decide to play the romantic. You bring Brenda flowers. You memorize e.e. cummings’s “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond.” While she’s in the bathtub, you bring her the bag of Gummy Bears and recite.

She looks up at you, confused, unable to grasp the real import of your gesture.

“You’re Vietnam,” she says finally, her hair lathered, her pointy nipples poking through the suds.

“Pardon?”

“You’re a bright, shining lie.”

You go back into the bedroom. Eva Peron and Pat Nixon stare at you.

You buy a case of Veuve Cliquet and go uptown. When Sister Alice opens the door and sees Brenda, she becomes a benevolent wisp of meekness. She makes a cross on Brenda’s scar and says, “I bless you, my angel. You are beautiful. So, so beautiful. You are blossoming with the Spirit.”

You give Sister Alice the Hermès scarves and J.B. the walking stick. You give him a handful of cash, and he shuffles to the door.

When J.B. comes back with the drugs, you pass Sister Alice her stash. She blesses you. She tells Brenda that you have been a true benefactor.

She ties off her ankle with the Hermès scarf and shoots heroin into her foot. She takes the scarf off her ankle and wraps it around her head, like a pirate. She lies down on the floor and recites the Twenty-third Psalm. Then the Lord’s Prayer. Then she fades out.


You sit around the Buick table, drinking champagne out of big, red plastic cups, like you’re at a frat party.

“It’s a fact,” J.B. says.

“A fact?” says Alice’s daughter. “It’s not a fucking fact. It’s an idea, a thought.” This is the first time you’ve ever heard her speak. She uses a wet Hermès scarf to cool the hot crack pipe.

“Fact,” J.B says. “We are energy. Energy can not be extinguished. It can only change forms. So it’s a fact that there is life after death. Death merely transforms your energy into something else. Of course, no one knows what the fuck that energy will turn into.”

Sister Alice considers. “You’ll probably turn into a squeak in the floorboard,” she says. “And every time you squeak, I’ll think, fucking J.B., always calling attention to himself.”

Brenda looks at you.

“You’ll probably turn into a fart,” she says. And laughs.


You go out on the fire escape. It’s one of those sunny autumn afternoons, the kind that makes it easier for you to tell yourself happy little stories about how your life is going to turn out. Sunlight slides across the spray painted words FUCK YOU and ADMIT on the warehouse across the alley.

Most of the windows are broken. But directly across from you, through new, clean windows, you can see a kids’ ballet class. They must be on a break or something because girls in tutus are bouncing around, chaotic little groups forming and disbanding. A couple of girls are by an open window.

You stand up and do a little jig with a champagne bottle in one hand and a cigarette hanging from your mouth. The girls cover their mouths, giggling. Other girls come to the window.

You shift to ballet, prancing around, doing little arabesques and pirouettes, and then, in a screechy, operatic voice you sing,

My name is Fred
and I want to go to bed
because I have a disease
in my HEAD!

By now the whole class is crowded around the windows, laughing.

You pour champagne over your head, and the girls go crazy with giggles.

You try to break the bottle on the fire escape railing, but it only cracks, making little fissures under the foil label. So, in an inspired move, you smash the bottle against your head, and it shatters, glass fragments clattering down through the fire escapes below. This is the funniest thing the kids have ever seen.

You consider becoming a kindergarten teacher.


J.B. leans his head out the window.

“Man do I know comedy,” you say.

He doesn’t say anything. He just gives you that look, so you give him a handful of cash. He nods.

“I like your girl,” he says.

“She’s all right. As it were.”

“Maybe she has friends?”

“Maybe.”

“Go out later?” he says. He has a grocery cart stuffed with clothes, old toys, beat up shoes. Sometimes you push the grocery cart to his favorite corner and hang out while he peddles his stuff.

“Maybe,” you say, dancing and waving at the girls. Blood is mixing with champagne and dripping down your forehead. But what’s a little blood compared with this flood of adoration that you feel emanating from the ballerinas.

Brenda keeps meaning to troll for clients. You keep meaning to go to class.


You ride the subway with your video camera, filming artistic shots of kissing Hispanic teenagers and fat, dozing men until a crumpled, middle-aged woman politely denies your request to film her.

Brenda is at the other end of the car, gripping the straps over her head, looking like a torture victim hanging by her wrists.

She starts singing Barry Manilow’s Mandy, substituting “Brenda” for “Mandy.” And she’s good. When she finishes, the crumpled woman gives her a couple of bucks.

Brenda sits next to you. She kicks her feet out in front of her, like a kid sitting on the edge of a swimming pool agitating the water. She sees the question on your face.

“I was quite the big shot in the ol’ high school drama,” she says. “You should have seen me in Cabaret. Boy did my Dad cry.”

She stops kicking and looks at you.

“So,” she says, “if you were an apple, what kind would you be? It’s a personality test.”

“Well, gosh, from your perspective, I’m probably just a Cameo. But you’re a Granny Smith. So there.”

She laughs. “Aw, poopyhead.”

She rests her head on your shoulder and lets herself be rocked to sleep by the clattering train.

The crumpled woman smiles at you, and you get that Jack Nicholson-I-might-actually-exist feeling again.


The Yankees are in the playoffs. Natalie tells you that if the Yankees make it to the Series, she and Tom might come up for a game.

You ask her if she wants to hear about your movie. She says she has to go; Tom is on the other line.


Brenda is bored. She wants to start using needles. So you shoot her up, showing her how to find the vein and slip the needle under the skin. She watches the blood slip up the needle. You slowly push the whole syringe back into her.

“Oh fucking God,” she says. “So this is what the fuck it means to be relaxed. All my life I never understood that word.”

You shoot yourself up.

If you stand in one place for too long, you fade out and start to fall over; you hit your head on a wall and startle yourself awake, only to do it again a few minutes later. So you both keep moving, circumnavigating the room, little Magellans of solitude.

A couple of hours later the two of you become bundles of prickly itchiness, so you both sit on the bed, taking turns scratching each other.


From a street vendor, you buy a Dalai Lama video. Back at your apartment you put on your ascot and black, velvet smoking jacket; you remove your khakis. You wash your hands, pour yourself a glass of bourbon, and climb into bed. With evening coming on and Brenda somewhere else, you listen to the Dalai Lama say that the unenlightened existence is suffering.

________________
Brenda blows out a long streak of crack smoke. She’s sitting next to you on the bed, wearing only her underwear and socks, watching women’s kick boxing.
________________

“The state of unenlightened existence,” says the Dalai Lama, “which is the state of all sentient beings in samsara, is like being tied together by the ropes of negative karma and delusions and afflictive emotions and thoughts and encased in a net, a very tightly bound net, of evil consciousness and self-grasping attitudes and then being thrown around endlessly by the fluctuating torrents of pain and suffering.

“That is the characteristic of an unenlightened existence,” he concludes, cleaning his glasses on his robes.

You think, Huh.

You change a light bulb and understand what Tom must feel like after running a marathon. And your hands are cracked and bloody from chronic hand washing. And too much chocolate is making you sick. You need a break.

So you rub Vaseline on your hands and cover them with socks. You wash down a few sleeping pills and a tranquilizer with a pint of Jägermeister. You tell Brenda that you’re going to take a little nap, and you sleep. And sleep and sleep.

You wake up, and the sun light is ambiguous; it could be late afternoon or early morning. Brenda blows out a long streak of crack smoke. She’s sitting next to you on the bed, wearing only her underwear and socks, watching women’s kick boxing.

“Woman boxers,” she says. “They’ll kick your ass and then they’ll fuck you. Or maybe they’ll fuck you and then kick your ass. Interesting,” she says, placing another nugget in the charred, glass crack pipe.

When you wake up a day later, Brenda, still topless, is holding a brick of milk chocolate in one hand and a cigarette in another. Scrutinizing you, she says, “You’re not really giving me much to work with here, are you?”

She licks a corner of the chocolate brick and uses it to make a cross on your forehead.

She says, “I now christen you Eunice because your you-ness, your ness-of-you, as it were, is so goofy. Yes, you can be such a delicate petal, with your drug-addled freaky charm and all, but some part of your essence, your truest self, your fundamental you-ness, fills me, for reasons I can’t quite explain, with dread and contempt. You’re like this soft, unformed thing. It’s a conundrum. Eunice.”

“Well, hello to you too, sunshine.”

After thirty hours of sleep the first of everything feels like a little taste of heaven. The first cigarette, the first drink, the first hit.

And your hands are so soft.


You wander through a bookstore, reading first sentences. You like reading first sentences because they make you feel like you can start something. But if you try to read more than a few sentences, your mind seizes and you have to go back and read what you’ve read over and over and over.

It occurs to you that you should read last sentences. Maybe that way you’d feel like you could finish something.

Keeping with the Polish theme, you consider buying Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska’s View from a Grain of Sand. Instead, you buy Fifty-Seven Things to Be Grateful for Right Now, Training the Anxious Dog, The Seaweed Diet, Diagnosing a Narcissist, and a children’s book called Miss Rumphius.


You sit on the bed and read her Miss Rumphius. You show her the pictures.

The book tracks the life of Miss Rumphius, who as a child had three ambitions: travel the world, live by the sea, and “do something to make the world more beautiful.”

Towards the end of her well-traveled, seaside-residing life, Miss Rumphius becomes known as the Lupine Lady because she makes the world more beautiful by planting lupines all over her town.

“Eunice,” Brenda says afterwards, teary-eyed, her mouth and fingers goopy with white chocolate, “we have issues.”

“But,” you say, showing her the gratitude book, “at least we don’t have polio.”

Brenda nods, considering, then: “No, I’m sticking with the ‘we have issues’ thing.”


To distract her from the piranha infested waters of your issues, you go into the hallway, carrying her on your back.

“Now, what do you say to a horsy?”

“Um,” she says, “giddy up?”

And you gallop down the hallway, saying “bdump, bdump, bdump,” like a knight from Monty Python’s Holy Grail.

“Yee haw!” she says, as you almost crash into the humped-back old guy who lives down the hall. He smiles, because young folks who do silly things in hallways must be in love and issue free.


The Yankees are playing the Braves in the World Series.

Natalie tells you that Tom has a friend at some super big shot law firm who can get tickets.

“Tom’s trial is finishing up, so maybe we can catch Game Six or Seven, if the Series is still going. And I really want to meet your girlfriend. She sounds likes she’s really good for you.”

You look at Brenda. She just shot up, and she’s in her fluffy, pink bathrobe doing some kind of Tai Chi thing while the Dali Lama talks about the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena.

“We have a lot in common,” you say.

When you hang up, you go into the bathroom and wash your hands. You stare at the toilet paper, taking little hits off a bourbon bottle.

Brenda yells, “This Buddhist shit makes total sense.” Then, a moment later: “Where’s the pipe?”


You are sitting on the floor underneath the window, your hands covered with Vaseline filled socks. She is sitting on the bed, reading Miss Rumphius. Her back is towards you. A square of morning light comes through the window, catching a few flyaway hairs and a slice of her neck. Her fluffy, pink bathrobe is loosely draped over her shoulders. The bathrobe makes a drowsy slide off the smooth, pale slopes of her shoulders and down her elegant back.

The disorienting, painful beauty in this accidental gesture pierces your heart and turns your insides into a gooey stew. You wonder if Cary Grant or Jack Nicholson has ever been affected by such small heartaches.


With the Yankees down two games to none, you and Brenda catch a cab to the Met. You’re wearing your ascot and smoking jacket. Your fedora is perched at a rakish angle, like Humphrey Bogart.

You tell the cab driver some tidbits about Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz.

“When he needed to clear his head, he took a nice little horsy ride.”

Brenda says, “Yee haw,” and takes a little snort out of the Chinese food container.

“He had only one regret,” you say. “He wished he’d spent more time with his family. Isn’t that rich?”

In the basement of the Met, you consider headstones from Ancient Rome. You read one left by parents for their “incomparable and sweet son.” You wonder how many things in your life have been incomparable and sweet. You wonder if any of them have been human. You think of Natalie, late one night studying for exams, giddy from lack of sleep, poking your forehead over and over, saying, “Is this annoying? Is this annoying? Is this annoying?” and then kissing your nose with a big smooching sound and saying, “We sure are in love, huh?”

“I need more Moo Goo Gai Pain Remover,” Brenda says.

You hand her the Tiffany’s Chinese food container, and she slips into the bathroom.

When she returns you go upstairs and sit on a bench in front of a portrait of a thirtyish bearded man who’s wearing a long, black overcoat and reading a book. The caption informs you that he was a Russian short story writer who never wrote a novel because he felt that in the end the miracle of one great page was worth an entire book. Around 1888-89, four years after he sat for the portrait, he committed suicide.

Brenda rests her head on your shoulder.

“Those zany, wacky Russians,” you say. “It’s amazing that they don’t all kill themselves. Especially if they read any of those goddamn novels. Maybe,” you muse, “that’s my problem. I’m channeling my inner Russian, which needs to be taken out back and shot.”

Brenda lifts her head off your shoulder. “I’m going to make the world more beautiful by using deodorant regularly and flossing and paying my bills and talking less and shopping in regular stores and smiling when I pass the yams at Thanksgiving.”

“You freaky, mcfreak freak,” you say, laughing. But she’s not laughing; she’s just staring at the suicidal Russian.

“Look,” you say, “there are two kinds of people in this world: Miss Rumphiuses and suicidal Russians. We’re suicidal Russians. All the suffering in the world comes from suicidal Russians trying to be Miss Rumphiuses. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot—all suicidal Russians, but they totally fucked up the world trying to make it more beautiful. So make friends with your true self and focus on gratitude. I mean, buck up. At least you don’t have leprosy or severe spinal cord damage or skin eating bacteria. Or psoriasis. I knew someone who had that, and they were miserable.”

“You’re a sad, sad little man.”

You nod. “Yeah.”

“You know,” Brenda says, “Diagnosing a Narcissist says that people who obsess over gratitude—or any other kind of emotional tranquilizer—are actually extremely self-centered. They’re so worried about feeling good all the time that they focus all their mental energy on making themselves feel psychologically comfortable. So for them other people are just little, one-dimensional cartoon characters who either contribute to their psychic coziness or not.”

“Granny Smith,” you say. “Let’s get out of here before this guy offs himself.”

“First, I need another taste of Kung Pao Pain Remover.”


Moving down the museum’s main stairs, you get caught up in a line of elementary school girls in unadorned blue uniforms, looking like they’re all part of the same cleaning company. A teacher urges them to stay with their buddy.

“You are incomparable and sweet,” you tell the angelically awkward kid next to you.

She smiles politely and inches closer to her buddy.

You get flushed out the main entrance with the highbrow girl janitors into the windy, blaringly bright afternoon. Brenda isn’t in the mood to hear about the Holocaust, so you head for the subway.


You and Brenda are alone on the platform. You can hear a train hurtling along somewhere in the blackness.

“Eunice,” Brenda says. “See if you can make me laugh right now.”

“I do know comedy.”

“Don’t let me down. So. If you were in a hunter-gatherer society, what role would you play? It’s a personality test.” The train isn’t slowing down; it’s an express.

“Well, I guess I would be the guy who invented the word ‘insouciance.’”

“Well, that wasn’t very funny,” she says as the train screams by.


The Yankees take three games in Atlanta and lead the Series 3-2.

Natalie and Tom are coming to New York for Game Six. Tom’s law school friend got him box tickets close to Steinbrenner.

“Let’s meet for drinks before the game,” Natalie says. “And bring that new girlfriend.”

You look at Brenda. She’s telling Eva Peron and Pat Nixon that she understands, powerful woman are always getting screwed, as it were. She tells the silver donkey and the silver monkey to back off.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“It’s just drinks. I know you can commit to drinks.”

“Yeah, yeah. How’s Tom’s marathon training? I can’t wait to share notes. I’ve been carb-loading.”


You go out for toilet paper, but the deli is out of your brand. This causes a flutter of heart palpitations.

When you ask the Egyptian guy when he’s going to get more Sassy Baby Tissues, your voice cracks. He shrugs, but maybe he sees your sweaty brow or your trembling left eyelid or that you’re on the verge of tears. For whatever reason, he offers you a free chicken sandwich, which, you must admit is really very kind, although directed at the completely wrong orifice. You walk a block to another deli, and for a horrifying moment it appears that they are also sans Sassy Baby. But then you see it, next to the competing brand, which for all practical purposes might as well be a chicken sandwich.


She’s gone. No duffel bag. No fluffy pink robe. No Miss Rumphius.

So you stack the toilet paper, wax your ears, and wash your hands. You put on your ascot and smoking jacket and climb into bed. With the covers pulled up to your nose, you tell Pat Nixon and Eva Peron that you’d love to, really you would, but you have got to make your movie, quit smoking, work on your comedy, and somehow, somehow, somehow, somehow, somehow, somehow quit being Eunice.


You leave a message on Natalie’s answering machine, knowing she won’t get it in time.

“So remember how I told you that Brenda’s a model? Or maybe I didn’t. But she is, so yeah. Anyway, she has a work thing tonight. Her modeling agency or something. I think it’s a caviar and cocaine tasting. Kidding. (Pause.) There won’t be any caviar. Hiyoo! Anyway, she really, really wants me to be there. ‘Needs me there,’ she said. And you trained me to be a good boyfriend! So—”

The answering machine tells you that your time is up. You call back.

“So like I was saying, we’ve got to go to that caviar thing, so I’m totally bummed to say that we won’t be making it tonight. But let’s definitely get together soon. And I hope Tom’s kicking major ass in his trial. May. Jor.”


You have trouble identifying the appropriate emotion. Brenda triggers nothing, but a crumpled McDonald’s bag skidding down an empty alley in the late afternoon fills you with an implacable desolation. And children who look like they don’t have a buddy totally fuck you up.


You’re across the street from the meeting place, a bar in Union Square. Evening is coming on. Your fedora is pulled low over your brow and you’re smoking a cigarette, all film noir.

And then there they are, Natalie and Tom, heading up the sidewalk, arm in arm.

They laugh—laugh in that really intimate way, Natalie beaming up into Tom’s face, Tom kissing Natalie’s forehead—that really intimate way that tells you that they’ve created their own vibrant, secluded emotional universe.

They go into the bar and you stand there for awhile, smoking cigarettes, sucking in lungful after lungful of the realization that your place in Natalie’s consciousness is dwindling, like that shrinking circle at the end of cartoons, and soon, in the part of her mind where memories of you once existed, there will be nothing but a blank screen.

You say, “Th-, th-, th-, that’s all folks.”


At O’Fallon’s you tell the bartender—and his doll-like chin and complexion—that you’re done with movies. You’re going to write a book. But you need help with the title.

“Here are my choices. Ready? Hey God, What About Me?: A Spiritual Memoir. No? Okay, how about this? The Sun is Hot and So Am I: An Autobiography. Or better yet, The Sun is High and So Am I.”

He listens. He buys you a drink. He does not laugh. In his Irish accent he tells you to go home to the wife and eat dinner. “It’s good,” he says smiling. He loves that joke.

The Yankees win Game Six, winning the Series. No one at the bar seems interested in your book or the Holocaust.


You’re drinking Jack Daniels in a cab that’s cruising around lower Manhattan on a mild, sunny afternoon. You wipe sweat off your forehead and break a scab. Blood trickles down your forehead. You dab your forehead with the ascot. You remember, a little too late, that the ascot is yellow, a color that doesn’t exactly conceal the blood stains. And the blood keeps coming in slow, thick drips. So you dab your forehead with the velvet lapels and sleeves of your smoking jacket.

You can’t remember how you got this cut, but it offers itself as an explanation. Maybe the cut goes all the way through to your brain, and everything that matters—control, a sense of propriety, the ability to care, hemoglobin—is oozing out of your skull, leaving nothing but a mosaic of phobias, a scrapbook of Holocaust facts, and a craving for oblivion.

You tell the cabdriver that if he can guess what happened on this day in the Holocaust, he’ll get a really big tip.

“Uh,” he says, tapping the ashtray, his English hesitant and insecure, “Jews died?”

“Touché,” you say, wagging a finger at his eyes in the mirror. “In fact, on this exact date in 1941 the Germans liquidated the Koritz ghetto. That’s in the Ukraine. The town Commandant and his family watched the massacre from their porch. He ordered one of the soldiers to grab a Jewish kid and throw him in the air. The soldier threw the kid in the air and shot him, as one witness said, ‘as a hunter shoots down a bird.’ The Commandant’s family thought that was just the coolest thing ever. One of his daughters said, ‘Daddy, do it again.’”


You get out at the World Trade Center. You pay the fare and give him the silver baseball from Tiffany’s.

Looking at the Towers you remember something your father told you when you were a kid. He was taking you to Brooks Brothers for your first navy blazer; the two of you were standing outside The Plaza Hotel waiting for a cab.

He told you that if you stand at the foot of a skyscraper and look up, other people will stop and look up too. And if you do it long enough a crowd will gather. So you stand there, looking up at the Towers. A couple of people look up, but no one stops.

Maybe it’s because you’re swaying. And you’re wearing a yellow ascot and a black, velvet smoking jacket with over-embroidered sleeves and lapels. And they’re blood-stained. And now you seem to be removing them and putting them in the trash. And you’re singing what sounds like it might be the theme to Laverne and Shirley.


Back uptown, J.B. wants you to pay for some women, but your heart isn’t in it, so you help him spread out his stuff on his favorite corner. The corner also serves as a bus stop for some kind of circular route because, with reassuring predictability, the same bus driver is behind the wheel every time the bus stops. And every time the bus stops, J.B. tells the driver that you’re his lawyer. And every time you smile and wave.

The bus driver, one of the few other white faces in the neighborhood, takes a cigarette break with you and J.B. Her eyes—so level, so precise—give her an aura of invincibility. You give her the manners book, telling her that the bouillon info clarifies what we’re talking about when we’re talking about bouillon.

“It made me feel ebullient,” you say, offering her the pint of Jack Daniels. She smiles and shakes her head.

J.B. keeps up the chatter with the passersby, the parents with school kids, the gang-bangers. He tries to sell the silver donkey to a gawky junior high school girl for ten bucks, telling her that it matches her braces. You tell him two bucks; you’ll pay the difference. He throws in the Eva Peron doll for free. J.B. is saving the silver monkey for Sister Alice.

A hush of a breeze.

When you go back to Colorado, you will embrace gratitude and eat more sea-based nutrients. You will start jogging again. You will become a Buddhist. And maybe get hair transplants.

You are only thirty-one. You have time, oodles and oodles of time.

But right now you are cradled in a little nest of peace. J.B. is hustling and laughing, and you’re stocked with crack and weed and heroin. Jack Daniels is in one coat pocket; Pat Nixon is in the other. You will walk to the deli, get a couple Bud tall boys, and sit on the sun-soaked sidewalk, feeling like Jesus, in the world but not of it. You will light a cigarette, and it will taste so good.


Brook Millard is working on a book of short stories. He lives in Denver.

FICTION: Responsibility

By Alexander C. Kafka

There were a few men, mostly lawyers. Gary's professional connections, his acquaintances from Yale and the law review. Now they were in his or other government agencies, or federal alums who'd gone to private firms.

But there were mostly other women there. Some of them lawyers, too. But overall, a more eclectic bunch. The preponderance of women was embarrassing, thought Joana. But it also figured. He was the kind of man who related best to women, who dated them once or twice, then built a friendship out of talking about dating, organizing mass outings that were sexless not just in fact but in feeling.

"Hey," a typical message would say. "This is Gary. Long time no see. Listen. A bunch of us are getting together Saturday at Glen Echo for ballroom dancing and it would be great if you could join us. Bring someone or come alone. Either way. No need to call me, but lemme know if you need a ride or something. We'll meet at the entry to the Spanish Ballroom around nine.”

The chemistry wasn't right, women would say about him, but he's a really nice guy. "I don't know why—he’s not bad looking," they'd report. "But I'm just not that attracted to him." Maybe they could fix him up with a friend, they'd say.

So, Joana mused, looking around the room. Here they were, assembled. The starters from when Gary first moved to D.C. The friends they set him up with after their own tepid date or two. The friends' friends. A little convention of professional women in their late twenties through mid-forties. A few now with boyfriends. A recently acquired husband or two.

Everyone was tense and earnest, gathered in the dim living room. The sofa, the chairs, the floor all covered with FOG—Friends of Gary—making self-consciously casual chitchat, waiting for a few stragglers. The host, Arnold, welcomed each guest with a sober smile. "Glad you could make it. Just put the food over there on the table. There're sodas in the fridge."

Finally, the group settled down and Arnold introduced his sister, Laura, an obese woman rabbi from Pittsburgh who'd been planning to come to town anyway to see her new niece and offered to sort of get things rolling, Arnold said. He asked a man in a wheelchair to turn off the little air conditioning unit so everyone could hear. That made the room even closer, the air that much thinner. Joana felt that she would suffocate.

"Why don't we get started?" Rabbi Laura said, squinting through thick glasses, brushing alarming clumps of hair off of her front, a displaced dining room chair creaking beneath her bulk. How nice would a dress have to be to look nice on this woman? Hard to imagine, Joana thought, edgily eyeing the smock-like outfit, the acres of blue denim. She knew better than to talk about it, but ugly things, ugly people, made her physically ill. It was a true hardship. Not the kind people felt sorry for you about, but nonetheless real. Like bad allergies or an ulcer.

"I didn't know Gary," said Rabbi Laura. "But if so many friends took time on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to pay tribute to him, he must have been a remarkable man." The rabbi sighed a lot between sentences, a kind of stagy, emotional sigh, somewhere between spirituality and asthma. It gave Joana the willies. She wondered if she were the only one.

Her own absurdly reform congregation, growing up in Potomac, had put a higher premium on guitar sing-alongs than sermons or prayers. Lots of "Blowin' in the Wind" and "If I Had a Hammer." Every now and then a half-baked "original drama by the children." And even these artsy agendas were an annual phenomenon around the High Holidays. Weekly services were for fanatics, she'd been sure.

Sunday school in Rockville had been a joke, an excuse to flirt and discuss TV shows and eat bagels with cream cheese. A chance to compare the fits of everyone's new jeans and blouses or the gaudiness of their mazuzas. When every now and again a hapless teacher actually tried to impart knowledge—the Hebrew alphabet, a Bible story—the efforts would be met with surly stares, muttered conversation, passed notes, and even stupored heads on crooked arms, faces down on the plastic, wood-grain, fold-up tables beneath the overbearing fluorescent lights.

To her parents' quiet, head-shaking dismay, Joana had declined the bat mitzvah. Some of her friends memorized their torah readings phonetically, approximating the thin, Oriental melodies they'd heard a thousand times on their tapes. But what was the point, chanting this gibberish? Becoming a woman? She thought not. She wasn't sure then how that would happen, but she knew a bat mitzvah wouldn't do the trick. She didn't want to be tutored for a year by some glum, cagey Israeli University of Maryland grad student while her friends went out for track. It seemed so medieval and cultish. Religion—any religion, but her own most of all—made her skittish. And listening to this awful woman rabbi was close to unbearable.

"When someone dies," the rabbi said, "particularly when they die in the manner Gary did, there are many emotions." Sigh. "There is sadness." Sigh. "There is frustration." Sigh. "There is anger." Sigh.

Joana wanted to giggle. In order not to, she concentrated on her San Tropez panties beneath the cooling sheen of her short, black sundress. The breezy feel of the frail, delicate silk at her crotch. The waxy string sides, more naked than nakedness. The delicious pull of the back—not thong, but sensuously narrow. She closed her eyes and hoped the others would think it was regret and sorrow.

Since her late teens, she'd reveled in owning lingerie. Through college and her master's and the years since, her tastes had become more costumey and erotic. She didn't wear it always. She had the Hanes, the Fruit of the Loom, the Jockey, for everyday. Just now and then, when she needed its emotional, visceral reinforcement to shore up her confidence or take her to sweeter places. During exams or job interviews. Waiting in line at the motor vehicle department. Accompanying her sister Maureen on errands.

But the lingerie was particularly vital when contemplating death. It had gotten Joana through her grandparents' funerals—a teddy with lace at the midriff for grandma Bess, red Moulin Rouge culottes with a matching camisole for grandpa Hal. Tastefully concealed, mind you, beneath proper dresses knee-length or longer. Her mom's passing was particularly difficult. Mrs. Schuler had died relatively young of multiple sclerosis when Joana was a senior at Tufts. For that, a tarty purple French-cut bikini bottom framed by garters and thigh-high stockings, and topped with a semi-transparent bustier.

As their bodies were lowered into the ground, Joana had indulged in wild sexual fantasies involving the outlandish outfits, several men, and feathered masks. She'd felt awful about it, but also blessed that she had this strange mental apparatus. The bodies meant nothing to her. She'd loved them all when they were living and in her reserved but sincere way, she'd let them know that. But the corpses had nothing in common with the living people who'd shared their features, and she was unable and unwilling to cry for them. The mourners would offer her condolences, then, as if embarrassed to mention it, tell her how strangely beautiful she looked. How she had a lovely glow even at such a sad time. How strong she was. They didn't realize.

But Gary she'd known only casually. Besides, it was hot. So today, the simple pastel blue panties, made in Italy and delivered Federal Express by catalogue from a boutique in Toronto, were her only escape from the dour here and now. She pictured their minute waves and folds, their sheen and delicate effervescence as she twirled gently around in front of the closet mirror.

"Sometimes when words aren't adequate," Rabbi Laura said between the obnoxious sighs, music can help us to contain … and to confront … our conflicting emotions. If you'll all focus on the candle and the bowl of water on the coffee table … I thought we could start off by singing a negun, just a melody with no words."

With that, the rabbi started la-la-ing in a hoarse, slightly hammy alto. The group hummed along, with a few bold la-la-ers taking the lead, the loudest of them—a man with sweat soaking through his Oxford shirt—utterly off-key. If he'd tried, he couldn't have been more distant from the cloying tune. It was an actual tritone away, a hoarse, hideous organum, almost wailing, as if from some crazed monk. Joana stared at him and shuddered.

Then they went around the room introducing themselves and saying how they knew Gary. Sure enough, the few men knew him professionally and not terribly well. And the women—a teacher, a stock broker, a TV news producer, an ad firm account manager, two attorneys, a dentist, a general surgeon, a restaurant manager and Joana—had either dated him, fixed him up with other women, been fixed up with him by other women or otherwise counseled him on his love life. They chuckled uncomfortably at this farcical element of the gathering, for it was too striking and too absurd to simply ignore.

This was a morbid social house of cards built on the hollow ego of a lonely man, Joana thought. And now it had collapsed into this ungainly pile of strained emoting. She wished herself elsewhere. God was it hot. The backs of her knees felt sticky and a little raw against the sofa's stale-smelling, rough upholstery.

Joana knew—all these women knew, they must have—that they were just the tip of the iceberg. At the thought, she shook her head and looked up at the ceiling. There were so many others, she was sure. (This time she didn't care if anyone noticed her, but if they did, they likely thought she was overcome with grief, appealing quietly to the heavens.) Cindy, for instance. Cindy, the banker friend who'd gone out with Gary and suggested that he call Joana, wasn't in the group. Had she not been told? Had she washed her hands of him? Joana hadn't thought to call her, figuring that the secretary who somehow had Joana's number would certainly have let Cindy know. And she was just one, Joana was positive, of coutnless missing links in this romantic Ponzi scheme. Surely there were other Cindy's. Lots of them. Even if they weren't on a readily apparent phone or e-mail list. Gary had taken in all womankind.

Some of the women recognized each other from the group outings—the karaoke sings at Japanomatic or the get-togethers at Twister Alley in Wheaton to dance to the Prairie Pals. "You're Jessica, right? We met at Bob's Billiards that night. Good to see you again." Then a resigned stare. "But I wish it were under better circumstances." That was a typical variation on the afternoon's mantra.

At least Joana had escaped those vapid group get-togethers despite Gary's best efforts to snare her. If she weren't his date, he wanted her as one of his outing groupies. But she hadn't succumbed to more than that one awful evening with him. She didn't become, she thought with relief, part of his now-abandoned, nomadic, platonic harem. She didn't need him, like so many others seemed to, just to say, come Fridays and Saturdays, that she had some place to go. She went where she wanted. She always had. More often than not, she preferred to be alone. When she wanted company, she wanted it to be finite and stimulating.

No one here knew her beyond her brief introduction, and now, especially, she was glad she'd said so little about herself. "I'm Joana. I went out with Gary once, and when I heard, well, it seemed like such a waste. I had to be here, I guess." She'd really told them nothing. She was a stranger. Anonymous. And that, she now saw plainly, was for the best.

Rabbi Laura suggested that anyone who wanted to speak say something they remembered or thought or felt about Gary. Her brother, Arnold, the host, read a passage from Bertram Russell that in its own windy way seemed to say you shouldn't feel guilty if everyone finds you totally unapproachable and distant and can't confide in you. The wording was a little baroque, but Joana liked the sentiment. Bertram wouldn't be here, she thought to herself.

The woman in advertising showed a video of a local news broadcast in which she and Gary were interviewed at Umbria Restaurant’s grape-stomping festival. Gary had invited Joana to the grape stomping, the restaurant's annual promotional gimmick, but she’d begged out with some feeble excuse. Watching the video, she was glad she had. It made her sad to watch. The group Gary had organized, the uneasy, fixed smiles on their faces as he sang the aria with the hired tenor. Gary knew the aria well. That was impressive. But there was something brash and off-kilter about his joyless spontaneity. It was that void beyond his work and noise and exhibitionism that had made Joana cringe on their one date—to Blues Alley in Georgetown. And it unsettled her again now watching him on the staticky, faded videotape of the schmaltzy opera performance at the dowdy Italian restaurant.

The dentist said she'd once counseled Gary about a personal ad he'd placed in City Paper. It was all wrong, she'd told him. "You'll never get a date with this thing," she said. "Let me rewrite it." She did, the dentist recounted with a straight face obviously destined for a punchline. Whatever the story’s kicker was, Joana knew she wouldn't find it funny because the tale seemed pathetic and sordid to her. She was humiliated she’d gone out even once with this desperate man who sought mates in the newspaper, and she was now sorry her conscience had compelled her to come to this morbid gathering.

The respondents to the revised ad, the dentist said, smiling with a hopeless mirth Joana didn't like, were an incarcerated woman and another who was in her late fifties and lived on an Eastern Shore farm with her ancient, ailing parents. The woman in her fifties emphasized that she was still a virgin, still waiting for her soul mate.

Gary struck up a long-lasting correspondence with both these women. “That's just the way he was,” the dentist said. But then he ran the ad he'd written and gotten "just dozens of dates," she beamed. “All great women.” Great women like these, Joana thought, looking around and feeling a little light-headed. Great women like me, sucked into this helpless man's vacuum of emotion.

The stock broker remembered how fond Gary was of brownies. How he was, in fact, a brownie connoisseur. When he bought, it was only from Tivoli. But the ones he made were even better, she said. She'd once glanced in his refrigerator and seen eight tubs of sour cream. That, she said, was his secret. "I guess I can reveal it now," she said, then laughed, then broke into sobs and someone handed her a box of Kleenex.

A couple talked about how Gary had sung "Mac the Knife" at their wedding. And not only that, they'd said, but it was the best rendition of "Mac the Knife" they'd ever heard. Better than Sinatra. That's funny, said another couple. He'd done the same thing at their wedding.

When the restaurant manager had been between jobs the summer before, she said, there was suddenly a flurry of outing messages from Gary. Sing-along nights at Mr. Henry’s. Alvin Ailey at the Kennedy Center. A Myrna Loy festival at the American Film Institute. She’d felt so lost that summer and Gary steered his social-life raft her way, she said. When she found a new job, the invitations just as quickly, and just as subtly, ebbed.

The remembrance was meant to show how profoundly generous and tactful Gary was. But, Joana thought to herself, looking down at her sleek leather-strapped espadrilles, Gary probably figured, with Sharon insecure and jobless, he might actually have a chance of bagging her.

Joana had fled Gary after just a goodnight kiss that one chilly October night. Gary had blabbed on and on about be-bop and what a brilliant bassist Ron Abner was, and how Reuben Blake, a local pianist, should have become rich and famous instead of being sidelined by a stroke. Gary made a point of going up to the players between sets and shaking their hands and asking about various D.C. jazz musicians he had heard and what were they up to now and where could he find this or that hard-to-find album. How the vinyls somehow seemed to have a soul the digital versions couldn't touch, and was that his imagination or did it have to do with the remixing? On and on.

Even the players, after a while, seemed to realize the talk had no real personality behind it. That it was like radio chat. Filler. White noise. Gary really did seem to know a lot about jazz, but it was knowledge in pure crystal form, undiluted, undigested and indigestible. Show-offy smarts. Despite it, he didn't really seem to find anything affirming in the music, and the players seemed to figure that out after a few minutes. The evening had left her cold and she’d been anxious to get away from him. When she'd gotten home, she had to decompress, take a bath, channel surf, and she'd felt, for no particular reason, like crying.

But though many of the women around her were balling away now, Joana couldn't have summoned tears if she'd tried. The stories, the recollections, kept coming. They were torture to Joana and she couldn’t understand why the group was putting itself through this. For whom? For what? What did it solve? Who would it help? Was it really solace to them, these acquaintances who'd known so little about Gary? Is that what they were crying about? That they'd been oblivious to his sorrow? That he'd been oblivious to so much, camouflaged by his bland extroversion and whirlwind of activity? These shallow recollections explained nothing, resolved nothing.

Were they crying, as Rabbi Laura suggested, because they would have been there for him if only he'd asked, if only he'd leaned on them, if only they'd known? Joana wasn't at all sure that was true. Gary was tiresome enough when being friendly and energetic. Imagine if he'd been a morose whiner as well as a fake.

He was so very meticulous, was a recurring theme. The neatest desk in the office. Never even a folderless file on his computer. He was meticulous even in doing himself in. Not only had he left the letters in his pockets—one to family, one to friends—and the will. But he’d left the vaccination records of his two cats, Romulus and Remus, stacked neatly on the dining table of his tidy little one-bedroom Roslyn apartment. He’d even left instructions on how often to change their flea collars, and when the next change was due. A note on the best combination of dry-to-canned food for the sake of their urinary tracts.

The strange thing, said a colleague named Matt, who seemed to have known Gary just a tad better than the others did, was that Gary had also made plans for the months ahead. Tickets to Wolf Trap and a local Democratic fund-raiser. Reservations—non-refundable—for a Chicago trip in the fall for his grandmother’s 90th birthday. Maybe it showed he’d had doubts about whether he’d really go through with it. Or maybe he’d decided absolutely to kill himself, but only after he’d decided absolutely that he had to hear Chaka Khan one last time. Then, maybe, he'd listened to “Through the Fire” on his stereo and figured that was good enough.

Or maybe the tickets and reservations were a lawyerly contingency plan in case there were some logistical problem—an unexpected relocation while his office was sprayed for bugs. Something like that. Maybe he just wanted it to go well, had rehearsed it down to the suit and tie and shoes he’d wear, gone over it again and again in his mind like “Mac the Knife.” And maybe if some chaotic chance event were going to interfere with this last flawless performance, Gary would have to postpone it and would want to sit at a table with a Kennedy and go to Chicago to toast his grandmother before he’d have another chance. Maybe he just didn’t want to be bored between suicide attempts, thought Joana. Maybe it was worth the money in his tight budget to keep himself entertained in case he had to live a little longer.

But it was all maybes. The speculation was a curse he'd left behind. The note to the friends explained nothing and offered no real comfort. It said he'd hidden his troubles and his pain too well, and that they shouldn't feel guilty for not realizing how despondent he'd become. But of course in denying their guilt, he'd assumed it would be guilt they felt. And the denial itself was an inducement and indictment. Like saying don't think about a pink dinosaur with heart-shaped spots all over it. The note was the penultimate fuck you, Joana realized. A lawyerly jab to the gut disguised as a final considerate gesture. Penultimate to the final fuck you. The fuck you to end all fuck you’s. The mother of all fuck you’s. The lunchtime swan dive from the roof of the Federal Trade Commission. In the midst of this posthumous lovefest, she felt the purest hatred. A hatred so unpolluted it gave her a sudden strength as she looked around at these silly women. They didn't even seem human to her, they were so misguided, so illogical.

To wrap things up, Rabbi Laura sighed some more and talked about the Jewish belief in hereafters. It was a common misconception, the hideous, loud woman explained, that Jews didn't believe in an afterlife. Perhaps not a heaven or a hell, she said. But they do believe—they have, since ancient times—that one learns some lessons in a lifetime, but misses others. And that in another lifetime, the person comes back and fills in those gaps. Again and again. Through time, through an infinite seminar of lives in different circumstances, he or she learns more and more of what makes up the whole of an ideal. The person, in his or her many incarnations, may never quite reach the ideal, but coming closer and closer, it is in the striving that the transcendence of the human spirit is manifest, the rabbi said pompously. We call this the rotation of souls, she said. And, she concluded, "It's clear that in this lifetime the lesson Gary learned so beautifully was how to give, and that what he'll have to work on next time is how to take."

With that, the rabbi lead the group in the negun again and the impromptu ceremony was over. After a few moments of awkward silence, people sidled over to the dining room table and loaded paper plates with pasta salads and squash soufflé and desserts.

"Wasn't he Greek? Wasn't he Greek Orthodox?" Joana asked the dentist. He'd gone on and on about it at Monte Carlo over their London broil before the jazz club. Not that Joana had particularly given a shit, but he was like that, fleshing out the random details of his life like a politician in a Barbara Walters interview. Get to know the Gary behind the Gary. Seemingly flustered and fueled by Joana's silences—she hadn't meant to be rude, but she was never chatty—he'd told her about Father Dmitri and the old youth group and how he still kept up with all of them.

"Technically. But he was really an agnostic. He was pretty adamant about that."

"Either way ..." Joana shrugged the implied question, looking over at Rabbi Laura.

"I think Arnold felt it was important that there be some structure to this," the dentist said. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. These things are universal."

What things? What are you talking about? Joana wondered. But she let it drop. "Why wasn't anyone from the family here?" she asked.

"They're coming in for the formal service at the FTC on Tuesday ... Did it really bother you that it was a rabbi?"

"No, I guess not," Joana said. Duh. Of course it bothered her. He was Greek Orthodox. It was ridiculous. But what was the point in arguing about it? Who really cared?

Joana looked at the food. She was hungry from the hour on the elliptical she'd substituted for lunch, but she couldn't touch it. It looked too rich. Poisoned. She had to get out of there. She said a quick goodbyethankyou to Arnold and fled to her petite convertible. She drove quickly from the depressing little Takoma Park house to her Biltmore Street apartment in Kalorama. She realized she'd left the Tupperware with the salad at Arnold's. Fuck it, she thought. That was one house she'd never go back to. And she hoped she'd never run into any of those people again.


She peed and brushed her teeth and splashed cold water on her face. She had some left-over pad Thai and sat down at her drafting table. It was a project for the symphony—a good, steady client for four years straight. She’d hooked up with them through Maureen, who was a third-stand cellist. Joana felt gleeful having something concrete and sensible to think about after the maddening waste of an afternoon. Lots of elements to work with. She fiddled with the brochure layout, trying different schemes for having the maestro peer out paternally over the inherently dull grid of the season schedule. Hmm, she thought, Yo-Yo Ma’s playing the Elgar. Maureen would like that. It was one of her favorite pieces, and Ma was her hero. He’d done the Dvorak the year before and Maureen had raved and run off to B&N to buy his latest recordings. The best soloists reinvigorate a symphony, she told Joana. And with Ma, there’s no bullshit. He’s a pro—humble and easygoing. That, of course, was also a pretty fair description of Maureen herself.

Joana sometimes hated to be with her little sister because of the air of disorderliness and hazard that clung to her. There were always crumbs and near misses at crosswalks. The stick didn’t seem to help. She didn’t think Maureen ever learned to use it right or something. Then there was Kaiser, who was adorable and dutiful. But even Maureen, despite her loyalty to him, was tempted to ask if he couldn’t be replaced with a dog that smelled better. The vets never knew quite what to make of it, but it really seemed that there might be something seriously wrong with his GI tract.

But though she girded her strength for visits and errands with Maureen, and often found her unrealistic and scatterbrained and hopelessly naïve, Joana also worshipped her and relied on her, easily as much as Maureen needed her. If their roles had been switched—if it had been Joana whose corneas inexplicably and suddenly peeled themselves off of her eyes like poor-quality shrink wrap—would she have fared a fraction as well? Hell no. She would have lost it. She would have become psychotic, taken to drugs or something. Sat in her room and gotten fat and refused to bathe until she forced her family to commit her to some kind of institution. No, she wouldn’t have continued at Peabody and incrementally adapted the way Maureen had. She certainly wouldn’t have become even wiser, even more mature, more compassionate, because of it. If it had been her instead of Maureen, she would have become terribly bitter. That it might some day happen to her, too, was her very worst nightmare. When that happened in the chronic bad dreams, she shot up in bed, the sheets soaked with sweat, shivering and sobbing.

Joana arranged and rearranged the iconic variables of the symphony brochure, played with color charts to find something resonant with the previous seasons’ schedules but with just a few refreshing distinctions. Comparing shades of salmon and flesh tones on the oversized screen, she suddenly remembered that Gary had different color eyes. One was brown, one a pale hazel. Weird the way these things come back to you, she thought. He’d been so physically awkward that night in Georgetown. Self-conscious, it seemed, about his posture, blushing when she’d happened to look over at him while he was chewing some ice cubes at the club. She didn’t give a shit if he chewed ice cubes. She’d just happened to look over at him, that was all. He ever so tentatively took her hand when he kissed her on the cheek before putting her in the Liberty cab.

What had he wanted from her? What had he wanted from anyone? Sex? Company? A listener? An audience? None of those seemed to be the right answer, though they were all true. There was no right answer, she supposed. And when he’d realized that was the right answer—that no one had anything he wanted—he’d killed himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to take. It’s that he was dissatisfied with the selection. It was the ultimate selfishness. Joana shook her head, pulled up a drafting program, and started playing with proportions.

After about an hour and a half, the cavernous two-bedroom apartment—rent control, a real prize—seemed unbearably still, the light the sad smoot-filtered low voltage of late summer dusk. She rested her eyes a moment and leaned back in the high, lumbar-support chair, then got up, brushed her hair, and walked the couple blocks to Soleil in Adams Morgan.

She ordered a scotch old-fashioned at the sleek bar, and cherished the numbing, earth-bound slowness it delivered, losing herself in the textured acid groove coming over the speakers. She basked in the powerful air conditioning. And she admired the smart, flattering lighting, the cutaway walls and expansive mirrors.

A woman sat next to her on the only empty stool and ordered a Pernod. Joana watched the clear liqueur turn its milky, pale yellow as the bartender added water to the woman’s tall glass. She wondered if the yellow were one she could use. How would you produce its density? She’d have to try to mix it on her Chameleon program.

“That filtered?” the other woman asked the bartender. “The water, I mean. Do you filter it?” The city had lead in its pipes. It had been in the news a lot.

“Don’t worry,” the bartender said. “It’s Poland Spring.”

“Great,” said the woman. “Thanks. Pretty, isn’t it?” She’d turned to Joana, who hadn’t meant to stare.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m a graphic designer, and I was just thinking about that color, if I could use it for a project I’m working on. Just spacing out.”

“No problem.” The woman sipped her drink contentedly. “You’re waiting for someone?”

“No. … You?”

“No. … But if you were waiting for someone,” the woman said, “who would it be?”

It was a very weird question, and the woman must have known it, because she laughed awkwardly, self-consciously, and played with the rim of her glass and looked down at her parachute-panted knees. Joana didn’t know what to say. Was it just nonsense nervous conversation, the way hyperactive boys with nothing to say blurt out, “How now brown cow”?

“Um …”

“It would be a man or a woman, is what I mean,” the woman said.

Oh. “It would—uh—it would be a man. I’m flattered, though.” And she was. “Sorry.”

“No. No, I’m sorry,” said the other woman, who, without even finishing the other two-thirds of her drink, laid down a ten-dollar note. She looked over for change at the bartender but he was helping someone else. Flustered, the woman just left the ten there, gathered her little pocketbook from the floor and walked out, muttering, “My mistake.”

Maybe the woman had seen Joana looking around and thought she was, well, looking around. Joana sucked a cube, chuckled to herself, paid, and left. Eighteenth was teeming with the juvenile crowd. Eighties bubble-gum pop throbbed from Déja New across the car-clogged street, and grinding dance bass riffs pulsed from Vistas. Near the the three-way intersection with Columbia and Adams Mill, every narrow bar had a different beat—reggae, conjunto, jazz lite, blues. She withdrew some cash at the ATM and figured she’d go get a video when she passed Viva Cuba at its new location. The grand opening crowds of several months ago had disappeared. The doorman, nicely dressed in a svelte, tangoey black suit, eyed her appreciatively—a flirt too open to be objectionable—and said, for her, no cover. She smirked and kept walking. Then stopped and turned back. Why not?

Inside, she checked out the different floors. She had another drink in the third-story café. It was nice. Quiet Spanish guitar music, with interesting, teasingly sensuous photos lining the walls. She found a little round table a couple had just left, and sat on the high stool enjoying a sangria. Three men—preppy, young, and nice-looking—talked law school at the next table. One caught her eye, and his was caught in turn. Relaxed, undaunted, he asked her if she wanted to join them, and she did. Brent, Harry, and Scott were their names. While Brent and Harry seemed jerky and aggressive in a warmed-over adolescent way, Scott, who’d asked her over, seemed straightforward and pleasant. Final year at GW, he said. They were celebrating the end of their treacherous summer internships. Did she want another?

“Just water, please.”

“I’m sorry. They’re really not bad guys. They’re just fidgety or something tonight,” Scott apologized after his buddies had grudgingly been shooed away by him. He had a gentle squinty confidence about him. He was tall, and dressed nicely in Send slacks and a soft, maroon, short-sleeve polo that flattered his relaxed, broad frame. There was a little weekend stubble and fatigue that only accentuated his studenty youth and energy. She was very attracted to him.

“They want to get laid,” she said, enjoying the shock value.

“Well, yeah,” he nodded, taking her in. “I suppose they do.”

He looked bewildered and thrilled as Joana led him wordlessly downstairs to the salsa dance floor. It was crowded, but in a cheerful, celebratory way. Not pushy. Lots of excuse-me’s as the intermingled yuppies and workadays, Hispanic, black, Asian, and white, carried Coronas to their dates. Scott moved with an easy grace. And Joana knew that as he watched her own happy, angular gyrations, he was falling under her spell. She had a look of fun-overcoming-skepticism that captivated men and had since she was a girl. Pale with her thick, black page-boy cut, toned, with a cutely contained lankiness, she well knew her looks’ quiet, potent authority. And she could tell, as the DJ navigated the giddy crowd through its pressurized contortions, that Scott was cataloguing the breadth of his budding infatuation with her. She enjoyed his breathless, helpless scanning of her, as reflexive and natural as gooseflesh in cold.

“Will you walk me home, please?”

“Sure,” he nodded. The drinks had hit her, and the quick walk felt like slow motion. She’d stepped into the anti-matter of anticipated pleasure, feeling it grainily part before her and close again behind her in the humid night. And she hoped Scott felt it too. It was what she most liked to share in life.

At her lobby, she took his unsure hand, looked him over with a moment’s strange conscientiousness, as though she’d quiz herself later, then kissed him deliciously.

“Are you scared of me?” she asked without smiling, then smiled.

“I just didn’t expect this,” he said, and she was glad he didn’t pretend that he had. “Did you?” he asked.

“I did. And then I didn’t. And then I did again.” She grinned and looked down at their hot, joined hands.

He laughed a quiet laugh, shook his head, and they rose in the ancient, caged elevator.

Inside, she made them decaf cappuccinos—good, frothy and strong with traces of cocoa and cinnamon on top.

“These yours?” he said, looking over the vanity wall of framed posters, brochures, and ads she’d done. She nodded. “They’re … I don’t know much about what to look for. But they’re striking,” he said.

“That’s what to look for.” She joined him and studied him the way he did the wall. “Sometimes people look for too much.”

He bit his tongue in order not to say she, too, was striking. It would have sounded awful, and contrived. But it was true. Bird-limbed and coyly suspicious and hungry looking, her weight on one sharp hip, cupping the oversized Williams and Sonoma mug, blinking, basking in its homey warmth. She was something else. It was a great apartment, too, he thought. So big. Nice and dry and cool.

“You like Ella?” she said. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Ella.” She looked, for an instant, soft and reaching. But it vanished almost as quickly, displaced again by that unpredictable willfulness, that nameless edge that taunted and provoked him.

“I’ve only heard her a little, I think,” he said. “That sounds fine.”

They danced and kissed and she felt his excitement. At that, he pulled away a little, but she pulled him back. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “It’s nice. Me too.” That made him shiver, and that made her glad. Their bodies settled together and rocked to and fro to Ella’s cooing.

“Whoa.” She started undressing him. Every time is different, she thought happily. Every time recapitulates the blushing time. She felt very, very light.

“No, please,” she said. “Not yet. Just you first, OK?” Awkward and painfully exposed, he’d squirmed and wanted to slip off the straps of her dress, but she hadn’t let him. She kissed his chest and his stomach and his thighs, and from her purse on the futon sofa she pulled out some condoms.

“You checkin’ me out down there?” He sounded a little resentful. “…Hey, what’s the deal? Why not just give me a complete physical?”

“Don’t be offended,” she said. “I like to look at you.” It was true, and it was a lie. He was offended, until he forgot to be. She kissed him again and caressed his face and then did slide out of the little, black dress, which fell to the wood floor as quietly and lightly as a rose petal. She let him tug off the panties and watched the vein in his neck throb. And she helped him with the condom. The she opened another of the square packages.

“Two?”

“Don’t worry.” Narrowed eyes. A temptress grin. “You’ll still feel it.”

Double-wrapped, he pulled her toward him and her mouth toward his. They kissed for a tender, weightless spell. Then she turned her back to him and kneeled on the futon-sofa, her hands on its back. Scott reached around and rubbed her tentatively. She smiled.

“How much do you know about female anatomy?” she asked.

He pulled back a little. “Well, I thought quite a bit. But if you’re asking, maybe not.” He was hurt. “I’m not proud. Show me.”

She was glad he wasn’t proud. And she showed him. “It helps if you pull this back a little, gently, like that. Mmmm. Yeah. Like that.”

Again, he chose to forget the offense he’d taken, captivated by her long neck, the mild sweep of her back graduating supply to the taut underneath. He mapped them with one hand as she moved against the fingers of his other.

She braced her knees broadly, reached beneath herself and guided him.


In the morning, Joana was unfazed by his watch alarm. He had a tennis date and no number to cancel it. She looked content and sweetly ruffled, makeupless and robe-wrapped, and they had delicious brioche from Rise Bakery with Café Busto from the Americana Grocery. As they sipped and stared, the phone rang. Joana pursed her lips in a fun, knowing way and didn’t answer.

The machine came on. It was an unaccompanied cello playing “Happy Birthday.” Scott started to ask, of course but Joana put her finger to her lips. It was a family tradition, one her mom had started when they were little girls. Early morning, weekday or weekend regardless. For the rest of them, it was singing. Her Dad would call soon from Geneva and croak the tune in his own wonderful, artless way. But for Maureen, it was playing, and beautiful, sonorous playing at that. The last notes echoed from the machine’s peewee speaker through the big room. Maureen didn’t say anything. But then that wasn’t uncharacteristic. Played and hung up, leaving just the whir of the dutiful, oscillating fan by the TV. Joana savored the moment.

“I didn’t know it was your birthday.”

“How could you?” Joana said. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“How old are you?”

“Older than you.”

“Hmm.” Scott gulped the rest of the cup and chugged the orange juice from its little teardrop-base glass. “Well, many happy returns.”

On his way out, he said, “I’ll call you.”

“Please don’t.” She knew it was like a sword thrust, but meant it and knew it would go easiest if the thrust was steady and straight.

“I don’t understand. … Did I say something? Did I do something?”

He looked at her, wounded, his face flushing. She didn’t want that. She couldn’t prevent it.

“No,” she said. “You were fine. You were wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for being with me.”

“'Thank you for being with me?’ That’s it? So … I’m not going to see you again?” He looked incredulous, his forehead creased. He waited to find out she was kidding.

She shrugged an I’m-sorry shrug, and they stood there awkwardly.

With a grim little exhaled laugh, he finally looked away from her, then got into the elevator, letting the quaint cage door slide shut after him with a decisive clang. She watched his slow, mechanical descent, his averted eyes and stonily fixed expression as he disappeared beneath the edge of the worn stone flooring where it met the shaft.

She went back inside her apartment and finished off her coffee. She opened the French doors to the little balcony. She sat in the sturdy Ikea chair she always left there. In the girding, close heat, the Post on her lap, she pushed back against the brick. Braced, she wrapped her toes around the iron railing, and read.


Original photo of woman is by Sacha Leclair.