God's Gift to Women 9781935622185, 9781935622215

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God’s Gift to Women S TA N F O R D F R I E D M A N Stanford Friedman

Scott & Nix  ·  New York

Text copyright © by Stanford Friedman, 2010. All rights reserved. Published by Scott & Nix, Inc. 150 West 28th Street, Suite 1003 New York, NY 10001 www.scottandnix.com Excerpt from “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” by Thomas Wolfe, originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine, June 15, 1935. First electronic edition published in November, 2010. ISBN (PDF): 978-1-935622-18-5 ISBN (ePub): 978-1-935622-19-2 ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-935622-20-8

Praise for God’s Gift to Women

“Stanford Friedman’s book is full of insight into what makes the modern male tick. The struggle between freedom and commitment, alienation and love, is brought forth in prose that delights with its mellifluous delicacy. God’s Gift to Women is also very funny, at time even slapstick, with a fine ear for how men and women communicate—or fail to—today.” —Nancy Jo Sales, contributing editor, Vanity Fair

“God’s Gift to Women reminds me of Nick Hornsby’s High Fidelity— except instead of a tale about a man’s obsession with music, we get a book about a man’s obsession with the opposite sex. I’d call this novel ‘guy lit’ but it’s too smart, too knowing, too literary for that. Really, it’s a 30-something male’s coming of age story. Anyone of either sex who feels confounded by love, dating and what it all ultimately means will love this book.” —Paula Derrow, editor, Behind the Bedroom Door: Getting It, Giving It, Loving It, Missing It

“The first thing I’ve got to do…is to grow to my right size, and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden.” —Lewis Carrol

One

A road is a clock laid over the land, a mechanism of ramps and lanes and accidents. Speed into Distance, our surest measure of Time. It is the day before Easter, 1976. The back roads of mid-April have sat untended, unprotected, and now, like a trick doormat set out for visitors, a sheet of black ice covers a swatch of this narrow, two-lane bridge on the outskirts of Princeton Junction. Two strangers approach at once through the thick fog. Angie, who fails to see it coming and then panics when she feels the bulky Lincoln Continental that belongs to her mother start to slide so that her foot, the high-arched and red toe-nailed foot which would tease Scott under the table when they sat across from each other at lunch, instinctively slams the brakes and the car begins its spin in a clockwise direction. Time and gravity speeding up, the headlights reeling like an electric minute-hand and the vein pulsing in her delicate neck counting the seconds. Now the path of the man in the opposing lane is blocked by the full broad width of Angie’s mother’s car, so he strikes it. Going 70 miles per hour he crashes into her at a perfect right angle, forming for half a second the ideal tension of a vertical crossing into a horizontal before the metal and the chrome, the plastic and the flesh, have a chance to twist or crumple. With the life speeding out of her counterclockwise, this unexplained element in a particle accelerator, the atomic Angie, the girl Scott will never see again, is propelled by the collision’s force through

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the windshield. Her corpse and a small gift she has bought for him are pulled from the bridge’s gravel shoulder. No. It is November the 12th, 1995 and here at the start, at this other bridge, Scott is trying to keep his mind off the finish: the crowds with Wendy somewhere among them, her big brown eyes full of hope, her fists tight with worry, clutching a bag that holds a plastic, Chinese take-out container filled with homemade chicken soup. And he is trying to forget the present he has hidden away back at home that he will give to her this evening. It is not yet 8:00 and already thousands of runners have amassed here, mainly involved in the effort of not freezing to death. They are sipping hot decaf or hot chocolate, carbo-loading their systems with bites of bagel and energy bars, massaging each other’s legs. Scott is standing by himself, back to the wind, this memory of Angie, which is not even a legitimate memory, just a version derived from what the radio had to say, again burnishing itself into a three dimensional nightmare, making it’s sudden appearance as it has so often over the past two decades. The trip he has ventured upon to get here this morning had him leaving his upper west side apartment at six and catching the subway to Times Square. He then power walked to Fifth Avenue to join the others who had pre-paid their nine bucks and were waiting for the bus to take them to Staten Island. All told, less than two hours. That is, of course, not counting the four days per week training he has pushed through over the past four months. Starting just after the Fourth of July when he smoked what he promised was his last cigarette, he kicked his 10-mile a week habit up to fifteen. Up to twenty by his birthday in mid August, maxing out at 35 by the end of September, and virtually coasting through a strong 25 last week. Now, the effort to put a week’s worth of running into a single day, a single moment for which he has waited all summer. There is a sudden, cold, dousing of rain and it just as quickly vanishes, a little wink from a nasty God above. The heavens play just as they please.

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He imagines Angie high up on some impossibly tall bleacher, ready to urge him on at the start. Her long red hair braided with green yarn that nearly matches her eyes; her clear, throaty voice shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” as in her cheerleader days. Then he curses himself again for this failing, the inability to leave her behind despite the list of lovers he has since assembled, despite the ring he will probably surprise Wendy with tonight. Just as the runners know to keep their eyes on the solid blue line painted down the street, Scott heeds the markings of the path he has taken away from Angie, the torn relationships of a dozen complex women, bread crumbs on a trail. Many who were close to Angie’s weight and size, or who grew their hair in her style. Some the opposite extreme, nearly boyish. One that deflated in a month, and another which lasted just a night but nonetheless refuses to recede from his memory. Donna, Nancy, Jamie, Rachel, Faith, Gina, Marcia, Jane, Patricia, Patty, and, God help him, Diva28. Tracing this path backwards in his mind he arrives at Angie’s front door. It is 1974, early morning of a clear September Saturday in their hometown of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Angie has forgotten they had made a date for breakfast. Her mother, always kind and quiet, answers the bell then toddles off to wake Angie in her bedroom. It is the sound of running water, the shower being turned on, Scott hears in the core of this memory, and the empty stairs leading up to where she bathed. When he projects the path forward into the near future it is to the bathtub he will find himself in tonight, with Wendy. Number 12, the even dozen, the pot of gold at the end of his arch of lovers. The one at which he will stop. Scott is wearing a torn, bright orange windbreaker and a pair of plain gray sweats worn over his running clothes. Though resembling nothing as much as a flattened traffic cone, he feels handsome and strong, knows that when the women volunteers leer at him or when a female runner brushes past on the pretense of getting a drink, they are looking through his jacket

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and imagining his bare chest and solid arms. Nonetheless, he is shivering. It is the coldest day ever for the marathon and he cannot keep his muscles loose. He feels the hamstrings cursing him, his calves are gooseflesh, and he longs for the puddle of sweat that he knows will slowly envelop his sleeveless shirt in just about an hour, how it will start as dabs of salty water like rain dripping from his skin. Then the moisture will gather to form a large and ugly stain down his chest. Scott thinks of it as pouring out his heart, as if the muscle were a slug and the upcoming 26 miles a steady stream of salt. But for now, in the shadow of a giant inflatable bottle of Gatorade, he stretches his chilled legs against the cool wind coming off the river, clasps his hands behind his head like a convict being cuffed and flexes then relaxes the muscles of his arms. This ritual preparation always strikes him as just so much preening, akin to the way he would prepare for a date when he was a teen. With Elton John or Styx masking the silence of his room, he would stand in front of the mirror and look deep into his own reflection, become lost in the gaze coming back at him, the cool blue-gray eyes, the curly, thick brown hair (how he misses this, hair so dense and wild he could hide a half dozen pencils within, then send them flying at his cackling classmates with a sharp twist of the head). When he finally managed to pull himself away from his own image he would slip on a tee shirt and a button down, his pair of blue Levi’s over the white Fruit of the Looms his mother picks out, and a pair of black Converse High-tops over bare feet. A splash of his father’s Old Spice and Scott was ready to roll. It was just that easy to be prepared. Just that innocent to think that hair and muscle tone and the awkward glee of a date would never succumb to attrition. But now, standing in the cold among thousands of aging bodies on the verge of a marathon— thousands of hearts ready to pump like the pistons of a giant engine gone crucial, so many contained raceways of blood at full tilt— Scott’s quarter-sized bald spot is chilled, his left

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triceps aches and Angie flies through the cornea of his eye again and again against his will, falling in through the iris, etching her damaged body onto his retina. Scott is on his belly atop his big plastic sled and he has begun the descent down the steepest hill in the park. Angie is lying on top of him, squeezing his shoulders for dear life and screaming directly into his ear. “Beam me out of here Scotty, you’re going to kill us both!” “I can’t hold her captain, there’s too much gravity in the antigravity chamber.” “Scotty, I’m depending on you.” “All hands abandon ship!” With that, Scott lifts the left side of his body from the sled and their combined weight is enough to finish the job. They go rolling into a foot of packed snow as the sled drives itself headfirst into a tree. Scott is 17 and this sweet girl is clutching him for warmth and laughing so hard she can barely get her words out. “Next time, I do the driving.” He can feel her breath on his face and her hands seeking his coat pockets. “Get that dumb smile off your face right now,” she says. But he cannot. Scott wishes he could find a quiet moment alone somewhere so he could slap himself back into reality. A couple hard strikes to his chilled cheeks would do it. But he has not earned the privilege. The so-called elite men and women runners have their own places to prepare, away from the quotidian. In large quiet rooms in nearby buildings, the big money athletes are, he suspects, deep in meditation or sneaking a smoke or already running the race in their minds. But the staging area for the masses is a cacophony of large tents, body types and utterings of every conceivable language. A twelve-piece band is playing Sousa. Beneath one of the canopies a group of about 20 men are preoccupied with davening and Hebrew chanting, their tefillin and tallesim wrapped over their warm-up outfits, their words to God lifted out and over the crowd, making a

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beeline for the heavens, while only yards away, two male runners are tight in an embrace and beyond them, four women are tossing around a bagel like a Frisbee, laughing and licking butter from their fingers as they do what they can to stay calm. The distant surroundings are vintage New York. In one direction the Parachute Drop at Coney Island rises like a poor man’s Eiffel Tower. Manhattan, Staten Island and Sandy Hook are all part of the panorama should Scott bother to sweep around and view the vista. Instead, he partially unzips his jacket to examine his abs and straighten his shirt. He stares down at his bib number, 7021. When the starting gun finally goes off, his group will converge with the others, falling in step behind those who are being paid to participate. Like ketchup from a bottle, 28,000 individuals will ooze forth through the bottleneck Verrazano Bridge over Upper New York Bay and for what Scott hopes will not be much more than four hours, his body will supersede his mind in an exercise of pure endurance until Central Park materializes and Wendy finds him in the throes of exhaustion, bent double. She will kiss him on the small of his back, sit him down on the curb and spoon-feed him his soup. He re-zips the windbreaker slowly, hearing each nylon notch melding into the other, a simple protective scar working its way up his chest, catching just below the Adam’s Apple. A little womb he thinks, a bright orange cocoon he will soon discard so to fly out over the city. But he barely feels the tab of the zipper between his fingers his hands are so numb with cold, so he is nostalgic to be back at home. To have just been startled out of a dream he can no longer remember by the heinous 5:00 shriek of his alarm clock, to feel Wendy’s hands as she, half-awake, pushes him out of bed and covets the entire mattress, to have stepped inside the small confines of his warm bathroom he enjoys so much, the cheery shower curtain he picked out on his own with its bipedal pigs in various swimwear, voguing. This being Sunday, Scott planned to

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neither shower nor shave in keeping with his family’s tradition of performing no extraneous grooming on the weekend. An extended Sabbath. “Sabbatical from bath” is the pun that plays itself out in his mind when he realizes that his ability to rationalize any lazy act is still his strongest suit. A marathon run is one thing, but the smallest of cleansing chores is too exhausting to contemplate. In a corner of the bathroom an amazingly large dust-bunny, well, hair-bunny, sits staring up at him, ready to pounce, and he is sure if he were any less religious he’d actually bend down, take the creature by the tail, toss it in the wastebasket and laugh. Let it live one more day. The act of reaching down to retrieve it would be sacrilege; he would not even be bending toward the east. He’d be pointing north, paying homage to the Arctic, bowing to Santa Claus. Blasphemy. Lost in such inane thought, Scott is not even conscious of his urination, this mindless secondary function. It is not until the bathroom echoes with silence does he come around. Like it was six hours before, his urine is clear, a sign he is well hydrated, a full tank of wet. As he contemplates flushing, he is skimming his tongue across his furry cuspids and incisors, squares of bone with the powers of a Chia Pet to spontaneously grow stubble after soaking a night in the one beer he allowed himself, countering the adverse effect of alcohol with the mother lode of carbohydrates the brew provided. The Pepsodent is nearly shot and Scott has to squeeze his tightest fist to get the last splat of paste. A milestone. The fifteenth tube he and Wendy have completed together. And in total, this was the fiftieth in a row he has had help with using up. In fact, the number he is solely responsible for can be counted on one hand. From grabbing it away from his brother, to the long string of roommates, and the run of women who have borrowed his brush before a morning kiss, and now her; this shared intimacy has always been a comfort, a strange proof to Scott that he is loved, a fossil tube of dents made by familiar fingers.

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In the six months it took to get over Faith, Scott worked through a family-sized by himself. Like a twisted Hanukah miracle the paste would regenerate over night. For every bit he took into his mouth to scrub away a day’s loss, the next morning a nearly full tube glistened. In addition, the space in the medicine chest that had been Faith’s (and before that Jamie’s) could not be filled. Scott tried to put the shaving cream there, or the deodorant, but somehow each found its way to the shelf above, or was simply left on the sink. On the shelf, water marks from bottles of contact solution and perfume refused to be wiped away. But now they all have vanished. So after Scott spits the dregs into the sink, he reaches beneath to find a fresh tube, which he pops from its box and places mindfully on the very spot where Faith once kept her pills. A magic vessel waiting to be rubbed, the stem of the clock of Scott’s passion. Now thoroughly purged of the previous night’s transgression and about a half hour ahead of schedule, Scott relents and opts for a quick shower, more a wake-up douse than a bid for cleanliness. He is in and out in three minutes, half that time spent posing with his chest thrown out, like a romance novel hero beneath a waterfall. Toweling off, he says adieu to the curtain of pigs. He strokes a comb through his hair, Speedstick under his arms, and ambles into the living room. He peeks out the small window, through the safety grate and into near darkness, then places his forehead against the glass to judge the temperature. The pang of cold against his skin is identical to that chilly, dull throat pain Scott gets when he shovels down a pint of his favorite Mocha Chip frozen yogurt. “Moo-Cow,” is Wendy’s name for it. Bedtime, when she removes her makeup, slips on her sky blue negligee and boils water for a cup of tea she always calls to him, “Hey Mister, want some Moo-Cow Chip?” He plops down on his old futon and clicks the remote. A man in an ascot is thawing a chicken on some sort of defrosting

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board that uses no electricity. Time-lapse photography shows pork chops completely warmed in fifteen minutes. A pound of hamburger, a rib eye, a large fish, all turn wonderfully moist and bloody in record speed atop this frightening space age device that somehow sucks up heat from nowhere and channels it through one’s potential dinner. The finale involves an ice cube melting in 20 seconds even as a small blonde girl’s hand rests near it on the board, cool as a cucumber. A slow bead of water runs down and moistens the girl’s fingers. She giggles. Something about that is too oddly appealing so Scott surfs over to a news channel to watch a replay of the night’s weather. The animated rains drop over New York like sticks of chalk falling from their godhead clouds of slate. Boredom. He is awake too early with nothing better to do than blame himself for this lousy trait of always being ahead of time. He peers into the bedroom to see if Wendy has by any chance risen to consciousness but finds her deep asleep, the tiniest drop of saliva, like a jewel, set in the corner of her still lips. Scores of times he has told her he would do anything for her, and in still-life moments like this, he believes his own words. He tiptoes in to get a better look. “You’re making me all nervous, buddy” is what she would say if she were conscious, is what she does say whenever he sneaks into the bathroom to admire her long legs as she shaves them, or else it’s, “Get out of here you perv!” A lock of her reddish brown hair has fallen across her face and absorbs the light coming in from the hallway, her eyes move stealthily left to right beneath their closed lids as if reading the morning air. Her body, beneath its sheet, is a contour map of the city, the hills of Harlem falling into the flat valley of Morningside, the hidden complexity of midtown, hips extending to two different rivers, then those strong legs converging, her feet entwined and spilling out of the bed, into the waters near Battery Park. If he were an inch tall, he thinks, if he were a crew member from that ship in Fantastic Voyage, he could run a marathon across her freckled skin. “Maybe I am a

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perv,” he whispers to his miniaturized self, and retreats from the room shaking his head. He pads into the kitchen hunting not the coffee which he craves yet resists, but rather anything to keep his mind off the forthcoming run. More than the fear of exhaustion, Scott is afraid of psyching himself out, of being over-analytical. It had happened to him once already, last week in his office at the Gotham List Council. As one of the company’s five list brokers, he is forever fielding requests from clients hungry to buy just the right mailing list for their glossy catalogs or fliers offering seemingly free trips to Florida. Just as Thursday’s work was coming to a close, Scott answered his phone and the voice on the other end requested a list of affluent New York households, with a “breakdown by zip code.” Scott could only mumble that he would have to call back. All that was registering in his mind was the idea of he, himself, breaking down as he raced from one zip code to the next. Each borough discarding him like a misaddressed envelope. He got up from his desk and his knees were shaking. He did not calm down till dinner, when Wendy put a large glass of bourbon in his hand and told him, “Self-medicate. Now.” He closes his eyes to the brightly lit kitchen for a few seconds and thinks he will be fine if he can keep himself distracted. His eyes open and there, stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet in the shape of a cowgirl brandishing a whip, he finds the list of chores Wendy has drawn up. He happily scans it for something quick. There is no time for the involved machinations of cleaning out the refrigerator, which is crammed with all the withered Marathon Diet vegetables, half-consumed plates of spaghetti and the large green object, partially wrapped in foil, that was at one time meat. Nor does he have any interest in tying into small bundles the three month’s worth of The New York Times that he has fashioned into a replica of the Empire State Building in the hallway. The only option with any appeal is Wendy’s request for him to

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empty out the stupid vacuum cleaner which he has owned forever. It’s not a pretty job, but it couldn’t take too long, and the irony of cleaning a cleaner appeals to his sleepy sense of amusement. When he’s more awake and thinking, Scott believes, next to the brutish alarm clock, the vacuum is the creepiest invention ever brought to light of day. A macabre collector of scraps. Memory’s detritus. The dead skin of every lover who has set foot through the door. For this reason he had always put off emptying it. It is a Hoover Quik-Broom II, one of those small electric sweepers with a tiny cup that is supposed to be taken out and dumped regularly. If it is not, all the dirt collects in a canister above it. The canister eventually begins to bulge and something should be done. That point had long passed. When turned on and the tiny, pathetic engine chokes and whines, it should be hidden deep in the closet until the rugs are dirty enough to see footprints within. That time had also come and gone. To avoid a disaster of dust Scott decides he has no choice but to return to his happy bathroom with the device and a Hefty trash bag and place the thing in the wet tub. He releases the cup and watches the grime pour forth. If Scott’s life turns out to be dark and worthless, he imagines his brain would resemble this mess. Gray matter. A powder finer than soot, more like talcum for evil children or cocaine cut with ash. Scott can’t help but breathe some in and the resulting sneeze blows a fine cloud of the stuff right back at him, making it look like a cartoon stick of dynamite has gone off in his hands. He scoops the dirt and puts it into the bag. Then he reaches his hand up into the canister to pull out the gunk that’s stuck. What he has gathered are wads of carpet fiber and strands of hair. Not just his hair. Rachel and Faith have never met, but here they have been entwined for years. Is this lint from Patricia’s favorite sweater or from the pullover Gina once lent to him? The dog Jamie pet-sat. The tiny bits of crystal from the New

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Years when Philip dropped his glass. Stored like uranium yards away from the vulnerable, smooth skin over Wendy’s heart. Who ever stops to think what happens to it? That everything eventually collects into a canister until the glow fades and the atoms meld into one indistinguishable ball of trash. An alert is given over the P.A. and Scott, deep in memory, is nearly knocked down by the hoard of racers heading to take their marks. There is still a good thirty minutes before the official start but it will take that long for the volunteers to herd the runners into position. Like a National Guard decked out in matching purple sweatsuits, they lock arms and form a human chain that slowly leads the runners onto the roadway. How odd to be standing here in the middle of a toll plaza, a space never meant for footfalls. The booths where the weary toll collectors spend their days are empty and dark. All around, people are peeling off their jackets and leggings, a tree off the side of the road becomes a giant coat rack and its branches sag under the weight. Shivering, Scott chooses to keep all his layers on for a little while longer. If only he knew the hidden secret of that morning’s infomercial, how to draw heat from the empty space around him. There is no real hurry to disrobe, anyway. Even after the gun is fired he knows to expect nothing but slowness. With 28,000 people trying to navigate a bridge simultaneously, there is not much to be found in the way of speed. He has calculated that the first mile will take him about twice his average time as this crowd of the underdressed maneuvers its way into the shape of a spirited race. The marathon is 26.2 miles with the .2 coming at the start. How harmless a figure it seems when he reads it in print, the small numeral to the right of the decimal, the insignificance of what follows a period. But for Scott it is another proof that nothing stops where one expects it. He could say a life, a race, a love, ends here at an X, but there is always more, some runover, pushing its way into reality. That after any conversation there is something

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left hanging in the silence. And that extra may be significant or it may be random. The .2 of the marathon is a holdover from the 1908 Olympics in London. The distance added so the racers could start at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Queen and end up at White City Stadium for the masses. For that whim it is Scott who must pay the price of the here and now length, which seems so small but moves so slowly. In truth, the number is quite large, 385 yards in all, nearly four football fields to do little more than assume a brisk walking pace while trying to keep his thoughts from getting ahead of him. He exhales deeply and watches his breath take form in the cold air, linger, then rise. It is the 26th running of what he and Wendy have euphemized as “this prestigious event” and, always a lover of lists, he tries to recall the statistics he memorized last night as she massaged his feet and quizzed him. The numbers that add up to an event, the minutia populi: 22,050 feet of rope, 13,000 gallons of Gatorade, 1,800,000 paper cups, 132,000 safety pins, 350 linguists, 642 tubes of K-Y jelly (for the post-race orgy, Scott imagined. He prefers good old Vaseline to lubricate his knees and elbows.), 13,700 No Parking signs, 33,000 heat retaining SpaceWrap blankets and four and a half tons of ice. Out of control, he thinks, as he feels his heel stepped upon by an older gentleman jockeying for position. The early marathons were simple, the way girls were when he was a kid. But each marathon has grown bigger, more complex, breaking from a race around an oval into a long encompassing stretch, a parallel of the history of Scott’s romantic involvements. In the first years of high school, before he mustered the nerve to approach Angie, there were two girls he would go round and round with. Judy and Liane. His memories of them now are skin-deep at best. He thinks he recalls a zit on Judy’s cheek and maybe the double-pierced right ear of Liane. Maybe. All he remembers for sure is the sense of speed, chasing after one, then letting her have a turn at chasing him. Then passing the other. When they all had

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finished they were right back where they had started. Not that any of them really knew where they were going in the first place. The first six New York Marathons were also just circles, four laps through Central Park. The initial race in 1970 drew only 127 runners with the winners receiving a cheap watch and a recycled bowling trophy. No brand-name sports drinks then, just bottles of soda, untouched for lack of an opener. This has all been documented. Scott is clear on the subject and by comparison it makes the vagueness of his early adolescence a frustrating matter that sometimes hounds him. He is in no way clear on who gets the cheap timepiece for qualifying as a first real date. The girl who let herself be tied to a chair and from whom he stole a kiss but never spoke to again? Or Debbie Marlow, the most experienced girl in 7th grade, who tried to seduce him but found his innocence too much of a challenge (For Scott’s part, he was oblivious until a bolt of revelation struck him half way through 8th grade, walking home one day when a crazed cocker spaniel suddenly jumped a fence and chased him up the block. Sweating and running like mad, Debbie’s face appeared to him and his cheeks flushed at the uncovering of his own naiveté.)? Or was it Carrie, who was definitely the first girl he legitimately asked out, but who responded in the negative, as her mother would not let her car date. Embarrassed and confused, he never asked her again, yet to this day he gets together with her on his brief trips home, and to his mind it is she, in lieu of Angie, instead of Wendy, who would be his wife if he had settled in New Brunswick and become a car dealer or insurance agent. She is still attractive and available and shares with him the healthy history of childhood. There are moments during the few times a year they visit, when a quiet hum of desire plays under their speech. Then it is gone, slipping back to the time it belongs in. The mature five borough New York Marathon as we know it now began in 1976, (Angie still new to the sod) at the urging of Fred

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Lebow, the godfather of the event. That year 10,000 spectators showed up (100 at her funeral) to watch the 2100 or so runners trek around the city. Today, two million viewers will line the streets and there will be TV coverage from air, land and sea. Scott likes to believe his coming of age is equally grandiose, if not so widely publicized. With each coupling his skills have been honed, growing ever more familiar with the routes and hazards along the way. His innocence voided like so much clear piss. He sees himself as a confident lover, which perhaps explains the devastation that has accompanied each successive break-up. Too much of a good thing is how he tries to see himself, on those nights when the deep rumblings in his chest begin and a small thread of mucus finds its way to his lips. He jerks as the vulgar honk of an air horn blasts over the crowd, the starting signal for the disabled runners. Scott guesses a gunshot is considered a distasteful way to launch a large group of the wheelchair-bound into action. He is too far back in the swarm to see their streamlined wheels go spinning, but he hears the roar of applause and knows now, finally, it is just a matter of minutes. He peels out of the weathered orange jacket, strips off his sweatpants and tosses both to the side, fodder for the homeless. He thinks of Wendy, no doubt awake by now and preparing for her walk to Central Park. He visualizes her hand reaching toward him then pulling away with a diamond secure around her finger. Then the diamond expands in Scott’s mind like an iceberg hatching from the ocean. It grows into a frozen lake upon which, suddenly, a familiar car is skidding out of control toward an oncoming stranger. Then the image itself shatters as a cannon blast forces a scream from Scott’s throat that gets lost in the exuberant roar of the thousands as they begin moving forward. The elites, who were placed in front of the pack just before the gun, are off on their own, the men taking the left lane and the women keeping to the right. The Mexican runner named German,

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German Silva, trying for a second straight victory while the Kenyan woman, Tegla Loroupe, hopes for the same. Each could win $20,000 and a Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo to drive the dirt roads of their homelands. There are separate times for men and women. If you are a previous champ or international star there is a definite place from which to begin. For everyone else it’s wherever they can find space to run. The wind is insane over the Verrazano Bridge. The wind-chill at 7 a.m. had been 18 degrees and it feels no better now. The runners try to huddle together for warmth as they trot. Scott sees three people stop and turn back altogether. Struggling upstream against a sympathetic throng, they dejectedly go off to join the several dozen who decided, even after their months of training, that they would not even try to run in this weather. Psyched out. They would remain in Staten Island and catch a ride back on the busses that return most of the runners’ warm-up suits back to them at the finish line (20,000 clothing items, Scott recalls from his quiz). Meanwhile the bridge curves like an eyelid toward Brooklyn and Scott at once feels the insignificance; he is no more than a microbe floating in this mass, he is a dust speck if the city really is a cyclops and the bridge its waking eye. He ends up running on the lower deck of the bridge, which is not at all what he imagined. Instead of sunlight shining down on him, he is surrounded by infrastructure and the deep vibrations caused by so many thousands running to his left, his right and above his head. The massive support arches are pocked with diecut cubbyholes where rats could nest or body parts be hidden. This is a runner’s equivalent of taking the subway he thinks as he edges over to the leftmost railing to get a view of The Narrows. All along this side of the bridge are men who have stopped at the call of nature and Scott at once knows what was meant when he overheard a man wearing a full tuxedo in the morning crowd refer to the bridge as “The World’s Largest Urinal.” All the hydrating

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takes a toll the moment the running starts and, perhaps through power of suggestion, Scott’s own bladder is now making a strong request for attention. He pulls in beside a couple boys with shaved heads and NYU t-shirts, pulls down his running shorts and adds his flow to the showers already pouring down. The sub-zero breeze knifes through him but he persists, forcing a smile. He realizes the swaying that he thought was just his confused stomach is actually the entire bridge reacting to its load. A steady and disconcerting to and fro. There in the bay sits a fire department pumper boat shooting huge streams of water into the air. Scott opts to see it not as a ridiculous reverse of the gallons of pee filling the waters, but rather as a fountain of hope to wish upon, and, hitching up his briefs and returning to the fold, he now feels the tempo of the runners begin to quicken. Ten minutes into the run he can finally take up a decent pace and about four minutes after that he passes the Mile 1 marker, the bridge’s midpoint, the highest spot on the whole Marathon course (274 feet above sea level, a fact he couldn’t keep straight till Wendy wrote it across his palm with her fingernail). A strange silence settles in. The runners keep to themselves despite being packed together like a school of salmon heading upstream, wondering what sort of frozen mess they’ve gotten themselves into. Then a wave of murmurs rise as Scott passes the street sign announcing the 92nd Street exit, the turn-off which will squirt him out into Brooklyn.

Two

A rainbow archway of balloons welcomes him into the borough and onto Albreen Place, this street lined with trees and two-storey brick homes. The neighbors have all come out to be the first ones to shout their words of encouragement. But it’s hardly needed here. Two miles under the belt already and feeling fine. Then it’s a left onto 92nd Street and a bridge that crosses back over the highway. Just ahead, a small group of well-wishers have gathered in front of the Bee-Kee-Nee Bar and yell muffled, morning-drink slurred words of luck as the turn is taken onto 4th Avenue, a sixmile straight-away that will end with a beacon not yet even in sight, a 512 foot monolith the natives know as the Williamsburg Savings Bank. Scott tries to figure out how he is feeling, if his heart is pumping the way it should, whether his legs are properly loose. He really hasn’t the foggiest idea. A red gush of embarrassment spills across his face and suddenly, not 3 miles in, he begins to doubt himself. How foolish he is to think he could pull this stunt off. That he could run from or run toward anything on purpose. A marathon would give him direction, that’s what he had thought. It was the whole purpose for him being here after all. Wendy had hugged him tight and was so proud that he had decided to bear down on what had been just a hobby. “I’ll do it for you,” he had told her and her eyes misted. But the reality is that he is just following a line painted by a city employee who has burdens of his own and could lead him only to debt and boredom. Another tardy realization in a life full

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of hindsight. Days in his lowly office at the List Council he cannot figure out how he got there, how a one-week temp assignment as a clerk had sprouted like a field of weeds into a full-time job that allowed so little satisfaction. “It’s just what I fell into,” he once explained to Wendy. “Perhaps I can accidentally place my forehead on the barrel of a gun and mistakenly pull the trigger,” he tells himself now, remembering that tomorrow he goes back to the office. Such dramatic leaps of mood are not uncommon for Scott. It’s the side-effect of having minimal independent thought couched in a handsome shape that is drawn to women the way the doughy body of a cruller is pushed toward the hot fluid shock of a mug of coffee. So often he doesn’t know what to do, or how to do, or even why he is doing. Then there is the flash of awareness that turns his face crimson, and finally the forgetfulness that allows him to carry on for no good reason. Even now, the blush has left his face as he leaves the business of the race to his legs. Office walls dissolve and he thinks back to a time when he knew even less than he does now. As a teenager, Scott possessed a dumb streak a mile long. While pot was all the rage in the boy’s bathroom and members of the basketball team were dragging the senior cheerleaders out into the woods, and both the woodshop and drama teachers had student “girlfriends,” Scott was no more than a beer drinking gossip hound, never zeroing in on the fact that real sex was happening all around him. In his growing adoration of Angie, intercourse involved a brief touch on clothed skin, a wisp of that red hair against his hand, or just her eyes meeting his across the cafeteria. Of course, it could well have been this trait that drew Angie to Scott. Coy yet timid, she knew less was more with him and that was something she could easily handle. Some afternoons when he walked her home they would pause to roughhouse. “Scotty, my shoe’s untied,” she would say, despite the fact she had on sandals. Scott would kneel down to inspect and she would stroke the back of his neck with her middle finger, striking an erogenous zone that

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shot a dose of adrenaline through his system. He would grab her around the thighs, put her in a fireman’s carry and run with her for several blocks. “You have the strength of five giant men, or ten really tiny ones.” “Yes, yes I do,” he would pant. One afternoon during a study hall, Angie snuck up on him as he read, and grabbed his knee. The reflex action of his leg jerking up and slamming loudly into the metal desk sent the room into several minutes of compulsive laughter. Even severe Mrs. Stoakes could not hide a smile as she warned everyone to settle down. But it was the other reaction Angie was there to monitor, the instant and maintained bulge in his blue jeans that took forever to fade. “We learned the diff between gourmet and gourmand today in Home Ec.,” she told him. “So what am I?” “Definitely a gourmet. You don’t need a lot, but you get the best and you know how to savor it.” “Do me a savor and get back to your seat.” “I’ll do you a savor alright.” Scott wishes his appetite as an adult could be so easily satisfied. Small, safe moments of unplanned eroticism that would last him for days, well, indeed last him his lifetime. And just to spite himself, before the beginning stages of thirst and soreness have a chance to develop, he feels the stirring charge of his libido. Scott’s thoughts so easily leave the marathon’s paved street just as he passes a small bodega where a Jamaican man in dreadlocks has set up a steel drum and is pounding out an inspiring version of Girl from Impanema. His consciousness floats in a den of its own, pulls up a fluffy chair at the scene of a certain sexual encounter: Marcia, the girl who took his virginity, or as he likes to joke to himself, the girl who mistook his virginity. Scott had a plan for selecting the woman to whom he would first surrender. It would happen in one of two ways. He would seek

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out a girl he knew he loved, someone with whom he would build a strong and caring bond. They would date for several months and then one sleepy night they would fall into each other’s arms and find a way. This would have been the plan with Angie, had she not gone off to college so soon. Had she not gone. The other option was the polar opposite. Go to a bar, get drunk but not incapacitated, latch onto an incredibly gorgeous woman, and bed her. Simple as that. Scott figured, either way, the experience would be vital. He also felt they would be equally fulfilling. The lesson plan of a quick, incredible night of blind lust would be just as useful as what was learned by the gradual loving buildup into bliss. It is easy now, in retrospect, for him to spot the holes in this plan. Simply, there were few gorgeous woman at the bars in which he hung out. Plus the concept of truly knowing that he loves somebody is a fallacy. Or more succinctly, Scott knows he’s in love like he knows he has a cold. He is deep within it, it embraces his entire body, and it will pass. Marcia lived on the floor beneath him his sophomore year at Indiana University. He had first met, and had a minor fling with, her roommate Amanda. She played viola in the orchestra for their college production of Man of LaMancha. Scott was one of the chorus of prisoners. Late into the closing night cast party, Amanda noticed that he was pretty drunk and approached him. She was on her second bottle of wine, acting on a strong desire to cause a scene, and exceedingly pleased by the idea of seducing a man who spent the night singing, “I come for love!” “It’s dandy they let you prisoners out tonight.” “Yep. All torture and no play makes Jack a dull slave.” “I thought your name was Scott.” “Scott’s my stage name. My party name is Jack. Jack B. Nimble.” “Oh, I see. I suppose you have quite the candlestick.” “Privileged information.” “Come here and debrief me, Mr. Nimble.”

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“You can call me B.” Soon Scott found himself under a coffee table with Amanda’s lips air-locked to his own, their arms wrapped tightly around each other. He glanced up through the glass tabletop to see the butts of a couple dozen beer bottles and a blur of colors and motions, and then just darkness. Next thing he knew, it was morning and he was on an unfamiliar sofa, a plastic soda bottle nestling his aching head. A girl, though not Amanda, was passed out on the floor beside him and the room smelled stale and smoky. A good party. Scott ran into Amanda the next afternoon in the cafeteria and they wound up dining on stale pizza together, talking as friends, gossiping over their own party-lust, touching hands lightly. “Hope I wasn’t too forward last night.” “No such thing as being too forward,” he assured her. “Hmm, all the guys say that.” “Yes, they all got it from me.” “Cute. You know,” she said, now grabbing his wrist firmly, “I bet you’d really like my roommate. I gotta go.” She left just like that. Scott chewed the last slice of pizza, chewed and then swallowed. An archetypal Midwestern thunderstorm was passing through Bloomington that evening. Torrential rain and huge nearby bolts of lightning were keeping Scott glued to the window when he heard a knock at his dorm room door. Assuming his best Edgar Allan Poe voice, he intoned, “Enter and be recognized.” It was Amanda in a bathrobe. Scott said, “Er.” They hugged and Amanda gave him a tender kiss on the lips. “You give great hugs,” she said, “let’s be good friends.” Scott hugged her again. “Now, go downstairs and meet Marcia, she’s terrified of thunderstorms and I don’t know what to do with her.” “No rest for the wicked?” Scott asked. “That’s right, get down there. I’ll hold your place up here for awhile.”

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“Well, why not. If my roommate gets back just towel him off and set him in the corner.” “Oh, don’t worry about me.” “Ah, the many joys of dorm life,” thought Scott, treading the stairs down to the girls’ floor. He shouted the mandatory alert, “Man on the hall!” He had no idea what he was about to get himself into as he went gently rapping, tapping on Marcia’s chamber door. A small, teary voice said, “Come.” He entered, and there on the standard, small, universityapproved cot sat a shaking, petite and gorgeous brunette in a tiger print blouse and Levi’s, a cigarette firm in the side of her mouth and a steady stream of tears fighting to douse the fire. Scott sat down beside her. “So…Amanda told me you’re some kind of thunder expert or something.” Her voice was nasal from the crying. “And you believed her?” “Well she does tell the truth once a month or so, usually the same week she shaves her pits. So I was just hoping.” “That’s too much information already,” Scott told her, and she smiled slightly. “You’re of no real help to me is what you’re saying.” “I’m a student, not a meteorologist, damn it.” The allusion was lost on her, so he tried a different track. “Try to think of the window as a big TV and there’s a really great episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom being performed live for our entertainment. It’s free and it’s in stereo, what could be better than that!” She didn’t buy in, nor would she ever overcome this fear of storms. Still she was taken by Scott’s efforts, or at least amused by their lameness, and warmed to him quickly. “It’s awfully sweet of you to come try and calm down some crazy woman you’ve never even met before.” “Well, it wasn’t like I had a choice.” She laughs and punches him in the shoulder.

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They talked for an hour or so about their classes and their friends, but it was getting late and they both were tired and hiding embarrassed yawns. “Time to call it a night,” Scott finally said, but before heading upstairs he held her hand and touched his lips to hers, sitting on that creaky bed with thunder rattling through campus, and now both of them shuddering. Scott put his loss of virginity scheme into action. Since their first encounter was one of sympathy rather than lust, the idea of a sudden leap into sex had been disqualified. Scott dug in to build a relationship. His first real try. He embraced the art of holding out, building his desire to make love, testing the waters. He learned the data of Marcia, the sibling names and childhood exploits, her taste for bland foods covered with ketchup juxtaposed with an intense aura of sex that emanated from her skin and overwhelmed him. But, in the thick of this, Scott could not find love. A great degree of like and attraction, yes, but it had a definite stopping point— so he reasoned at the time, before he learned the law of decimals. “Well,” thought Scott, “If there was ever a time to blow off a plan, this would be it.” After weeks of sleeping in the same impossibly cramped bed but not consummating the decision, one early Saturday morning Scott decided to make the sacrifice. Marcia, who had been staggeringly patient of his slow and pathetic crawl toward this moment showed a definite willingness. Without benefit of birth control and little more than half awake, he allowed his less than accurately aimed appendage to be guided into darkness. Two slow strokes was all he could stand. He exploded outside of her, gasping, then, feeling faint, passed into sleep, leaving Marcia awake, splattered, but at least inspired. “It’s a start, finally,” she whispered to herself. With the aid of her ever-patient suggestions, Scott’s skill and endurance grew. “Better and better” she would say every time, rewarding him, but also telling the truth. Nightly they would try new techniques, usually in her room with Amanda spending the

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evenings at a new boyfriend’s (it never took her long to ingratiate). Afterward, Marcia would smoke a cigarette by the window. Scott could see only the red glow of the tobacco and the slightest outline of her body. In the morning he would watch as she put on her make-up and to this day he knows of no other act performed by a human that was so well concentrated upon. Again with a cigarette burning away near her lips, dressed in only a bra and panties, she made contact with her reflection and while never so much as blinking, rouged and shadowed and glossed her face into a totally desirable creation of beauty. She would end the ritual with a sigh and a tamping out of her smoke, switching gears back to the point where she was aware of Scott in the room, and she would jump him. Her scent of smoke and nail polish combined never failed to arouse him. For no good reason there were many times when they went at each other without protection, and there were other times when the cheap condoms Scott bought would snap inside of her. So the end of the month was always looked upon with trepidation. Marcia was by no means regular to begin with, driving Scott into intense world-ending fear. Sometimes she would be more than two weeks late. She would phone him with the good news while he sat in his room figuring out what kind of meaningless well-paying job he could get to support a child, or how they would take the macabre trip to a clinic and he would have to be there for her not only then, but forever, to appease the guilt. Scott took up smoking himself and would sometimes sit in the dark and stare at the glow around his mouth, reflected in a small mirror on his wall. So it went, and so it lasted, for a year and a half, until the time of Scott’s graduation. They knew from the start their future was limited. Marcia had no desire to leave the Midwest and Scott couldn’t wait to get back East. They had made a quiet pact to enjoy their time together and part without anger when the day came. Scott had passed his final final, but Marcia still had at least a year

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to go, and he wasn’t sticking around. “After all,” he told himself, “this was never love.” It was merely his first at bat in the major leagues. It was also the first time that Scott got to leave first. To walk away alive. Their sexual intuitions had merged to what he thought was near perfection but intellectually he had tired. His major in Communications and hers in Biology had provided them with few mutual friends and minimal common territory to explore. Indeed today, his strongest memories of her, except for one, are of her undressed or of her in total darkness. But it is that one cloaked and buttoned memory which forever pins him to her. The memory of a phone call, a month after they last saw each other. She home for the summer in Michigan and he still in Bloomington planning his move to New York. A single word delivered from so far away that was terror and relief at once, that would permanently change her life as it would always haunt him. Just a grotesque pimple compared to the loss of Angie, but nonetheless a flavor of death. She stated it matter-of-factly over the copper line that connected them and his brain sparked ever so slowly. Mi Scar Rage, Miss Scare Age, Mis-care, Miss Carriage. “I just thought someone should know,” she said, “And I figured it should probably be you.” It was a reality that was at once demoted into a bad dream. All the ties had already been cut, she was firmly out of his life, and now suddenly a dot that began its existence even smaller than a decimal, growing to perhaps the size and likeness of his fist and with the strength to support a line of numbers that might never end, a repeating fraction, was amassing like a wave, like the crest of a wave rising over them both, her own water a hard sea, a hard C (care, carriage, carnage) with the only high ground being the lowly act of getting off the phone as quickly as possible and accelerating the timetable for his move. Then a series of distant letters sealed with his DNA, a genetic match to what she lost, his last licks, the equivalent of spit in her face. Until, in a few year’s time, the intensity of the whole matter begins to dry,

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the scab forming, then brushed off, the scar like the minute one on the bridge of his nose from chickenpox, remembered by him only when staring too long at his reflection. His beauty mark. Nearing the fourth mile of the race Scott grabs up a cup of water as he jogs by a courtesy table, or “Fluid Station” as they’ve been dubbed, and splashes it over his face, bringing him briefly back into the here and now. The clear liquid mixes with his salty sweat and as he feels the moisture evaporating off his forehead he sees he is in a pack of maybe 20 runners in a slow stampede through this most multi-ethnic of neighborhoods. Churches and synagogues stand nearly door to door. Russian Jews, Blacks, Scandinavians and Hispanics line the streets. He wonders how many of them he might have on record amid the millions of addresses back in the office, each unknowingly about to receive a catalog suited to their unique psychographic profiles. They are all so well bundled while he and his fellow runners are so naked. Except, that is, for the one guy just behind him in a gorilla costume. Scott wishes it was late June, the beginning of beach season. He yearns to be staring out at the ocean trying as he does every year to understand it as one huge body, not the parade of individual waves or the collection of swimmers or the fatal edge of the horizon. Unlike the fisherman focused on his thin line cast out into the surf, Scott tries to fathom all the Atlantic as a lover, whose needs he can attend, whose arms would welcome him, whose tide, the colossal rise and fall, is no different than the rhythms of, say, a coffee pot on a Sunday morning. The Pyrex container filled to the brim, dropping with the morning paper, miraculously rising again after Wendy sails into the kitchen. Then reaching its ebb when the last thin slice of salmon has vanished. Here is the key, Scott thinks; to take the big picture and collapse it into his realm: the ocean as Mr. Coffee, humanity as Wendy’s cool hand, peacefulness as a pillow, life as a finish-line ribbon pulled taut between two volunteers in Central Park.

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As slick as Scott knows he looks, running against the backdrop of an adoring crowd, he knows he is even more handsome when surrounded by ocean. Water, the color of his eyes, extends his body through schools of jellyfish until even the seagulls mistake his teeth for shell, his toes for tadpoles. He remembers the waters like the distant relative that it is and in return the Atlantic recognizes his shape each summer and welcomes him back. How pleased the water seems to have him. Several of his girlfriends have made trips with him to the beach, each a mystery to the surf, but not a surprise. A new playmate by his side, on his shoulders, splashing, tugging down his trunks when he intentionally lets down his guard. The way that a pier welcomes any new boat, a different name but the same build and buoyancy, so the low tide of Jones Beach each season would grow accustomed to a new pair of bare knees being kissed beneath its surface. But without exception the women would grow tired of the salt and seaweed before Scott, and wade to shore to nap or draw their fingers through the hot sand. He would linger, float on his back, shut his eyes and cross his arms over his chest. Carried by the current he imagined how it must feel to Angie, buried so long ago but still bobbing in his brainpan like a rag doll. It is a high school graduation party and Scott and Angie have been locked in a dark closet for exactly four minutes. They have three minutes left to do as they dare while on the other side of the door the blare of Born to Run masks whatever sounds they make. “Will you miss this when we’re apart, Scotty?” She takes his hand and puts it to her breast. “How about this?” His hand to her thigh. “And this?” Her free hand to his crotch. He reaches in to kiss her but their foreheads bump together hard and she recoils. “I want to guard your dreams and visions,” he sings by way of apology. “You’re the boss,” is her only retort before maniacally tickling his stomach, his hands flailing away for any part of her he can have and just as she succumbs, her tongue finding his ear,

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the warning knock is given and the music dies down. “Damn, 15 seconds left,” he tells her. She silently collects herself and checks her buttons. The door opens and they both squint at the intrusion of lamplight. If Angie is always there, center stage in his cerebellum, he is unsure how well all the others will fare, all the vaguely familiar bodies that rise into his fantasies like dolphins forced to the surface by an oil spill of testosterone. Floating on the eddies of his consciousness, they are there for him to avoid. He brushes them aside with a wave of his hand and the movement of his arm through the air transports him to the edge of a lake. He is a little boy on vacation, fishing to satisfy his Dad but more concerned with the kite he is managing to fly at the same time. Two lines cast in opposite directions with him as the intersection. Had he not snagged a mudfish first, he wonders what he might have reeled in with his kite as bait. Tugging up at the clouds, a yellow diamond with a tail torn from a bed sheet. Who could he have brought down from heaven? Who would like to return to him? Through what might be tears Scott blearily notices a huge, ugly building mocking him at the corner of 4th and 55th. Several smashed cars sit rotting in its lot and a peeling sign proclaims, “Auto-Body.” The phrase itself an accident, yet so fitting into the well of Scott’s psyche. At this moment he is certainly nothing less than an auto-body, rolling mile after mile down this crowded avenue. His reflexes so often on automatic: the morning erection, the uncontrollable turn of the head even when walking with Wendy, the mindless state of being he assumes on a long run such as this, the Angie nightmare so tightly woven into his thoughts. He envisions now those terrible split-seconds when her flesh and the car she drove became, exactly, one body, out of control, shattering in every direction, the heartbeat fading, the fan belt whirring like a blood pump. She eventually stalls, or at least drops to the rhythm of Scott’s footfalls as he forces his view away from the garage

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and thinks instead of Angie alive, rehearsing a scene together in drama class, she an elderly but merry spinster offering a teacup of arsenic to him, an elderly man free of deep thoughts. He swallows and neither dies nor fully brings his focus home to this race. A small signal in the back of his mind warns that the tongue is rather dry and maybe he should have drunk that water instead of splashing it over his face and perhaps he should talk to the group of runners around him or acknowledge the eight Hasidic men standing like a flock of chubby penguins who applaud as he runs past. What comes from his mouth though is just a double syllable, “t’roo.” The first utterance he’s bothered with all morning and he is not even sure why he’s said it. “T’roo and t’roo.” He knows he has heard it somewhere and somewhere recent at that. A song on the radio last night? No, now he’s got it. Jason, Scott’s office mate, had put the Xeroxed copy of the short story on his desk. A little taunt to end the work-week, knowing that Scott would soon enough be in his home borough. An old short story by Thomas Wolfe. It’s fourth paragraph highlighted with a yellow magic marker. Just so he’d be ready for Jason on Monday, Scott had memorized it. He was a quick study at this sort of thing, the result of all those years of school plays: “Dere’s no guy livin’ dat knows Brooklyn t’roo and t’roo (only the dead know Brooklyn t’roo and t’roo), because it’d take a lifetime just to find his way aroun’ duh goddam town (—only the dead know Brooklyn t’roo and t’roo, even the dead will quarrel an’ bicker over the sprawl and web of jungle desolation that is Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo).” Sprawl and web and jungle. Scott looks to the sky. The neighborly street expands into a six lane local highway, a boulevard splitting its middle, and the Williamsburg bank coming into view, egging him on from afar. “Thit!” A thin pony-tailed man who is passing Scott mumbles to

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himself, and from the tone Scott understands it to be a vulgarity. “Thit,” he says again to no one in particular, “I bit my damn tongue.” He sympathizes, for this actually is something Scott has spent no small amount of time considering. His five senses and the organs that do their bidding can either work for him or against him in a race. The tongue, he has decided, has nothing to do with running. Still, he always marveled at Michael Jordan, the way his tongue flailed like a puppy’s when he was lost in concentration on the paint. How it was counterbalance to an impossible shift of weight or leap of flight. But with the exception of a slight ache from his one remaining wisdom tooth, Scott’s whole mouth is mute as he trots his way down Fourth Avenue. His tongue stays pasted tight against his lower row of teeth, a useless appendage, just that much more weight to be carried around at a time when it is so important to be light. The cold air of Brooklyn rushes over his tongue without hint of the borough’s famous knishes or Coney Island cotton candy. He has certainly heard the metaphors enough times, the taste of victory, savoring a win. But there is no flavor to what is occurring now, the liquids of his body seeping from him, ignoring the mouth’s warm invitation to gather there. His tongue, the unwanted, a grandpa just getting in the way, once in a while sloppily taking a lick at the upper lip only to be repulsed by the cool salty dampness. His nose is failing to pick up the scent of any identifiable object. A bead of sweat will occasionally be drawn into a nostril, caught up and overtaken by the fast beat of his breath. With everything closed on Sunday there is no baking of bread or churning of industrial carcinogens to generate an odor. There is of course, Scott’s own body scent, rich with his dangerous chemicals. The musk, that Wendy smells when she nuzzles her face deep into his chest and breathes in like an addict, is now trailing from him like heat off a comet. He pictures himself streaking through the frozen streets as women on the sidelines are overcome, not knowing

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what is hitting them, and hypnotically running after, caught up in his tail. A police barricade falls over as he runs past and he is not sure if it is a wind gust or his own magnificence that deserves the blame. But then Scott reaches up with his left hand and takes a quick strong inhale from his armpit: the sour smell of poisons being cleansed from his system, dressed for success with the barely remaining herbal tease of deodorant. In college his friends would spread a narrow swath of roll-on down the tile hallway of the dorm and set it afire. It would go up like a fuse. Yet, calmed by its artificial forest smell, he slathers it liberally everyday over this sensitive and private outpost of his body. Thus, while there is nothing coming in, Scott realizes he is a fine generator of smell. From his feet which are only now forming the first tiny blisters, up to his crotch which is busy tolerating the relentless back and forth of his thighs, and straight up through to his hair that is casting off the last vestments of its two day old shampooed bouquet, Scott is a factory of his own, polluting the tiny environment of his proximity, slowly burning out his own pistons, all in the name of endurance. If he had to choose a favorite sense, touch would win hands down. Sticky address labels printed from slick computer tapes. The miraculous sliding scale between soft and hard, sharp and rounded, smooth and cancerously lumpy. The only sense picked up at every organ. The nautilus ear housing a cotton swab, the sharp stab of a nose hair tweezed from his nostril, a speck of dust burning the eye, or the tongue pressing against another tongue. The most democratic and go-anywhere of the five, but also the one he is most deprived of now, with only the feel of wind between his fingers, and the dull asphalt upon the soles of his sneakers. The tactile sweat drying off the brow and his moribund tongue limp against his teeth. When he thinks of the gift of sight and the complexity of hearing even the simplest words being spoken, he cannot help but dwell on the first girl he dated upon moving to New York. “A

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vision,” is what he called her on the night he realized her beauty. And when their longings collapsed it was because of silence. His own dumb silence and her too clever quietness as she hopelessly waited for him to catch fire. Put in perspective, Scott’s time with Donna is in fact the least memorable of the memorable co-minglings he has experienced. That is, he feels like it must have had some kind of importance, but he doesn’t recall a whole lot of detail. A few patches of conversation, a session or two of sex. Nothing more. They’d known of each other for several months, ever since she began showing up on the morning bus he took downtown. But Scott never really applied himself toward falling for her until one night at a movie theater near his apartment. As he was waiting in line to go in, he spied her beneath the marquee saying her goodbyes to a girlfriend. At one point she swung her head in such a way that her thick blonde hair swept across her forehead. That was it. That one instance was the only coming attraction he needed. “A vision,” he said, to the teenage boy who gave him a sideways glance before tearing his ticket in half. Having the built-in luxury of those daily bus rides, Scott proceeded methodically. He initiated the operation by saving the seat beside him one morning when the bus was packed. He waved at her when she got on board. “Hey, you’re on here every single morning,” she said by way of thanks as she sat down with him. “Yep, we must be on the same schedule. You didn’t look to happy to be standing yesterday so I figured I’d save you a seat.” “How cavalier, lucky the crowd didn’t turn on you.” “I know, they’re an ugly bunch. My name is Scott, by the way.” “Hey Scott, I’m Donna.” Such polite and unmemorable banter as this became the mainstay for the next four days with Scott not knowing how to take it further nor sure if he really wanted to. But on Saturday

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afternoon they ran into each other on the street, each with no big plan and more than a few hours to kill. “No such thing as a mere coincidence,” Scott said to himself. “How about a little stroll?” asked Donna. “Excellent suggestion.” The defining moment was upon them and it turned out to be a very lengthy moment at that, transforming itself into a long, long walk from 110th Street to Greenwich Village. They kept to Broadway for the entire journey, halting sometimes to windowshop or pet a dog, traversing the city’s diagonal artery that pulses with the widest possible assortment of geniuses, destitute, retailers, urban professionals, tourists and lovers. Scott cannot recall one damn word they said for the entire three hours. He remembers getting an ice cream cone from an outdoor concession at Lincoln Center (food and sex being the two things he is best at preserving) and he remembers arriving at the Speakeasy Pub on MacDougal Street, both of them thirsty and dazed by the sun. They walked in and neither could see a thing in the relative darkness of this basement bar, their eyes spoiled by the day’s brightness. Then he is blank. Undoubtedly they had drinks, maybe there was a band. All he positively recalls is being with her in the West 4th Street subway station at around two in the morning. Drunk, tired, but excited to have spent an entire day with that head of hair and the formidable collection of neurons and emotions contained beneath it. They shared their first kiss there in the station, standing close and only their lips touching, like they were surprised to be doing this, like it was the expected action of two people who try not to do what is expected of them. “Are we a cliché or what?” she asks him. “I can’t imagine how it can be any worse,” says Scott. He tilts his head and right on cue, a violinist begins to play on the opposite platform. Their kiss turns into a mutual groan and then small, quiet smiles.

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“Perfect,” she says, now if only we had a plate of spaghetti we could suck on either end of a long strand and end up with our lips stuck together.” “I bet you say that to all the boys.” “Take off your shirt and give it to me.” “Huh?” “You heard me. Let’s trade shirts. It’s the only way we’re going to break out of this cheesy karma.” “Wow, that’s very unreasonable of you. I like that.” So, right there in the thankfully all but empty uptown platform of the A train, with a violinist looking on from across the tracks, Donna peeled off her white T emblazoned with a picture of Janis Joplin and held it out to Scott. In turn, he was miraculously able to draw his attention away from her cleavage, the silky white bra, and surrender his own shirt, even though it was one of his favorites, a cartoon picture of a dog saying, “I think I’ll do that again.” with a caption underneath which read, “Creature of habit.” “Watch it!” a runner just up ahead shouts. Scott sees the large pothole just in time. He leaps and lands himself in Donna’s apartment a week after their fashion exchange. She has pulled out a dopey paint by numbers kit for them to play with. It’s a Raggedy Ann and Andy picture, with the two of them holding hands inside their toy box home. “You must be a frustrated artist to still be playing with these at your advanced age.” “No, I’m a frustrated mathematician and it’s good therapy for me to paint over all these damn numbers. But on second thought, maybe it’s time for a new canvas.” She takes a dab of brown on her brush and fills in Scott’s dimple. “Just call me Seurat,” she says and proceeds to fill his face full of dots, some brown, some Raggedy-hair red. With more red she colors in his Adam’s Apple, adding a green stem that goes up to his chin, and a smiling worm poking its head out. Now, holding the

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brush in her teeth, she slowly unbuttons Scott’s shirt to reveal a new canvas. She does a simple Jasper Johns on his smooth chest. A solid black line running from the center of his collarbone down through his navel and ending with an arrow pointing to his belt buckle. She stops right there and hands Scott the brush. “Your turn.” “Hmm. I think I’m in my blue period,” he says as he places a blue period on the center of her forehead. “Yes, quite, quite blue I think.” He spends a minute planting little flowers on her cheeks but then sticks the brush behind his ear and hurriedly gets to taking off her blouse. As he fumbles with the tiny buttons, he is remembering a childhood incident at a county fair, a sly wink given him by the tattooed lady when he wound up behind a tent in an effort to escape his mother. She had a look identical to the one now on Donna’s face. So Scott keeps his eyes on his work. Having finally removed her top and unclasped her bra, he paints a read heart on her chest. It is, however, a rather clinically correct heart, not the traditional valentine variety at all. He puts in large veins and motion lines to suggest the pumping action. Next, he draws a square that boxes in her stomach, and fashions her belly button into a kind of dial with a few tiny numbers. Inside the box, he draws a big cup of coffee, a hot dog, and a few white, puffy, kernels of popcorn. He looks up from his masterpiece to her now smiling face and says, “The Visible Woman.” She studies her belly, “A hot dog and a coffee cup, very Freudian don’t you think?” “When in Vienna, do as the Viennese do.” Scott vaguely recalls the ensuing shower, a bad pun he made about a bleeding heart liberal, and the soft squeal of the mattress on her rickety old bed. Beyond that night, the remainder of their time together is blurred into a single average evening, the television on, dinner delivered and spread across the table, the silence that would

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envelop Scott like mink, rendering him unable to think of one interesting comment worth stating, one question he cared to ask of her. It was the custom of the contented, telling him, what? As long as the picture is O.K., don’t fool with the controls? Or was it, don’t get yourself locked in to this woman because you know how love passes through your body. Or simply, watch it. Donna can drive a car too, and she also has no defense against an icy bridge, an oncoming traveler. Donna, however, saw that it was Scott who had hit a wall, and she could not bring him around. She tried fighting, she tried being evocative, sneaking a silk blindfold into bed one night just to see if she could get some sort of reaction (Scott laughed, then slept) and finally, she went elsewhere. Scott remembers being shown out of her place for the last time. She said, “Hey, good-bye” and swung into that gesture which sends her hair in motion. He crossed the threshold and heard the hinges squeak behind him. Years afterward, on a night when he was drunk and miserable and poetically inspired by his own disgust, she popped into his mind and moved him to scribble a short, revisionist ode on a bathroom wall at a bar downtown. It was not the Spakeasy Pub, that too had left him and a coffeehouse called Pot taken its place. This bar was new to the neighborhood and called itself The Regency Room. Despite having been open for just a few months, the bathroom was already plastered with graffiti. He noticed a joke by the door: “How do you make a clown cry? Hit him in the face with an axe.” Above the sign he saw a small-brown-green smear with the words, “Experimental Snot: Do Not Touch!” printed neatly beneath. Thus enlightened, Scott stood in the john for half an hour and built a mea culpa out of memory: There is a vernacular that exists somewhere between the spoken and the held, a communication born of dismissal. I have freed her

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to the black of her room, shutting the door behind me, and now, from here, I speak. Her hands do not cup my jaw, she hears what I never said.

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Three

“Mile 6,” reads the banner at 22nd St. and 4th Avenue. Scott recognizes this as the 10k mark. He smiles at the thought of how only months ago such a distance seemed so out of reach. Now look. Child’s play. Just up ahead is a table filled with paper cups from which to choose. He is more than ready for a drink having been so caught up in his daydreaming that he passed right by the last opportunity. Perhaps a volunteer will gather up a cup and set it in his outstretched hand as he speeds by. Or if not, he’ll make the choice himself. Pick the one meant for him, the one that holds something more than water. It is a cold beer that would please Scott the most. The tangy hop flavor is a treat he never tires of, despite his decades of consumption: the six-packs he bought illegally at a bait shop every Friday once he turned sixteen, the chugging contests that first familiarized him with the kind of dull, vibrating pain he has come to expect, the daily dozen he consumed in the summer of ’81, just after graduating from Indiana. Scott was sharing a house, just off-campus, with Larry the Graduate Assistant homosexual and his frustrated wife, Karen. Neither of the men worked from June to September, but Karen would wake early enough to get to her desk at the college library by 8:00, and that was merely the first of her two day jobs. From 3:00 to 6:30 she waitressed. Scott would rise to the smell of the coffee she had left on for them. At noon Larry would run to the store for the paper and a “suitcase,” twenty-four 12-ounce cans of Gobel beer. Around 2:00 or so Larry would usually try to get Scott to bed. Rarely with

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any amount of subtlety and never with any success. Karen would get home at 7:00 to find them passed out on the couch with Three’s Company blaring from the set. Beer, beautiful beer. He recalls how two quarts of Budweiser helped him blot out of a messy error of judgment just last month. It began innocently, with he and Wendy splitting a garlic and sausage pizza. It was one of their rituals and one of the many reasons Scott adored her. Bad breath and healthy diet be damned one night a week. They talked while they chewed, or stuck a tongue out at each other, and grease would drip all down their shirts. Afterward, they would undress and put the dirty clothes in the hamper with Wendy traditionally reciting the dictum, “The couple that stain together, remain together.” But on this particular evening Scott, thinking himself clever, cut her off with a line he had come up with while on his pre-pizza run, “The couple that grease each other, appease each other.” “That doesn’t even rhyme you asshole,” Wendy yelled. Then she grabbed a quart of Bud from the table and went into the bedroom. Scott took a fresh quart from the fridge and drank it down while watching tv. He knew that she would conk out and by morning whatever it was that had gotten into her would be gone. His remark would be written off as being said while under the influence. They would kiss good morning and file the incident away in their bulging collection of harmless white lies. Brew in hand atop his lumpy futon that night, Scott found himself nostalgic for the little bedroom he leased from Larry and Karen. He remembers that bed, with the pillow he still refuses to throw out, the one that on so many mornings feels velcroed tight to his face, how he would lay awake, naked, with the covers pulled back waiting for Larry to be brazen. If Larry had just come to him one night unannounced, taking what he wanted, Scott would have given. Or so he thinks, now that it’s too late. Now that gay sex has been ruled out by plague. He tries to imagine a day when the cure

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comes. How thousands of men, men like himself who might desire another man only because they can’t have one, are suddenly free to experiment. How he might welcome any guy at all just to experience the sensation, just to break a taboo or to embrace an intrusion. So, just as there has been a succession of beers, there has also been a parade of bedsprings. The mattress he now shares with Wendy was bought just before he met her, three years ago at World of Sleep. He remembers flopping down on it at the store, testing the “E-Z Slumber” springs, and how alone he must have looked compared to the couples being helped by the other sales people, textbook newlyweds in the midst of building their lives. As a child, Scott shared a room with his older brother, Evan, until he was 11. Their single beds separated by an Ethan Allen nightstand, top drawer full of baseball cards, bottom drawer stuffed with Mad magazines. Three important nights in that room have stayed with him. One, age 11, a nightmare where he is pulled from his bed by a hand extending from the window. He is tied to the spinning light on a huge fire truck and kidnapped. Superman is flying above the truck but not even he can rescue him. Two, age 16, Evan is by this time off at college and Scott has the room to himself. He is half awake at best and hears a pounding on the window that won’t go away. It’s a dream that remains with him even after he thinks he’s fully conscious. He cries and hides in the closet. The next day at school his friends tell him they were by to pick him up for a midnight curfew-breaker and why didn’t he answer their knocking. He tells them he didn’t hear. Three, age 19, home from college on Easter break. He wakes late on Easter day and flicks on the radio. It is the middle of the morning news and the reporter says, “Dead is Angie Lipton of 1831 Rosedale Lane.” He is sure he hears wrong. While a freshman back at I.U., Scott had the lower bunk in a dorm room, affectionately referred to as the I.U.D. He shared the space with a guy whose name also was Scott and who snored like

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crazy. Whenever he started, Scott would kick at the higher bunk till he turned over on his stomach. One night, he caught grief from his floor mates for wanting to go to bed early when they had a big night on the town planned. Well tough shit, there was a French midterm at 8:30 a.m. and Scott wanted to be focused. But at around 3:00 in the morning, he awoke to something tickling his nose. He half opened his eyes to find that he was being entombed in toilet paper. Ribbons of it were hanging down from the upper bunk and now they had begun placing strips over his face. Scott was too asleep to unearth himself, but he did manage to speak. He thought he was saying, “Get the hell out,” but the guys only giggled and acted like he was mumbling. Eventually, they exhausted their supply of Charmin and decided to go down the hall for one more drink. The slam of the door snapped Scott into a more energetic state and a word he hadn’t bothered with in a long while popped into his head: revenge. A simple plan was concocted; he lumbered to their mini-refrigerator, extracted the one stick of butter that had festered there for months, and placed it in the upper bunk. He returned to bed and waited, squeezing a wad of Charmin in his hand. Fifteen minutes passed and finally Scott stumbled into the room, burping and breathing heavily. He threw off his clothes and sprang up into bed. In the lower bunk Scott counted to five before he heard, “What the fuck!” followed by a dull splat from across the room, the sound of a soft log of fat being flung madly onto a concrete wall. Scott cracked up. Scott looked down from his greasy perch and couldn’t help but laugh as well. “You’re an asshole” he said, right before vomiting over the side. Scott rented an apartment his senior year, a one bedroom all his own with a window that opened upon a busy street. Some mornings, he would tie back the drapes and read the paper in the nude, waiting for someone to peer in. Larry and Karen’s house was the last place he slept before coming to New York in the fall of 1981. His first big city apartment

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was a two bedroom he shared with a guy named Denny who had put a “Roommate Wanted” ad in the Village Voice. Denny was due to return to his native Ireland in half a year’s time so Scott understood the situation was temporary. It turned out to be for the best. Denny was a complete slob, and the commute into Manhattan was long and tedious. But it was a nice enough space, the entire second floor of a house in Kew Gardens, Queens. Downstairs lived a woman who reminded Scott of the nosy lady in Three’s Company (Time and again this show haunts him, their casual lack of sex, the jealousies played for laughs, Suzanne Sommers’ voice in his drunken haze on those afternoons he fell asleep on Larry’s couch.) except that she was widowed and lived with her two teenage daughters. There was the obese one who always spat in the driveway, and the thin one who moped around always on the verge of sobbing. Scott’s bed for these six months was an inflatable mattress and two sheets. When Denny flew off, Scott forked out $25 to a service called Roommate Finders and soon found himself in a larger apartment in Long Island City cohabitating with a wannabe actress named C.J., and her two cats. She had gotten as far as working in an off Broadway box office but could not find the courage to actually audition for a role. Her choice of fashion was garishly flamboyant, part gypsy, part Gypsy Rose Lee. He was subletting his half of the apartment from a clown. A real clown who toured with the Big Apple Circus. The bedroom held a twinsize captain’s bed and that was it. No room for anything else, though Scott often mused on just how many clowns he might be able to cram in. One night, after a bout of drinking at the Irish pub just down the street, Scott brought a one-nighter, a woman whose first name he can no longer remember, into the narrow confines of that bed. Maybe it was “Tammy,” or was it “Teri?” But, one thing for sure, his appreciation of the absurd will never let him forget her last name: Babeplan. He had made her spell it out for him on a bar napkin. Scott thought it sounded like a randomly generated

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password, or a great name for the leggy killer in the next James Bond film. Regardless, during their antics in that confined space, Scott stained the wall with a splash of massage oil and nothing would get rid of the blotch. Sometimes he would come home to find C.J. staring at it. Barely four months after settling into the clown’s room he saw and grabbed up a flyer posted at the laundromat for an inexpensive studio apartment, in Astoria. There, he constructed his bed out of nine milk crates placed on the floor and covered with a sheet of ¾" plywood. A cheap Styrofoam mattress completed the masterpiece. By 1983, he had had enough of the outer boroughs and fate was smiling. Through a friend of a workmate’s sister, Scott met with a French professor at Columbia who was about to go on sabbatical to Paris for a year and was seeking someone, anyone other than a student, to rent his decent sized one-bedroom near campus for a measly $650 a month. Scott moved in, enjoying the ample space and Spartan decor. He took a quilt, laid it out in front of the TV and christened it the two-dimensional sofa. No depth. Amazingly, the professor’s sabbatical turned out to be permanent; he was offered a position at a small school outside of Paris. And in return for Scott’s work in getting his few belongings shipped overseas, the professor made a call to a colleague at the Columbia housing office smoothing the way for Scott to stay as long as he pleased. So far, he has pleased for twelve years. Jamie’s bed doesn’t count as his of course, but he is fond of it since he performed the assembly after she ordered it from the Sears catalog. Philip, Scott’s nemesis and the guy who stole a woman from him, sleeps in a bed that looks like a cage. Jason sleeps on a sofa bed sold to him by Scott. He swore to his co-worker that no bodily secretions ever came in contact with its fabric and truly believes this pledge to be accurate. So unlike the futon Scott bought to

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replace the TV quilt. It has seen him through a large handful of sordid nights and he refuses to let it, nor the memories stuffed therein, be carted away. He looks behind him dreamily, wishing to discover one of his old beds there waiting for him, but what he of course sees is the missed water station now far back in the distance. The frustration of now having to wait to wet his lips, combined with a mocking bead of sweat running down his neck, takes him time traveling. At their high school prom, Angie licked his neck during the last dance. The song was Me and Mrs. Jones (we got a thing going on). Almost two years later, half asleep on that Easter morning, Scott waited for the news to repeat. He laid there, still, in a cold sweat through twenty minutes of disco tunes. He remembers hearing The Hustle, I Just Want to be Your Everything, YMCA, MacArthur Park. Then just as the news was coming back on there was a knock at the bedroom door. Neither of his folks had ever done that before, his mother always keeping away and his father just barging right in. When his mother said through the door, “Are you awake?” he replied, “I already know. I heard it.” It was very much like Angie to be driving fast in bad weather. She owned that sense of immortality common to people under the age of 25, and she liked to flaunt it. Growing up in a small town, risking death was one of the few ways to have any fun. In her teens, Angie had accumulated three broken bones and a long scar on her forearm to show for it. For his part, Scott had inherited his mother’s worry-wartedness, was scar free, and had fretted about Angie’s tomboy antics so many times during their high school days he ultimately built up an immunity to her carelessness. Yet, that morning in his childhood bed, without the proper upkeep, Scott was left shivering under his blankets as he pictured the crash. Her head crooked in confusion as she hit the patch of ice, hair falling down over her face as she began the skid across the center line, then the hair flying up like static as the oncoming car slams her, and finally

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she flies like some morbid Alice through the looking-glass. He imagines the broken body and feels a tingle up his right thigh. The spot she rubbed for him once when it was sore, the time he thought nothing on earth ever felt so good. It is the same spot where she rests her hand in the photo taken of them on prom night. Scott’s mother was infatuated with that picture and had placed it on top of their large television along with her other family favorites. Mindless or helpless, she kept it there for months after Angie’s death. That summer, Scott could not escape into a sitcom without her ghost floating above the screen. Nor could he ask his mother to take it away. What would be the psychological damage of Mom removing the last trace of his dead girlfriend? Better to feel the knot of grief and anxiety in his gut than to play with fire. Perhaps as a result, the TV women he had crushes on began to stray from what he thought to be natural. His pubescent dreamgirls ran the norm, Susan Dey of the Partridge Family, Maureen McCormick of the Brady Bunch, Peggy Lipton in The Mod Squad. But under the photo’s constant watch it was not Laugh-In’s Goldie Hawn he fawned over, dancing in a bikini, her skin-paint graffiti asking him to “sock it to her.” Rather it was Joanne Worley, the clownish overweight brunette, her massive bosom hidden by a bright yellow boa as she yodeled an aria until Flip Wilson smacked her with a cream pie. Lucie Arnaz was another heartbreak. Unexplainable now (Was it the lips? The hair? The way he never knew what show she would pop up on next?) but soothing and sexy at the time. All it does now is remind Scott of the inane impression Philip always does at parties when he’s stoned, that Desi Arnaz “Lu-cee, I’m home” yell. Scott spies a safety pin lying in the street so here is what he does to Philip right in the middle of the New York Marathon, huffing his way down Fourth Avenue, passing the famous Greenwood Cemetery, final resting place of Dewitt Clinton and Samuel Morse, important men who would also despise Philip.

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Scott crushes the creep in his bare hands until he is the two separate parts of his origin, a sperm and an egg invisible in the crevice of Scott’s palm. Then he unclasps the pin and when he pokes himself, imagines the point piercing Philip’s stupid sperm eyeball and the bead of blood rising from the puncture is the yolk that would have been Philip’s heart. So petty was Philip in the way he hurt Scott, the pain of a pinprick is comfort. Scott wishes he could go then to the bed of Philip’s parents, point to the exact area above the mattress where he was conceived, using one of those wooden pointers that his professors used to hold, and say, “Philip you would have been alive starting in this physical space, but I have made your father’s sperm an Oedipus and your mother’s egg has rotted.” This makes Scott feel much better as he trots into the pretty Park Slope section of Brooklyn along this never ending road. His smile vanishes though when a rush of déjà vu makes his head spin. He was involved with a certain woman who lived near here. Scott remembers his Faith as a fable. Some twisted Brothers Grimm about the consequences of getting what you want. He had first laid eyes on her in March of 1991, some three months prior to when their lips would meet in a bathroom in Alice Tully Hall, the beginning of their eventual end. Once upon a time Scott was at a bar. Philip, who had been trying to make up with Scott for three years at that point, phoned him and suggested meeting up at The Regency Room in Greenwich Village to try out their signature drink, a dangerous concoction called Skip & Go Nakeds. SGN’s were made in a pitcher full of ice. Take one part every clear alcohol that can be gathered, add orange juice and Triple Sec, then top it off with half a bottle of Bud. The way the beer unsettled the sweetness of the Triple Sec made the drink convincingly tasty. And of course the gin, rum and vodka provided all the motivation one needed to take the drink’s advice. Hence, the Regency’s dance floor was always full of half-clothed

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college students and twenty-somethings of every shape, size and indeterminate gender. The girls would skip crazily around one another, past the awkward guys doing basic steps leftover from the fatal disco years. A herd of little red riding hoods keeping the wolves at bay. This particular evening, Scott and Philip sat at the bar splitting a pitcher and admiring the scenery. Philip, as was his way, was talking ceaselessly about his job. He worked for a downtown ad agency and took great pleasure in immersing himself in whatever product category he was assigned. Tonight it had something to do with skincare. He was on a tear about the dangers of rubbing vitamins into one’s skin. Scott paid attention for about fifteen seconds before cheating his view, tuning in the dancing and tuning out Philip’s babbling. He had no idea why he was giving Philip such clemency anyway. A guy he didn’t care to listen to, a bar lit with strangers performing quasi-pagan rituals. The whole matter was simply depressing. He should have stayed at home. In bed early and early to rise. But he always has trouble saying no to a friend, even an ex-friend, plus he is convinced bars are both storybook and holy, that inside one of them might be an angel or visage or a fairy godmother. A woman who could save him. Sure enough, there in the middle of all the skip-to-my-lou’s, was Faith. Tall, with silly cat-eye glasses bouncing off her nose, auburn hair in a pony tail, black heels, mini skirt and a gray T pulled off the shoulder to expose a silver bra strap. Actually she looked pretty hopeless, but her movement hypnotized Scott till the entire bar was just so much Impressionism splashed on a canvas. Faith wasn’t skipping like the rest of the dancers; she was shaking, or writhing as he later romanticized it. Some hopeful guy stood across from her but it was clear she was deep into herself. Whatever it was she had hooked onto inside was rattling her skin and throwing sparks out from her eyelids. She was aflame and Scott thought just to dance with her might be enough, that picking up her vibrations would cause his soul to stir and flush the

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impurities from his blood. He took a big swig of Naked and stood up, noticing Philip had gone silent, engaged now in basketball on the bar TV. He tried to make eye contact with Faith but she was all consumed, pumping her hips like she was being electrocuted, eyes shut tight behind her specs, fists clenched. Scott sat down. By midnight, the two bar hounds had punched as much of a dent in their second pitcher as they were able. Philip was droning on about skin grafts and Scott was torn between calling it a night and making a mad rush to the dance floor clubbing Faith over the head and dragging her off by the pony tail. Then a guy wearing a tuxedo glided onto the floor out of nowhere, heading straight toward her from behind. Faith somehow detected his presence before he was even close. She turned, ran at him and jumped right into his arms, wrapping herself around him like silk. He carried her off the floor and straight out of the bar. Ouch, thought Scott, perhaps he wasn’t so off base in his idea of clubbing her. A lost cause nonetheless. Scott grew morose and retreated to the men’s room to regroup. To Philip’s dismay he did not return for half an hour. Philip noticed ink stains on Scott’s hands when he returned but decided not even to ask, he just wanted to be home in bed. They did a less than heartfelt skip out the door, an act they had agreed upon early in the evening and felt obliged to uphold no matter their collective mood. “Who was that masked man?” Scott asked a passing sewer grating. “Who?” replied Philip, “You mean Faith and her monkeysuited suitor?” “Faith?” “Yes, the fevered temptress, bra strap of the gods. What, cat’s eye got your tongue?” “You know her.” “I know him. Sal. He’s, of all things, a percussionist with the New York Philharmonic. Lives in the same building as Howard,

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the guy I share my cubicle with at work. Days when Howie comes in looking like death, I know either Sal’s been rehearsing all night, or Faith stayed over and they had been doing it with the crash cymbals again.” An old and drunken quadrant of Scott’s brain lingers for three seconds on the phrase “crash cymbals,” transcribes it as “crash symbols” and a clattering of synapses brings Angie to mind, framed in a round plate of brass. Then gone. “So she’s definitely not up for bid is what you’re telling me.” “Be careful,” was all Philip replied. His standard response to any question involving matters of the opposite sex. Then he launched into a lengthy monologue about eczema. Scott watched the passing cars and evening dog walkers, humming Little Drummer Boy to himself. Weeks went by and the bright torch that was Faith diminished into a mere Bic lighter. A quick flare up of memory once in the laundromat at the sight of a bra, then once again, vaguely, in a return trip to the Regency where she was nowhere to be found. Nothing at all like the constant candle light of Angie, but embedded in Scott’s lust list still. Much better off anyway, he reasoned, remembering that he promised himself never to get involved with an attached woman, the lesson he had learned four years ago from Patty and had ever since obeyed. Faith was all but erased from his mind the night Philip invited him to go over to Howard’s and watch the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs. The three of them sat on the couch guzzling cold beer and demolishing an extra large with garlic and pepperoni. Philip always liked the TV to be blaring. The stadium in frenzy. Marv Albert shouting, “Yes! Yes!” The constant stream of car commercials beaming out to millions of New Yorkers who’d rather take a knife in the chest than own a vehicle in the city. Philip blabbing on and on. “Mercurochrome,” he spouts, “Facial scrubs.” “Antibacteria.”

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Scott and Howard just nod and chew. Halftime came none too soon and Scott excused himself to get a moment of peace out on the stoop. Philip had learned not to mind the fact that Scott clearly needed to get away from him for a small rest nearly every time they got together. Scott partly did it as a dig, which always improved his spirits. A revitalizing swoosh of cool air greeted him as he stepped out the door, but there, sitting where he wanted to sit, was a redheaded bundle. Head down, she was rocking back and forth and softly sobbing. An exposed bra strap gleamed up at him. God is good, he thought, and reached for his cigarettes. “A Jew, a Catholic and a Presbyterian walk into a bar,” said Scott out into the night, “and the bartender says, ‘What is this, some kind of joke?’” Faith, her mouth covered by her hands, made some sort of snorting sound which could have been either a groan of agony or a giggle shot through a silencer. “What the hell do you want?” she intoned, speaking through her fingers. “Nothing, but you’re in my spot.” “I didn’t know stoops had reserved seating.” “That’s not what I’m talking about. Cigarette?” This was one of Scott’s favorite ploys. A line which sounds suggestive of something, but who knows what? He didn’t have a clue as to what he was saying but it was enough to get Faith to lift her head and look into his eyes. Where, on the dance floor, all that he could see of her features was fire, now there were pacific green irises, a dimple, mud-blonde roots where her hair was pulled back. Simple as a match. “Sorry,” she said, rising to her feet, “I don’t smoke.” “But tobacco is good for the soul.” She brought her face close to his and he picked up her scent which smelled, for all the world, like electricity. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” she sang, and ran back upstairs.

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Basketball season gave way to spring training and the boys of summer again taking over the television for 162 games. The Regency Room closed after one very bad evening that Scott read about in the paper involving shards of broken pitchers and a guy recently laid off from his construction job. Scott, in an effort to preserve his sanity, had begun making excuses not to hang out with Philip, and his cravings to touch Faith’s eyelids devolved into occasional and relatively harmless morning fantasies. One day in early June, Scott arrived at work to find an envelope, addressed to him in his boss’ handwriting, stuck in his mail slot. He held it up to the light to see if its contents were pink, then wondered if pink slips really were pink, or was it only an allusion to the color of his skin, the pound of flesh extracted. He had been at the List Council for 6 months now; there was really no reason to worry. He had done exemplary work on his latest assignment, custom-designing a list of middle-income, middle-aged, Caucasians on the East Coast who had purchased a new car in the past year. Of course there was the small matter of petty theft. He was by no means alone in his habit of taking home pens, paper clips, staples, and even entire reams of printer paper, but if there was a plot to toss him out of the company that would certainly be reason enough. He poked his pinky underneath the flap and tore open the envelope. Inside was a pair of tickets to see the Julliard String Quartet that very evening, along with a Post-it note that read, “A pair of box seats for thinking outside the box. Keep up the good work and soon we’ll be as tight as these guys. Enjoy.” Classical music was not Scott’s forte. He would have preferred finding tickets to REM, or even The Rolling Stones, aged as they were. But no use looking a gift boss in the mouth. Scott found it impossible to scare up a date on short notice to such a potentially sleep-inducing concert so he arrived early to Lincoln Center and managed to sell off the extra ticket out by the fountain to an old Russian man with a great white beard who said

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his name was Mikhail. Even that was more conversation than Scott cared to engage in, despite fondly remembering a goldfish he once owned with that same name. He let the ticket go for five dollars, enough for an intermission cocktail, or maybe a couple Hershey bars in case he grew bored to the point of exhaustion. Scott took his seat just as the house lights dimmed, the Russian man’s beard and big toothy smile nearly causing a white out in his cerebellum then fading to black as a round of applause greeted the quartet’s entrance. Mikhail was enthralled from the first downbeat. Scott immediately began to drift out to sea. Mikhail’s Navy. Mcsorley’s Ale. Michelle, My Belle. Mickey Mickey Mickey ail ail ail. He had a good friend back in Bloomington named Mickey, a guy who lived down the hall in his dorm. He was from a small impoverished town in Indiana and was destined to one day return there to be the manager of the Bonanza Steakhouse unless a miracle occurred and he graduated college. Mickey had an odd connection to music. Rock-n-Roll that is, not this classical stuff. For one thing he looked like Jerry Lee Lewis. For another he had impeccable taste in picking new talent. One day around midterms he brought back an album with a skinny nearly nude, not particularly sexy looking black man on the cover. Mick predicted great things would be in store for this singer. Scott shrugged him off saying the day of single-named rock stars ended with Cher, Madonna being the possible exception, but certainly some undernourished greaser going by Prince didn’t stand much of a chance. Thus, Scott learned his sense of pop culture was not nearly as keen as he imagined. Though, years later, when Prince changed his name to some unpronounceable hieroglyph, Scott was struck by a vague sense of ultimate victory. Names, in addition to being his bread and butter, are simply the best way he has of keeping tabs on his memories. Angie, Wendy, Faith all set off unique sparks, fiery bookmarks folded into the synapses of his disheveled mind. But there is one other mnemonic

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Scott uses and it stems back to another album from Mick’s collection (Scott misses vinyl, the tone arm following its concentric path to the record’s center where the title is revealed. Now nearing his 35th birthday, Scott has wound his way into the center of his life where he wishes to find his name writ large, and then begin a reverse and controlled spiral out toward the lip of his existence). This was a recording of fusion jazz by some group Scott had not heard of nor has yet to hear about again. He can’t even begin to recall their name but does remember how it was a gimmick album really. The songs didn’t have titles; they were represented instead by brief schematic diagrams. So, for instance, the first song was called “ __ ,” the second was “___,” and so on. This idea of leaving out the text, omitting the middleman, stuck with Scott. Words had been so much his life that to understand anything without their use, going from picture to sound, was fascinating to him. Possibly, he could go from sound to taste, smell to touch, without speaking, without scribbling down one consonant. For years he tried to find areas of his life where this technique could be used, where words could take a nice siesta and something else, anything, would relate directly to actions. He was slightly disappointed to concede that there was only one circumstance which fit. He was disappointed because it was the same circumstance he dwelled upon almost all the time. How shallow I am, Scott thought, to take new principles and apply them only to sex. But it was true. For nearly every woman Scott had slept with he had at least one clear snapshot in his mind— not a movie or an airbrushed photograph, but a clear mental Polaroid— of he and the woman in a specific sexual position. Given a copy of the Kama Sutra then, Scott could see a pose and think, Oh yes, that one was Rachel. Legs around the neck? Ah, Nancy. It wasn’t until he had dwelled on this concept for a very long while that he realized the kicker. Whatever that camera was he had managed to build, it was using a built-in flash. Rarely did Scott make love in the light. So, it was not his eyes that were

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doing the recording, it was some other sense, a hidden organ that blooms in the dark and absorbs sensation in ways so unfamiliar it goes unnoticed. Or else all his other senses had combined to equal sight. The touch, taste, sound and smell of the act compressed into a piece of film, developed by the pheromones racing through his cortex and the firelight of his synaptic bursts. Still, there seemed not one useful reason for this device Scott spent so much time perfecting. It became to him an exercise, like tai chi perhaps, focusing his mind and body, turning the pages but feeling them as sheets. Envisioning the position of his body in relation to that of a woman’s and committing it to memory. An alphabet. Over the years what has Scott spelled out on the tablet of his bed? Certainly not the Ten Commandments. Certainly no morality lesson. Scott suspects it is something he’d rather not know about himself. Written in a kind of invisible ink, translatable only in his dreams. As it turned out Scott could not quite make it to intermission. His bladder was being an unruly patron and demanding a trip to the loo. He ducked up the aisle, with no plans to return. Approaching the bathrooms, he saw the familiar scene of the Gents being readily available while a small line had already formed in front of the Ladies, the infirm who like Scott could not wait, and the savvy who knew to get a jump on the impending crowd. There, standing between a silver-haired dowager in mink and a pencil thin lady in a purple evening gown, was Faith, in a strapless dress. The pressure from his bladder eased miraculously, replaced by a different sensation altogether. She had already spotted him and when his eyes met hers she got out the first bon mot. “Let me guess, I’m in your spot. Right?” Scott laughed. “No, the spot you’re in you can keep. But I thought you were more a philharmonic type of groupie.” “I’ve been sneaking out to see quartets just to spite the bastard.” The vulgarity caused the line of elderly women to stir

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and grimace. Faith stared down the dowager and told her to be quick because she really had to go. “Why don’t you use the Men’s, I’ll stand guard for you.” “I thought you’d never ask.” As she scooted by with the old women united in their disapproving sneers, Scott could smell the alcohol on her breath. The door closed behind him and Scott heard the rush of applause marking the start of intermission. “Better hurry up in there,” he said to the solid pane of wood. She responded with a giggle, “How do you use these things?” A stampede of suits was charging toward him. “The time is now,” he implored. Suddenly the door creaked open and Faith reached her arm out to grab Scott and forcibly yank him in. All she said before kissing him was, “Washroom, come quick, I need you.” And then her lips, her hands upon his lower back, her solid shoulders caressed in his shaking hands, surprising yet expected, comfortable and totally alarming, silent, removed from time. The crush of men entered to find them there necking in front of the row of urinals. There was scattered applause as Scott tried to pull away, but the act of being discovered appeared to only spur Faith on. Catcalls echoed off the array of porcelain and surrounded them. “Can’t you do this in the theater proper like a normal couple.” “Go stand in front of concessions if that’s what you’re into.” “Lady, I’m pulling it out regardless.” Finally she freed him, still without a word and he without the slightest idea what to say or expect. She took his hand and led him out of the bathroom, through the coat-check, and onto the glistening street where she raised her strong arm into the black air and its very magnetism pulled a cab to the curb and Scott does not even recall the door ever opening but they were inside nonetheless, and they were traveling. Faith’s studio apartment, all the way out in Park Slope, seemed as though it could evaporate at any second. Shear gauzy drapes absorbed the breeze, there were vases everywhere, most holding

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only stale water, one with a dying hyacinth, a smattering of pollen in the air weighing down the regular city dust, bonding to it like a virus, making the air grow lazy and thick. Her bed, a gathering of feathers barely holding its shape. “Am I another quartet,” Scott spoke softly into her ear as she removed his tie then knotted one end around the headboard and the other around Scott’s wrist so tight he could feel his own crazed pulse. “What,” said Faith, “You mean the way I play you?” “No, I mean am I just another outing you use to spite the bastard, as you lovingly call Sal.” “Do you have a problem with that?” She unzipped his fly. “Just curious,” he said as he felt the whole room, the entire eastern seaboard, dismantle around him. Tethered to the bed he sank and rose and did whatever she made him do and Sal was just a short form of salad and the concert was merely cultural foreplay and Angie was only the pistil of that sad hyacinth. His eyes finally closed, with Faith’s skin blended into his own, and all he saw was an afterimage of his bound, opened hand. A stranger meets it with his own and places into it a bright green cup brimming with water. Here at mile 8, he takes a conscious, long, cool sip and feels it all the way down his throat. He salutes the Williamsburg bank with his free hand as he circles around it, and is surprised to find the Brooklyn Academy of Music waiting for him right next door. He has been here by subway several times but it seems so out of context now with his belly just beginning to understand that the cup is empty already and his left nipple starting to burn from the friction against his shirt and the microscopic dust floating in the heat between his toes getting ready to spontaneously combust. It is a strange little pattern the runners find themselves in here. With Fourth Avenue at last out of the way, they merge left onto Ashland Place, then a sharp right onto Lafayette Avenue, deep now into the Fort Green section of Brooklyn with its many trees nearly forming an arbor over the street. The trees, the roads, the arms of the runners all bending at their own odd angles, arrowheads

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forming wherever he looks, mirroring the triangle that took shape in Faith’s bed. Any three-sided figure, by nature, is closed and sharp. So it was with Faith and Sal and Scott as a single geometry, the way their corners met, their hands touching or not, the bits of knowledge each possessed adding up to something that is predictable if one is familiar with the formula. But Scott was a novice cheat, having tried it once before with Patty and failing miserably. He took his guilt pangs at face value, avoiding Sal at all cost, turning to sap whenever Faith reached to his belt. Cheating held all the chemical properties of cocaine and Scott had become a hopeless addict. Sal also was inexperienced or, more likely, blind. Faith was a pro, of course, but had the least to lose. She manipulated the two men with ease, scheduling her time, measuring out her sex, a ready supply of birth control pills inhabiting Scott’s medicine chest. Sometimes Scott thinks they still would be sneaking around today if she had not failed to consider the dynamics of rain. Specifically, what affect a thunderstorm has on a scheduled outdoor concert by the Philharmonic. When Sal walked in on them in his own apartment, drenched and in need of dinner, Scott was sitting naked behind Sal’s practice drum set, playing along with a tape of the Beach Boys. Faith, wearing only a bikini bottom was standing atop the coffee table, pretending to surf. First it was Scott stopping the beat and letting the drumsticks fall from his hands. Then Faith turning her head toward the foyer. Sal, mouth agape in a silent scream, Faith running to the bedroom, Scott tearing to the couch to find his clothes, Sal deciding who he would like to murder first, deciding on Faith, and treading slowly toward the now shut bedroom door. Scott, boxers on, the rest of his stuff in hand making a break for the exit hearing behind him the carefree voice of Brian Wilson singing, “fun, fun, fun till your daddy takes your T-bird away,” and an explosion that he figures is the bedroom door being shattered off its hinges.

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The next day Scott phoned in sick. He asked his colleague, Jason, to cover for him and arrived at Sal’s apartment building early, guessing she would still be there. He hid behind a dumpster until he saw Sal, slump shouldered, descend the stoop and drag off toward the subway. He steeled himself to get up to the door and then spent a long time just staring at the buzzer. His lungs were swollen and his stomach was churning with bile. He was about to press the button when he saw her through the glass of the locked second door. She stood there, on her side of it, and did not say a word. She looked at him, or possibly at herself in the glass and shook her head. Then shook her head again. He turned and left to go home. His skin was thin as soggy newsprint and white as borax. His ears rang with the roar of his chest collapsing from within. Just past the entrance to the G train at the corner of Bedford and Lafayette, Scott catches his own reflection in the scratched Plexiglas of a phone booth. He closes one eye and his face becomes Wendy’s; the way she looks coming out of the ocean from a swim. He moves his lips and she speaks: “I will be with you always and unconditionally. I am faithful. I am not a mistake. I am alive. I am exclusively yours. I am available to you.” He jogs in place in a slightly staggered rhythm, shaking off the mirage, getting a feel for how he is holding up. Each step he takes reverberates in his mind, the same way a puddle might spawn concentric circles. What he remembers now is not only the silence surrounding Faith that day, but also the many ways he has talked to women. Not the information passed on or even the secrets kept back, but the pure and odd mechanisms of his interaction. And the grammatical terms of endearment with which they responded. Rachel would pluralize nouns so that a disagreement with a verb turned into a love pat, “You are my teddy bears,” she would sigh without a hint of saccharine. Similarly, Wendy likes to alter verb tense: “You is the sweetest man,” or leave out the verb altogether, “You handsome.” How totally inane it sounds to Scott, out of

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context, making him cringe. But he knows he is equally guilty, more so adding in his fixation on Angie, more so still, considering the litany of styles he will use to communicate with the women he adores, or once adored: He will call in the middle of the day, when he knows she shouldn’t be home, just to listen to the voice on the machine. Does she sound happy? More depressed? Does the I, one day suddenly turn into We? Can that mere recording spark a memory to get him through another day? He will speak to her in bed in the pitch black and if they have just made love he will say how pretty she is in the dark or if they have fought he will growl like a bear and poke her ribs till either she laughs and twists his finger or turns her back to him and kicks hard with the heel of her foot. Or if they are breaking up he will talk in gulps and fall into tears. He would speak to her at the grave. He will speak in dirty words over the phone, ennobled by her anonymity, the turn on of spending money to pronounce specific verbs for some woman who fakes being aroused while she is doing her nails or sitting in a cold empty room watching a cockroach. He would like to have an earnest conversation sometime with one of these women he calls when Wendy is out of town visiting her mom. One who for a change claims not to have long blonde hair and a 38-inch bust. He would like to ask her about the job and if she’s happy and if only they could get a cup of coffee they might both be that much happier. He will talk directly to her on the bus when what there is to say is strictly trivial. He will lock eyes with her and the words turn into cotton. He could be saying anything and her reply might as well be in Hebrew because the white noise of a flirtatious stare is deafening. He will type at his keyboard while she, hundreds of miles away, replies in kind, and the text that fills the screen, the stream

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of wires, somehow decompress into a kind of affection where he offers to wrap her hair in the letter y or place her in the crook of an ampersand or type a long sequence of spaces to signify emptiness. The sentences yield to numbers. An area code, a prefix and a suffix, the cold components of nearness, like the medical names for the pieces of the heart. He has only yelled when deep into a fight, when she has accused him of being a stone or doing just barely enough to prove love or after another long afternoon of silence. He will talk to her in the rhythms of her own voice, the unique turn of phrase or accent or barely noticeable emphasis on a wrong syllable. In this way Scott takes her into him. When he speaks in her tones he comes to understand her paths of thought. He has tried many times to talk to women in nightclubs but never finds anything to say. Scott has trouble enacting a cliché. He cannot, for instance, bring himself to make out in the back seat of a car, so the very idea of picking up someone in a bar precludes him from actually doing so, as he well knew that first night he spied Faith. There have been months of his life when, if the phone rang, it could have been any of them. Distinct voices connected to wishes that never came true but stayed around anyway. Persistent and integrated as a night full of sirens. Complicated as the wiring of his answering machine he too often let answer for him, but as simple as a gathering of ten digits on a dial. Press 1 for customer complaints, press 2 for the inability to end a romance, press 3 to flee. Then there were the times when the continual silence of the telephone was unbearable. He would imagine the ringer inside its plastic housing, not as the mass of solder and microchips it no doubt was, but as the old fashioned twin domes of chrome with a small metal clapper poised between, ready to clatter wildly when the right combination of numbers was entered by a soft and hesitant hand. But those hands were busy elsewhere. The

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answering machine never blinked with life, the red light that counted the number of calls staying as steady as an EKG of the dead. The corpse was the body of his social life, and it was buried in the shallow of blank white squares that filled his week-at-aglance daybook. Now the steady red light from an overhead traffic signal mocks him as he starts off again and the road is a readout of white blinking lines. It is a street screaming that it is full of messages, that if he would simply stop running long enough to find the button on the lamp post and press it, the path would rewind for him and play back the luring screech of tires from the fast-breaking cabs, the basso rumbles of the city bus, the soft confused squeal of those who didn’t see it coming. The 7021 pinned to his chest could be the tail of a local call, an over-sized cocktail napkin he took from a smitten young beauty but then tore in the wrong place. Like a confused version of Cinderella, he imagines himself Prince Charming, running through the kingdom bearing the 4 digits to the townspeople, hoping against hope for a maiden to recognize the sequence and come running after him to shout, “Yes, I have the three simple numbers you’ve lost. I have them right here. No need to go any further.” In fact, Scott has a collection of four torn napkins, three crumpled sheets of notepaper and one dried up moist towelette package. The original manuscripts of eight possibilities, the phone numbers, in the women’s own hand, acquired from college happy hours and adult education courses and chance encounters, from which he could build a first date or consign to indifference. They are his butterfly collection. Scott will sometimes remove them from their shoebox and admire the drunken curves of the 8 and 9 scribed by Jamie, or the shy moth-like 36 in the center of Gina’s. Or, when the scraps are aligned and turned vertically, they are his menorah. Strings of numbers that he looks to and understands as a symbol of devotion, eight arms of light which signify a miracle

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and are proof of the ability to love. The antithesis of his religion’s yarzheit candle, the beacon of the dead. He would speak to her at the grave. It is 1992, mid autumn but oddly, terribly hot as Scott, home for a visit, borrows his parent’s car and drives to the cemetery. He does not play the radio. He parks behind the cemetery office and wanders into a small, quiet room that adjoins a prayer area. It is his first time here without knowing where to go. Past trips had always been with relatives. To visit his grandfather. To bury his grandmother. To mourn a cousin’s early demise. But this was not family. Yes, he had gone to Angie’s funeral, but he did not follow the procession down here for the burial. He wanted to, but when it was time to leave the church, only family cars were supplied with the tiny purple flags for their hoods. In their grief he had been forgotten and he was too embarrassed and empty to do anything about it. Only they turned on their headlights and burned their way through midday traffic, leaving Scott alone in the lot fumbling with his keys. Now he wants to see her. To hold his lips down to where they are tickled by the grass and tell Angie that a day does not go by when she is not thought of, that perhaps he has forced an early end to so many couplings because of what she had taught him. That life can be a matter of inches. That he can wake up any morning, even Easter, and find himself alone. That if he gets too close to someone who disappears, he might vanish as well. Scott was hoping the office would be high tech, maybe there would be a computer screen he could go to, enter her name, and have printed out a map of just where to find her. But naturally this is not the case. He enters to find a room overflowing with papers, filing cabinets opened like little mausoleums, and a solitary woman scribbling something in pencil at a desk. The woman’s name is etched in a nameplate that is actually made of marble, just like the smallest of tombstones one could imagine.

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Scott does not know if she thinks it a joke, or if it was possibly a gift from some thoughtless marble supplier, or what, but it strikes him as so macabre he turns to leave. The woman looks up though and offers to help him. Her name, Scott reads off the marble, is Mrs. Pat Fields. Amazing he thinks, if ever there was a name for a cemetery’s secretary this would be it. Better even than the guys he knew whose names were drinks: Tom Collins and Bud Weiser. She is a calm and peaceful lady and Scott feels at once comfortable once she asks the name of the person he’s come for. “Whom do you wish to visit?” she asks. He tells her and she glides off to another room, to a small cabinet which turns out to be a card catalog of the dead. She files through till Angie’s card appears and, really, as if her by now decomposed flesh were a book, copies down the plot number where she has been so carefully shelved. She shows Scott on a map. However, it’s an old map, produced before the new area Angie is in was incorporated. So Mrs. Fields draws the section in with her pencil and marks an X at her grave. Outside, a warm breeze is blowing and hundreds of leaves are falling from their trees. Scott drives the 5 mile per hour speed limit to the new plots, following Mrs. Fields’ neat arrow marking and arriving at the section newer than a map but so old as to contain and understand scores of souls. The leaves surround him and Scott is searching. She is not where Mrs. Fields’ X indicates and Scott is searching. He reads every elevated tombstone but none say Angela and Scott is searching. There are dozens of head stones placed flat into the ground and Angie must be one of these. Not a rich tombstone. Her folks could not afford one. Who plans ahead for their 18-year-old daughter to die? Scott is kicking the leaves trying to find her. The leaves are as thick as underbrush and there is no way of telling where the headstones are hidden. He spends twenty minutes kicking the leaves, the act he did for fun so often as a child, when he lived for the rustling noise and the soft give when he dove into a freshly gathered pile. Before Lyme disease.

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Before his bones grew up. And now Scott is searching but he does not find her. He finds only strangers. He is sure she must be right here. A matter of inches. He thinks he is just not letting himself see her. That she waits. That something lost reveals itself only when it is no longer needed.

Four

Mile nine finds Scott jogging solo through the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It’s Bed-Sty in the common parlance so there is a multitude of piggish images trotting through his mind: The chic pigs on his shower curtain in an orgy of various sexual positions, little plastic pigs bent in disturbing ways, a horrific photo he once received in an email of a farm girl being mounted by a huge boar. Then an odd morphing of Miss Piggy and Angie and Wendy coming to nuzzle beside him in bed. Eesh. He prods himself to concentrate on the race, on the actions occurring outside of his subconscious. But his thirst is growing and a blast of endorphins is playing tricks with his brain. Most of the noises trickling in through his ears are indecipherable. The streets are lined with people speaking a dozen different languages. The sounds permeate his tympanic membrane by accident, words falling into his head with perhaps one or two randomly finding a niche to perch on, striking a chord of awareness. A young boy shouts, “Way to go,” and for no reason a tear forms in Scott’s right eye. He replays the phrase over and over for blocks, assigning to it some sort of sad, oblique lesson he neither comprehends nor can shake until he has to say the words out loud to himself. “Way to go,” Scott tells his numbed ears. His eyes dry and he hears his breathing settle. Then for no other reason than his own amusement, he tries to keep his lips closed while pronouncing the word, “tympanic.” Is it still cold? Judging from the crowd around him it is. Runners pass by and he can see their breath. Some people on

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the sidewalk seem to be shivering. Scott, if not exactly warm, is…what? He searches for a word to describe himself and finally comes up with “preserved.” Like an artifact in the Smithsonian, he thinks, or a good leather saddle that had been treated right. Not “ridden hard and hung up wet,” which was one of Nancy’s favorite sayings. Oddly, he often dwells on the word “saddle.” It’s possibly his favorite noun, so serious yet so fun. Saddle should mean, “a little sad.” Saddle is skidaddle without the skid, or the virgin tense of “straddle.” He first fell in love with Wendy because she smelled of saddle soap. In reality, Scott has no idea what saddle soap smells like but when he sat down next to her on a park bench on a gloriously sunny October day and inhaled the leathery clean scent of her hair, that was the word which breezed across his skin and caused him to strike up a conversation. He feels dry inside and out, as if that last tear was the final ounce of liquid to be had, so when he spies an upcoming water station he is uplifted. He grabs a cup and empties it in one solid gulp, remembering too late that he could likely cramp up were he to do that too often. Cramp is such a miserable word yet it is the perfect echo of the pain itself. Onomatopoeic. Scott had his share of them while training, the perception that his stomach was full of pipe, each piece twisting into a knot and stopping him in his tracks. Wendy hates the word cramp, refers to them only in the context of her monthly encounter, and instead called Scott’s condition “frustrated guts.” “Frustrated guts!” he shouts downward toward his belly. The term always strikes him as particularly vulgar. The hard consonants blot out Wendy’s face and force him to think back to a woman who taught him the real meaning of frustration. His romance with Gina began with a mirage in the sticky summer of 1988. Scott was taking a six-month, adult ed. screenwriting workshop at Columbia University. He had an idea he wanted to be the next Errol Morris. Write his own Thin Blue

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Line exposing the hidden secrets and wall of silence behind the direct mail business. Classes were held on Saturday afternoons in three-hour sessions, and it was on the first Saturday that he spotted her sitting directly opposite him in their large classroom. The chairs had been arranged in a broad oval around the professor, a man who claimed authorship to a dozen screenplays but whose name was totally unfamiliar to the entire class of twenty. Whoever he was, he clearly enjoyed being the center of attention and would lecture endlessly on the principles that made his little-known movies great. Catching Scott in mid yawn that day, Gina stared right at him. She had piercing brown eyes, full lips and the longest, densest, black hair he had ever seen, upon a petite and toned frame. More an ingénue than a writer, he thought. She wore a bright, flower print dress and Scott swears, when she looked at him, she stood up and straightened her dress in such a way as to afford him an unobstructed view up it. His memory now is of her nude inside a large, pluming whirlwind of roses, but it is the nakedness of a Barbie doll: hairless, breasts without nipples, gaps at the waist and neck to allow for bending. He wanted to speak to her right after class but she vanished from sight the moment they were dismissed. She did not reemerge until a week later when he discovered her sitting out on the campus lawn eating a muffin. He knew her by the unmistakable curving lips, but in every other way she had changed. Her hair was up and pinned close to her head, little make-up, jeans and a sweatshirt. He wandered on over to say hello, “Hiya, you’re in my screenwriting class I think.” She chewed her muffin for several seconds and swallowed before answering, “Oh. Am I? Hi.” “Either that or you have a twin who owns an incredible flowercovered dress.” “Oh, did you like that? It’s my Spring look.”

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“Yes, very nice. I’m Scott by the way.” “Gina.” “So how’s your writing going?” “Who knows? It’s a real pain. I’ve been at this script for years and I still don’t know if it works.” This was just the sort of comment Scott was hoping for and he greeted it as he would a familiar front door, the simple entrance into her life, into yet another unknown but sexy as hell life. “I’m no expert but I’d be glad to give you my personalized comments if you’d like,” was the only key Scott needed. She would have to see him again to give him the script. Followed by a lengthier time together to discuss it. “Yeah? That would be great! You don’t have to you know, you’ll see parts of it in class.” “No, I want to, it would be good for me to read it all the way through.” “Well, sure then. I’ll give you next time I see you?” “How about tomorrow?” “Great.” They met the next evening in front of a campus bookstore. It was raining and Gina showed up underneath a ridiculously large umbrella while Scott’s only shelter was the awning he stood under with a group of soggy coeds. Gina had only a half hour to spare she told him, with no further explanation, so they took a short stroll around campus, sharing her ample protection. She explained the characters of her screenplay. There were two female inmates and a corrupt male guard in a “complex triangle of death.” Each wants to kill one of the others. If prisoner 1 kills prisoner 2 before prisoner 2 kills the guard, the guard will be free to kill prisoner 1. But if the guard kills prisoner 1 first, he will be signing his own death warrant, courtesy of prisoner 2. Well, Scott was expecting something more along the lines of a Woody Allen New York sophisticated satire, but nothing wrong with a female inmate story

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he reckoned. It was actually a very practical storyline when looked at from a financial perspective. What Hollywood mogul wouldn’t find value in the opportunities it presented? He imagines Whoopi Goldberg hidden in the shadows, a knife up her sleeve while Jodie Foster skulks down the hall and John Malkovitch watches them both on a hidden camera. Gina appears honestly happy to be in Scott’s company. They talk easily, she is flattered by his attention and she lets him take her arm as they walk. They make their way to her bus stop and she scribbles down her phone number on a page torn from her notebook. “Call me when you’re all set. I’ll cook for you?” So easily done. Scott takes a full week to give the manuscript a careful evaluation. He winks at her when they’re in class but he is not yet ready to speak. Her form is not that bad, he is happy to see, for he has learned from copywriters at his office that there is no bigger turn-off than a woman who cannot compose, while one who knows a turn of phrase is eternally erotic. Scott has made a few minor notations dealing with specifics like the type of knife Whoopi would be able to get her hands on, the unusual amount of beauty products in Jodie’s cell, the direction blood would splatter when confronted by a large industrial fan. He has read over every scene slowly and indeed slowness is his call-word for this new woman. It is counter-intuitive to his usual frantic, New York style of courtship, but everything appears so perfectly on track here at the start. A no rush wooing, a waltz that will reach a crescendo at the exactly right time, Scott need only dance it out. He reaches for the phone and plays Gina’s number. She has cooked him a traditional dinner, circa 1955. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, fresh iced tea. “It’s my Honeymooners craze,” she explains, “Eat up, Ralph.” “Baby, you’re the greatest!” Scott purrs, and they dig into their

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meal amid fast chatter of their days at school: the tragedy over the coffee maker breaking down, a rumor about one of the students being a prostitute. Then, they wash the dishes together like a couple, with the prerequisite flinging of suds and thwacking of the drying towel. They sit side by side at the cleaned off table to work over the script. Scott shows her his suggestions. She nods at some, takes exception to a few, and asks him how he feels at certain scenes. Scott though is no longer paying the slightest bit of attention to the task; he has condensed his entire being and now is just the displaced air her words push out over those incredible lips. He must touch their moisture to reconstitute. He gently places a finger over her mouth to silence her, then finds his lips slowly meeting hers. One-two-three, one-two-three. “Oh,” she says quietly, “I, uhm, was not ex-pect-ing…?” He is taken aback by her reaction. Just how Gina was not prepared for him to kiss her will forever be a mystery, if she was telling the truth. He was more convinced that she had pulled a play out of the old Women’s Handbook, that secret list of rules and complex replies compiled for situations just like this one, or for the distinct purpose of driving men deep into self-doubt. Scott’s next impulse though, was a correct one. He kissed her again. She smiled. She kissed him back. And, really, that was enough for the night, another step in the very right direction. Such a luxury to move through this romance slowly. Gina tells him she’s throwing a party the next weekend and Scott offers to arrive early and help her set up. She touches his chin, he runs his hand down the length of her hair and they do not set eyes on each other again until Scott shows up on Friday, hauling four big, heavy bags of ice. This night they are not Ralph and Alice, they are Nick and Nora Charles. Witty, urbane, they drink like fish till all hours of the night, finding the sudden moments to touch hands or make eye contact. “Darling, ever since my fourth drink there are two of everybody.”

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“Well kid, then you did not bring enough ice.” Scott had arrived at seven and it was well after three when the party finally found its last legs. Despite knowing only a handful of her guests, he had had a great time all around, but now wanted nothing more than to head home and sleep for twelve hours. As the last hangers-on went for their coats, Scott too began to bundle up. Gina grabbed him by the elbow, “Won’t you be a doll? Stay and help me clean up?” Oh…two…three. “You were out the door, weren’t you?” she asked when the apartment had cleared. It wasn’t asked in anger. It was more like Scott had pulled a play from the secret Guy’s Handbook that she could not grasp in the least. Scott, pathetically, was shot having had uncountable “Gina Tonics” and what seemed like several hundred cigarettes over the course of the night. His sexual antennae were down and the only idea in his head was the most basic: rest. Gina said she was going to take a bath. Actually, she said this five times to Scott who was now trying to pass out on her bed. “A bath sounds just fine?” she suggested. It did, but if he were any more relaxed he would be comatose, so she was deep into soaking before Scott caught on to the invitation’s intent. Too late to act upon it, but it at least served to get him on his feet. That, plus a very full bladder. Gina emerged from her bathroom like some kind of virgin goddess in a cotton white nightgown, her hair fresh and flowing down over her shoulders. She stood still and just watched him for a full, long minute. Then she flirted, “Not a thing for you to wear to bed? Hmm, can you squeeze into one of my night-shirts?” “I’ll improvise,” he said, stepping into the bathroom to relieve himself and discreetly brush his teeth with a fingerful of her minty toothpaste. She was in bed when he came out, just a low single candle

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burning beside her on the nightstand. Scott stripped down to his boxers and cuddled up beside her. “Mmmm,” he heard her purr, and she placed her hand on his chest. Scott was thinking they would have the entire wide-awake morning together and, feeling not the slightest need to rush, fell fast asleep. It was around 11 when the phone rang and Scott opened his eyes to find the room crazy with light. Gina picked up the receiver and chatted sleepily. “It’s my mom,” she mouthed to Scott who, despite that less than sexy pronouncement was keenly focused on Gina’s very close body. He began to tease her, running a finger over her knee and down her leg, then two fingers back up her leg all the way to her backside. Gina was not minding this at all, keeping her body still and focusing hard on her phone conversation, trying to keep her wits about her. Scott wondered how far he could go in this odd, and psychologically messy, goofing around. Could he crawl under the sheets to begin kissing her with her mother right there on the phone? He thought not. One more small burst of patience and then the timing would be right. Scott held his ground, simply massaging her free arm as she talked. And talked and talked and talked. A small dinging sound was emanating from the back of Scott’s brain. A hangover perhaps, but more likely, he realized, an alarm that has gone off too late. Finally, she hung up the phone. “Good morning,” Scott said and before she could respond he began to kiss her deeply, and just as he reached a hand to the front of her nightgown, the phone rang again. Ah, he thought, here at last is the Woody Allan New York satire he was expecting from her, though this he was not finding funny at all. She pulled away nervously and picked up the phone. “Vice Squad,” were the words he expected her to mouth to him, but instead her eyes bulged with panic as she mumbled something into the phone and hung up. “Shit, you have to get out of here right now,” she proclaimed, “He’s on his way!” He two-three, one-two-three? “I’ll tell you next week, call me.” Scott wished he wore glasses so

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that he could put them on crooked the way Woody would do in a moment like this, with Gina suddenly gone kooky, more Louise Lasser than Dianne Keaton, dressing him, rushing him out, finding a green M&M leftover from the party to stick in his shirt pocket by way of apology. The explanation, which came three days later over burgers at a campus diner, was of course predictable to any film buff. The other guy was a boyfriend in long-standing who spent long weekends upstate caring for his long-dying mother. Scott had caught her off guard with his attention and now she was confused and not a little bit guilt-ridden. This other guy represented commitment and safety in her life. Especially since she had seen the huge house he is due to inherit. Scott feebly tried to persuade her, “There is always time for safety later on. It’s the here-and-now right now, and you owe it to yourself to have a little fun.” Then he misstepped. In his frustration Scott accidentally uttered the words marked as poison in the handbooks of both genders, “Don’t you realize that commitment leads to marriage and marriage can lead to children and who in their right mind would want to be stuck with kids!” Gina blinked and her eyelids made a deafening SLAM! that still echoes in Scott’s ears here on Bedford Avenue under the 10-mile marker. With her mouth full of french fries she said, “Don’t you know you should not ever say that to a girl?” “Yes,” he said as the waitress brought the check, “Unfortunately I know that all too well.” From that moment on their days together acquired a certain quality which might best be described as Greco-tragic. Scott had to have her, wildly obsessed with the idea of physically possessing the body he had merely touched. He had his chance once— more than once— and gave it up for the commonplace opportunity of a good night’s sleep. Magic beans for a milk cow. Gina, over the next agonizing weeks, grew somehow sexier and even more beautiful.

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She drove him crazy in a million ways, saying they were to be “just friends,” and in a dozen attempts he always came up short of bedding her. He tried taking her to expensive restaurants, tried playing racquetball with her, and, in the closest call, tried getting her good and drunk. One Saturday night they were off to a party at his pal Philip’s place, but stopped for a Tex-Mex dinner first. She put away two Tequila Sunrises and was being quite flirtatious. At the party, she had several glasses of wine and Scott felt he was finally home free. The way Prometheus must have felt carrying his torch. The party was pretty much a non-event, with no one of real interest present. Philip was there in a corner busily smoking a joint and talking, in his Desi Arnaz fake accent, to people Scott had never before seen. Scott tried to make eye contact with him, but Philip’s pupils were glazed. Time to go. He signaled to Gina that they should head out as soon as he made a pit stop to the bathroom. Gina nodded happily, sipping her wine and talking to some girl about Roger Corman films. Scott found his way, spent a few moments brushing his hair and fooling with his shirt, trying to tuck it in correctly, and emerged ready to at long last complete the hunt. She was gone. Not in some other room, not out in the hallway. Just plain not at the party. He was going to unhinge. This woman was going to make Scott ball up in a giant knotted fist. He decided to leave at once, before people started to stare in horror at the green bile that was no doubt oozing from his ears. Speed-walking the dark street to the subway station, his hands were clenched so severely that his fingernails made marks deep into his palms. Then suddenly he thought he heard her laughing at him from just across the street. He looked and in a very dimly lit parking lot he saw her, inhaling a joint, Philip’s arm, asp-like, around her shoulder. The noise that emanated from Scott’s throat was otherworldly. It was not loud, but it was awesomely disturbing, approximating

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the sound of a fork caught up in a garbage disposal. Gina and Philip turned to see him as he went thrashing down the street and into the subway. Again Scott feels the rage he stores for this idiot course through his body. His pulse and his pace quicken and any sense that he might cramp up is replaced by pure furor. He thinks it is like the radiation that flowed through Bill Bixby as he became The Incredible Hulk on TV. But it is also sand turning to glass as it absorbs a nuclear blast, keeping the atmosphere around him safe for others. Boiling mad, he devises another solution to Philip. This time it is Philip chopped into squares the size and thickness of playing cards. Scott shuffles him and fans the deck, rips a slight tear in the one that holds part of Philip’s lung. Scott imagines taking the diced up man to Pennsylvania Station, to the giant, old mechanical board that displays the departure times of Amtrak trains with a flutter of numbered metal tiles. He imagines replacing the numbers with pieces of Philip. Then he can listen as his body parts clatter with every leaving locomotive. Weary travelers looking to see when the Metroliner boards, will instead find four hideous rectangles: a slice of ear, a vivisection of flank, three fingers descending into the palm, and a firework explosion of veins. The board will overload and go critical, and Piecemeal Philip will spin off into the dimension of time itself, morphing into a mangled freak, falling through the stem hole of Big Ben, at the very second it is completed in 1858. A carney will find his bloody mess, take it to a tent and immerse it in formaldehyde. Then Philip will travel England for 9 years inside a jar till one day he is broken open and burned by a woman half crazed as the result of a stillbirth. Scott stormed down into the subway that night and vented into Gina’s answering machine. Called it right up and screamed his head off into the innocent little cassette tape, sitting beside the cradled princess phone, the smoking gun that led to this whole

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mess. How dare she two three, what the hell was she thinking two three, how is anyone this inconsiderate and bow to your partner and return to your side of the room. Bang went the payphone when Scott was done and a smattering of applause came up from three guys sitting on the bench nearest it. “Way to go,” one shouted. A smile crossed Scott’s lips. A message on his own machine was found the next day and Gina was sorry about it all but maybe they should see a little less of each other and Scott began to learn how to deal with the uncontested fact that he could never have her. Never have her yet still have her at least alive. Cold consolation. She eventually did marry mister safe guy, bore his children, cut off her long hair to a short motherly bob. All that, Scott suggests to himself, makes it that much easier to get over the idea of wanting her. But time turns in his head with such arrogance. He could be looking straight into her exhausted Mom eyes and see only that stare she gave him having emerged from her bath. Now, as he runs past another table full of water cups, he splashes himself with one, floating blissfully in the tub with her, while his blisters swell and, with him hardly aware, an upstairs shower responding to Angie’s touch. Angie’s fingers were long and thin while Scott’s are short and stubby. They would entwine beneath tabletops and between seats at the movie theater and on the dance floor at prom. They would separate to clap or eat, or if they came upon a street sign while walking. They would shout, “Bread and Butter!” unclasp their hands, then rejoin them with the quickest of kisses. In those innocent days all of Scott’s kisses were fast and shy; the first one she gave him at the end of a play rehearsal on an afternoon when they were the last two souls left in the entire high school, and the last one he gave her just before she drove off to college without him. The irony is not lost on Scott that the first kiss with so many of his girlfriends has been a goodbye kiss of sorts. His memories are of subway tracks and cold, single-taxied streets and stoops,

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an outdoor festival at twilight, and the boulevard at Broadway and 43rd Street. He is often reminded of a poem he has known since high school, Wallace Stevens’, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Specifically, way number five: “I do not know which to prefer,/ The beauty of inflections,/ Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling/ Or just after.” It is the just-afters that Scott remembers. The actual moments, when his lips and tongue are awake but his eyes closed, are lost, his mind simply clouded over by a pure white delight which subsides just in time to utter a word or two like, “see ya,” or worse, “thanks,” which made Jamie laugh so hard. To this day she taunts Scott whenever she runs into him by shouting, “You’re welcome.” Patricia slipping off into a crowd after he kissed her on a misty midtown afternoon and tasting the bubblegum flavor of her lipstick. The dream state he was in after kissing Wendy as he walked off with the packages of hers he had offered to carry. Taking them all the way into the subway and through the turnstile before coming round, before hearing her shouting after him, finding her standing at the token booth with a big smile. Handing the package back over the turnstiles, his fingers brushed against the back of her hand. Jamie on a night after choking down an over-priced meal in a terrible midtown restaurant, returning to his place to eat ice cream and play Nintendo till two in the morning. After he escorted her to the corner to catch a gypsy cab their kiss goodnight was long and sweet. Amazing, the way a kiss between two friends became a kiss between lovers, like a new element just waiting to be discovered, like that small plastic washer on the space shuttle Challenger. How a little thing goes unnoticed. Then one day the seal gives way. Scott knows he can be just friends with someone and then, suddenly, it explodes. All those days Scott was on lookout for Gina, his blinders adjusted and head bent at the precise angle to spot her face, lurking quietly in the same field of vision but on a different

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frequency was Jamie. She too had signed up for screenwriting and they often talked to each other behind the professor’s back, went for coffee, even a couple of times to a flick. Scott thought of her only as a classmate, a colleague. In fact he had never even bothered to learn her last name. So when the day came that he was able to get a grip on his obsession and stop to take a good look around, there she was, sitting in a corner of the student lounge, smiling up at him. He’d seen her before in this same spot but had never focused on her in the way he began to now. She was not an obvious beauty the way Gina was, the way Gina could be dressed in boy’s clothes and still ooze femininity. She was more a secret. There, look, her eyes are so serene, oh, I see, yes, those legs, ah, I understand it, the fineness of her red hair. “You know, I have no clue what your last name is.” “Well Scotland, just what sort of clue would you like?” “A really big one please.” She acquiesced, “It’s DeMeer. Jamie Caroline DeMeer.” Scott thought she said Demure, which was the word he was already thinking, the summary of her personality that her looks presented. He was soon to see that she was anything but. Scott began stepping up the number of times he suggested they get together as he grew convinced that Jamie, in reality, was a woman of extremes. And, to his surprise, she found irresistible the certain extreme qualities Scott had to offer. For instance, she marveled at the sweat that pours from him when he eats spicy food. She would delight in taking a napkin and dabbing it in her ice water, then delicately touching it to his forehead. Beads of perspiration would engulf him no matter if it were Mexican, Indian, Chinese or Thai. It was an intense passion, the kind, Jamie secretly hoped, that would follow him to the bedroom. Drinking was another joy they shared. Scott couldn’t wait to get her drunk. The timbre of her voice would change to approximate that of a really happy mouse. Her body, already fluid and loose,

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would become even more animated, a life-size Betty Boop spilling all over Scott, her hands at his shoulders, her lips at his ear, her leg firm against his. Her conversation, never g-rated to begin with, would take off to all kinds of wild highlands involving sexual confession and gossip that almost always turned out to be true. His favorite of her tales involved her unique interactions with a guy at the neighborhood video store which allowed her to watch a great many films and enjoy a very reasonable price. “The guy was a complete asshole but sometimes a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do. It was all in the name of furthering my art, of course.” “Of course. But which of your arts exactly were you furthering?” “Sex, film; same diff.” “True,” he replied, “Throw some food in there and you’ve got a complete evening.” “Ooh Scotland, I love a good food-sex movie. I saw Tampopo like five times. There’s the scene when the woman’s boob falls into that pitcher of cream and then later when that live crustacean thing is set loose on that pale white tummy.” “Yeah, those Japanese filmmakers definitely know their erotica. Personally, I can’t get past that scene in 9 ½ Weeks, Kim Bassinger blindfolded in front of the open fridge while Mickey Rourke pours the milk and manipulates the plastic bear full of honey.” “I’m glad we have this in common,” she said cynically. “Yes, sloppy food sex voyeurism, it’s a fine foundation for a relationship.” Their togetherness took on a pleasing predictability. After lastcall of an evening out at their favorite drinking establishments, they would end up back at one of their apartments in front of the television. If they went to Jamie’s, they would tiptoe in to make sure her roommate was asleep before turning on the set, watching

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Letterman at low volume as they unbuttoned each other’s shirt and then redid them each to the other, the buttons of Scott’s blue denim long-sleeve, into the holes of Jamie’s silky blouse, creating a cocoon in which their torsos were drawn together, their faces brought close for long kisses. On the nights they went to Scott’s, Jamie would joyfully annoy the pet goldfish she had given him for Christmas (Hanukkah he had to remind her) and then admonish him for never cleaning out the bowl. Scott would respond by putting on their favorite video, an hour of Warner Brothers cartoons, so they could neck and wrestle with each other while Pepe LePew sang That’s Amore to his unrequited love, the cat with a streak of white paint down her back. Scott would always muzzle Jamie and pin her down during his two favorite episodes, the one where the ole Big Daddy of a chicken, Foghorn Leghorn, gets plucked by a giant keg of TNT. Turning to the camera he says, “Fortunately I keep my feathers numbered for just such an emergency.” Jamie would take that as a cue to pull off Scott’s shirt and shoes and socks so that he may repeat the line to her. And several minutes later Scott is spellbound by the Roadrunner episode where Wyle E. Coyote has picked up so much speed he cannot stop himself until he is way out past the edge of a cliff, standing on nothing but air over the gaping ravine far below. The sigh of relief, then the sudden realization as his body pulls away from his head. After the fall he always hugged Jamie tight to his body and found the soft hot moon of flesh behind her right ear, and kissed her there. Foreplay while watching cartoons was a pretty clear indication that this was not a union of intense depth and significance, but that was quite possibly the reason for their great lust. The risks were negligible. So much so, Jamie would later sum up the purpose of their months together as “killing time.” They were only passing through, Scott’s apartment an unyielding station house, his bed its wooden bench. What she was really waiting for,

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her eventual spouse and father of her daughters, was currently elsewhere. He was some other guy involved with some other girl in a neighborhood Jamie would move to when it was time. When she was ready. She will recognize him, when he arrives, by the way in which he has absolutely nothing to do with Scott. As for his part, what Scott was waiting for was pretty much what he got: distraction, physical intimacy, laughter and the so important passage of time into the future and away from a particular past, one more layer of cotton to fold over a burning memory. If Jamie was killing time, then the others were clocks of their own devices. Angie these many years has essentially been time itself, the humming in the background of all his movements. Or she is a deathwatch beetle, the constant ticking of her head against the wooden casket. Or else she is mortality counting backwards, readying herself like a girl at a tree with eyes closed in a game of Hide and Seek, or more appropriately, Ghost in the Graveyard. More than once he has heard her scream, “Ready or not, here I come.” Marcia was a patient timepiece, waiting for her reward which came first in rivulets, then in streams (they could not stand in the same moment of their passion twice), then in a flood she could not control. Scott sang along to the car radio the day he left her, “You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone.” Nancy was tuned to a rapid metabolic clock that kept her always hungry for men, while Patricia was the timeclock that calmly petered out. Rachel moved in a different time zone, exotic and hard to imagine, hours ahead of what Scott was thinking or a day behind what he wanted. Gina kept guard of her most important part, the biological clock in her belly, the call of the child, the bells telling her it was time and wouldn’t you, Scott, please get out of the way. Patty wore a spy’s wristwatch he is sure, recording in secret their plans, the charts they constructed of each other’s bodies and the paths they decided upon. Faith was the melting stopwatch of Salvadore Dali, that whole affair framed in a gold leaf rectangle, a desert of such

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heat and brightness that when Scott finally emerged (like Moses, were he an absurdist) his hair was much grayer than it should have been. It was either their intensity, or time really had sped up. And now Wendy, she is the countdown. A mirror ball perched atop Looking-Out-For-Number-One Times Square. When he stares at her he sees a million reflections of himself, or the glue that holds his sanity in place, or an incredible terror that involves the shattering of their two lives across the remainder of all the time he has left. The commitment he has spent his adult existence avoiding is being lowered down a greased pole and in the macro equivalent of ten seconds he must be ready. When it reaches bottom, it won’t be just one year in lights, it will be fifty. Or rather, it will be a single word. The M word. Harbinger of responsibility, Draco in drag, the force that can bend a line into a circle the way a rope conforms around a neck, wedded, conjugal, one-hand-one-hearted domestic institutionalism: Marry, queen of Scott. Ordinary as fungus, easy as cancer, it happens every day but he cannot for the life of him understand why. How, if he cannot even choose what shirt to wear in the morning could he possibly predict what woman to spend the rest of his nights with. Why, when he has earned so many credits in his liberal education of romance, would he want to enlist in an ROTC where it’s the same drill forever. Had he married Marcia, he never would have known about the city’s architecture as taught to him by Jamie. Had he married Rachel instead of dating Wendy, he would have gone through life thinking the difference between hard wood and soft wood had to do with firmness rather than the shedding of leaves. Had his breakup with Faith not driven him to the weird sexscape of cyberspace he would have been even more repressed than he is now. The proof is in the statistics that support his reasoning. One in two end their marriages before death has its chance. Despite his Jewish upbringing, when Scott nightmares of

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getting married he pictures it as a Christian ceremony. It’s that cross. He envisions a giant wooden one on the altar and stands before it with a veiled woman in white. It is no woman he knows. The minister is bald and expressionless and the church is packed yet silent. Jewish tradition decrees a couple should be wed beneath a canopy and this seems wholly right; hiding this oddest of impulses from the eyes of God, an undercover operation performed in an ancient language and sealed with the smash of a wine glass, the end of pleasure. Scott wishes for a glass of wine that has turned into water. Warm water would be fine, or even saltwater. Hell, it could be a glass of Philip’s own spit and he would gladly gulp it down. He ponders all the liquid wasted in the millions of sealed envelopes generated by his company’s clients, how he mindlessly signs off on the siphoning of such a precious commodity. And the saliva he used up years ago, in mailing letters to Marcia, he is desperate for it now. Had he only driven to Michigan to see her she would have served him a glass of lemonade as means of compensation. Granted, she would have surely cried and maybe even he would have shed a tear or two, but his mouth would have held its moisture and he would not be in such a desperate state. He had spilled quarts of tears over Faith and those were justified, but there were others that made no sense at all. Other times when he began to cry just for the hell of it. After a couple cups of coffee the slightest of tragedies could set him off, usually it was something on the local news, a dying pet or missing child. Most disturbingly, there was something about older, overweight actors in dramatic rolls that always sent him over the brink. Scott possibly saw too much of his own father in them, so when Ed Asner, in Rich Man Poor Man, got in his rowboat and rowed off forever, he was devastated, and every year in that Christmas movie when Asner gets cancer, Scott feels the tears welling up. Equally depressing was Ned Beatty as Mr. Gibbs in the PBS version of Our Town.

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The pantomime of taking imagined flowers from his daughter’s grave to place onto his wife’s was unbearable to watch. Thinking back on it, Scott is sure it is somehow tied to his own father since Asner’s portrayal of Lou Grant never fazed him, nor did he care when Beatty was raped like a pig in Deliverance. It was only when the actors played Dads. Dads tied to deaths. Still, Scott’s father is skinny and in excellent health. He reconsiders. Fat, sick, and lonely is a trifecta Scott dreads, so maybe these televised images are ghosts of his own future if he doesn’t watch out. If he runs he will stay thin and strong. If he never is together then he can never be alone. A wife can’t die, nor a daughter before her time. Underfoot, Scott feels the road take on a new texture. He is running on cobblestone, an indication he has arrived in Williamsburg, closing in fast on the halfway mark of the race. Actually he need only turn to the crowds to identify his location. Scores of Hasidim line the streets in their warm coats and massive fur hats, waving, smiling, some just shaking their heads at these fools out running in the freezing cold. He is glad none of these men are his father. This section of Brooklyn houses the largest Hasidic community in the world and the rules they grow up under are strict. Big Mac’s are anathema. Direct-response mailings go straight to the trash. Men and women made separate. Rumors exist that married couples make love through a hole in a sheet, but Scott understands the origins of this, how ignorant neighbors saw the men’s large white prayer shawls hanging on clotheslines and jumped to a conclusion. Still, to Scott’s eye, the pervasive air of denied pleasure has blown any last sign of joy from these men who are applauding him. He could not last a day in this community. He would never want to sacrifice his refined hedonism. Nor would he ever deprive a woman who showed interest her inalienable right to stroke his muscled abdomen. As a Hasid he would spend his days studying Talmud, arguing God’s mercies with his neighbors until sunset. In his study he would grasp a small prayer book

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while his bald wife would light just two candles in the kitchen, one indicated God’s love for her, the other her love for God. He would work in a Manhattan camera store then come right home. He would not flirt with married women at happy hour. He would not stare at businesswomen on the street nor discreetly smell their hair in elevators. He would have never looked twice at Jamie or Gina, nor at a particular chubby waitress who comes rushing to mind as Scott’s stomach lets out a worrisome rumble. During his third summer in New York, Scott could often be found at The Red Flame, a greasy-spoon just across from his apartment. It was dirt cheap with big portions and Nancy was his regular girl. He would say to the busboys that Nancy herself was a big portion for she certainly was the stereotype of the fat, jolly waitress. And Scott could tell she craved him— why wouldn’t she? He would spend at least an hour over breakfast, gulping down coffee, dipping wheat toast into eggs over easy, flirting with Nancy all the while. She would respond by sticking a maraschino cherry on his plate, or blowing on his coffee for him. But once he finished eating and had left a big tip, she would not cross his mind the rest of the day. Then, one Saturday morning after the usual faire, instead of a check, Nancy put down an I.O.U. for him to sign. On the back of a napkin she had written, “This one’s on me, but you better take me out for dinner tonight. No cheap place like this hole in the wall! I’m off at 6:00.” A bold move, thought Scott. He figured he had nothing to lose, if she was this way at work, she must be quite the time at play. He was there at 5:59, grabbed her by the cute, stubby hand, hailed a cab and they were off to Peter Luger’s, all the way into Brooklyn for steaks. It was the priciest meal he could think of in a joint that did not require a suit and tie. Cruising on over the Williamsburg Bridge Nancy gave him due warning, “Hope you brought plenty of cash Hon, because I’ve been saving my appetite all day. And you know they don’t take credit cards.”

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“Not to worry, my wallet can barely contain itself it’s so full of cash. But if you think you’re hungrier than I am you got another think coming.” “You’re on partner.” They each downed a tumbler of bourbon at the bar as they waited for their table. Then a half-bottle of wine while waiting for their order to arrive. Systematically, they devoured their doubleporterhouse, a side of spinach, a side of potatoes, bread and butter, and the rest of the wine. Nancy talked and talked through her eating, which was fine with Scott for she was endlessly hilarious. “It’s a good thing I liked you from the start because you wouldn’t want to know what we gals do to some of the regulars that we’re less fond of. It’s not just unscrewing the caps on the saltshakers either. We’ve got an ample supply of cockroaches back in the kitchen you know and you’d be amazed to learn where some of them have ended up. Or parts of them anyway.” “If you’re trying to make me lose my appetite so you can out eat me, it’s not working.” “Hon, I’m just giving you the facts. If I wanted to make you sick all I’d have to do is tell you about what we caught the short order cook doing with the dish-washer last month. Let’s just say there wasn’t nothing short-order about it. Some people will do pretty much anything. Some people. You ready for dessert?” Scott waved down a waiter and ordered a slab of cheesecake to share and a couple cups of coffee. There were no cabs to be found by the time they had licked every last crumb off the plate so they had the cashier call them a car service. Climbing into a spacious blue sedan, Nancy slipped up beside Scott and placed her hand on his knee. “Thanks for that, Sweetie. Care to take me back and show me your etchings?” “At the very least,” he replied. That was how it started and that was pretty much the flavor of the entire ten months they played together. They would split

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amicably with him eight pounds heavier and she deciding to go back to school in the west and gain a degree. “In something,” she said, “In anything.” About mid-way through their romance, they spent a fourday vacation at her place just eating and fornicating, eating and fornicating. She would cook up something heavy, a giant plate of nachos or a frozen pizza, always something with cheese, they would gorge themselves, finish off a six-pack then collapse in bed for about an hour. When they awoke they had at each other till again exhaustion struck and they fell asleep, only to wake up hungry. One evening they thought about going out to a bar to hear some music, but decided against it and tore off each other’s clothing instead, with their teeth. As shallow as Scott can sometimes be, even he realized this was not the healthiest of ways to go about seeing a woman. He also realized that that was O.K., he could live with it, he could forgive himself. Nancy could be dead tomorrow, could choke on a Buffalo wing or sear her heart on a burning strand of string cheese. She could beer herself into a state of coma or collapse under the weight of all the red meat that has amassed inside her veins like bricks supporting a great and curving wall. Better she should know joy. Toward noon on the last day of their self-imposed seclusion, right before a bout of sleep, there was a knock at Nancy’s door. She rose, putting on her tangled robe that smelled of sex and barbecue sauce, dodging the plates and clothing surrounding the bed, and made it to the hallway just as the knocking turned into a shout. It was Nancy’s neighbor, Eileen. Scott heard Nancy’s friendly hello as she opened the door then strained to listen as their voices grew soft. She was telling her why Eileen had not seen her for days. Why no one had. There was a giggle, a suppressed shriek, and then Scott heard Eileen declare, “Just who does he think he is, God’s gift to women?”

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He picked at a bit of pepperoni which had lodged between his molars and contemplated the question. “Who do I think I am?” he asked the pillow. God’s gift seemed a bit much, even the idea of a God who gives gifts was a stretch. Plus, to choose to give it to women over men sounded not at all in keeping with what he knew of the bible. What is it a woman receives that men are cheated out of ? Childbirth? Hardly a present. Breasts? No, those are His gift to men. God’s gift to women in the form of a man; Scott can appreciate the self-deprecating feminist humor of the idea. After all, by this point in his life he was pretty sure he understood what women wanted: a good secretary with housekeeping skills wrapped in a masculinity that can contain a woman or free her or shelter her or rape her or flow from her or flow because of her. He also knows it is the intensity of these expectations that determines a woman’s sanity. He hears Eileen say, “Bon Appétit!” and Nancy reply, “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,” and the snap of the deadbolt as she locks the door brings it to him: God’s gift to women is that they outlive men. That is the intent. A blessing of years. A kind of leisure that makes everything else bearable. The pleasure of patience. This is what they get, the scores of months added on, the continuation after the stop. The easy out of not being the one to go first and all the weight which is lifted because of that. So the Lord giveth and before Scott can make the small step into what his subconscious was about to tell him about entitlement and gifts never received or taken away, he spots Nancy in the doorway with her robe in her hand. Her breasts seem cast in deep shadow but as she approaches the bed he sees that actually they are coated with Hershey’s syrup. The next chance for water comes just before the Pulaski Bridge, in the predominantly Polish section of Greenpoint. His head is so light now and his daydreams so thick and tactile he decides to pull over to take in his drink standing still. Gain some composure. The volunteers manning the table are all abuzz. “Have you heard?

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It’s German and Tegla, just as predicted. Two hours 11 minutes for him and 2:28 for her.” The news makes his stomach sour. Not even at the official midpoint of the race and already there are winners. He, and what must be at least a quarter of the pack with hours yet to go. It’s been only 150 minutes and it feels twice as long and he understands neither his own slowness nor the incredible speed of the first place finishers. But he bears them no malice, a distinct change from his usual feelings when beaten badly. He will spare them any Philip-esque torture because he knows what they’ve been through. The newspapers had explained how Silva’s father, Agapito, died of stomach cancer over the summer and how Loroupe’s sister, Albina, passed just two weeks ago from a severe stomach hemorrhage. It is a kinship, the small family of runners who bring along their dead. He wishes there would be a chance to speak with them, to ask if their angels soar through their minds the way Angie loops through his. Is there a law of inverse proportion at work that accounts for their speed? The slower the death, the faster one runs? Had Angie lingered on the brink of life for months instead of a split-second surrender, would it be Scott with the gold medal around his neck? He could have beaten everyone, proving his superiority in not only athletic prowess, but psychotic obsession as well. In New York City that is no small feat. But the reality is he is merely lost in the crowd. He reminds himself the race is about personal goals, not competition, and his body responds by informing him of an urgent need to move his bowels. Fortunately, a bank of Call-A-Heads have been set up right there on the corner so he dashes in, surprised that there is any waste in him to expel. He feels like he should be sweating, but he’s not. He returns to the table full of cups and sips from one slowly as if never having tasted a liquid before. His eyes blur a bit, then clear, his feet begin to itch. He decides to start running again immediately, before his body has any more second thoughts. He starts off in a slow trot and others pass by him quietly. One

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young girl turns her face from him for no reason he can discern. She has big black sunglasses and her hair is pulled back. A sort of marathon Greta Garbo look, he muses. Feeling achy and cottonmouthed, Garbo’s words come to speak for him. He just wants to be alone. Almost as much as the couplings he constantly relives, Scott remembers and dissects the time spent by himself. He knows it to be a compromise. When alone, if he was sad or scared or just in need of being touched, he was out of luck. But the phone and the internet went a long way in easing nights like those, and even when suffering he felt manly doing so. The tough, silent cowboy. When together— these days meaning the one bedroom walk-up with Wendy, her music playing softly on his stereo— and wanting to be by himself, there is nothing he can do. He can hardly tell her to get out. He could ask her to, but then feelings are hurt and doubts arise. Then he becomes mad at her for no reason other than his own inability to cope. It’s all insanity. Weighing every issue, Scott has no doubt it is easier to solve the equation of being alone than the problem of being together. One variable instead of two. The past took care of itself. How to solve the future is still a dilemma for which faith (“Small f,” he says out loud) is all he has to depend upon. And of course love. He thinks he must love Wendy very much. He pounds his fist twice, hard into his chest, the punishment he imposes whenever he starts to blame himself for situations that are out of his control. Sometimes he will be the last to leave work, hoping for just a few moments of serenity. But, in sharing the space with whirring databanks that hold fifty million families, he feels more surrounded than on the subway. Scott so enjoyed the bliss of his old solitude. The wonder of sitting on the floor in his underwear, eating spaghetti right from the pan while crushing the occasional ant. Cranking some Grateful Dead tune and singing along, or hanging upside down from his bed with the television tuned to

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Three’s Company. Stupidity without the pain of embarrassment, and God knows he was stupid plenty of times. He will occasionally share with a friend, a workmate, or a lover an abridged version of one of his dumbest moments, his first attempt at lighting the gas stove in his first New York apartment. He now rehearses the story in full as he runs, imagining he’s being interviewed by the local news in the way other victims of domestic traumas have had their moments of fame. “In Jersey, in the modern home I grew up in, I only knew about electric ovens. I was totally unfamiliar with the Manhattan gas version and their pilot lights. So, the first time I wanted to boil water I turned the knob on for the stove, rather than the top burner, thinking I needed to fire up the contraption from inside somehow. I stood there for a couple minutes and a little voice was telling me this couldn’t be the right approach. Telling me I should start again. Unfortunately I ignored that voice, lit a match, and opened the oven door. ‘Blown off your feet,’ is an expression I had often heard, but until then had not experienced. A blast, which looked like Hiroshima from my standpoint, picked me up and set me down about six inches back from where I last stood. Then a very basic thought came over me: ‘I’m on fire.’ I pulled off my shirt and began rolling on the floor like in some film I must have seen once. Nothing was happening. I realized then I was not in flames, rather I had only suffered singed hair across the front of my scalp. Not only did I look ridiculous there flipping around on the linoleum for no good reason, I also smelled disgustingly burnt.” Yes, quite the little domestic Scott was not. Collector of dust and old newspapers, that was him. The guy who had not made his bed since he can last remember, who knows five delivery restaurant menus and phone numbers by heart. He was proud to say that his name and the word “homemaker” had never been used in the same sentence. Indeed, quite the opposite. “Un-uh,” Scott says aloud, quickly changing his mind. He knows

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what the real opposite of homemaker is. He has definitely been one. He has been one twice. He is anything but proud about it. Nobody wants to be a home-wrecker but as Scott sees it everyone is entitled to a mistake, so what he did to Patty and Alex was his big boo-boo, complete with lasting tensions and guilt of at least three different varieties (To his way of thinking, what he did years later with Faith was her error, not his own.). Scott met Alex on jury duty. While neither of them ended up on an actual case, their week of sitting together in boredom, waiting to be called, forged a friendship. They bonded over talk of Chinatown dumplings and Yankee earned run averages, but it was not enough to hold Scott back from temptation. It began with wind. Not a dreamy love poem breeze, but rather a Hemingway kind of cautionary gust that Scott should have heeded instead of rode. On an April afternoon that Scott had hoped to spend picnicking with friends, massive winds were thrashing New York City. He was due at Patty and Alex’s apartment to help with the food. Alex was actually away for the weekend, attending a wedding of a guy Patty hated. They had had a small fight about the whole situation and this was the resolution. He went, she stayed. Patty and Alex fought often, but it was successful fighting that tended to keep them together, that more often than not ended in compensatory sex. Scott saw how Patty acted around Alex and thought that here was a woman who was actually happy with what she had, who didn’t want to search any further. As a result, Scott was always very comfortable in her presence. There was no need to flirt or show off. So, on this day when Scott took his life in his hands walking the streets, dodging whirlwinds of garbage and discarded plastic bags that had become airborne, he arrived at Patty’s doorstep in need of drink. Two other friends of Patty, Erica and Besse, had also arrived and the plan was to call the four other folks who were up for the picnic and arrange a meeting place. But now storm clouds were hanging low over Manhattan,

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the empire state building half obscured, taxis driving with their headlights on. “Clearly we’re doomed,” pronounced Patty and all agreed. Besse phoned the others to announce the wimp-out and Patty spread her picnic blanket over the floor, setting out bread, cheese, olives and salami. Then she went into the kitchen and came back with a full bottle of Tequila. The previous evening she had rented Raiders of the Lost Ark so she threw that into the VCR. By the time the Nazis had melted like wax and the holy ark was packaged away in a warehouse, the liquor was shot and the three girls and Scott were huddled together feeding each other Oreos. Scott, overall, was feeling unusually platonic considering the amount he had to drink and the number of women in his presence. Just being in this apartment, which was half Alex’s, was enough to remind him that some situations are sacrosanct, that one does not look God straight in the face nor think naughty thoughts around certain friends. He got up to go but the women protested. “Stay,” said Erica, “let’s have a slumber party.” Erica was always a quality flirt, thought Scott, so just for the heck of it, he returned fire. “Sounds nice” he said, “but I don’t think I could trust myself around three such sexy women.” A silence smothered the room, too much honesty, perhaps, in that little remark. Scott thought he detected a slight blush on Patty’s face, a small grin from Besse. He kissed each girl on the forehead and escaped out onto a street littered with broken umbrellas that looked like the carcasses of poorly designed and doomed to extinction flying dinosaurs. Two weeks later Besse threw a party. A really bad party with little food and less raison d’être. Patty and Alex were there but Alex decided to leave early. He claimed exhaustion, but Scott suspected boredom. Scott had come by himself with the hope that Patty’s friend, Erin, would be there. Erin’s Irish good looks and brogue sent Scott into a tizzy every time they met. Then again they had met only thrice, each time briefly. Scott had hoped to make some

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headway with her, but as it turned out Erin was not in attendance. The entire scenario was looking dire. Scott sat with Patty on the floor in the corner of Besse’s funky studio apartment drinking wine and waving to the other people who were sitting around generally not having a good time. “Take me home before I start to cry,” said Patty, under her breath. “Thank God,” intoned Scott, and they were out of there. They strolled the dozen blocks to her door with Patty being unusually quiet, and as he kissed her cheek and turned to leave her to the safety of the doorman she said, “Scott, can I tell you something?” Scott turned like an innocent convenience store clerk who had no idea of the carnage that was about to ensue. “Sure.” “Remember the other night at my place when you said you left because you couldn’t trust yourself ?” “Uh-huh.” “Well, I wish you would have stayed.” Something like a kaleidoscope on acid began turning in Scott’s head, with images from the past year of he and Patty joking around, twisting and turning upside-down. He saw Angie’s face and he saw Alex sharpening a knife. Scott said, “Oh.” “Oh!” demanded Patty, “I pour out my soul to you and all you say is Oh?” “Sorry, it’s just that, uhm, you caught me with that one, I mean I hadn’t considered…” “Fine,” said Patty, “whatever.” And she disappeared inside her building. Back in high school, with the help of Henrik Ibsen, Scott learned a basic rule of modern tragedy: If a gun is introduced in Act One, it will undoubtedly be fired in Act Three. Scott knew he was now helplessly under the effect of this law and that Patty had presented him with a fine pearl-handled revolver. He saw the whole, obvious storyline laid out before him. Act Two would be played over the next few months with the finale coming around

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Christmas. He was due to house-sit for them when Alex was off for a ten-day trip to see his folks and Patty gone for just a week’s visit to her sister’s. There would be three days with Alex gone, Patty here, and Scott with keys to their apartment. The Pulaski was nowhere as near freezing as the Verrazano, but then again nothing outside of his skin in the past hour or more has made enough of an impression for him to take note. Other runners are just so much passing traffic. He waves sometimes to the crowd, whether there is one or not, just because he is sure they are watching him, the women no doubt commenting to each other as he goes by. But inside that handsome frame, there’s the rubbery feeling in his legs, and the ever-increasing thirst that grows disproportionately worse with every cup of water he takes in. Finally out of Brooklyn and into Queens, huffing down Vernon Boulevard and past a man jovially playing a button accordion. This is no longer the narrow, crowded, neighborly type of street he trotted down earlier. Here the road is wide and warehouses dot the landscape, casting an industrial pall over the packs of runners, and the ones running by themselves. Queens is short on tallness, most of the buildings reaching up just a couple of storeys. Far to his left, but visible as he runs, is the East River, and on the other bank a clouded-over Manhattan glows like a silver Oz for him. He bobs his head up and down, tracing the skyline he knows so well, then holds his glance just south of the U.N. The site where he and Patty did it, on a couch that belonged to Alex’s mother. Sometimes sex was a cure for Scott and sometimes it was just the drug. In Patty’s case it was the latter. If bottled up in a pharmacy-orange container, the label would surely read, “Betrayal.” For as sweet as the physical act was (the way no words were exchanged when she came home to find him dozing on the sofa, the elegant form they took in what could have been a ridiculous positioning, the way they afterward bathed each other like cats), the addictive eroticism came from the absolute fact that

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they were doing wrong. It was like sipping a sweet poison. In small amounts for a short period of time it would not kill. But the black thrill of cheating would keep them at it long after Alex’s return. It went on for two months behind his back. Short, quiet violations of his home. Or else Scott’s apartment where, after sex, Patty would shower below her neck, scrubbing the word IVORY into her skin, leaving an anonymous white cube in the soap dish. But she would never leave his place smelling of green apple, she could not risk a dampness to her hair his fingertips did not expect. These were the times when coming clean was a nameless act. It was a black stretch sock that brought the affair crashing to its lousy end. Ironically, Scott lost it in their apartment before Patty had even returned from her trip. It had gotten kicked under the couch the night prior, and what with all the goings-on upon her return he forgot to retrieve it. He went barefoot all the day and when finally heading back home he just gathered what he thought was all his dirty clothes and stuffed them into a grocery bag. Alex, having maniacally cleaned every inch of the living room one morning on a caffeine high, came into the bedroom where Patty was reading. He wore the sock over his fist like a dead, bloated puppet. Patty attempted to lie by telling the accidental truth, “Oh, Scott must have lost it while house sitting.” They had been together too long for that. He could see the subtle tenseness around her eyes, hear the smallest of tremble in her voice, sense the flush of red she was not allowing to rise to her cheeks. Alex actually suffered the least, blessed with the gift of being pissed off at the both of them. Anger is the patina of pain, the safety coating that keeps it in check, freeing a person in Alex’s position to heal even as the threats and fits of rage pour out of his throat like vomit. He would come home from work to find her double-clutched, lying on the floor sobbing uncontrollably, and he would walk past her. She would cook for him and he would eat stone-faced. Scott’s name was never said aloud nor did Scott hear

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from either of them for weeks after the one short tearful call Patty made from a pay-phone to let him know. “He found out.” “Shit.” “I’ll talk to you later.” The day they finally did make contact, it was both of them together at the receiver. They had worked through this as best they could by themselves and now they needed Scott, just to see his face and hear his voice, to reduce him back to the size he should be, rather than the giant looming cloud he risked becoming. He met them the next afternoon at a pocket park near the East River. Within blocks of the United Nations building, they made their peace. Scott apologized and cast full blame on himself, taking the bullet to save their relationship, a first for him. Alex believed him, to a degree, for after all he knows what men are capable of doing and were his body willing to act upon what his thoughts sometimes told him, it could well be him doing the apologizing to some other once happy couple. They parted, if not friends, then at least bonded in some new way, like a pod of seeds maybe, a buried nugget from which their histories can grow and randomly intertwine. Patty and Alex stayed together another two years, happy enough to co-exist, but never fully able to excise the distrust Scott had caused. Scott of course went on to be lured by Faith like a fly into a Venus Flytrap. Then to Diva28 like a wounded mutt. And at last to Wendy like a Peter Pan. She will be his mother as well as his wife and they will live in an apartment where he never grows old. She will sew buttons on to his shirts and he will protect her from crocodiles and amputees. Thinking it over, as the entrance ramp to the Queensboro Bridge already presents itself, he understands that each newly acquired woman was always a betrayal of some part of his past, even though Angie, watching him now from a cloud above Central Park, has refused to abandon him, and would hug and soothe him despite his cheating ways, were her arms not turned to mud.

Five

Scott wishes Philip was floating above him, not as one of the angels that reside in his mind, but as a Macy’s Thanksgiving day balloon. But not a cartoon. Scott wants the helium hose attached tight to his flesh-and-blood snotty nostril and a rush of gas a billion times hotter than any snort of cocaine to melt his sinuses and fill his ample skin till he is as long and round as a jumboliner, every nerve ending expanded to ten times its size so even the breeze making contact with his massive arms causes such intense pain that he screams endlessly. But because every capillary is filled with helium the sound emanating from his two-foot long mouth is just a soft nasal hum, like the buzz from a high-intensity wire, that gets lost in the crowd’s laughter upon seeing Philip in this state, looking like a humongous alley cat that has lost a fight, his brain sloshing around in the hollow of his skull, genitalia not thorned like a cat’s but absurdly wide and scraping over the treetops. He is kept from flying away by no less than a dozen guide wires attached to his body and held to the street by a cadre of clowns. The wires are welded to his nipples, select fingers and toes, and his prostate. The clowns of course are worshippers of Satan, tugging him too hard, opening the hoods of parked cars and touching the wires to the engine batteries just to make Philip twitch. They lead him into lampposts, his plea to be put out of his misery unheard amid the frightened screams of children. Ultimately, a disgruntled Macy’s employee aims a crossbow to the large bull’s eye that is Philip’s navel. The arrow strikes true and he explodes with a deafening

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Bang that echoes up and down Broadway like gunfire. His sorry organs and viscera drop to the street like the bits of excrement that sometimes fall from an airplane’s bathroom, his eyes bounce like volleyballs then deflate, fingernails crash down like sheets of ice, splintering into dangerous shards. His flesh has blown into thousands of pieces that flutter in the wind like pink confetti. Most catch a breeze that takes them out over the Hudson where bit by bit they fall in as if the river were an aquarium receiving a generous sprinkle of fish food. It’s called the 59th Street Bridge, but unlike Art Garfunkel, Scott is feelin’ most decidedly un-groovy as he traverses this busy hunk of metal. The path he follows was once a trolley track back when New York was quaint, before anyone thought to torture himself by stapling a number to his chest and running till every last drop of moisture leaks out from the staple holes. Half of him is sure he’s in the early stages of dehydration. But the other half won’t let him stop, keeping him hyper-stimulated, confused between what he’s imagining and what is real. Did an obese and hairy man wearing only a diaper and sneakers just pass him? He thinks so. He is trying to find a way to focus himself. Killing Philip helped a little. It most always did. Scott was happy to have someone to thoroughly hate, who deserved his most venomous thoughts. It took so little to achieve and required such small amounts of maintenance. But the result, as Alex could also attest, is an easing of the hurt that circulates through him. An overwhelming ovation for blowing up Philip rings in his ears. And, thrillingly, the mighty roar for his little scheme turns out to be real. Its source is the thousands of people jammed onto First Avenue to welcome the runners into Manhattan proper. He had heard that this was the most inspirational moment of the race and now understands how it is so, better even than what it will feel like to finish, if indeed he can make it. Logic tells him that most everyone is shouting in English, but so many words crowd the

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little amount of air above and between the runners, the syllables collide and reflect and become just a happy, churning thunder that never ceases. Scott acknowledges the crowd by waving with both arms and nodding his head in a minimal style of bowing. “Thank you,” he is saying softly to his fans, “Thank you so much.” And, as he comes up on a large crowd that has gathered at O’Flanagan’s, a little pub near 65th Street, he sees that someone has politely answered him with a sign that says, “You’re Welcome!” “How the hell?” Scott says to the back of a frizzy head that runs about a yard ahead of him. He looks again at the sign, then follows the arms holding it, up to the neck which is wrapped in an orange scarf, to the end of a long mane of red and into the face with its shit-eating grin and twinkling eyes. Scott laughs so hard he almost cramps out right there. It is Jamie, just done with brunch no doubt, bundled up in a snug wool coat and matching mittens, there to show support in her ever ironic and only slightly spiteful way. Scott slows but does not stop as he reaches her and shouts, “The pleasure was all mine!” Jamie sticks her tongue out and zings him, “Nothing new about that.” Scott is envious of her tongue and wants it now. Not in a kiss, but in a transplant. Any new tongue would do at this point, something wonderfully wet and sensitive and agile to replace the hardened slab of jerky his teeth have been putting up with. That goes to the top of his holiday wish list and while he’s at it he adds “new fingers” at the number two spot. His current ones have been numb for quite some time and now, though he refuses to believe his own perceptions, the tips of his ring fingers are decidedly bluish. He holds his arms straight out in front of him for a better look at his hands, creating the appearance of a zombie jogging after his prey. He folds in his thumbs and draws his arms together so that his eight digits come together like little blue and white candles, a human menorah announcing the start of the holiday season. Just five weeks till Hanukah, and six till Christmas. It’s his

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favorite time of year to be in New York, despite the extra hours he is forced to put in at the office. Soon the giant Tiffany snowflake will adorn Fifth Avenue. A massive evergreen will be plucked from its earth and trucked to Rockefeller Center. All the store windows will replace their usual mannequins (those exact, sculpted women, eyeless and dead, but dressed to attract the tourists who know no better) with tableaus of peace and everlasting life. Gifts will come his way from work and from Wendy and he in turn will pick something sweet to give his girl. Something permanent. There is a page he tore out of Life Magazine which looks like just the thing, a rare find for him since he goes out of his way to ignore nearly every print ad he encounters when not at the List Council. For twenty bucks, an organization called the International Star Registry will name one of the galaxy’s billions of stars after one of your loved ones. An official certificate comes in the mail as does a star-chart with your new namesake circled in red. It seems such a romantic notion to Scott he wishes he had known about it sooner. He fancies the idea of the universe being full of familiar, welcoming bodies. Marcia somewhere east of Orion and Patty lost beyond the scoop of the Little Dipper. Gina, a comet streaking past a hundred lost worlds, and Angie aflame in supernova. Yes, he must call the toll-free number this week and place an order. He pictures archangels harnessed to a switchboard taking his call, balls of flame drawn from their celestial warehouse, one christened with the name of the woman he will soon find waiting for him. He remembers how she is half star already, a night early in their time together, making love in the kitchen. Scott looked up through the open curtain and thought he saw a neighbor peering in, a telescope focused on their glistening skin. But in retrospect he is less sure, the neighbor’s window too far for Scott to see through. Just another fantasy to help ease the pain of scientific knowledge. Scott knows the distance to the sun, how there are stars, come and gone, whose light will not reach him in his time.

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Wendy will be the center of his world and it is she that he must wish upon. Come Hanukah, they will turn out the lamps at sunset to watch the candles twinkle. On Christmas morning, heedless of the day’s meaning but thankful for the day off, Scott will fix her a huge holiday breakfast. Wendy will never know, but this particular tradition did not start with her. He’s been cooking up flapjacks and hash browns for his lovers for nine years, starting with a woman who taught him the joy of biting. The sweet pain that teeth can bring when applied not to his cooking, but to his own muscular chest. Vampire love is how he thinks of it, in hindsight. Nights full of undead passion while their days were spent in a graveyard of salespeople. It was the Christmas season of 1986 and Scott had yet to land a permanent job in the city. During that year he had performed many menial temp jobs. He alphabetized index cards for the American Heart Association, and was an in-house messenger at Pfizer Pharmaceutical. Then, in December, he landed a position in the mail-order department of Madison Avenue Wines & Liquors. Stuffed in the attic above the famous New York retailer were thousands of Christmas requests ready to be sorted and filled. Scott, because he grew up in New Jersey, was fluent in the art of mindless tasking and after just a week he was promoted into the best temp job he ever held: Scribe of Schmelkin. In the mid 80’s Saul Schmelkin was the uncontested king of New York wine merchants. His list of regular clients read like a Who’s Who of vino aficionados. Asti for Mrs. Astor. Pinot for Paul Newman. Chardonnay for Susan Sarandon. At Christmas-time, he was swamped with orders and now that he was up in age he had neither the strength nor chutzpah to do his paperwork. Scott was given a folding chair. Six days a week from 10:00 in the morning till 9:00 at night, he sat beside Saul and wrote out his orders, or scrambled after rare bottles of Pouilly Fuisse and 12 year old Scotch, and fetched the same lunch for his chief everyday: tongue

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on an onion roll that would be chased down with a bottle of private stock. The store closed at 5:00, the overtime began, and it was not unusual for a spontaneous wine tasting to break out. Great bottles were passed around among all the hardworking salesmen and, as though Charles Dickens had underwritten the whole affair, they grew jolly and pink-cheeked. About two weeks prior to Christmas Day the new girl, Patricia, started work, handling the phones. She was petite with short blonde hair and a trace of a Jersey accent. Scott found her to be nearly perfect. No surprise there since his months with Nancy, the all too eager waitress, had put him in an ever-appreciative mood for the female form. But what delighted him the most was that he had the unique experience of knowing the exact moment she began to desire him. Down to the second. He saw it coming like a fat baseball asking to be smacked and Scott belted it right over the centerfield wall. Four days into her new job, a call had come in for Saul from Bill Cosby, but Patricia somehow ended up losing it in the tangle of multiple phone-lines that rang endlessly. Saul was furious. He stood above her as she sat at her tiny desk, hunched in his old man’s frame, and yelled at her till her eyes misted. Overhearing it all, Scott had the intensely clear realization that if he cheered her up, he would have her. One kind word would be all that was required. He walked over, told Saul his sandwich was waiting, checked his watch, and said almost as an aside to Patricia, “Welcome to the Yelled At by Schmelkin Club.” She laughed and he saw the tension fading from her and knew in that moment, between the word “club” and the pause at the end of his sentence, she had fallen for him. “He gets grumpy right before lunch so if you’re going to screw up, try not to do it till the afternoon.” “Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.” Then, as if on cue, Carl, one of the cashiers, rushed over to relieve Patricia for lunch. “Any plans?” Scott asked as if he didn’t know the answer.

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“Take me out of here,” she replied, “I’m craving turkey.” Over freshly carved sandwiches at the deli next door Scott inquired as to whether she has these kinds of cravings often. “I have all sorts of urges,” is her reply and a guy at the next table over tries to suppress a laugh. A bit of sandwich escapes Scott’s mouth and falls into his slaw. He wipes his mouth and mumbles, “Oh” through his napkin. “Shopping is a big one, and wine of course. And there are weekends when I will get up, open a new book and read it straight through no matter how much of the day it takes.” “Wow,” was Scott’s witty retort. “Oh, and pot of course, sometimes I really, really crave pot.” “We have quite a bit in common then,” he said, though in earnest Scott has always been rather indifferent toward marijuana, unable to read for more than an hour at a time, and despised shopping. “I’ll smoke just about anything,” he offers. This odd remark sends a confused smirk across Patricia’s lips but mercifully she rights the conversation, “Have you smoked ham?” she asks, “Have you smoked salmon?” Scott takes a slice of turkey from his sandwich and holds it to his lips like a joint. The shop was going at full tilt upon their return and they lost track of each other until 6:00, when it was time for her to leave and time for his fifteen-minute break from the backlog of phone messages Saul had amassed. It was sprinkling as he walked her up the block. “I’m heading over to Lexington to catch the subway, thanks for saving me today from the wrath of Schmelkin.” “All in a day’s work,” he says, and despite that corny line she reaches over and kisses him on the cheek. He responds with a soft, lingering kiss to her lips. She does not argue. She simply smiles, then crosses the street. The following day was a Friday, a half-day for Saul as he would leave early to mark the Sabbath, abandoning Scott to a pile of paperwork. Scott zipped through the morass of orders then spent

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the remainder of the afternoon in a full-out assault on Patricia. Whenever she rose from her perch, he would chase her around the store, hide behind the wine bins and jump out at her, take her hand and lead her to the stairway, wanting to neck beneath the timeclock where their in-cards kept track of the hours spent together. “Down boy, down,” Patricia scolded him, and then relented by allowing his hand over her sweatered breast, “Or at least wait until we get home.” That excellent invitation immediately transformed him into an android, eager to do just as she commanded lest the offer be rescinded. “Yes master,” he said in monotone, flailing his arms up and down like the old robot from Lost in Space, forgetting that that was actually the automaton’s signal of warning. She gave him a coy sneer of general disapproval, shrugged jokingly and said, “See you at six.” It is typical of Scott to simplify a person if he sees her only in the same arena every day. Since all he knows of her begins at nine and ends at dusk, it is a sit-com version of her life that becomes his reality. Just the intriguing and one-dimensional front end of what could be a wondrous valley to explore, or the deceptive face of a hideous creature with tentacles that tunnel down and away in every direction. It is a danger-free way to proceed until figuring out if the risk to dig deeper is justified. Would trying to know everything about Patricia be worth taking the chance that she might be a monster, or worse, be merely mortal? He knew he should begin his descent cautiously, but an invitation to sex doesn’t come along every day, and even if it did, lost cause that he is, Scott would always accept. Although allowing Patricia to lead him downtown, onto a PATH train and into a huge, two bedroom apartment in Jersey City will cause him to streak into this great unknown as if sliding a greased pole to the very center of their emotions, he fetches her at six on the dot, they punch each other’s time card and soon enough are riding under the city and beneath

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a river. When she told Scott that she lived in a two-bedroom he immediately began thinking about her roommate. Besides having a girlfriend, there was nothing better than having a woman he could legally flirt with as a bonus. They might meet in the middle of the night, both of them half-dressed and en route to the bathroom. Or it might be early morning, her in a robe and him without a shirt. Or, as it turned out, she might be Cleve, Patricia’s 50-year-old transvestite uncle who rarely leaves the apartment. He welcomed Scott in on that first evening with a weak hug. There was a trace of rouge on his cheeks and he smelled strongly of Chanel No. 5. The three of them sat around the living room, ordered a pizza and passed a joint. “I want you to know that we have a long history of transvestitism in our family, my boy.” “Aunt Cleve, you are such a liar.” “Pish my dear, you know it is true. Your mother was a raging panty-wearer who just unfortunately happened to be born a woman.” “Scott, please ignore everything he says.” “Ignore what you wish my boy, that makes it no less false. Just be sure to take a look before you go anywhere tonight, if you know what I mean.” “Don’t worry, replies Scott, I’ve already squeezed the merchandise.” “Ah-ha— and I thought you were a gentleman caller.” “You two make a delightful couple,” Patricia declared in mock disgust just as the downstairs buzzer rang. “Stay in your corners guys. I’ll let pizza-boy up.” “Oh do invite him in if he looks the type my dear.” It was midnight by the time the last slice of pie and the final bud of pot had been exhausted. Cleve was comatose on the couch. Patricia took Scott by the belt loop and led him to her room. Somehow through the fog of being stoned in the dark he found

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himself naked beneath her and as he was preparing to mumble a sentence about her scent, how there was a strong aroma of Patchoulli, he felt Patricia’s face go to his chest, her jaws open, and her teeth clench down on a mouthful of his own flesh. He was in mid-scream before the rush of adrenaline lit up his entire body. When she bit again it was more of a moan that left his lips. “Learn something new every night,” he thought, though the words left his mouth as “Learnew new nigh.” This evening’s lesson was a primer on the fine line between pleasure and pain. It was an act totally without logic, which was exactly why it was so erotic. Pure action and reaction. Even though he awoke too early the next morning, with brownish bruises all over his body, he could not have felt more renewed. He clicked off the unspent alarm and plodded into the kitchen at the far end of the apartment. He unearthed a couple skillets, found the Bisquick and the grater for the potatoes, and cooked up a small offering that he set in front of her. She rose from sleep quietly, kissed him, and took her fork. Scott sat at the edge of the bed and watched her chew every bite. When she finished she kissed him again, this time her lips tasting of maple. Then they showered together and left the house silently, not wanting to awaken Cleve who had melted onto the living room floor, snoring away in just his bra and half-slip. Scott knew some basic laws of motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A pound of feathers falls as fast as a pound of lead. If a relationship is not moving forward, then it is either moving backwards or growing stagnant. Despite the thrilling brutalization of his flesh that was to become a thrice a week ritual, there was little else to sustain his yen for Patricia. They had even less in common than Scott originally imagined. For Christmas he got her a bong, she got him a silk tie and they were both disappointed, though they pretended otherwise. She spent the holiday home with her folks in Maryland, he in his apartment with the televised yule log burning in its eternal loop. The

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following week, brief chats at work grew ever briefer. They spent more time smoking pot and less time reflecting on their days. On New Year’s Eve as they kissed in a living room full of strangers and cross-dressers at a friend of Cleve’s, Scott visualized the very heat of their attraction turning cold and brittle like dried glue. When Patricia broke up with Scott at the end of January they were like two withering starfish. After silently sharing a flask in a stroll through Central Park on a tepid day, they found themselves atop one of the huge gray boulders near the Delacorte Theater. There was nothing left to say to each other. Their wine store jobs ended the day after New Years, leaving them with nothing in common but the obvious. Not that Scott does not adore the obvious and has proved to be a skilled handler of it. Small talk, recreational drugs, physical attraction all rose to the occasion and it was enough to keep them warm for a couple months, until the fluid state of their passion leveled and then began to drop, drying up under the city’s heartbreak of a sun. Winter in New York can ice the best of couplings on its own, but this time it had help. Scott had succeeded in boring a relationship to its death. Sometimes he surprises himself by just how uninteresting he can be. A preoccupation with the weather is no help. At least not in Patricia’s case. Donna lived to discuss the weather. They would have long silly talks about storm systems, highs and lows, drought, and, as poetic as they both were, they never extended their conversation to the metaphorical. None of their talk about disastrous conditions or long spells of unchanging dry patterns ever reflected on their feelings for each other. But Patricia had no use for the weather. What could Scott say? It was a friendship triggered by one kind act, carried out on a streak of mutual niceties, good sex and the more than occasional toke of weed. Now the day has set them gently down on this rock where they lie on their backs, arms and legs and heads unmoving. From orbit, a weather satellite might see them as two empty hands reaching up. Patricia mutters sleepily that .

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they’ve nothing left. Scott would argue if only he could. She kisses him one last time, on the forehead, and disappears into the park. Scott falls asleep and when he wakes up it is night. The cheers and the wind and his chattering teeth are in concert. The bobbing heads along First Avenue are a crowd of musical whole notes bunched together in overpopulated measures but Scott tries to play every one, his heart racing in cut-time, valves opening and closing, percussive exhales. He bangs his hands together like wood blocks but feels nothing, nor registers the pathetic dull clap. He cannot get Flight of the Bumble Bee, a version he heard in a commercial, out of his head. The relentless pace of the music throws off his rhythm and the fact that it’s being played by an orchestra of bees is no help. His body is a hive with all its busy blood at work, serving a specific queen, constructing a honeycomb in her honor while thousands of little stingers bounce around his vacuum-packed ribcage. He is up above 100th Street now, making his way into Harlem. The crowds and the runners have both thinned out. The next water stop is also a sponge station and that has to be a joke. Even in his current condition he knows better than to dip his hand into a chest of ice water. Even though he imagines his brain more dried up than the little square sponge handed to him by a volunteer, drenching it all at once would be fatal. His mind would mudslide like drought-stricken California hills during a sudden flood, carrying away houses full of memories, tearing away street signs, unearthing dead bodies. Still, he does not let loose of the sponge. He dabs it across his forehead, under his arms, into the back of his neck, hoping his pores will make nice with the porous texture, causing it to expand. Nothing. The brittle little square is just a pocket-sized hunk of his own freeze-dried skin. Scott tissues. A little Box-o-Scott clenched in Scott’s own hand. Miserable to be sure, but also mockingly elegant. Soothingly linear, every angle a satisfyingly warm 90 degrees. If only all of his complications

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could be placed into equal sized boxes and piled neatly somewhere outside of his heart. Perhaps upon the new shelving on the walls of his lungs, the reason his breathing has been increasingly difficult ever since he crossed into Manhattan. That way he could just open them one at a time and in order. The unstacking of boxes would be such an efficient way to proceed through life. Yet, he is hard pressed to think of any realm of nature that has embraced the square. No animal or animal-part, not a single leaf or berry. The invention of the wheel was easy, man is surrounded by circles. The truly amazing feat was the invention of the square. A little epiphany warms his fingertips as he thinks how humans have ignored the roundness of the sun, the stone, the drop of water and even their own cells in favor of the skyscraper, the air conditioner and the yard. Even psychology chooses sharp edges over curved surfaces. That square Post-it note which led him into the path of Faith had read, “A pair of box seats for thinking outside the box.” And the box shaped rooms he has lived in, filled with other boxes that were built to help him escape. The TV screen and the computer monitor. The beds which served as launching pads for his dreams. Fliers and magazines and postage-paid reply cards. But not the gas oven thankfully, and not the open window or the razor blade. Then there are the Plexiglas boxes to which Scott, for a time, was helplessly drawn. Especially his first spring in New York, before meeting Donna, when the sidewalks turned to runways brimming with short skirts and cleavage. Then again a half decade later when his obsession with Gina was at its height. Scattered around Times Square in shops with names like Peepland and Playpen, they could usually be found upstairs or way in the back. There would be five or six to choose from, dressed in curtains. He would sheepishly glance at each, and the girls who guarded them, then point to the woman he desired, a redhead if there was one, or at the very least one who was not so thin as to be past the point of eroticism. He would

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enter his half of the box and she, through a separate entrance, would go into hers. Inside, a transparent wall separated his wanting fingers from her overworked flesh, a Plexiglas sheet that was usually yellowed and stained, on both sides, with God knows what. Scott understood this box for what it was, the exact opposite of a confessional, a room in which to commit a sin. Seven minutes in heaven. A small slot in the wall allowed both words and cash to be exchanged. She listed off just what she would do and how much it would cost him to watch, he would reply by feeding bills through the slot until she sighed. Sometimes the girls were so distant they might as well have been pages torn from Hustler and glued to the wall. But he knew that every now and again one realized her fortune in having a guy such as Scott alone. He felt their appreciation even as he gawked at their breasts pleasingly pressed against the glass. He is pretty sure he remembers one girl once saying, “Gee, I should be paying you for this.” If only his office were as erotic. Or if he could nap in the box B.F. Skinner kept his daughter in, or the one where Cool Hand Luke spent measureless warm days bouncing a ball. Monty Hall offered gigantic boxes to the contestants on Let’s Make a Deal. Or would they rather have what was behind the curtain? A contained mystery or a shrouded one? So many boxes built for the living while even now the dirt is on its way, seeping through the woody folds of Angie’s casket like a piggish man slipping through the curtains of his own peep-booth, unzipping her musty dress, damp. She has changed in that bad part of town, giving it up to the earth, her every molecule an orifice. All the dead are sluts, treading on Scott’s heels. She could be a stripper but for one thing, the beating red ticket of admission that would allow her a new velvet cage and a flashy neon sign that shouts, “Live! Girls! Live!” Scott could enter and glimpse her pornographic silhouette, the way she would hog the air and dare to age. Strands of DNA spinning like tassels. There are cells and then there are cells.

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There have been metaphorical boxes as well. The Johari window, for one, which initially sounded to Scott like a position from The Joy of Sex but is actually a lesson he has never forgotten from Psych 101. A window with four panes. In the first is everything Scott knows about his being that others know too (his good looks, his sense of humor, his passion for food and drink and trivia, his inability to commit). Pane two holds what he knows about himself but is unknown by others (the strength of Angie’s grip over him, an intelligence often ignored). Pane three contains the truths others know about him but which he himself has not uncovered (his egotistical goings-on, the discomfort generated whenever he talks softly with his friends’ girlfriends, that he’ll never give up smoking for good.) And the creepy fourth pane: qualities of Scott known neither by himself nor anyone else (how he copes with mortality, his true feelings about Wendy, his certainty that Angie was only toying with him, the mosaic of dreams forgotten when the alarm goes off ). Scott has extended the metaphor to include the crosspieces that hold the four panes together, or rather, near to each other but never touching. Instead of wood they are made of coincidence and luck, both good and bad, some he is aware of, others which simply exist without him ever knowing. For instance, there was a man who passed Scott near 125th Street, though neither paid any attention to the other. Over the years, this person has been the therapist for both Faith and Patty. In the doctor’s segmented brain he knows some guy named Scott had been in both of the women’s lives, but he has not realized that it is the same guy, let alone the one he has just breezed past. He has the potential to understand more about Scott than any single living person and to help him, but instead he dwells on his own problems, keeps to his own circle of acquaintances. He is part of the amalgam holding Pane one and Pane three in place. Scott is in the midst of a dozen runners now as he reaches the

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unequivocally ugly Willis Avenue Bridge at 134th Street. Hoisted about 25 feet above the Harlem River, it’s 101 yards of decaying steel and concrete. Perhaps Dr. Reed Richards, from The Fantastic Four comic books Scott used to collect, had become a very old man and stretched out his elderly carcass to create this arch. Maybe he offered himself up to help a beautiful young marine biologist cross over, but found himself unable to retract. In classic swingbridge form he could pivot slowly at the waist to avoid tall ships but the effort stole the wind from his voice. Like a granddad trying to impress a coed, he went further than his years would allow. The heroine merely laughed and disappeared into the river. A superhero in trouble. Arteries hardening into gridwork, the megaelastic skin now just so much used up chewing gum. Unable to call out for Ben Grimm to pound him back into shape or Johnny Storm to warm his joints, he resigned himself to his fate, focused on a memory of Sue, his invisible wife beside him in bed when they were young (rather than one of the amazing positions he might have concocted for them later on) and closed his steely blue eyes for the last time. As the years went by, his costume shredded with the passing traffic, the department of transportation painted a line down his spine and replaced his swivel hips with gears, his veins with hydraulics. So now, some sleepy guard might press the wrong button and the span Scott is on could pivot round, causing him to run right off the end of the world. All of his fellow runners are frowning but it is not because they worry about the bridge nor even fear their entrance into the Bronx where Scott dreamed there would be muggers waiting at every corner to steal his pricey running shoes. They are scared because it is mile 20 and thus a milestone. This is the point where most amateurs are known to hit the wall, where the rookies surpass their training and proceed on sheer self-determination. Or where one convulses and quietly admits defeat in the disappointed shadow of Yankee Stadium.

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The good news is that Scott knows he could not be any more exhausted or depleted than he has been for the last couple of miles. He has broken through his wall and because there is such little left of him, it takes hardly any effort to keep running. He is the poster child for the principle which states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Or he is the small glowing diode of his stereo receiver in off mode. Or he is the spacecraft Voyager soaring through inner space with a weak but persistent nuclear heart. The bad news is that besides being dehydrated and borderline hypothermic, he has lost any remaining control over his thoughts. The little movie marathon of girlfriends with which he has entertained himself has begun to run on its own, projecting dim images against his frozen-over eyelids. Bodies and names collide with histories and fantasies to the point where Scott wishes he could faint, finish life as a pothole here on Alexander Avenue: Jamie is to Nancy as Gina is to Marcia what Patricia is to Donna while Jane could never be that to Patty. Faith wants to live among the impoverished families of zip code 90210. They dredged the Marcia of all her pollutants but Diva and Rachel merged into Drachelva Inc. and the long, cool smokestacks choke the flora and the fauna of her flesh. The queer burnt Philip jumps over the lazing Faith. Gina wants to train dogs. Patricia plays the flute. Wendy and Angie take their girls for a ride in the Rambler through the fifth dimension. Up, up and away, they sing. Round and round she goes and where she stops is the Sigfreud Theater in time to watch a Keystone Kops remake where all the girlfriends, in uniform, chase bank robber Scott through town, waving their nightsticks, lifting their left legs high when they make a sharp right turn. He is trapped in a cul de sac but when they beat him silly across the back and shoulders, the force of the clubs transforms into the soft tap of an inquisitor. Nightsticks should be synonymous with candles but are instead their opposite. A small man dressed in green and orange, and looking almost as pitiful as Scott feels, is tapping Scott’s shoulder. His jet-black

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hair looks frozen to his small scalp and his frail olive-skin arms hang like icicles off the narrow ledge of his collarbone. He has a distressed expression on his face and seems to be muttering nonsense. “To stay Benny? Sembri non say Benny.” “Poor guy,” Scott says under his breath. Part of him would like to take the man up in an embrace and rush him to the nearest emergency room, or onto a shuttle bus to the airport where they can hop a flight to someplace hot and spend a week thawing out and sipping sparkling water. He would call Wendy from poolside and ask her to speak with this man. Perhaps in just hearing his voice she would understand what he is about. She had done as much with him, after all. The few words he first muttered to her on a park bench she instantly translated into an agreement that binds them still. However, this was neither a time for compassion nor reminiscence, he could barely help himself. Scott extends his arm, not sure if he wants to shake the strange man’s hand or shove the guy aside. He expects to hear the shattering of an ulna, but there is silence. Scott does a double-take. The man has vanished. Fallen into a sewer? Flattened into a sheet of black ice? Or isn’t that him up ahead, taking off on his own to the cheers of the tiny handful of people gathered here at the receiving end of the Madison Avenue Bridge, the means of re-entry into Manhattan. The Bronx gets short shrift. Less than a mile and the race is done with the borough, anxious now to wrap itself up in the nice little bow of Central Park. This monstrosity of a bridge will be the last vulgar jag of road with which he’ll have to contend. The city poured out its beauty into the George Washington and the Brooklyn. Even the Verrazano, which is so far in Scott’s past that it feels like it exists on some other planet, has its own singular loveliness, so expansive that it curves along with the earth. The short, fat Madison is a lost alien who they never came back to retrieve, hidden from the hysterical masses by being in plain view and assuming a form

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which they understand to be helpful. Thus beauty, Scott realizes, is a trait unique to Earth. Where even a dog appreciates the symmetry of his bone, this hulk from outer space has no ability to conjure a shapely form. The dull metallic footfalls thud like muffled blows of a hammer, what carpentry must sound like on Pluto. He thinks about the gibberish words spoken by that strange yet evidently speedy man and wonders if possibly he is their leader. Was he telling Scott to repent for the end is near? But the bridge does not swallow him during his trespass nor does it snarl when he gives it an intentional little kick goodbye as he exits. From here, 138th and Madison, the street numbers begin a countdown that will soon enough take him into a wealthy stretch of 5th Avenue with all its lovely and comfortingly human brownstones and mansions. Humansions. He wonders if the alien leader can read street signs or even if he is still part of the same dimension to which Scott clings with what remains of his mental and physical balance. The strange utterances of the man return to him and while he still does not know exactly what the guy wanted, he now recognizes the language. The phonics become familiar all at once, like a long-ago acquaintance suddenly recalled. Rachel talked in her sleep and more often than not she would be dreaming in Italian. Scott liked to imagine she was a gifted freak of nature, pulling in a foreign tongue from the night air and channeling it through her daily experiences. This, of course, was not the case. Rachel had spent years in Italy before they had met. She went there on scholarship to study their government, to trace the political system in detail, everything from how a pothole gets fixed, to the election of their leaders. She came back to America not only fluent in the language, but a masterful cook as well, creating for Scott, on their early dates, wonderful homemade pasta dishes served with fresh cilantro or basil, snacks of milky smooth slices of mozzarella sandwiched between slices of brilliant

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red tomato, crusty breads slathered with olive oil green as the Mediterranean. Scott first met up with her nearly 6 months after her return to the states. They both had rented bedrooms in the same East Hampton beach house for the third week of July, 1987. Scott’s motive for this investment was obvious and predictable, while Rachel’s reasons were counter-intuitive. She was looking for time to reflect. She assumed if everyone was busy coupling she would be left alone to collect her memories, dig into her writing about her trip and try to come up with a purpose to carry her through the rest of the summer, now that she was back in the country of words which end in hard consonants spoken with hands firm in pockets. The thought had never crossed her mind that a guy, an American guy, would have any interest in her. Scott noticed her when he first arrived at the house, about 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning. He had been stuck in Manhattan waiting for a locksmith after his key broke off in the apartment door, and then was trapped in traffic with all the workaholics. When he finally made it to the five-bedroom house just a few blocks from the ocean, he was not sure if he would walk in on a party that was running at full strength, or a totally quiet and dark house, it’s occupants drunkenly asleep, or already absent, sharing a bed in one of the other houses packed with romance starved New Yorkers. What he found was a dimly lit living room, a bedroom with a creaky bed that smelled of the beach, and a kitchen with one light on, Rachel sitting at the counter contemplating an avocado, a blank notebook opened in front of her, a grimace on her face. But it was a stunning face. Deep-set eyes and a proud chin, an archetypal Judaic nose. Thick brown hair that stopped at her shoulders. Scott decided to go in for a glass of water. His entrance caught her off guard and she jumped. “Merda!” “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” “Oh…hi. That’s ok, I was just lost in thought. I must have looked ridiculous focusing so hard on this avocado.”

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“You looked fine, I figured you must just really identify with vegetables or something.” “You must be the last missing roommate.” “Yeah, I’m Scott. Traffic was a disaster, I wanted to be here hours ago.” “I’m Rachel. You haven’t necessarily missed too much.” “So I notice. Where’s everybody else?” “All three of them went to some disco or other I think. I decided to stay behind and get some writing done. That’s why I came here in the first place. Want half this avocado?” “No thanks, I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your muse.” Rachel laughed and Scott grew instantly intrigued, but also a bit paranoid. He knew these Hampton rentals had strict rules and that rule number one was no mating with your housemates. In a town brimming with eligibles there was no reason to start something up with a gal who would be splitting the cost of groceries and utility payments, who might fight over the washing of dishes or cleaning of bathrooms. Rachel was attractive, yes, but Scott would let it rest. She was just the first visage of a week full of possibility. “I think I’m just going to call tonight a wash and go to bed, the drive kind of did me in. Sorry again to have disturbed you.” He turned and headed for his room, she mumbled something brief which Scott heard as “chow.” The days blew by in an alcohol-induced stupor. There were lobster dinners and sand in his shoes, beer beer beer, and a Radio City tour guide named Tina whom Scott slept with twice before she let on she was here just to get back at her boyfriend who tended to ignore her. Scott was barely aware of having sex with Tina even as he was doing it, here in this strange setting where people tend to copulate as if they were watching TV, a way to pass the time that doesn’t involve conversation. Today Scott remembers only her name and a single image of her standing on the beach, oblivious

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to the fact that a small jellyfish had attached itself to the top of her right foot. He ran into Rachel perhaps a dozen times over the week, always either in the kitchen late at night or on the porch with a cup of espresso in the late morning. If she wasn’t scratching away in her notebook, she would tell him about Italy, or they would inventory the somewhat dilapidated condition of the porch, what the sea breeze was doing to their hair, or wonder over the fact that their other three roommates, it turned out, were all named Chris. Then it was over. Scott, Rachel and the Chris’s shaking hands and exchanging numbers in case there were any residual monetary matters to be cleared up. When Scott shook Rachel’s hand their eyes met for a second. For just a second. Three weeks later Scott was treading through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an effort to rise above his weekend penchant for sitting at home watching cartoons and there she was on a bench in a room full of Italian Renaissance. She was transfixed by a Madonna and Child with two angels in close consult, a disposable pen a moment away from falling out of her hand. Scott went and stood directly in front of the painting, into the brilliance of her stare like a deer egging on a pair of headlights. A scowl crossed Rachel’s face and the pen dropped, then confusion and finally a deep laugh as she recognized her old porch partner. “Small world,” said Scott. Rachel patted the spot next to her on the bench either to have him join her or to merely move him away from the artwork, he was not sure which. “Come here often?” he asked in his best lounge lizard voice. “Most Saturdays,” she replied, “These are a little more inspirational than the avocados.” “Maybe you just have yet to find the right avocado.” “It’s a big ole world,” she informed him, bringing his idle chatter to an abrupt end. She stared straight into the eyes of Baby Jesus.

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Scott took another swing, “Look, I suspect you were probably spoiled over in Roma, but I know a pretty nice authentic restaurant downtown if you’d like to have dinner. We can relive old times.” “Sure,” she said so matter of factly that he thought she was making fun, “Why not tonight?” “Why not,” he replied. The intimate Basilica Restaurante was nearly packed when they met there at 8:00, but fortunately they were able to grab a small table back near the kitchen. A harried waitress took their order, then Rachel went to stand in the small line for the bathroom. She returned just as the meal arrived. With their knees bumping, Rachel picked at her cantolini while Scott, sweating, plunged into his huge bowl of spaghetti putanesca. She was starting to tell him about the Italian vineyards when he cut her off abruptly, “Enough of Italy for one day, how about some recent history?” She glared at him for a moment as if ready to yell, but then acquiesced, “Fair enough.” She told him how she had taken a part time job tutoring high school kids in Italian, and of her two bedroom Chelsea apartment that she shared with a social anthropologist whose name, terrifyingly enough, was Chris Scott. In return, as they progressed to biscotti and cappuccino, he told her about his glorious career in mailing-list management and got no laugh at all when he asked, “Of all the demographic marketing areas in all the towns in all the world, why did you end up residing in mine?” Over an Anisette nightcap he threw caution to the wind and made his confession, “You’re going to hate me but I have never ever traveled outside of the country nor do I have any aching desire to do so. New York, as far as I’m concerned, has all the other countries inside it, so why risk death in an airplane flying somewhere where they don’t speak your language or have Pop Tarts.” “You’ve got a lot to learn, Buck-o,” her eyes filling up with

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disgust. If she wasn’t so damn pretty Scott would have called it quits right there. And he realized if Rachel didn’t think that he was so handsome she never would have jumped at the dinner invitation in the first place. So, after he paid the bill, they walked through the west village. He took her hand and they talked only of New York. When the conversation faltered and he felt her hand slipping away, he did what he thought best, took her face in his hands and kissed her gently, their gaze again locking as it had in the Hamptons, and peering so deeply that they could each see themselves reflected in each other’s eyes. Off they went down the path of least resistance. Dinners out progressed into dinners in, kisses into caresses, chats into arguments, spontaneous actions into icons obese with symbolic importance. Scott’s bathroom held tampons and cotton balls. Their sex was intense and fanciful and healing. They told each other romantic fantasies as they wrestled about in bed, trying not to climax before the stories did, and then they would collapse tight into each other’s arms. Scott had found that there were some women he wanted to hold at night like a child’s stuffed bear, and others to put a wall between like Clark Gable to Carole Lombard. Rachel was of the former variety, soft and delicious to breathe in. He would sense when she had fallen asleep, then minutes later the low stream of Italian would begin and like hypnosis it would knock him out until morning. But over time the differences and idiosyncrasies took their toll. It came to a head with the goldfish, the ones Jamie had given him. From the time Rachel began sleeping over, Scott knew they had to go. They were driving her into spasmodic episodes of totally unnecessary jealousy, emotions he had no handle on whatsoever. It seemed that even though he was over Jamie completely, Rachel had taken up the cause for sport, refusing to let her leave Scott’s head, allowing her to float over the bed, crowding Angie’s space. So he thought about scooping the fish up into a thermos like a couple

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of matzo balls and transporting them to a pond in Central Park, or else walking through Riverside Park, risking a dash across the West Side Highway and releasing them to the Hudson. Ah, who was he kidding? It had been a nasty winter and any cold-water shock would do in both Mikhail and Toulouse after their sickly existence in the cramped two-gallon aquarium he had cleaned only twice. If not the cold then certainly they would be an easy snack for anything able to withstand the waters of Manhattan. Scott consulted the Magic 8 Ball he kept on his nightstand. Grasping the dusty orb with two hands he asked, “Is it the right thing to do to flush Mikhail and Toulouse down the toilet?” He flipped the ball over to read the answer, floating on a blue triangle in a sea of black murk, “My sources say no.” Well, O.K., certainly there are moral, ethical, Judeo-Christian dilemmas involved with the sacrificing of pets and undoubtedly that is the cause of the 8 ball’s thumbs-down. The question had been phrased incorrectly. Scott was ready to live with the guilt of killing something without good cause. Deep down he was even thrilled since this was a sacrifice that felt like a deal with the devil. Voodoo. Rachel’s heart in return for two small lives. If she couldn’t stand the goldfish Jamie had given him before he and Jamie broke up— a fact reinforced by the constant, evil glares she gave them, so be it. He had no real attachment to his pets, a shake of food every other day was about all the attention ever paid. Sometimes he woke up hoping they had died (and died together, to avoid loneliness). He always thought it was a strange gift for Jamie to give. Her tastes usually ran toward the egomaniacal. Once, she gave him a framed picture of herself at the age of eight. Not a particularly gratifying treat for Scott, seeing the woman he was sleeping with as a child, her father’s hands reaching in from the frame toward her. These fish came from out of the blue he punned to himself at the time. Two little twerps with unusually white bodies and a patch of red atop each of their heads. On the fatter one, the blotch was

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reminiscent of Gorbachev’s wine-stain forehead and as for the runt, the stain set off its white body in a way that reminded Scott of Letrec’s Moulin Rouge poster. But Rachel made sense of the situation, “They look just like her!” Damn if she wasn’t right. They were tiny aquatic Jamies, ivory skin, thin red hair, huge unblinking fish-eyes. “Would Rachel, Jamie and I all be better off If I flush Mikhail and Toulouse down the toilet?” “Outlook not so good,” sayeth the toy. “Should I stop depending on a piece of plastic to make all the decisions and face up to my own responsibilities for once in my life?” “As I see it, yes.” Scott dripped eight drops of Superchlor Plus into the toilet bowl. A fighting chance he figured. At least this might keep them from going belly-up the moment they splash. Two quick flushes would do it. The first to whisk them through the pipe, an enclosed six-storey waterfall down from his apartment to whatever kind of septic expressway exists beneath his building. Then another quick jerk of the handle to send a shot of clean oxygen their way. A life-raft of bubbles as they fall into a tunnel of shit. No problem, the fish had done well living in their own excrement. Their threadlike turds settled in with the green gravel bottom of the tank and then engulfed them whenever Scott would pour fresh water in to replace what had evaporated. Playing God was what it was, adding two inches to their world as their waste surged up around them. Now he would be sending them on a space shot. Scott took a large glass bowl from off the shelf, filled it with room temperature water and two drops of the Superchlor. With the little net on the long handle that had come with the aquarium he scooped up Mikhail easily, watched him go limp in the moments when the world became all air, too much to breathe, and then spring back to action in the bowl. Toulouse smelled a rat and gave

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Scott trouble, first ducking behind the pump then darting into the submerged wine glass, the one toy Scott had offered, then finally, after being trapped in a corner, squirming fiercely in the net until plopped in with his friend. Scott carried the bowl into the bathroom with the image clunking through his head of a servant bringing a vessel of sacrificial blood to his idol. He emptied the fish into the toilet and they seemed pleased, actually, in this deep luxurious oval. Toulouse ventured down into the hole he would soon enough be drawn through, investigating the toilet parts only a fish could see, then reappeared to swim behind Mikhail. Scott considered putting the lid down so he wouldn’t have to watch but decided against it, knowing too well that imagining their demise would be even worse than witnessing it. He placed his thumb and forefinger on the handle, jiggled it, then fired her up. They vanished at once, swept into the vortex, that clockwise swirling of water the shape of a hurricane, the familiar spiraling path like that of Rachel’s finger when she spreads the spermicide on her diaphragm, that other great killer of fish. He knows, in the southern hemisphere, water flows in the opposite direction and at the equator there is no spin at all, bathwater runs straight down the drain. He flushed a second time. “Call me Ishmael,” he said to the sink. Despite Scott’s supreme act of generosity, things only got worse. He could not bear one more museum outing nor tolerate another documentary on international politics. He grew bored with her constant sleep-talk, and the way she mindlessly took off her shirt when she came over, so comfortable with him as to remove the sexuality of being topless in his presence. As for Rachel, she cringed at the amount of time he spent in front of the television, the brief conversations and hallmark long silences, all the bad manners Scott could not help but exhibit despite knowing their fatal consequences. In the end, it was no one specific event that split them up, nor was there real hatred or anger, it

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was merely a fuse which had extinguished itself after a slow 10 month burn, short of setting off a powder keg. No damage done. He remembers their final words, her voice low and cracking, his little more than a mumble, as they sat on the floor, holding hands, breaking up. “I think you just saw us as something we weren’t.” She delivered her line as if rehearsed. “Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough,” he replied, happy to extend the metaphor but depressed by the sentiment. “It’s not your fault and it’s not mine either.” “We just ran out of room.” He kisses her on the forehead and holds her for a minute in silence. Scott remembers one gigantic tear falling and making an audible splash onto Rachel’s thigh, leaving a wet blotch on her jeans. But for the life of him he cannot recall if it was his or hers. What he wouldn’t give right now for that big fat juicy tear. He is so thirsty he wishes he could drink dirt, unearth a frozen hunk of soil and suck the moisture right out. His tongue is nearly glued to his upper palate even as he feels the blisters growing large on his feet, an oasis of fluid he will never reach. He imagines a picture of himself in the New York Post, shoe torn off, sitting in a gutter sucking furiously at his own heel. How often his body had betrayed him. Not merely the tears, but the nervous sweat, the sweat from spicy food, the snot, the pin pricked drops of blood. It’s as though he’s been full of holes his entire life, a roadster whose tires are riddled with undetectable slits, not damaged enough to blow out or be replaced, but requiring maintenance every few weeks, a kiss or a coupling, to re-inflate his id and his ego and send him on his way. Now, when he needs it most of all, he is defeateddeflated. If only at one of these street corners he could be fellated, blown back up to size, topped off. He is a collection of withered veins as tangled as the orgy of cable and ancient water mains that pulse below the asphalt. When

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the weather warms, as it must, Scott will have sensation in his fingertips once again like Wendy has and takes for granted, like Angie did before the steering wheel became as huge as a manhole cover, and without fail, somewhere in the city, a hundred year old sewer pipe will expand with the heat of Spring till it cracks and subways will flood and a street will sink into itself, having nowhere else to go. Or if the crack is minute, there will be just a trickle, harmless until mixing with the road salt that has fallen in through sewers and open manholes. The salt that Wendy says is ubiquitous and ruins her good shoes, that could have saved Angie’s life had a road crew been on its game. The salt and water will flow, seeking not its own level, but rather an underground cable with insulation worn away or nibbled at by rats that took it to be licorice. Under the right conditions the union of saltwater and electricity will result in such an explosion that a manhole cover will soar into the sky like a flattened rocket. The thunderous wonder of a heavy body ascending. Or else the saltwater will be stealth, stealing the amperage at its source, electrifying every sewer and converting every manhole cover into a griddle. Our rubber tires and rubber soles tread ignorantly, like Wendy shopping or Angie on a pleasure trip. But not so the horse, pulling its hansom cab toward Central Park, its bad luck metal shoes scraping lethal contact and the shock sending the beast to its knees, collapsing amid morning traffic, a faint whinnie lost in the blare of horns, the helpless driver unable to drop the reins, screaming in the grief of a mother tongue. A sadness beyond Wendy’s scope, a new steed for Angie to ride. For their last Christmas together she had told him she would like a pony she could ride to school and keep in the garage instead of her sorry bike (or, in retrospect, her mother’s car). It would feed on Cheerios and carrot sticks and be strong enough to hold them both on slow rides through the park. Her hands around his waist. Her weight, her breasts, pressing against his back. Instead, he bought her a crystal pony to hold in the palm of her hand.

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Prisms of light scattered up her arm, her fingertips glistening in their coating of tears. Her gift to him was a sweater (worn till his shoulders poked through and his gut grew too large) with a row of elephants sewn across its middle, circling his torso as they would the place in the jungle to which they always return. His last Christmas card to her was generic, “Wishing you a wonderful holiday with happiness and prosperity throughout the New Year.” But he added little drawings around the words: Three wise men as stick figures staring up at the dot above the “i” in “Wishing” which he had made into a star. The two p’s in “happiness” had arms and hair and embraced each other. Wendy always chooses cards that have no real sentiment. More often than not it will be a picture of a cat or the city skyline or a champagne bottle pictured on the front, and the inside is completely blank except for her smallest of wishes. “Happy Bday. Luv, W.” or “Merry-xmas! L, W.” Scott attributes this upsetting behavior to the fact that Wendy never had the good fortune of experiencing a tragic life event. There is no sounding board around her heart to bounce her blessings off of. She thinks there will always be time to say whatever needs said, so no need to rush or ever go on at length. The cards she gives him are merely signposts. Like the emptied packets of marigold seeds she tapes onto a newly turned windowbox in anticipation of what will bloom. Greeting cards merely hold her place in his mind until she takes him to bed and plants within him a field of new memories. That part is as vivid and intense as he could hope for, but he is left with nothing tangible afterwards. Nothing in writing.

Six

There are sections of Harlem that relax and do not bother to follow the neat grid which scores most of Manhattan and makes navigation a simple matter of numbers and mnemonics. Lexington, Park, and Madison Avenues, from east to west, L.P.M. Late PM. Long Past Midnight. Midnight at the Oasis. No, no oasis, concentrate. Here in the 22nd mile, the road bends around a square, Marcus Garvey Park. M.G.P. Mighty Good Punch. My Gorgeous Puss. Make God Pay. Scott knows the history of this patch of ground. How it is an old-timer with secrets of its own. It was called Mount Morris for over a hundred years, named perhaps for the Morris family who ran a racetrack in the neighborhood back in the 1830’s. In the 1930’s Robert Moses turned the foreboding rocks and hard places into a playground with stone walls and stairs. The pool and amphitheater were added in time for the summer of love. It was renamed, in 1973, for the tough-luck black leader who formed the defunct United Negro Improvement Association, tried and failed to colonize Africa with Black Americans, and started a freight shipping company called the Black Star Line. It went bankrupt. After some jail time for mail fraud, Garvey was deported to Jamaica. Hot sunny Jamaica. Tropical drink Jamaica. Some men have all the luck. Scott wishes for a mirror to appreciate his weather-beaten features, cheekbones which must be protruding like icebergs, and eyelashes stiff as camel hair, jutting from what is otherwise a perfectly flat face and body. He is a more studly version of the

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patient from his childhood board game, Operation. He envisions how each of his bones are laid bare and if the kiddy surgeon botches their removal, his nose will glow bright red. The Wish Bone, The Wrenched Ankle, and of course, The Broken Heart are all ripe for plucking. A little ditty comes to him, the theme song from the game’s TV commercial, but with the lyrics changed to satisfy a ten-year-old’s morbid habit of tainting everything with death. He remembers singing it with a group of boys out on the playground in fifth grade, and a teacher stifling a laugh before ordering them to cease. “Suffocation, we play Suffocation. Suffocation is the game we like to play. First you take a plastic bag, then you take a rubber band. On your head, now you’re dead. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee.” Now might be a nice time to be dead. He is half way there anyway and completing the task would at least rid him of the pain and the cold. Angie would take his stiffened body in her shattered arms and fly him close to the sun until he sprouted wings, a reverse Icarus. He would divide his work-free time between cloud hopping with her and soaring through Wendy’s sad days, tutoring her on grief, introducing her to the kind of weight he has lived with his entire adult life. Yes, he wishes his soul was deceased, but what stops him from jumping in front of the truck full of photographers and cameramen cruising past is the terrible waste of sacrificing his body. It deserves a better fate than to be lowered into a freezing plot. There should be time for more people to enjoy his smile, to admire the perfect width of his forearms. He wants however many months it will take to come to terms with the encroaching baldness and the subtle layers of fat around his midriff. He wants to see what it is like to stay handsome for one woman over a great

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length of time now that he is something other than young. He will keep his body alive because the challenge needs to be met. His lucky days are long gone. What are the chances, ever again, of experiencing an odyssey like the one he found in Jane, a pretty woman who, by fate, recognized his virility, even through thick layers of cotton and naiveté. A low-rent Mrs. Robinson who picked him up then set him down on the other side of a night he would relive for years. Though it may well be shock, rather than lust, which keeps the memory fresh. Two petite brunettes pass by and they look totally unaffected by what they’ve been through. One speaks in French and the other replies in English. “Qu’est-ce qu’il passe au cinema?” “Hmm, I think Bridges of Madison County might be right across from the hotel. Or Sense and Sensibility if you’d rather.” Scott thinks, Dead Man Walking. He notes the small Canadian flags they wear on their backs and is transfixed by not only the calm flow of their speech but by their identical strides. Their steps are slow, predictable as a downbeat, and generously unguarded. They employ the footwork of the bilingual, the patient two-step of a people who say everything twice, ascending like an accent ague, falling like the crosshatch of a Q. Neither will pay him any mind. No hope of him gaining access to the silk web they spin with their words. He visualizes a black widow’s delicate handiwork and sees Jane poised at its center with her spidery grasp. It was Scott’s first summer in New York and he wanted to do some acting, if just to tell his friends back home across the river that he had become a big city actor. Some weeks he did secretarial work through a temp agency, other weeks he just uneasily burned through his savings. But before he settled into any sort of permanent real-world employment he felt he owed it to himself to give theater his best shot. He had his college experience to put onto his resume: The Man of LaMancha, which had led him to

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Marcia, and also a production of Inherit the Wind where he played the judge. Beyond that, he lied, adding the four high school plays that had bonded him to Angie and promoting them to the rank of regional theater productions. He paged through five different dramas from Chekov, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard and listed them as well. But his meager talent and lack of a union card kept him out of most everything that sounded the least bit glamorous. The aspiring actresses he met at cattle-call auditions were pretty but not gorgeous. They all smiled when he talked them up or lit their cigarettes, but director after director, even the female ones, looked right through him as he performed his memorized monologue. “What a piece of work is man,” Scott would intone, “How noble in reason. How infinite in faculties. In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel.” He would try to imagine the Bard up in the balcony, a tear in his eye, proud that his words were being so tenderly treated. “Thanks,” the directors would all say, insincerely, “Next.” Scraping the bottom of the barrel, he finally won weekend work at an outdoor renaissance festival. His auditioning skills were not as important as the fact that he would voluntarily give up all his summer Saturdays for miserable pay, and be willing to wear a heavy, black costume. He was one of about 30 such “actors” who had to be at Port Authority by 8:00 to catch the bus up to Tuxedo, New York and portray a roving character, prancing around the grounds of a park called Sterling Forest, entertaining the clientele. He was cast as Dr. Creedmore Apple, the village bloodletter. For props, Scott bought two plastic leeches, one he named Leech Majors, and the other Cloris Leechman. He roamed about on these hot August weekends sweating like mad, scaring small children and pestering the adults. As a bloodletting tool, he carried a large twig which he referred to as “me stick which ain’t very sharp,” assuming a bad cockney accent. He was allowed a fifteen-minute

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lunch, usually consisting of a gigantic turkey drumstick and a tankard of ginger ale. Afterward, Scott would join some of the other men as targets in the Soak-a-Bloak game. He would sit on a hay pile along with 6 other guys, and women would line up to throw wet sponges at them. Whomever the sponge hit, the woman got to kiss. Scott’s success in truly looking like an evil and clumsy bloodletter did not serve him well in this particular event. Only once the whole summer, when there was a free-for-all, as one woman demanded to be kissed by all the men, did Scott finally get to pucker up. The kiss was so hard and fast he nearly chipped a tooth. The roles-reversed version of the game, Drench-a-Wench, simultaneously went on across the road and Scott would usually spend a few moments there watching one extremely buxom lass get smacked again and again. Each day ended with the big joust and it was his job, along with the other rovers, the beggars, thieves, merry men, priests and milkmaids, to keep the growing crowd amused while the knights put on their armor, mounted their steeds, checked their breakaway lances and took a few practice gallops. One especially humid afternoon Scott was babbling per usual about his “dull stick” when he noticed a woman who was actually paying attention to him. He realized that she must be thinking of him as a complete idiot, which is to say she was the ideal audience. He walked over to where she was sitting in the grass and continued on with his spiel. “’Ello young damsel. Feeling a bit pale, are you? A little bleeding might be the thing for you then. Ay what? I’m sure I got one ’o me leeches ’ere somewhere. Cloris, where are you pet?” She sat staring up at him, all the while licking at a frozen Sunkist orange, one of the tastier, and suggestive, treats sold at the fair. “Well doctor,” she said in a low voice, “It just so happens I work at a drugstore. Maybe I can fill your prescription?” Scott suddenly saw the light. This woman was not staring at him because she

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thought he was a moron. She winked. Scott sat down next to her and gave her a good looking over. She was maybe 35, long brown hair, skinny and wearing a sexy halter-top that showed off her freckled shoulders. Her fingernails were at least three inches long. “Don’t worry,” she said, noting the suddenly shocked expression on Scott’s face as he stared at her hands, “I never scratch.” She told Scott that her name was Jane and asked if he would like a lick from her orange. He squirmed to adjust his costume. The joust began and they watched together, Scott neglecting his job and violating policy by covertly holding her hand. At times like these all realization of social commentary was lost on him. Scott failed to catch the symbolic representation of these men pointing their long lances at each other and charging. When the Black Knight was finally thrown from his steed, they exchanged numbers and Scott kissed her on the mouth. She stood up, smiled, and walked away. Scott, in his dark tights and codpiece, could not stand for several moments. He returned home that evening to discover a message from her on the machine, “Hello, is there a doctor in the house? Hi Scott, it’s me. I was hoping you’d like to make a house call up at my place in Pleasantville. There’s a dinner in it for ya. Let me know!” The recognition of her voice there waiting for him sent a thrill through Scott’s spine. An older woman, and a cute one at that, desired him. She had seen through his dopey costume to his true handsome self, or at least to his obvious youth which, he knew, for some women was the equal of physical beauty. He called the number she had written out for him in lipstick on a scrap of paper dug from her purse. She answered on the fourth ring. There was a dog barking in the background and he heard other indistinguishable sounds. Some sort of squeaking noise and a low mechanical rumbling as well. “’Ello young damsel, if it’s the doctor you want well then it is the doctor you shall have.”

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“What? Oh, heh, hi baby, I had no idea what was going on there for a moment.” “Sounds like you could use a physical.” “Take it easy, dinner’s at 6:30 sharp tomorrow. Don’t be late.” This was no longer a jolly-good fantasy with Cockney accents and knights on horseback. It was now the checking of train schedules, and a trip to Macy’s to buy some new underwear. Nearly every pair he owned was torn and he felt he was ready for an upgrade anyway. No more whites. He purchased two threepacks of briefs in bright blue, red and green. Oh, and passing by a peep show on 38th Street, he stopped in to get a box of Trojans, lubricated and reservoir-tipped. Scott preferred buying his condoms at sex shops for two reasons. He suspected they sold quickly and would therefore always be fresh. He knew the drugstores of his hometown were stacked with dusty boxes that sat long past their prime, that rubbers were like yogurt, alive with invisible but active cultures which could die and snap if not used soon enough. Scott’s second reason for coming here was, that while buying prophylactics from the neighborhood druggist was about the most embarrassing act one could do at that store, picking up a pack of rubbers from Sex Land was the tamest transaction by far to be found in this type of establishment. The next night he caught the 5:35 out of Grand Central for the half hour trip north. He felt like a starling, hyped and on edge amid a tired forest of gray flannel and Wall Street Journals. He wanted to tell someone just what he was up to but no one would make eye contact, dozens not even raising their weary chins off their tightly collared necks. Jane’s house was a ten-minute walk straight up from the station. A single storey brick three-bedroom with a small driveway where a Ford Mustang, a beaten up Dodge, and a Harley missing its front tire were all parked. It was an ominous collection of metal, suggestive of a Sam Shepard domestic nightmare, rather than the

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happy-go-lucky love nest the town’s name implied. The front door was open and through the screen Scott could hear a commotion coming from the kitchen: Two women arguing about someone named Simon, a dog barking, a baby screaming and the same squeaking noise he had heard over the phone. He checked to make sure he had the right address before ringing the bell. The house at once turned silent except for what he believed to be a fork making a soft thud onto a linoleum floor. Jane greeted him wearing an apron over a blank t-shirt and shorts. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek and asked him into the kitchen to meet her family. He passed through a shabby living room littered with magazines and baby toys and the moment he set foot in the kitchen a large golden lab charged him, sticking his snout right up Scott’s crotch. Jane, and a woman who vaguely resembled Jane, found this pretty funny and tried to hold back their laughter. Scott scanned the periphery. A frying pan full of hot oil, a plate of raw chicken pieces, a box of peas thawing in the sink, and in the corner of the kitchen, going in circles and sobbing, a toddler in its squeaky walker. Jane’s sister and her sister’s child is what he assumed until Jane made the introductions. “Scott, this is my daughter Amanda and her little girl, Jo. Um, you’ve already met Goldie there. He’s a tad aggressive. And no, there’s no husband waiting in the bedroom with a shotgun. I buried Max ten years ago. Thank God.” Scott’s mind was reeling as he processed her words. He managed to sputter out, “I know where he gets it,” in reference to Goldie’s enthusiasm but the women turned to each other and shook their heads. Amanda looked older than her mother and Jo appeared to be at least 18 months. “Pardon my asking,” he said, “but how can a 35 year old woman be a grandmother?” “Thirty-five? Ha, I wish! I’m 44 silly.” Forty-four was exactly double Scott’s age. If this were a more sophisticated tryst he could imagine her as the sexstarved older woman. But, as it was, he felt he had stumbled into a lair of white trash danger. Of course, that held its own eroticism.

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Of course, at 22, there was very little that didn’t. Scott looked to Jane’s hands and realized that those impossibly long nails had vanished. She now had short, stubby, unpainted fingers. “Falsies,” he mumbled to himself. Amanda asked Scott to help set the table while Jane did the greasy work. He thought about asking why they were setting out plates for four but then decided against it. He didn’t want to know. He just wanted it to be over, to be alone with Jane on the big unmade bed in the messy room in which he had thrown his jacket. A half hour passed in relative silence, Scott attempting to keep the chatter going but finding little to latch on to. Amanda was a part-time secretary with a very modest wit. Jane, while winking and stroking Scott’s hand at every opportunity, was coming up short of any topic other than how to excel at deep-frying. Jo babbled and squeaked and Goldie napped until the three adults finally sat down. With that, Jo immediately wailed for food and the dog once again made a beeline from beneath the table to his favorite part of Scott’s anatomy. The fourth chair remained empty. “Think he’s coming out?” Amanda asked her mother over the ruckus. “If he wants to,” was all she responded. “Got someone else locked up in the back?” Scott asked. “My son,” replied Jane. “Bud,” said Amanda simultaneously, “He doesn’t come out of his room much.” Scott feigned nonchalance, filled his mouth, and chewed. The women held a lengthy discussion on Jo’s potty habits. Just as the last pea was dropped to Jo’s walker for her to gobble up and Scott’s plate received its last bone and he wiped his hands on the paper towel on his lap, they heard the back door open followed by a loud scraping sound making its way toward them. “God damn it,” Jane shouted, “How many times do I have to tell him.” “Is that Bud?” Scott wondered. “No, no, that’s just Simon, my ex, trying to sneak the Harley

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down to the basement again,” Amanda said. Jane grabbed her fork and met Simon and his bike in the kitchen as he was yanking open the basement door. Scott strained in his chair to get a glimpse of him. Simon was wafer thin with oily brown hair. He wore no shirt and his face, chest and arms were covered with black grease. “Let me guess, auto mechanic?” Amanda nodded with a small smile. Jane and Simon argued by rote, apparently having had this fight many times before. Goldie’s tail became a metronome for Scott over the following two hours. There was the clearing of the table once Simon had ended his losing battle and retreated back the way he came. Then the prolonged goodbye as Amanda packed up Jo and her walker and some graham crackers, loaded up her car and cruised off home. Then finally just the two of them alone on the couch, splitting a Diet Coke, touching each other’s face, kissing. The only sounds were Goldie’s panting, the swish of her tail mopping the floor in 2⁄4 time, and a rumble from the hallway which must have been Bud snoring. Up close and on her home turf it was hard for Scott to forget he had a much older woman in his arms, let alone one that had given birth on more than one occasion. Her skin’s elasticity was not at all like any other girl he had held. Jane’s body had settled down into her bones, each cell at rest in its space like a bounty of ripe grapes, low hanging fruit. A soft fur covered her arms. Angie’s flesh was smooth and tight, wrapped perfectly around her frame like the cottony sheet of a soldier’s cot. Scott thinks he could have bounced a quarter off her gorgeous tan stomach and it would have leapt high into the air. But she is just his piggy bank now, holding his old pennies in the small of her back and buried deep into the earth, a treasure for emergency purposes only. There was no need for her now with Jane offering herself for free, taking him by the hand and leading him past a sleeping dog into the bedroom. Scott had fantasized about undressing her slowly, caressing her

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solid shoulders and firm legs as he went. But Jane was undressed and pulling back the covers on her side of the bed before he had a chance to react. The lights went out before he could take off his pants to reveal the sexy new purchase he had on. He had wanted to hit the bathroom and brush his teeth, but she had not gone and now was whispering to him, the pillow talk of a grandmother who had to get up in six hours, “Come here, baby, hurry on up.” He stripped down to his briefs and crawled in beside her, finding her face with his hands. She reached down to his waist and let out a sigh of disgust that he was still not naked. She snapped the elastic band and tugged at him till Scott reached down for himself and pulled his last stitch down past his knees and into the flux of bedcovers. A quick and perfunctory to-do list of foreplay ensued. Her lips here, his fingers there. A breast. A tongue. A moan. Then he was on top of her and in her, trespassing in the territory that spawned a daughter and a son. Her minute nails dug insignificantly into his back. There was a slight sigh from deep inside of her that may have been an orgasm but probably wasn’t. Scott felt compelled to come as quietly as he could so his body let into her a small quiet whisper and then shrank away. In the blank emptiness that followed, Scott looked to the clock on her side of the bed and it read 1:00. He blinked, looked again, and it was 3:00. He had an undeniable need to use the bathroom so, stealthily, he slipped away from her and into the hallway. A florescent glare shone from around the half-shut bathroom door. He tiptoed in, closing the door fully behind him, looked up into the bright light and let out a full, guttural two-second scream. Standing at the sink was a six-foot tall naked boy, seemingly neither awake nor asleep. He was rocking on his heels a bit, to and fro, staring into the mirror. His face was marred with acne, and Scott thought he could make out track marks on the arms which he held straight out in front of his body. He also noticed that he had his mother’s eyes. Bud made a sort of grunting noise to acknowledge Scott but

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never took his glance away from his own reflection. His wrists were bent downward and his shoulders were stiff. His paunchy frame was pale and nearly hairless. In his sleepy yet jolted condition Scott thought he saw a bolt protruding from Bud’s neck, but on second glance he found it was actually a huge black mole. Scott peed in record speed, opened the door without letting it creak and backed out without saying goodbye. Away from the monster son and back into the sheets with mummy. The next time his eyes opened the lights were on and Jane was dressed for work. If the alarm had gone off he hadn’t heard it. She was running her hand through his hair and he could feel the long nails, back to tease him again. “Rise and shine baby, some of us have to work for a living.” He retrieved his pile of clothes off the floor and dressed as best he could in his tired state, missing a button, forgetting his zipper. “I’ll drop you at the station,” she told him. “Need the lavatory before we go?” “God, no,” his voice quivered as he tried to figure out if what he saw in the night was real or just a fried-chicken induced bit of hysteria. There was a full pot of coffee already on in the dim kitchen and Jane poured them both a go-cup on their way out the door. Her old Dodge was a microcosm of her bedroom and Scott had to clear away several layers of debris— Whopper wrappers, a jacket, and some cassette tapes— before he could sit down in the passenger seat. The engine turned over with a cough and they sputtered the few blocks to the train in dreary silence measured between slurps of coffee. They pulled into the station, the mirror image of a dozen other couples already there, but clearly a fake among this domesticated suburban tribe of hunter-gatherers. The men on their way to the jungle while the women build their community and remember to pick up a pizza to have waiting for their husbands by 6:15. But Scott is heading home to sleep the day away and erase as much of this as he can. And Jane, after a brief kiss

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goodbye and a short exchange of “Had a good time,” and “It was sweet,” and “Had a good time,” drives off to her day job, loaded with burdens that he barely can grasp nor desires ever, ever, to understand. “It is serious now, my friend,” a man of Middle Eastern descent tells Scott as they make their way down 5th Avenue. The man runs with a pronounced limp yet has no trouble passing him. They are about to enter Central Park for the long tease portion of the race, a taste of how the finish will be, with the trees opening for him and the clean scent of their leaves brightening the air. Scott watches the gimpy man make the turn at 102nd Street and follows suit. He tries to enjoy the change of scenery but his legs balk at the new incline of the road, turning his knees into open mouths that scream like hungry babies. His knees know. There are three small hills to traverse but the knees want the pretty ribbon and they want it now. They want to make his body cheat from the path and go running west, short-cutting across the park. Even if he must crawl, the knees sacrificing their smooth shape to the gravel and bits of glass. They want that ribbon and they want a soothing packet of heat, a hot towel wrapped across each. But Scott’s brain is so high above, these demands are not heard. He is resigned to the sad truth. It is forty uneven blocks before the road spits him out on to Central Park South, to where he must circumvent his goal rather than cross toward it, until reaching the southwesternmost entrance. His brittle feet pound the road and his lungs still welcome the brisk uneven blasts of oxygen, but for all intents and purposes, Scott is in outer space. Not orbiting the planet but deep, deep in the black of unexplored territory. He is a satellite that has outlived its use, abandoned by mission control, left to the forces of large bodies and black holes, all vestigial systems shut down to preserve energy, the only sign of life, a faint erratic beep emanating from its core. He senses the starship Wendy just ahead and detects

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the comet Philip passing her, pacifying her, making a pass at her. He would fire at him or at least send a warning to her to increase velocity but his body has lost its viscosity— all his various particles held together only by a pathetically slow momentum. He would scatter in every direction were he to suddenly stop, like the voices of newsmen whose language falls from their tongues and fill up the universe. Like teletype escaping into the air from a cut wire. Like the way he was and wasn’t himself with Beth. He misses her right now, or rather he misses the way he was with her. That is, seated in a comfortable chair, his keyboard doing all the work. If only his body would disassemble and all his electrons speed through the phone lines to the finish line to the line for taxis to the line formed by the hem of his bedsheet that he would pull up over his mouth to admire his calm breathing until falling asleep. He would know again what it is like to be strong. His muscles proudly at rest, not cramped past the point of pain as they are now. His mind clear and at peace, not dark and seeded with doubts as it was the night he discovered her on his computer. There is a breed of guy who has time to kill after 10:00. The immobilized. The desperately-in-need-of-company crowd. A treehouse gang of the fragile. Scott had become a member in full standing in the six months after Faith. He counted his own days and days of spontaneous sobbing, his nose red and peeling, snotty wads of tissue all over the floor in every room. He would be sitting on the futon and feel the rumbling start loose in his ribs, then tightening around his lungs, the throat contracting and finally a series of sharp convulsive releases, then tears burning down his cheeks. There were hours when his heart physically ached, it’s addict desire for Faith denied and his brain helpless in finding a way to get her back. It was not that he still needed, or ever needed, her; it was that he no longer had her. Every break-up is a death of sorts and the sense of loss is acute. “FaithandScott” becomes “Faith; Scott.” Deep down he reasoned that eventually he would

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catch his breath, the day would surely come when he would be over this. He, if anyone, knew the symptoms were temporary, but of course he also knew how some things latch on and ride out one’s entire life. There was a period in his early twenties when he enjoyed his own company and that was enough. When a blown encounter, like the one with Jane, caused little if any damage. But that pleasure has long since been destroyed by his libido. If not with a woman, he is thinking about how he wants one and if he goes too long without, or if one exits before he is ready, he goes out of his gourd, punching the refrigerator, screaming into his pillow, doing pushups face down into his disgustingly dirty carpet. More often than not, after the crisis of Faith, the sun rose to find him pacing around the bed he had shared with her, like a moon around Mars, unable to break orbit. Knowing that he was in the abstract company of a thousand other men was no help in venting his misery. He understood that in bedrooms around the world his counterparts were leaking their snot and bruising their knuckles against plasterboard walls over girlfriends they could not control or failed to keep alive. Little pockets of agony with silent connections to his own, he thought, marathons of the disenfranchised. If left unchecked, Scott would carry out a depressing allegory such as this until it swallowed up his brain. An infinite regression of self-pitying images would bear down and paralyze him. Distraction was what was needed and so, with no human touch coming to the rescue, Scott put his faith in technology. It was during these early months of 1992 that he managed to discover a parallel universe, or to put it into the succinct revelation he said aloud one night to his bowl of Cream of Mushroom soup, “Mars Has Women!” His particular and pathetic boy’s club, it turns out, has its counterpart in the fairer sex but is equally invisible to the naked eye. The two sides, with a need comparable in strength to flirting, struggle to keep their

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romantic miseries to themselves, and so a device is needed, a secret machine that can see through brick walls and cell walls, that can split the bonds of matrimony and the bonds of neutrons. Thus, it was one evening shortly after a prolonged crying spell that Scott unearthed the power of his newly purchased modulatordemodulator and the lowly Mac to which it was attached. Steven Jobs knew what he was doing when he named his company Apple. Through his Performa 300, in tandem with a 9600-baud modem and channeled through CompuServe, one of the more urbane neighborhoods in the newly discovered world of networked computers, Scott has been visiting Eden. There is a woman, or so she claims. She says her name is Beth but that she prefers to be called Diva28, and he believes her. She is his discovery, his distraction and possibly something more. She lives six hundred miles away. He found her sitting alone in an otherwise empty chatroom named “Desire,” her nickname the only one listed in the roster of “Who’s Here.” He typed “hi” to her and she did not respond. He typed, “A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’” and she did not indicate a smile. He reached back and remembered the fuse he lit a year ago, “You’re in my spot,” he typed, bracing himself for the rejoinder. But instead she simply disconnected, her nickname vanishing off the screen. So much for first impressions. He logged off to go watch the news— Mike Tyson found guilty of raping a Miss Black America contestant— then came right back to see if she had reappeared. Sure enough she was there, if not exactly waiting for him, then at least a bit more talkative. “There’s no getting rid of you this evening.” was her welcome. “I’m stupid that way,” was his reply and that little dose of self-deprecation was enough to draw her out. She typed, “That much is obvious,” and followed it with a semicolon and a right-parenthesis, a wink in the language of the faceless. What followed was thirty minutes of explicit flirting, the kind one would not have the courage to do in person. It was direct and it led somewhere fast.

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“Tell me everything about your body,” he said. She did, with no shortage of intimate detail, and then typed back to him, “Tell me everything about your mind” “My mind is totally consumed in imagining your body.” “Take off your clothes,” she told him, assuming correctly that he already had. “I’m hard,” he bragged, but she replied instantly, “In the sense of being difficult?” Scott could not say that they were seeing each other, nor could it be called dating, though they spent 2 or 3 hours together 5 or 6 nights a week now. Beth and Scott were reading each other, typing back and forth in real time, and he was falling for her. In a microcosm where one can escape with the simple click of a mouse, where eye contact does not come up, where inflection has its own notation of sideways smiley faces, it is easy, too easy, to open up and share secrets. It is also all too simple to ignore certain truths. There is another man. Beth does not live alone. She is in a marriage with a guy she does not like, who shares a house with her, who leaves her to her room for hours every night not knowing what she is up to. Scott is the home wrecker yet again, but this time he is stealth and subatomic, an intruder the husband never suspects, her love escaping right out from under him while their house appears totally intact. Scott is actually her fourth online affair. Sometimes an exlover logs on with a pseudonym and talks to her till she figures it out. Sometimes Beth and Scott will talk as friends with one of them and, through the dirty miracle of “private messaging,” simultaneously talk behind that person’s back. In the near future there will be whole new disciplines of cruelty. There are nights when, before he logs on, she is already talking to another man. He can lurk invisibly while they make nice, using the electronic equivalent of a keyhole, and admire her skillful sexuality as she has her way with what could be a twelve-year-old boy or an eighty-year-old lesbian for all they knew. There is no room for

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jealousy on the internet. Flirtation is as essential to the flow of conversation as ascii text. The wires are filled with the lonely and the libidinous and the bandwidth, even in these pre Information Highway days, is large and cozy enough for all to find solace. Scott came to cyberspace after breaking up with his tenth girlfriend in as many years. Of course not every girlfriend was actually his to break up with, but the causes and results were the same. It could all be filed under one directory named, what? Repression? Idiocy? Either would do. Never knowing how to communicate, Faith had suggested a shrink. Scott, having gone to college in the sane Midwest, firmly rejected the idea. CompuServe proved to be a therapy of its own where he could say anything he wanted and where there was always a room full of guys even worse off than himself. Part of Scott knew that his intense attraction to Beth was actually just a measurement of how lonely he had become, but it was the part of him that was more than willing to be ignored. He went about trying to fit in with his depraved new world. He changed his online name to Triton, the largest moon of Neptune as well as the sea-god Neptune’s pitchfork, a skewer of sunken thoughts. He and Diva28 made a few casual friends in their virtual social club. They would talk sports with someone named EnormousJohnson, sling insults at DiaperBoy47, and withstand perverse come-ons for a threesome from CreamyItalian. But eventually they would grow bored and retire to a private chat, where it would be just the two of them. And their machines. The sex, in its own way, was great. If one can put off the need for physical union. If one doesn’t mind putting fantasy ahead of reality nor grow disgusted by the occasional need to wipe down one’s keyboard. Emotionally and spiritually it was a wonder because it made them both so happy. Diva28 and Triton were in bliss and this bliss was taken as love. They never fought. They discussed films and books and they kissed using x’s and they sat amazed that there were times when they would type the same words simultaneously.

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Some nights it grew downright freakish. Scott once correctly guessed the album she was listening to, and Beth somehow knew the name of his childhood dog without him ever telling her. “How the hell did you know that?” “I have no idea.” There were mornings when he sensed that it would be easy not to take this interaction seriously; this romance that flicks on and off with a switch, where hugs have to be spelled out and one’s vocabulary does most the work. Scott read Ann Landers enough to know that the woman never really leaves the husband. But there are ground-rules to every coupling and there was something thrilling at the heart of this one. They were the new-romancers. They need never leave their rooms. Scott did not have to send flowers, he could email poetry to her electronic doorstep. More than that, these evenings online allowed Scott the escape from his disaster trail of flesh-and-blood failures, while Beth too was comforted by the vacation from her ever-boring mate. As a man who has lived for years with a dead woman inside his skull, he had no problem transforming this fantasy into hope of a solid future. One rainy Monday he let his imagination go with her, fantasized a day in the year 2525 when her head gets stitched onto his body so that she is always there, dependent on him for survival. He asks if she would submit to that, if she would FedEx him in the morning with her noggin and a spool of thread so that they might share a bowl of Cheerios with a single spoon before he goes off to the List Council, paying double for a single subway ride but thinking twice as fast at the office. She says it’s a fine idea. They can split a hoagie for lunch and have two-for-one dinners anywhere in town. Then to sleep on separate pillows, each of them awash in their dreams, the exact opposite experience of being online. Full-color images conjured up effortlessly and in three dimensions, all the senses participating, while their eyes flicker beneath the lids like photocells. One night he explained to her how

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his dreams are always vague travelscopes - places he recognizes but can never quite name. His childhood house but with paneled walls. A car he has driven but with a missing windshield. Yet he is always comfortable with the setting into which he is placed, as if a fluid morphing of his kitchen into an exhibition at the Smithsonian featuring naked elderly women was to be expected, as if the glass of water at his bedside catches fire all the time. Diva allowed that her dreams, while no less bizarre, had limits and structure. She reasoned that, perhaps due to a past history of LSD throughout college, she is subject to an odd array or reoccurring visions. There are six all told that play out in repertory. Each one begins in the same weird way. She is inside a Blockbuster video store and Adolph Hitler is the clerk. Instead of price stickers on the video boxes there are mustaches and Hitler always checks to see that each looks just like his before allowing her to leave. In the rear of the store, between the shelf marked Musicals and the one labeled Action, is one called Beth’s Reoccurring Dreams. On that shelf are six videos. There is A Bridge Too Far, I Dismember Mama, Diva Does Dakota, The Invisible Man, Strangers on a Dream, and La Dolce Vendetta. She will make her selection, get the thumbs-up from der fuehrer and, literally, fly into a room painted all in blue, with one wall being a huge TV screen. She will slide the selected video into a slot in the floor, sit back as a bowl of tooth-white popcorn is lowered down to her lap, and then experience the dream she has picked. Last time it was The Invisible Man. As she describes it, she finds herself married to a man she cannot see. They have sex and she feels a presence on top of her, sees her breasts absorb the weight of a transparent chest and ultimately she wipes a clear liquid, the thickness of spit, from her thigh with a Bounty paper towel. He gets up to have a Virginia Slim and the cigarette appears to hover above a chair until he inhales. Only then does she see a part of him, the smoke showing off his narrow throat and broad expanse of lungs before turning tail and shooting out

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his nostrils like steam from a sewer. During the final drag, which he holds for a long time, she notices a dense spot on his lung. She tries to speak, to warn him, but the spot reconfigures itself into the shape of her own face, winks at her, and a whiff of smoke coils to become a finger that is put over the lips, signaling Beth to keep her own mouth shut. She awakes in tears, her nostrils sensing the real smoke from her husband’s Marlboro, which he has every morning in bed before he starts his day. “Is that how you picture me as well?” he asks her, “I am, after all, the one you really can’t see.” “No, no, no. I know how handsome you are by the way you type, the speed and the direction of your words. Your hair is a mess of W’s intertwined and your eyes are punctuated with pica sized x’s, when you laugh.” “U R my life,” he tells her. Scott squints hard so that the screen goes blurry, and he tries to sculpt Diva’s face from the jumble of scrolling words, but sometimes it is Angie he sees, bathed in blue light, rising up and away as words vanish from the top, their conversation filling in from the bottom. He tries not to let this happen, knows deep down that it is unhealthy enough to have one girlfriend he cannot touch, let alone two, occupying the same space. She will smile at him and he will type without thinking, shapely words that round the contours of her cheeks: Obsequious, Autumnal. Anything he can think of to give form to her memory, while Diva lets him ramble on with his affections, a blush that he never sees coloring her face. As the CompuServe bills doubled month-to-month, they began to discuss the possibility of talking on the phone. The backwards nature of this plan escaped neither of them but they failed to discuss it. Or rather, by this point, each knew what the other was thinking. First there is love, then possibly they will talk. What they did discuss was the danger of reality. Did they really want to leave their electric paradise? Didn’t they know that once they actually

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heard each other’s voice their perfect intimacy would be altered in some unpredictable way? Yes to those questions. But yes Scott calls her nonetheless, after an evening when their mutual urge gets the better of them. Beth surrenders her phone number, each numeral sears onto Scott’s screen like a pornographic image. They both log off their computers to free the phone line and he touch-tones the digits, listening to the ten note melody he creates. She picks up before he even hears it ring. Her voice is just as she described. Youthful, yet sultry. A doe. Scott’s voice pleases her too and their conversation instantly takes on the tone of their established familiarity, the adolescent references to sex acts, updates on how the week is transpiring, pledges of affection. What they say is not nearly as important as the fact that they both have voice. She is, in proof, a girl apart from his imagination, and he is a man with a language different from her husband’s. There are a few awkward pauses and a moment or two when he laughs more than he should, but otherwise it is as joyous and erotic as any date he can recall having. Scott on his futon in a room lit only by his computer. Beth down in her basement, the extra-long phone cord traveling over the stairs like a trip cord and wrapped around her foot as she lies on a shag rug, naked and able to moan softly without waking the house. They will want more of this. Soon they will make more phone calls and send letters. Soon he might get on a plane. Touch hands and stare into each other’s eyes. Then they will see how naked they really are. Then they will know. Scott spends his mornings waiting for it to be afternoon and spends his afternoons waiting for it to be night. During his lunch hours he absent-mindedly strolls through the small park at Union Square, coloring in the transcript of the previous evening’s encounter, molding skin and hair and voice around the solid bulk of words. He has a favorite bench beneath a tree that is refusing to turn with the season, still green as August though it is already mid October. He has seen this kind of thing before, knows that when it

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finally does go it will be all at once. From green to brown to bare in less than a week, most likely. He is daydreaming about Diva here on his bench one day, munching a hot pretzel, the mustard coating his tongue, and he is smiling because if he is not in love then he doesn’t know what he is in. If he is not lucky then he is thrilled to have this misfortune. Just then, he detects a shadow passing over him, trailing the pure scent of saddle soap. She sits down near him on his bench and he takes her in with the corner of his vision, his eyes working hard to broaden the periphery. She removes a book, The Bell Jar, from her knapsack but doesn’t open it and this act sets into play a sudden tension, a connection between them. There are several instantaneous results of this tension, one of which is luckily hidden by his overcoat, but the one that Scott marvels at involves a switch being thrown in his brain, a piece of binary code sparking to life that turns Beth off, changes her from one to zero just as simple as you please. He is thus free to proceed so he turns his head to her full on and opens his mouth to speak a word. “Before you say anything you should know that you have a gigantic blob of mustard on your chin.” She is smiling and reaching again into her bag, this time pulling out a moist towelette. She hands it to Scott and as he rips it open he notices that the tiny pouch is imprinted with the word Winners on the front, and on the back are the most remedial of instructions, “Tear open packet. Unfold and use.” He cleans himself, the lemony astringent replacing the leather scent of her hair which he was hoping to keep. He tries anew, “What else have you got in your bag of tricks?” She takes his last bit of pretzel for herself, without asking, and he grabs the sack for inspection. He finds a hairbrush, five more towelettes, two pens, a small mirror, keys, aspirin and, eureka, her driver’s license. He pulls it out and examines it as she pretends not to watch. “Brown eyes. Check. Red hair. Well, there’s some brunette in there but O.K., check. Height, 5'7", check. Weight, 350 pounds, double check.”

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“Very funny. Keep eating those pretzels for lunch and you’ll be the one who’ll need a crane to get off the bench.” “Well Madame, your papers are not totally in order. This poetic license of yours tells me all I need to know, with the exception of one crucial detail.” He takes a pen and a towelette from the bag and hands them to her, “Take packet, turn pen to on position and use.” She scribbles down her number. He fails to mention this encounter when he logs on to Beth that evening, but she senses something has changed. He can’t believe it himself, that what he thought was so vital last night is now as hollow as a shell, a shelter of sea-dust which he needed for awhile as he sank in his ocean of self-pity. He has healed, evidently, and is ready to abandon his hideout, to step onto dry land, to evolve. A move like this takes months, then takes just an hour. “I dreamed about you,” she types and each letter releases a pindrop of energy onto Scott’s dusty monitor. “Cool,” he responds, “I hope this doesn’t mean I’m a new release at your Blockbuster on the brain.” “Maybe so. I’ll title you Id-iana Jones.” He thinks to tell her that Farewell My Lovely would be more appropriate, but holds off. “Cool……,” he lets the ellipses dangle into “gotta go i’m afraid” and he shuts her down. The following night he resists the overwhelming desire to call Wendy and make sure that she is not just another hallucination, some trick put forth by a jealous Angie who wants to be his sole long-distance lover. Instead he does what has become habit. But this time he has a new mission. He is going to dump what he is through with. Scott crumples a paper cup in his shaking fist and drops it to the street. He has no memory of when he picked the cup up or if he drank what it had held. The modem amplifies the dial tone, then generates seven bleeps to call the CompuServe mainframe. It answers not with

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a warm “hello,” but with a high-pitched scream. In return, Scott’s modem lets out its own discordant squeal, the sound of seals mating or the shower scene from Psycho played at 78 revolutions per minute. His communication software, however, blankets it in calmer terms. “Negotiating,” reads the monitor, then “Shaking Hands.” His breath has become thick and knotted, sucking in and blowing out a long length of rope, as if his lungs were seminal, as if giving CPR to a ghost whose form, now and always, rests close to his skin. His arms swing on creaking hinges, his knees rise, fall, and shatter, rise, fall, and shatter. Still, he manages a pathetic little jump over the open grave that has appeared suddenly in the middle of the park’s East Drive. You have entered basic services CB SIMULATOR CB-10 1 ** Welcome New CB Users ** Read This First (FREE) 2 Guidelines for Behavior (FREE) 3 Access CB General Band + 4 Access CB Adult I Band + 5 Access CB Adult II Band + 6 Entertainment Center 7 Special Pricing - The CB Club 8 Cupcake’s CB Society Column + 9 CB Forum + 10 CB Profiles Enter choice

He double-clicks on 4, then chooses the channel Desire. A window opens and Beth is inside.

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Diva28: Sweetness! Triton: Hoy-Hoy my peach. Diva28: Feeling better today? Triton: well... Freud Flintstone: better than what? HAHAHAHAH Triton: let’s go someplace private.

Just a mile and a half to go. Too far. Too far by far. He needs a trick or a pill or a piggyback. He has read books on how to survive. He knows the rules. When buried in snow by avalanche, dig around the mouth and drool, tunnel out in the opposite direction of the saliva’s flow. When drowning, simply follow your own patient bubbles to the top. If dead, keep someone behind who can’t get rid of you. If thirsty, pray for warm rain. At Woodstock, children made love to the rain. In college, acid would blow in from a nearby factory and his umbrella would rust. In high school they were crazy for heavy storms. He and Angie would pile into the car and go driving through town, wipers too slow to do any good, streets lifeless except for the sudden opening into a distant galaxy, triggered by a crack of lightning. TERMINAL MODE USERS PLEASE NOTE: The navigation commands /GO and /OFF, etc, do not work here. You must type /EXIT or /MENU to leave the band. NEWCOMERS: Please join us on Channel 2 of the General Band any evening from 6:00pm till 2:00am EDT where a CB Helper is available to welcome and assist you. * *

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Diva28: tell me what you want Triton: I feel like i’m missing something Diva28: what do you mean? Triton: like I don’t know how to talk about things /han Scott Your handle has been changed Diva28: not sure I understand? Scott: the fact that we communicate without even knowing what each other looks like ***Diva28 is now Beth*** Beth: Not for me... - maybe for you... I don’t know Scott: Maybe I just don’t want to get hurt again Scott: i think i just reached a point where chat and phone was not satisfying enough? Beth: That’s ok. I just would prefer that you say so. Beth: I think it’s good that... Scott: I don’t want to put a... Beth: Scott, if wishes were horses... Scott: funeral wreath on a door. ***Beth has exited channel. /exit [END SESSION]

Seven

The escalator carries Scott up to a better place: Home Electronics. In truth, he did not mind following Wendy around, through the gauntlet of cosmetics counters and perfume snipers spraying the latest scents at any outstretched arm, but when she made her way to the sleepwear section the dynamic changed. Other women stared at him in discomfort and he felt a bad sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if he had wandered into a women’s bathroom by mistake. “Um, maybe I’ll meet you upstairs by the stereos?” “What, you’re abandoning me already?” “Yes, that’s how it goes on a first date with me. Soon as things start to get interesting, I seek shelter in high fidelity equipment. Besides, that woman over there holding the body stocking has an evil glint in her eye.” “Well, I like a man who knows where he’s going, even if it’s to another floor. OK, I won’t be that long.” “Take your time…get me a nice, strapless number.” “Nah, we’ll just pick you up a roll of Saran Wrap later, you’d look good in that.” “Kinky,” he whispered into her ear as he nudged his way past her and toward the clunking sound of the old, wooden, mechanical stairs. What he was thinking, though, was more complex than that. Part of him was highly aroused to be here with her, thrilled she had agreed so readily to go out with him, albeit on her terms.

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But he was less than enthralled by her choice of Macy’s as their rendezvous spot, and now there was the additional concern that she might actually believe Scott is a man who “knows where he’s going.” Couldn’t she see that a guy who stood by happily as he was being sprayed with perfume is not necessarily a take-charge kind of fellow? That someone whose quote-unquote career involves finding suitable homes for junk-mail might not have the strongest moral compass? If he could fake it long enough, perhaps his good looks and sense of humor would be enough to win her over. Maybe her own momentum of wanting a boyfriend will negate any of his flaws that would otherwise slow her down. Scott watches each step collapse onto itself and disappear just as it reaches its peak, and the sensation is all too familiar. Ten minutes later, eyes shut and brain oblivious to the mass consumerism going on around him, Scott sways to the sounds coming in through the headphones, REM’s You Are the Everything. A tap on his shoulder brings him round and he expects to see her there smiling at his ability to lose himself so completely. What he sees instead is a bald and weary sales clerk giving him the same evil stare he encountered from the body stocking woman. The stare that says, “Get lost you big loser.” “Sir,” the clerk says in a tired voice, “This woman has been waiting patiently to sample those headphones. Would you mind giving her a turn?” Wendy was trying her hardest not to laugh but when Scott saw her there, two loaded down shopping bags at her feet, and a mock grimace across her face, he let out a small involuntary cackle and that set her off as well. He removed the headphones from around his neck and placed them gently over her ears. The sales clerk shook his head and wandered off for his break. Out on the street at last, Scott is rejuvenated by the brisk air perfumed only by bus fumes and the smoke wafting from a nearby souvlaki cart. “The hell with Chanel,” he tells her, “The scent of

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burning meat would attract a lot more men.” He carries her bags full of family Christmas gifts and a new pair of men’s pajamas for herself. “Where now?” he asks. “Anywhere you want, but as for me I’ve got to get home and shampoo the cat, or feed my hair, or something.” “What? Already? Not much of a date.” “You had lingerie, music, and the smell of burning meat, what more could you ask for?” “Well, traditionally….” “Yeah, yeah…,” her voice trailed off to a quiet exhale and she brought her face close to Scott’s, hesitated, and then closed her lips softly onto his for a good quarter-minute. “Call me,” she told him when their gaze broke. “I will,” he said when he came out of his stupor, but he found himself talking to no one, standing alone on a subway platform, still holding her bags, and she back at the token booth looking at him like he was insane. How he and Wendy have managed to persevere for almost three years now is a mystery. The arguments, the successes, and the sex have all been of no lesser or greater intensity than during his other attempts at monogamy. There has been no heart-tearing explosion, no suffocating failure of communication. Was it that Wendy had some incredible ability to stick with what she wanted and the time accrued by her fortitude allowed love to take root? Or was it simply the law of averages kicking in? Was it that like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, he had gone through the relationship rituals so many times he finally managed to get everything right? Or was it that Angie’s hold on him was beginning to break? At this point in his life had Angie become a marble, a mere cat’s eye, to be kept in his pocket? Maybe he barely holds her real significance and remembers only that he must keep her, the same way he knows not to walk under ladders, the way a shaman knows he must keep his cures? “No,” Scott whispers into the wind, “she is right here with me.” Though so is Wendy along with all the biochemical

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burden that a prolonged commitment spawns: the dread of losing her, the physical need to hear her speak, a penchant for selfsacrifice. What’s left of Scott wants nothing more than to be taken into her embrace, to receive her soft wisecracking voice like warm plasma. “The iceman cometh,” she would say, or, “I thought I’d thaw a Puddy-Scott.” His runner’s trot is more a stiff-legged lurching but he at last has the sense that he is home free. He is in familiar territory, just one block away from Central Park South, a last slab of street before the beeline to the finish. The cold air has essentially hardened around him so he feels he should be able to glide like a hockey puck, but no such luck. Every uneven step is a crisis, every aching joint is a date gone wrong, each numb finger is someone’s widow. A murder scene awaits him as he exits the park. Grim blue police barricades hold back a smattering of damp, chilled, next of kin. They are all waiting for someone past due and seeing Scott only worries them. He is little more than a chalk outline on the verge of dissolving. As he approaches the Seventh Avenue entrance to the park, it hits him. This is the spot where German Silva made his famous blunder one year ago, give or take two hours. In his own desire to find a better life, to cheat death by a tenth of a mile, Silva strayed from the official course, turning here instead of the Columbus Avenue entrance. A foreigner in a strange land who saw the easy and logical way out and took it, but then thought again. The yells of the crowd and the cameramen weakened his powers of reason, muted his desire for solitude, and lured him back to the road well taken. Scott knows where Silva went wrong. Instead of turning right, Scott must take a left and hightail it down Seventh Avenue. He must pass up the chance to break into Carnegie Hall and make his singing debut, overcome his craving for a beer at PJ Carney’s, and focus all his strengths on getting to the subway station at 57th Street. He must insert a token of his affection into the specific

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turnstile that has tracked the number of ego trips he has taken on all the various underground platforms around the city. He must make his way onto the tracks and, with no train in sight, use his being’s very last drop of moisture to kiss the third rail, to jolt him directly into the cerebral cortex of Wendy or the warm closet of heaven where Angie awaits. He takes a good long look, but the barricades have him blocked in. He could not jump them even if he wanted and his spine would surely snap if he attempted to bend. Beyond the line of people who are shouting their misguided words of support, he sees cars zipping through the cross streets like so many needles closing a wound. The sidewalks are dotted with pedestrians making their way toward him, their umbrellas blown inside out, their black coats and hats, their black pants and gloves, absorbing the world’s last remnants of heat. Scott reconsiders his options. If he can run full on into a tree he will shatter, but that is a fate he would rather save for Philip. If he holds his breath he will create a perfect vacuum and be sucked out of the universe. Tempting, but he remembers there is a video still in his VCR that he promised Wendy he’d return. If he heeds the blue line and allows it to pull him to the proper finish, everything on the other side of the ribbon will be measured in terms of Wendy forever. Maybe that is not bad. Maybe that is what he should be wanting. Unlike Christopher Columbus, whose statue stands trapped high above a traffic circle just ahead and facing away from the park, Scott must make a voyage to the known world, surrendering hope of the unexpected. He turns his back on the thousands of apartments, and the women inside of them who perhaps see Scott on TV and smile, and enters Central Park. Soon, to his right, the broad expanse of Sheep Meadow will appear, his favorite part of the park. He would tan there on August weekends (oh, to lie down), he would toss a football there with Wendy (Christ, to spiral through the air), he would picnic and feel

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the warm wind curving in his arm pits, the serenity of his saliva finding purchase in the plush lawn, his blister-free toes and calm lungs absorbing the summer day. Ahead and to his left, nearly camouflaged amid the eastern hedge of Tavern on the Green and all but lost behind the wilting crowd, looking more like a lawn jockey than a martyr, will be the wee statue of Fred Lebow, chief of the New York Roadrunners Club and kingpin of the marathon until brain cancer stopped him cold one month shy of last year’s race. There was productive surgery in ‘91 and a remission in ‘92 which he saw as possibly his last chance to take the run. With the Nordic champion Grete Waitz staying by him for the entire 5 hours and 32 minutes, he dragged himself through every borough, transforming Waitz into a living pun, defying doctor’s orders, taunting his very cells while his companion, already a nine-time winner and so uncaring as to her own speed, provided a one-woman life support squad. Here, immortalized, he is suffering still. The trademark ball cap forever concealing the surgical scars, a malignant skull under bronze flesh. He is posed, one arm akimbo, the other slightly outstretched, his eyes peering down to the large watch welded onto his wrist. A dead man checking the time, the unmovable tonnage of a spry runner. The longer his steel eyes make contact with the frozen second-hand, the longer the dead must hold their breath. The space between the road and Scott’s uplifted foot aches with absence. The pedestal that holds Lebow is a vault without a lock. He wants to go to it, kick it open with his calloused heel and find inside the secret papers of the early departed, the private reasoning behind a premature grave. He thought if there was anyone who could have mastered the arts of the undead, it would have been Lebow. Scott had absorbed his biography. Born Fischl Lebowitz, he was sired only doors away from Dracula in a small Transylvanian village in 1932, the same year that FDR was elected,

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leading Hoover to predict that “Grass will grow in the streets of a hundred cities.” He survived the Nazi occupation then got the hell out of town, ultimately setting foot in New York in the 1960’s. He surrendered part of his name along the way, thus it is pronounced LEE-bow, rather than with a French accentuation. His brother Michael lost half a consonant more, opting for Lebov, while the other siblings, Simcha, Schlomo, Sarah and Esther held firm to their witz. Lebow did manage one small cheat against death. After taking in his own funeral on the Upper West Side, en route to his new digs in the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, he took a detour through this park, through his own grassy streets. With eight police motorcycles leading the procession the motorcade took a victory lap, crossing the same finish line that is now so easily within Scott’s grasp, but which is infinitely far away. He remembers Zeno’s Paradox, learned back in Philosophy 101. If he gets halfway to the finish, then halfway again and again and again, he could never reach the goal. The only way to finish would be to stop. He looks to the statue for an answer and, to his surprise, he finds one. Lebow has vanished and, in his place, an angel stands on point, reaching out to him with her small gift. Scott commands his feet to stop but they do not obey. His body is now just so many handfuls of metal filings being drawn to the finish line. Like space debris caught in a gravitational pull, or Little Boy during its drop, there is no stopping this. There is no stopping at all, his breath and his life and his loss and his total exhaustion cannot end and so it is the angel who must take wing and come to him. In his delirium he sees her alight from the pedestal and float low over the race, coming toward him, the face of course familiar, who he knew she was all along. She circles him and he smells the perfume he last smelled on a prom night decades ago. She swan dives, recovers, then sets her sight on a female runner to Scott’s right. He sees her rise high into the trees then power dive directly toward the

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unsuspecting woman, but rather than collide, when the ghost flesh strikes the runner it is absorbed. Angie fighting her way inside of the living so that Scott may take her back. “Hey,” he calls out to her, “Hey!” The runner turns and sees, in Scott’s gaze, a disturbing twinkle. It tells her that here is a guy not offering friendly advice or motivational well wishes. Actually, the look in his eyes tells her to run faster, forget about even the race and get the hell away from this lunatic. Yards from the finish and she has the luck of attracting a creep. Just great. She breaks into a slow sprint and Scott, as energized on hope as he is doped by dehydration and hypothermia, begins to gain on her. He is two arm lengths away when suddenly he is struck with the cinemascope feeling he is in a movie. Even worse, the movie is The Wizard of Oz. He is Tin Man and the harder he tries to get to her, to touch the ruby headband that is holding back her hair, that when released would uncork Angie into his arms, the more rusted he becomes till he cannot move at all. He is frozen in place on the roadway, mirroring Lebow’s statue, part Jack Haley sans oilcan, part Pygmalion. What miniscule perspiration he can muster casts a sheen over his hard skin. He trembles with exhaustion and exhaustion, he now learns, is the real patina of pain. Standing there helpless he is vaguely aware of other voices urging him on, telling him he cannot stop now that he has come this far. But he thinks otherwise, remembering back to how he laid in bed all morning after hearing of her death. How he failed to understand how life could go on in the face of continuous dyings, how any family learns to forget enough about their loved ones to move through a day. Should we not halt, shouldn’t our grief constrain us for years to honor all the lost steps of the dead? Scott feels the seconds ticking by over his head, his muscles now truly stiffening and his breath getting shallower. He wants to turn solid or turn back. His eyes close for a long moment to block out

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the sight of the finish line, and when he opens them there is a woman coming toward him, a woman wearing one of his coats and clutching a water bottle and a container of soup. The sight of her melts his fear, but in its place a flame of anger bolts from his gut toward his tongue. He feels the words start to take shape in his parched mouth, feels his upper row of teeth taking their mark on his lower lip, ready to rise up with the formation of a consonant, followed by the plosive that will unstick him from this problem, before setting down to rest on what will then be a smiling lip. A big step toward solving this disaster of moving on with his love while Angie’s ghost is in need of rescue; and surely he must get to her for only she can bestow a new heart. Wendy comes fast upon him and he unleashes the barrage of screams like cannon fire: “FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF!” Now it is her turn to freeze. They simply stand there looking into each other’s eyes. Wendy searches for a glint of recognition, the warmth she usually finds, but sees only two dilated and distant marbles peering right through her. Part of her knows he is not himself. He needs some help right now and that is clearly her duty, to calm him down and get some liquids into his system. But another part of her is just plain fed up. How dare he in public, and in those words which he had never before even come close to using on her. One hand wants to give him water and the other is cupped and ready to slap his face when suddenly Scott closes his eyes and a visible spasm of pain runs the course of his body. She nears him and rubs the water bottle against his closed fist. His fingers open and he accepts, takes a long swig and, like a dog that suddenly understands his source for sustenance, his place on the food chain, he nuzzles Wendy, head to her shoulder, arms gripping her gently. “Sorry,” he hears himself say, and then something that sounds like, “She was so close.” Wendy, at first, takes this to mean the end of the race, made feminine like the ocean. But then she understands that that was not it at all.

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“Wonderful, perfect,” she tells him, pulling herself away, “Now that you’re rehydrating, why don’t you take your dead prom date for a non-victory lap. I’m sure the two of you, as usual, will be very happy together.” Scott, thinks to himself, “I want to kill her,” then can’t help but smile at the irony: “Maybe I’d love her more if she were dead. Talk about competing for one’s affections.” Then, an afterthought, directed at one or both of them. “Let go of me,” he says to the empty space around him. The flesh and blood Wendy was already gone, through with him, slump-shouldered, herself about to cross the finish line, the shortest marathon ever run. Scott did not train this long to have her win out, so, finding his footing he takes off to end the race. Wendy senses his approach and begins to run, obviously intending now to beat him. She is no runner though, plus she is in low heels so Scott easily sidles up to her and just as he is ready to pass, she gives him a gentle elbow to the ribs and the shock of it starts him laughing. He responds by moving directly in front and slowing to a snail’s pace, not letting her around, making her try to shove him out of the way. He turns and runs backwards taunting her on, and that is indeed how he finishes, running in reverse with his girlfriend half pushing, half tickling him onward. The clock above him reads 4:57:09. A small group of volunteers applaud his efforts and they are both given shiny aluminum thermal wraps in which to bundle up. They go and find an empty patch of lawn past where the mobs are reclaiming their warm-up clothes. She gives him the soup and he kisses her ear. He tells her he’s sorry and she rubs the back of her hand over his bare knee. It is these small forgivings that hold their love in place. Scott thinks of it as an engine in need of a tune up, that instead of having it always sputter and then rebound, he need merely install a solid gold gasket around her finger and they will function like new. But then there is that other matter, the ghost in their machine. Scott lives with it like a familiar rattle

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but to Wendy it is an ominous fracture, invading, weakening her territory. Scott knows that she is right but that he is right too. It is the width of this gap that he must measure, the space of their distance apart minus their love and divided by their physical attraction must come to equal not two, and certainly not three. Doing this math of marriage in his mind as he slurps down the last noodle, he finds it is actually algebra, with ever-changing variables and as always, no definitive solution. Wendy is the future but how dare he have one? He lays his head down on her lap and sighs. “What now?” he wants to know. “We take you home,” she tells him. Lug you home, is what she actually thinks but would never say. Even that small verb is proof to her that he is worth the trouble. What Scott knows of her is only what she reveals, she is blessed by his shallowness. He will not find out, at least not for a while, that her nickname in college was “Lug,” an acronym for Lesbian Until Graduation. She had experimented with many lovers, but struck upon no worthwhile results. He does not know that he arrived beside her on that park bench just as she was dying to abandon the circle of friends she had tired of, and she has always found it a relief that he never thought her solitude odd. She went about acquiring Scott as a passport to a world of normalcy, figuring she could lose herself in his handsomeness if things ever got rough. She had not counted on his secret ghost club and the black-hole fear of commitment that blossomed around it. She measures her patience and wonders how much she has left. She needs a sign of his real intent and she needs it tonight. A volunteer tosses a leftover bottle of water to them, smiles and waves as if nothing is wrong. Scott twists off the lid and pours a slow stream into his mouth, saturating his tongue, letting it breathe and splash like his long ago goldfish. Wendy pulls the bottle from his hand and takes a long swig for herself. Without

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asking. Exactly as she had done with his pretzel the day they had met. This is at the center of it, Scott thinks. Bread and water taken from him, his violation and her liberty. A little war over life’s essentials. “May I have that back, please?” “No.” He cannot tell if she is teasing or is truly being cruel. He feels both anger and love tightening his shoulders. He takes a deep breath and the thought that passes through his mind relaxes him at once: “What I do not feel is indifference, even after all this time.” Leaning heavily on Wendy’s shoulder, Scott surveys the scene as they make their way out of the park through the 72nd Street exit. They are surrounded by thousands of limping and slow moving people in silver capes like rejects from a superhero audition. They pass by dozens of men who are leaving by themselves. Most have pained expressions and tread as if walking a minefield. “At least there is that,” Scott thinks to himself, “At least I have come this far.” Now, they are in a cab and heading home, cruising north up Central Park West. Scott is craving a hot bath, by himself, shielded by his shower curtain of pigs. Wendy is speaking a long slow stream of words that, like the cold, reflect off his poncho and scatter out the window that is opened just enough to send a breeze through her hair. Scott feels the road under him, the definite contact of the tires as they find a pothole or increase their revolutions to pass a bus. The cigarette in his mouth is warm and delicious. Its trail of white smoke floats out of the cab, a signal. Like the Vatican’s quaint way of declaring a new pope. A decision has been made. The rumble of the cheap engine is mesmerizing and the back seat so like a sofa and the Plexiglas between the driver and Scott so like the booth he would feed dollars through to topless women. Scott’s eyes are transfixed on the dashboard. The

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cabdriver’s license is taped there. His name seems to consist only of consonants and it all turns to soup in his mind. Xyjlbk Trjklmy. Ylsnvklpr Dwlk. The meter jumps in intervals of cents to the right of a blinking decimal, another way of measuring time— dollars into seconds. This never occurred to Scott when running the race, but now he thinks it must have been a very solid thought to the winners. They knew the formula all along, the direct opposite of the cabby’s, the shorter the time, the higher the payoff. The driver’s hands on the wheel are confident, occasionally leaving their perch to scratch the back of the head, to adjust the radio which is perhaps on. The speedometer is a chronology of years. There is a limit it is not safe to pass and while some have been stopped well short of thirty-five, Scott feels his chest turn into a chassis and imagines the speedometer’s needle pushing hard for seventy. He tugs at his seatbelt. The buckle is cool as stone. He glances at Wendy. How vulnerable she looks with her Mylar warmer removed. He scans the length of the dashboard. The air vents throb with heat. The ashtray holds a browned apple core. The open glovebox is a coffin of maps.

About the Author

Stanford Friedman is the Senior Research Librarian for Conde Nast, in New York City. Born and raised in Springfield, Ohio, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University as well as an MLS in Library Science from Rutgers. His poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous national print and online publications and he is a frequent contributor to Publishers Weekly. Learn more at his personal website: stanfordfriedman.com.