When I left Weiss at the Agency that night, I stood a long while on the corner of Market and Third. The rain had tapered away to nearly nothing by then, a ripple in the gutter puddles, a shimmer in the sheen of the streetlights on the wet pavement. I stood while the crossing sign went from DON’T WALK to WALK. Then it went from WALK to DON’T WALK again and I was still there, still standing. I was holding my cell phone down by my side. It was off. I had turned it off while I was with Weiss. I was rolling it over and over in my hand.
I felt—well, I felt a lot of ways. But more than anything else, I felt inspired. These ideas I had—all this palaver about the full and indivisible reality of the imagination—they had never been so clear to me before, so articulate, so exciting. And I knew full well the reason for it: Emma McNair. It was because of that conversation she and I had had at Carlo’s. Not just the things we said, but the way she let me rattle on without looking at me as if I were boring or insane. The way she had put her hand out to cover mine and the way she’d encouraged me in my ambitions. What would it be like, I stood there asking myself—how inspired would I be—if I could have conversations like that with her all the time? Especially if we could have them naked. What couldn’t a man accomplish with a woman like her to accept him and believe in him and pretend he was making some kind of sense?
It came back to me now—I had pushed it from my mind, but now it came back—how she had written her phone number on the Carlo’s coaster, how she had said so touchingly, “I’m just a girl in real life, and I’ll be very hurt if you don’t use this right soon.” Almost two weeks had gone by since then, two weeks of nights with Sissy, and I hadn’t called. What had I been thinking?
Then and there, determination flowered in me. I flipped the cell phone open. Turned it on. I had sat in my room and read the number on that coaster a hundred times. I knew it by heart. I was about to dial it. But before I could, the phone gave off a little tune. I had a message. It was from Sissy.
“Where’s my little sweetie tonight?” her recorded voice whispered to me. “I’ve looked all over for him. Where can he be?”
I was repelled. At first. But then she went on to explain at some length exactly why she was looking for her little sweetie and what she was planning to do with him when she found him. And holding the phone to my ear with one hand, I hailed a cab with the other.
Thus, ignominiously and unworthily and a lesson to us all, my small part in this story comes to an end.