Starshine’s first job in New York, as a nineteen-year-old nonentity fresh off the bus from San Francisco, was working the cash register at a Kosher-style delicatessen on Broome Street. The proprietor’s name was Nat Napthali. He was a stunted, droopy creature, a pension-fund manager turned restaurateur, who sincerely believed that with enough up front capital and a wax pencil tucked behind his ear, he could reap a cash cow from overcooked brisket and third-cut pastrami. His goal was to franchise, to “do for the Jews what Pizza Hut had done for the Italians.” Napthali’s Noshes survived for nine months; Starshine’s tenure lasted eleven days. She despised the ingrained stench of sizzling meat that seeped into her pores during the workday, that accompanied her home like an unwanted puppy; she hated Napthali’s gambit of intentionally overpaying her at the end of a shift to probe her integrity. But more than anything else, she detested the proprietor’s oblique and ongoing critique of her attire. He never said Please wear this, please don’t wear that. Instead, he confined himself to periodic barbs of the most pernicious sort, speciously casual observations on the height of hemlines and the merits of pantyhose and the podiatric dangers of wearing sandals, all phrased in the abstract to preclude any response. But when he finally informed her, point-blank in response to an accounting error, that a successful businesswoman showed less thigh and more thoroughness, she pulled up her skirt, gave the dumbstruck old ass a lot more than thigh, and stormed out. The next morning, Starshine adopted her employment mantra, a variation on the counsel to mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes, and she has never since worn shoes to any job interview. She stashes them in her handbag beforehand as a matter of principle. It they won’t hire her barefoot, she won’t do their bidding.
Starshine glided from counter girl to canvasser without the cushion of a golden parachute, without even the security of unemployment benefits. Wing-tipped loafers merit severance packages; barefoot women get paid under the table. So she stumbled through a series of short-term positions, maxing out her credit cards, nearly making ends meet, one foot on the threshold of gainful occupation and the other in the door of the almshouse. She answered phones for an East Village piercing parlor, rolled bagels in a mom and pop doughnut shop, played hostess at a short-lived restaurant for sadomasochists. One summer, she clerked at Brooklyn’s only vegan pet-food store; another, she painted fire hydrant heads for the city’s Department of Public Works, red for high pressure, green for low pressure, until her foreman decided to finger-paint the inside of her uniform. She even tried out as a lap dancer for an upscale Tribeca strip club, but never replied to their job offer. In four years, Starshine has briefly dabbled with babysitting, lifeguarding, fact checking, copyediting, dog walking, billboard design, yoga instruction, reproductive counseling, acupuncture promotion, and vintage clothing retail, a veritable pharmacopeia of thirty-six different jobs that don’t require footwear, only to conclude that employment of any sort is both arduous to obtain and highly overrated. Her goal has always been fame, not fortune. As a teenager, long before she’d cycled off her extra baby fat and conquered her relentless acne, before she’d learned to color her hair so it looked more natural that it did without dye, her fantasy had been to walk into a room as though strutting onto a stage, forcing all around her to take notice. Fame was the opposite of isolation, of insignificance. Fame meant you mattered. But rising above the fray in a city where overexposed, underqualified young women are as abundant as Norwegian rats and summer mosquitoes, standing out in this mecca for would-be celebrities, where each displaced heartland farm girl aspires to be a fashion model and every undiscovered waitress in a tight sweater fancies herself the next Lana Turner, has proven itself an elusive feat. And Starshine’s lack of a specific calling, what she terms her versatility, has made it all the more difficult. For Starshine doesn’t covet any particular form of stardom; she doesn’t yearn to play Broadway or sing at Carnegie Hall or dance at Lincoln Center. She simply wants to be famous, a household name. The end is imperative; the approach incidental. So in the meantime, having served her apprenticeships and mastered the art of marginal employment, she ekes out her living from month to month on the payroll of the Cambodian Children’s Fund.
Starshine’s appearance eases the monotonous routine of the building staff on her way into the office: She lets the lobby clerk ogle her cleavage while she signs the register, smiles at the elevator porter until he turns red as a sugar beet. An overalled maintenance worker carrying a ladder pauses in the corridor to undress her with his eyes. She throws him a seductive leer over her shoulder. It is fun; it is harmless. Off the streets, in the quasi-public office building that the Children’s Fund shares with the Better Business Bureau and the Veterans Administration, the attention of strangers is flattering. And evanescent. She is protected by the comforts of numbers, by the knowledge that these men are professional gawkers and not personal threats.
The waiting room is empty when Starshine arrives. There’s no sign of Jessie, the part-time receptionist. The girl is one of Starshine’s favorite living beings, a nearsighted Irish kid out of the Bronx who speaks with a thick New York accent and runs the office like a machine tool shop. She’s all spunk, that Jessie, and Starshine loves her to death. But today, just when Starshine wants to pick her brain for romantic advice, get an opinion from someone who has been around the block a few times, a counterbalance to Eucalyptus’s morning sermon, it seems that the girl has gone into hiding. Starshine tries the conference room and pokes her head into the supply closet. No luck.
“Anybody home?” she calls out.
“Give me a minute!”
The voice pierces the door of Marsha Riley’s office, followed moments later by the rounded form of the fund director herself. Marsha is a widow on the far side of sixty. Her features are sharp, her breasts heavy, her hair colored a synthetic shade of henna. The scallop-shell chain around her neck jingles when she walks. But although Marsha is not pretty, not even for a matron of a certain age, she carries herself with the self-assured elegance of a woman who has outgrown such a minor constraint as homeliness and never looked back. Capitalizing on her husband’s small legacy and her extensive connections, she has launched a one-woman crusade for the most innocent victims of the wars of Indochina. And if she can be the archetypal hostess, a poor man’s Pamela Harriman who quotes Shakespearean sonnets while smoking cork-tipped cigarettes, she can just as easily bombard you with detailed accounts of the atrocities in Cambodia and Vietnam. Marsha has no compunction when it comes to procuring pasteurized milk for infants or shielding toddlers from land mines. She will talk and put her money where her mouth is. She’ll march her way onto the floor of the statehouse or into a cell at Riker’s Island. She even made headlines in the late-1980s for pouring a martini into the lap of the Senate Minority Leader. There is no limit to Marsha Riley’s love for young people. She has devoted her golden years to playing foster-grandmother to the foundlings of Harlem and Brownsville and to raising funds for the orphans of Southeast Asia. Maybe this is altruism. Maybe it is compensation. For Marsha’s love is the peculiar breed of adoration, bordering on awe, unique to maternal women without children. She showers Starshine with all the affection she might show her own daughter, and yet, possibly because her devotion is so universal and non-discriminating, Starshine has never been able to reciprocate.
“What a morning!” declares Marsha. “If it hasn’t been one thing, it has been another. Make yourself a cup of tea, dear, and come sit with me a minute. I’m more than ready for a break.”
“What’s going on?” Starshine asks. “Where’s Jessie?”
She pours herself a glass of hot water in the office kitchenette and settles down on one of the vinyl love seats in the waiting room. Marsha sinks into the swivel chair at the reception desk and rests her chin on her crossed arms.
“Jessie’s grandmother passed away,” says Marsha. “She sounded like a truly amazing woman. She was ninety-seven and still stitched her own dresses. I’m—well, I’m not nearly ninety-seven—and I can hardly sew on a button. I guess ninety-seven’s a ripe old age. All the same, I wish the dear lady could have held on another week. The phones have been ringing off the hook all morning. “
“It’s pretty quiet right now.”
“There’s a reason for that, dear. I pulled the central cable out of the jack. It was getting so bad I could barely hear myself think. I didn’t have a choice. “
“Why are we so popular all of a sudden?”
“This is why,” says Marsha, sliding the op-ed page of the Daily News across the reception desk. “The Catholic Archdiocese issued a statement condemning euthanasia at VA hospitals. Read the cardinal’s column. The old windbag doesn’t hold his punches. He uses the words pandemic and genocide in one sentence. And I particularly like the passage about more soldiers being murdered in the wards of New York City than in foxholes abroad. But take a look at the bottom of the article. “
“It says call the Veterans Administration to protest. Am I missing something?”
“Nothing the rest of the city hasn’t already noticed. That’s not the contact info for the Veterans Administration. That’s our address and phone number. I already called the city desk at the Daily News and the editor assured me he confirmed his information with the building switchboard. So I called the switchboard and they said they don’t know anything about it. Meanwhile, every Sunday school teacher and Knight of Columbus in the city has a death wish for us. And they’re not just calling. There were two priests and a seminary student waiting in the corridor when I showed up this morning. It’s never-ending madness.”
“I’m glad you’re the boss. All I have to do is canvass.”
“I don’t deserve this grief, dear,” says Marsha. “I go to mass every Sunday.”
“This too shall pass.”
“Not soon enough. The important thing is that I need you to cover the office for a couple of hours this afternoon while I go down to Saint Patrick’s and convince them to issue a retraction. Is three to five okay?”
Starshine rapidly calculates the amount of time she will need with Jack and Aunt Agatha. Five o’clock for the Staten Island ferry is pushing it, but she knows she can duck out early. She has done it before. She is about to agree to hold down the fort when a visitor enters the office. The newcomer is a tall, reedy white man who stands bent forward like a broken bulrush. He desperately needs both a shave and a change of clothes. Starshine rolls her eyes at Marsha. Another crazy. They’re always headed to the Veterans Bureau to vent their frustrations, but somehow they end up at the Children’s Fund upstairs by mistake. Ninety-nine percent of the time these veterans are thoroughly benign. Once, however, a deranged ex-marine bit Starshine on the ankle, resulting in weeks of panic and a battery of medical tests, so she cringes instinctively at the stranger’s approach. She keeps one hand near the telephone to call security. Just in case.
“How can we help you?” asks Marsha in a singsong voice. “What can we do for you at the Cambodian Children’s Fund?”
The visitor steps forward rapidly and slams a stack of carbon copies on the reception desk. “How come you don’t answer my letters?” he demands. “I’m fed up with this shit. I know my rights. “
“If you would kindly tell me your name, sir,” prompts Marsha.
“My name’s King. David King. You know who I am!”
The man’s nostrils flare when he speaks; a tick afflicts his left eye. Starshine picks up the telephone receiver and realizes that the lines are dead. She has no idea where to find the central cable.
“Are you sure you’re looking for the Cambodian Children’s Fund?” asks Marsha.
“How the hell should I know who I’m looking for?” the man shouts back. “All you fuckers give me such a runaround. Go fucking here! Go fucking there! Nobody ever listens to a motherfucking thing I got to say. Meanwhile, I don’t get my money. You’re all a bunch of gold-shitting Jews and I still don’t got my money.”
“Please keep your voice down, sir,” says Marsha. “I think you’ve come to the wrong office.”
“Don’t tell me to keep my fucking voice down! I’ll decide when to keep my fucking voice down! You be happy I don’t come back and slit your goddam throat. Nobody fucking listens to me!”
The man leans over the reception desk and pounds his fist on his stack of papers. Starshine glances at the door, examines her route of escape. Marsha Riley remains stationary, her heavy arms folded across her chest. Then the man turns to his left, as though trying to scratch his shoulder with his chin, and begins arguing with his own elbow. Starshine picks up the words Isaiah and cupboards. It suddenly clicks. This is the demented lunatic whom Jessie was fuming about last week, the guy who thinks the messiah is camped out under his kitchen sink and wants to government to perform an exorcism. Or something like that. Starshine didn’t take much interest in the story at the time, and she is no more interested now. She pays her taxes. She works for a good cause. She even volunteers twice a month at the Presbyterian Mission. This man is not her problem.
“If you’ll kindly follow me, Mr. King,” says Marsha, stepping around the reception desk and taking the veteran by the hand. “I’ll take you up to the Veterans Bureau. Okay, Mr. King? Maybe they’ll be able to help you.”
The fund director leads their visitor to the door.
“Three to five, dear,” she says to Starshine. “Don’t forget.”
And then she’s gone.
Starshine leans back on the love seat and rests her feet on the magazine stand. She’s disappointed in herself and this makes her furious. Why can’t she muster more compassion for this unfortunate veteran? Is she really such an evil person that she feels nothing but disgust? It’s not his fault that he can’t tell a watermelon from a water buffalo. It’s not the florist’s fault that he’s old and lonely. Hannibal Tuck and Jesus Echegaray and Bone, even Bone, are just doing the best they can with what they have. And yet she dislikes them. As much as she wants to take them by the hand and heal their wounds, to play Marsha Riley to all the lost souls in the city, she doesn’t have it in her. She’s too insecure, too busy, too self-absorbed. But there’s more to it than that. Starshine knows the reason she dislikes these men is not that she’s a bad person—not even because she isn’t so far removed from them herself, because if she hadn’t burned off nearly half her body weight and stumbled upon the right skin creams, she could easily have remained unlovable. She dislikes these ugly, confused, desperate creatures for a much deeper, much darker reason. She dislikes them because time is not on her side, because beauty is ephemeral, because, soon enough, she will look like Marsha Riley and then like Aunt Agatha, because it is only a matter of calendar cycles before men no longer turn their heads when she passes.
But no!
She will not think about that.
She is Starshine. She is beautiful. She is happy.
Nearly all of New York’s treasured literary luminaries, during some particularly vexing season preceding their apotheoses, have contemplated premature self-censorship in the torrential eddies of the East River. The waterway itself plays an integral role in this rite of passage. The jagged floes of ice that choke the harbor in late fall and early spring foster the appearance of glacial progress, of the soft lap of a gentle stream, while the aquamarine glimmer of the surface at midsummer transforms one of the world’s most unforgiving currents into a rural swimming hole. To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city has done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge.
Larry Bloom, the paradigm of the despondent young upstart for whom the structure was commissioned, has traversed the pedestrian causeway on exactly 217 occasions. Every Wednesday for more than two years, at approximately half past noon, he leads a detachment of pleasure seekers, fortified with optimism and bottled water, through the intricate web of suspension cables that supports the majestic span; and every Wednesday at half past one, having conquered several poorly defended corners of Brooklyn Heights, he escorts his merry band back into Manhattan to celebrate its victory. Larry is certainly not the most experienced docent on the circuit. He is probably not classified among the most engaging. He is, without a doubt, the only tour leader among the hundreds of underemployed graduate students and retired college librarians and itinerant travel writers piloting foreigners over the channel who can state with absolute precision the number of times he has crossed between boroughs on foot. This anomaly does not reflect some flaw of character, a pernicious compulsion toward the minute and irrelevant. Larry does not double check gas ranges; he feels relatively comfortable in crowds and confined spaces; he does not even recall his mother’s date of birth. Yet for Larry, each encounter with the massive pylons and Gothic arches of Colonel Roebling’s masterpiece has come to stand for another chapter in his tribute to Starshine. The bridge crossings were his motivation, his benchmark. He determined at the outset of his mission that every passage across Hart Crane’s consecrated catwalk, every stroll over Whitman’s cherished water, would coincide with the completion of another page in The Biology of Luck. For most men, Wednesdays are the hump of the week, a hillock to be surmounted; to Larry, they were milestones in his torpid progress toward passion. He set himself a backbreaking schedule and he stuck to it. Day after day, month after month. Yet now, his letter lost and his romantic prospects dimming, he pities himself for the countless hours wasted in a smoke-filled studio apartment, before an aging word processor, churning out pages of drivel for a woman who could never appreciate them. He focuses his anger upon Starshine. She is the cause of his suffering, his stupidity. She is a selfish, love-spoiled bitch, and he will despise her, hate as strongly as he once loved, because the only alternative would be to heave himself into the water.
Pedestrian traffic on the bridge slows toward early afternoon as the lunchtime flurry subsides into a trickle of middle-aged power walkers and twenty-something couples on bicycles. Larry halts his party at midspan, allowing them a moment to admire the vista, to finish off the film in their disposable cameras, and even these unflappable Dutch are modestly impressed. The skyline rises before them like the furnished minarets of some mythic kingdom. This is the postcard city, the metropolis cleansed of its noxious odors and incessant din, purged of its people, a glass and steel backdrop seemingly constructed for the Kodak moments of foreigners. The Dutch lean over the railing and shade their eyes with their hands. Van Huizen waxes rich on the history of the Empire State Building, peppering his wife and the priest with details of square footage and elevator capacity. Larry does not bother to tell him that he is looking at the Chrysler Building. After 217 crossings, even the mistakes have grown stale. Usually Larry pays tribute to the neglected features of the cityscape, the tin roofs of the fish market, the distinctive black smoke billowing from the Standard Oil Building, the gabled spires of Governor’s Island, but this afternoon, without the benchmark of another paragraph to brace him, he retreats to the background and sulks in silence. The Dutch do not need him. Even Rita Blatt does not need him. He is a pathetic creature plagued by limited talent and unrealistic expectations, and he is of absolutely no use to anyone. He cannot hate Starshine. She is the last person he should blame for his shortcomings. She is a gorgeous, generous, thoroughly awe-inspiring young woman who has befriended him out of the kindness of her heart. How can he possibly hate her? He should be grateful. If anyone is the cause of Larry Bloom’s suffering, it is Larry Bloom. The matter is truly quite simple: Some people just don’t have what it takes. Larry swears that he will never again harbor any ill will toward Starshine, that he will cherish her friendship and respect its parameters for the rest of his life, because she is the lone fountain of beauty and decency in his otherwise arid existence. Then he catches sight of the water.
The river is darker than in Whitman’s day. Centuries of barge commerce and unregulated waste disposal have coated the naturally transparent harbor with a tenebrous sheen. Yet the distended reflections of the downtown office towers and the distorted dome of the municipal building instill confidence. The view is so placid, so inviting, like a panorama into which one might step without the slightest discomfort. Larry recalls the impassive face of the dead man, the slack features absolved of all their earthly anxiety, the hollow eyes rid of want and care. What is the use of torturing himself over an improbable book and an impossible girl? Why not spite fate and his own ugliness and end his suffering in the process? Death is not a negative. Death is a neutral. Larry takes one final, lingering look at the Dutch tourists posing for photographs, collecting evidence of their visit for indifferent friends and relatives, contentedly oblivious to the anguish of their ad hoc chieftain. He’d like to think that his death will traumatize them, but he knows that it will not. They have no more interest in his welfare than they do in the fate of the teenage temptress or the protestors beaten at Grant’s Tomb or the businessman consigned to the morgue. And why should they? Thousands of people die every day, stumbling over land mines on the outskirts of peasant villages and slashing each other’s throats with machetes, while millions more abide in squalid poverty. One Larry Bloom, more or less—and, for that matter, one Walt Whitman, more or less—doesn’t make a dime’s worth of difference. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy. Larry steps to the railing, vaults himself onto the security barricade, and closes his eyes. He is falling, plummeting, nearing death, when he suddenly hears the sound of his name reverberating like a drill inside his skull. A man is calling out Larry’s name. A living man. Larry opens his eyes. He is standing 130 feet above the water, on the precipice of death, but he hasn’t yet let go of the guard rail.
The summons shames Larry into retreat. If the results of suicide are painless, the actual act is highly embarrassing. He rescales the security barricade self-consciously, determined to cover his tracks, only to find himself face-to-face with the piteous Peter Smythe. This is the height of humiliation, a fate worse than death. He now owes a life debt to the one man on the planet who has less to live for than he does.
“Larry Bloom,” says Smythe. “I suspected I’d find you here. You’re a creature of habit, if you don’t mind my saying, and I admire that in a man. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I say, then I’ll take a pea-brained fellow any day. That Larry Bloom, I was saying down at the castle, he’s as regular as a bowel movement. You can set your watch by him.”
Smythe chuckles heartily. He holds his stubby hands against the girth of his mammoth paunch as though trying to contain his wit. His bushy gray mustache and ginger cap give him the appearance of a pushcart vendor who has sampled one too many apples from his own cart. Smythe is the city’s assistant deputy parks commissioner for Historical Cartography. He occupies a dank, cell-like office beneath the battleworks of Castle Clinton where he studies nineteenth-century traffic patterns and the placement of antebellum drainage pipes. Forty years of devoted civil service have bleached his complexion and crippled his vision, so that in his later years, he has grown into a colorless being who might actually have been born Peter Smythe rather than Fyodor Szymsky. Smythe’s one claim to Larry’s friendship is that three years earlier, on a sultry June afternoon much like this one, he’d introduced the novice tour guide to the city’s most attractive woman. Starshine Hart had heard from some ex-boyfriend, a professional treasure hunter, that Captain Kidd’s cache of riches had never been recovered. He’d planted in her brain the idea that the missing loot was buried under the Water Street landfill and she’d found her way to Smythe’s crypt searching for an easy fortune. Larry, having abandoned his treatise on disasters, was briefly dabbling with the idea of a book on the synthetic geology of Manhattan. The aged cartographer, hoping to impress Starshine with his connections and work his way into her pants, inadvertently brought them together. So Larry pursued treasure and Smythe pursued Starshine. Later, Smythe pursued Starshine’s roommate. All parties came up empty handed. Yet Peter Smythe, having used Larry once, culled from this experience a claim for future friendship. He sincerely believes, despite the overt evidence to the contrary, that Larry admires him.
“So congratulate me, Larry Bloom,” says Smythe.
“What am I congratulating you for?”
“I’m getting married. You would never have thought it, would you? A bachelor at sixty-eight years and I’m throwing it all away to tie the knot. My friends think I’ve lost it. What’s the point of hitching up at this time of life, they want to know. But I say better late than never. She’s way out of my league too. One hot mamma. The way I see it, Larry Bloom, this gal was worth the wait. “
Larry feels the blood pooling in his stomach. He has lost his letter, lost his romance, aborted his suicide—and now the least attractive man he knows, the crass, self-absorbed, grossly obese Peter Smythe is marrying the woman of his dreams. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. His glorious day is rapidly degenerating into some satanic episode of Candid Camera. He sees the Dutch priest beside Van Huizen and he wonders whether he isn’t better off asking the cleric to marry him to Rita Blatt. On the spot. But then there is the possibility that even she might turn him down, that he’d suffer rejection from a woman for whom he has no romantic interest, whom he actively dislikes, which only reminds him how truly pathetic is his own existence. He’d like nothing more than to roll the hideous cartographer into the water.
“Well, congratulations,” says Larry. “I’m happy for you.”
“She’s really something,” replies Smythe. “She’s a retired home health aide in Nova Scotia. I met her on the computer. In what they call an Internet chat room. We’ve been corresponding for nearly a year, but about a month ago, I finally took the train up to meet her and it was love at first touch. So I proposed on the spot. At my age, Larry Bloom, there’s no time like the present.”
“Well, congratulations again.”
“I bet you’re green with envy, Larry Bloom, but don’t worry. Your time will come. Consistency pays off in the long run.”
“I’m sure.”
Smythe scratches his ear with his fingers and wipes the wax on his trouser leg. He is just the sort of man who would chase you down on the bridge, interrupt your suicide, and then have nothing worthwhile to share. That is not why Larry dislikes him though. He dislikes the cartographer for the only reason people truly dislike one another, because they are all too similar, because he sees his future in Smythe’s isolated labor and Internet romances. He will age into a leaner, less presumptuous Peter Smythe.
“By the way, Larry Bloom,” says Smythe. “I almost forgot. This is business, not pleasure. There’s a reason I’m here. “
“Which is …?”
“I was in the office before you stopped by. You probably didn’t notice me. I was under the information desk, searching through a crate of mildewed brochures. But I heard you mention that you’d lost a letter, and I figured it had to be a love letter for you to care so much. I’ve lost many a love letter in my day. The sort of notes that don’t mean anything to anybody else but keep you from sleeping late at night, fearing you’ll be found out. I’ve been a bachelor all my life. I know how it is. So when the maintenance guy turned in your letter, I thought I’d do you a good turn and bring it straight to you. I’ve heard of Stroop & Stone. They used to have an office in the Flatiron Building, as I recall. Later at 500 Fifth Avenue. They move around a lot.”
“You have my letter?”
“Here you go, lover boy.”
Smythe retrieves the letter from the interior folds of his jacket and hands it to Larry. The envelope bears the scars of both water and coffee, but it is unopened.
“So you’re dating a literary gal,” says Smythe. “Tell me, Larry Bloom, do they put out?”
Smythe chuckles again, his eyes aglow with schoolyard conspiracy. Larry resists his impulse to hug his savior, to embrace the jiggling ball of flesh and to plant a wet kiss on his drooping forehead. His gratitude is fleeting. The old man’s stench of stale sweat and tobacco smoke is engrained. Larry fears that if he does lock his arms around Smythe’s chest, his appreciation will instantaneously evaporate and leave only the silt of revulsion in its wake. And from there it would be a short, awkward jig over the railing.