CHAPTER
ONE

Tristan Brodsky jogs across the block, toward his building, sidestepping the rotten produce the fruit-and-vegetable men pitch toward the gutters as they close up shop. He is late for a dinner table he will be the first to vacate, but Tristan’s ears still perk, listening for the slaps and shouts that herald stickball. Tristan is a two-sewer man. If a game is being waged against the wall of Moishe’s Delicatessen, he can cut the line and step up next to bat on neighborhood respect alone, take his two broom-handle swings at the pink rubber ball. No matter who is pitching, the fielders will retreat to the second water grate—the greatest compliment in life.

If eager dice tumblings and tough, anxious murmurs waft through the coal-smudged autumn air, Tristan can follow them into the brick-walled alley and extend a math-filled hand and be given the cubes as soon as the shooter makes his point or craps out. He can wager his train fare and win enough to buy himself breakfast tomorrow, or else lose his nickel and be fucked and miss tonight’s class: yet another setback for the Jews.

The neighborhood is quiet, though, of boys his age. Only the old men are out tonight, standing three and four beneath the failing butter-colored shafts of the streetlamps, each group very close together, many hands moving in English, Yiddish, German. German, Tristan likes best, though he understands it least. He and his little brother, Benjamin, have a game in which they pretend to speak it, the joke being that each word is incredibly long and articulates a concept or circumstance so complex or specific that it takes a paragraph of English to define. Their father, on the street, invariably joins a Yiddish-speaking cadre. He will not teach Tristan the language, even though it’s all around. Jacob’s face darkened and he shook his head the one time Tristan asked, as if embarrassed to speak the tongue of the old shtetl or scornful that his American son wanted to know it. Tristan was unsure which was unworthy, he or the language. Regardless, the desire disappeared.

The apartment is three flights up, twelve mingled dinner smells away, and Tristan breathes through his mouth as he ascends. Everyone cooks the same food the same way in this tenement, this part of town. The thick-waisted matriarchs pick through the same piles of pale vegetables at the same wood-crate markets, filling sad cloth bags with potatoes and turnips and wilting cabbages and waddling down the street to haggle over stringy gray beef. Undernourished chickens dangle from the butchers’ rafters on bloodstained lengths of rope, as if they had lost patience with the mundane gore of ghetto life and flung themselves to their demise. Every mother in the neighborhood culls dignity from her ability to sate a growing brood on water, chicken bones, and withered carrots.

It seems sometimes that the Jews think only of food, that for all the ritual and history and custom Tristan has endured in Hebrew school and seen dimly reflected at home, for all the professed sanctity of knowledge, all his people really care about is sitting down to a full table—what it’s full with doesn’t even so much matter, so long as the platters overflow.

Tristan’s parents, everybody’s parents, chase one foot with the other all day long and come home to a bowl of hot stew and a hunk of crusty bread to dip into it, and talk to their children about education with their mouths full. They buy two sets of dishes, buy the more expensive kosher meat, buy shul memberships, buy into the notion that the Jews are smarter than everybody else and that things are improving for them all the time, even if the country as a whole is in the shitcan and half the Bronx is on rent strike. For three months last year, Jacob kept a homemade blackjack under his bed in case goons came to collect, and Tristan’s broomstick stayed close at hand for more than just stickball.

Already some of the most prominent men in America are Jews. Already we have Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Groucho Marx, the good half of Mayor La Guardia. Already we have Hank Greenberg, the best first baseman in the history of baseball.

Already we have Tristan Brodsky, cutting past the rising smells of soup pots and gefilte fish: fifteen years old, the sum total of five thousand years of Jewry, one week into City College, a mind on him like a diamond cutter. Here is hope and proof incarnate even if he has not been to shul since his bar mitzvah and often skips dinner entirely, subsisting instead on five-cent apples bought from one of the six thousand vendors who have decided that hawking fruit is more dignified than joining the waiting list for city relief.

Tristan opens the apartment door and steps into the dim, grease-stained kitchen, where his father, brother, and two sisters are arrayed around an overburdened card table.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says, picking up his fork.

His mother spins from the sink with a big woman’s grace and waves an arm at Tristan’s back. “Late for dinner is no problem. Late for opportunity, Jacob, that’s what I worry about. They give him a scholarship, and already he’s fooling it away.”

Tristan stabs a bite of boiled beef and cabbage and squints across the table at his old man’s wristwatch. He has five minutes to eat, if he wants to make it on time to the address printed on the postcard in his pocket noting that due to special circumstances the first meeting of Professor Pendergast’s Contemporary Literature seminar will be held not on the City College campus but on Fifty-second Street, and it will meet not at 11:00 in the morning but at 9:00 P.M.

“What kind of a class meets at night?” Rachael adds when no answer is forthcoming, and returns to the suds-filled basin and the bobbing cookware. She has not yet sat down to eat; her food sits steaming on the table. When she’s indignant, Rachael cleans.

When she is tired, which is most nights, responsibility for the dishes shuffles between Liza and Pearl. Tristan is expected to return to his room, his halo of yellow light, his studies. The wisest men in the country where Jacob and Rachael were born and raised, where they met and married, were nurtured in this fashion: sustained with meals and solitude, shielded from the trivialities of life, left unmolested to contemplate the Talmud. The same reverence for intelligence persists here and now, in the Brodsky household in the East Bronx in 1935, but the appropriate vector for it is no longer so clear. Except to Rachael.

“Law classes he could take, Jacob. Or medicine. Even science. Your son could be another Albert Einstein, with a brain like his. Will you not talk to him?”

Tristan’s father dabs his mustache with a napkin and cuts his eyes at his elder son. With his mouth concealed, Jacob’s expression is reduced to ambiguity, perhaps censorious, perhaps bemused. The napkin falls onto his empty plate, where it lands like a tepee.

“Tristan,” he says in lumbering English, “how about being the next Einstein for your old mother here?”

“Sorry, Pop,” says Tristan. “I don’t think so.” He is named not for the Celtic myth or the German opera, but a line of ladies’ sweaters, Bertram & Tristan, that his father once peddled from his pushcart. Elias Tristan Brodsky is the full appellation, a salute to his maternal great-grandfather, but Tristan has not answered to his first name since the day he began school and found three other boys named Eli in his class alone.

Jacob drops his elbows on the table, interlaces his thick fingers, and rests his chin atop them. “Tough break.” He winks at his son—a coordinated twitch of cheek and eyelid so quick, it might go unnoticed. All four children smile.

“He refuses,” Jacob reports. “You want I should ask again?”

Rachael brandishes a soapy wooden spoon. “You two think you are funny. Ask why he should waste a whole class, instead of studying something that will help him get ahead.”

Jacob’s great square head swivels back toward his son. “Your esteemed mother wonders why you do not take up something of more utility, such as maybe ditch digging, or clock repair.”

Rachael slaps her husband on the shoulder with the spoon, then points it at Tristan. “We are here,” she says, “to survive. Adapt to the surrounding and you survive, as Mr. Darwin said. You don’t adapt, you have to leave. Or die.” She tucks the spoon beneath her arm. “We have to stay focused.”

“It’s just one class, Ma. I think I’m entitled to study something just because it’s interesting. Besides, aren’t we supposed to be the People of the Book?”

“That book.” Rachael lifts a finger to point at the gilded Torah lying closed atop the highest cabinet, swathed in six months’ worth of dust. “That book.” She indicates the Midrash next to it, a tome Tristan cannot remember ever seeing open. “Not—what was it you had your face buried in last month?—Kafka. Not The Great Gratsky.”

“It’s The Great—”

“Whatever it’s called,” says Rachael, triumphant, and Tristan peers again at his father’s cracked timepiece. Somewhere between Kafka’s shadowed villages and Fitzgerald’s glittering West Egg, he thinks, lies the Bronx.

Jacob scratches his beard and watches his wife. When she turns on the water, he cups Tristan’s cheek in his hand, gives it a light pat. His fingers smell of street grime, of the sweat he’s wiped from his forehead. “I won’t tell you what to do,” he says. “What do I know? At your age, I was working in my father’s shop. If not for your mother, I would hardly have picked up a book.” He lowers his voice, just far enough to pretend his tone is confidential. “As for her, she used to read I. L. Peretz until I thought she would go blind.”

“Only after I was done with all my work and had a few minutes for pleasure.” Rachael twists at the waist and looks at each child in turn. “You can read all the novels you want, after you have made yourselves successful.”

“The real brains skip a generation in this family,” Jacob announces, not for the first time. The outstretched palm again, reaching for Tristan’s cheek. The pat, harder than before. The refrain: “Better you than me, boy. Better here than there.” He points toward the air shaft and, presumably, Poland.

“Right.” Tristan spears the final chunk of meat on his plate, swipes it through the thin gravy, and plucks it from the tines with his teeth, chewing as he pushes back his chair and rises from the table, swallowing as he kisses his mother on the cheek. From atop a three-foot stack of browning Jewish Daily Forwards he snatches a cardboard-bound notebook and clamps it in his armpit, then steps around his father and makes for the door. Benjamin’s clear light eyes dart after Tristan, drinking in the brusque departure of his elder.

Tristan slams the door, lopes down the stairs, and hits the pavement. The elevated tracks rumble across the street, and he reaches the platform just in time to slip on board the last train car. He stands by the window, staring at warm kitchen-window dioramas, cutouts in the soldier-stolid buildings, and marveling at the whole stalwart notion of living within the cramped enormity of stone and brick heaped on this island. Paving the roads: How on earth did they do it? How long did it take? How was the water separating Brooklyn from Manhattan bridged?

He wonders if there were any Jewish architects or city planners, and decides not. Jews would still be debating the precise shape of Central Park. Tristan imagines a great gaggle of them, shouting and pointing compasses and slide rules at one another while teeming immigrants stand in an endless line outside the office window, freighted with suitcases and babies, waiting for their homes to be built. Across from the immigrants loiters a row of construction workers with broom-bristle mustaches, tools at the ready, thick forearms crossed over their chests. They roll their eyes at one another.

And just like that, Tristan’s exuberance peters away. The world fills up again with striving Bronx dwellers, recasts itself in wan, selfish hues, and pulls him in. He thinks of Mr. Jennings, the best teacher he had last year in high school if not the most appealing, the one who impressed upon Tristan that to appreciate the beauty of Latin you must think like a Roman—understand the words in the order they are written, rather than transplant them mentally to their Germanic homes.

One day, Tristan was partnered with an exacting, watery-eyed fellow by the name of Sammy Fischer for a writing exercise. After class, Jennings detained Tristan, looked up at him with his small hands laid flat on his desk and said, You don’t like Fischer, do you?

Jennings had no way of knowing it, but Fischer was the boy with whom Tristan shared his bar mitzvah day, as well as the spate of lessons leading up to it. They are a week apart in age, two buildings apart in distance.

I like him fine, sir.

No you don’t. Jennings smiled. Go on, Brodsky. You may be frank.

Tristan shifted his weight. I suppose I don’t particularly care for him, sir. No.

Jennings raised an index finger. That, Brodsky, is because Fischer is exactly like you. The teacher leaned back in his chair, appearing quite pleased with himself.

The train doors open on Fifty-seventh and Tristan trudges the length of the platform, eyes fixed on the downtown skyline and the proud, hollow trunk of the structure known as the Empty State Building. Over a hundred floors, and rents so high that most of them have never been occupied. It must be the quietest place in New York.

The station at Fiftieth would have brought him closer to the address in his pocket, as would have transferring to a West Side train back at 116th. But Tristan hates backtracking and lacks the patience to stand still, and he likes walking. He buttons his jacket, smoothes his hands over his chestnut hair, and cuts a path southward, darting west when traffic blocks his way.

A thousand little things are different down here. Newsstand rags blare HITLER’S LOVE LIFE Revealed! and KINGFISH KILLER INNOCENT? WITNESS SAYS LONG’S BODYGUARDS TO Blame in bright, crisp letters, with nary a gnarled Hebrew character in sight. Men’s suits seem cut from a more cunning fabric, somehow, as if they’ll never wrinkle, and ladies’ dresses are soft and light about their calves. Clothing speaks elaborately on the wearer’s behalf, doesn’t mumble go away with downcast eyes. People are on their way out and on their own time; no one will be where they are now at this hour tomorrow. There is perfume in the air, perfume and possibility.

Perhaps the postcard was meant to say 152nd Street, for here Tristan stands before 201 West 52nd, and it is nothing but a bar, Oswald’s, with front windows tinted so dark that Tristan can see himself in them: a lanky, perspiring kid sporting a cheap Bronx haircut, faint concentration furrows already lining his forehead. He looks as though he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, this future doctor/lawyer, the pride of the Jews.

Tristan approaches the black glass door and pulls it open. On the other side is an unexpected density of conversation, vibrations he feels all the way down at the bottom of his balls. Clinking silver and glassware punctuate an unseen symphony of trills and murmurs around the corner; whiffs of liquor and calligraphs of smoke roll toward him. Tristan has never been anywhere like this before, and in his mind he edits the sentiment for clarity: he has never been anywhere before.

Perhaps he never will. Sitting on a stool in front of him, at the edge of a luxurious burgundy carpet, is a thick, bald troll who appears to be contemplating whether to break Tristan’s jaw with a swipe of his hairy meat hook. A cigar lolls from side to side in his mouth, like a log in the ocean.

“You gotta be eighteen, kid. You eighteen?”

“Is this two oh one West Fifty-second?” asks Tristan, a staggeringly obtuse query, since the numbers are stenciled on the door’s outside glass, right above the handle.

“Don’ answer a question with a question,” the troll growls, sliding forward on his stool so that one black-shod foot touches the floor.

“I’m looking for Professor Pendergast.”

The troll chuckles through broken teeth and eases back on his haunches. “Oh. Yur wunna his. I shudda guessed. Alla way back, in frunnada stage. Two drink mimum.”

He jerks a thumb, and the cigar follows it. Tristan nods, ducks, passes. He half floats, half stumbles to the back of the room, gaze bouncing off the dark plush walls, the high ceiling, the carved mahogany bar stocked with mysterious bottles. Even as his legs carry him forward, Tristan twists back to look longer at the crisp white-shirted bartenders and scan the smooth sepia faces mingling with the pink ones. For a moment, he is mesmerized by the sequined red dress of a woman leaning in to laugh at her man friend’s joke, a long unlit cigarette cocked in her hand. A gleaming lighter emerges from behind the bar, cleaving the air with perfect timing, so that she notices it just as she reaches the summit of her lean-in and begins to rock back on her splendid ass.

Tristan’s footfalls grow heavy. His tongue and fingers engorge to the size of uncooked sausages. The shirt he’s wearing changes from light blue to mottled shit brown; his hair grows a foot and mats over his ears. A gnawed woolly-mammoth drumstick appears in his left hand, a Torah in his right. Tristan is a swarthy Jewish caveman, eyes twitching in the sifted light. The thought that he’s smarter than any son of a bitch in here is little consolation, and while the floating part of Tristan’s brain continues registering delight, the stumbling part sizzles with resentment of his parents, the entire Bronx.

By the time Tristan reaches the long table laid out in front of the stage, he’s had time to compose a future fantasy, a return-in-triumph reverie in which his entrance turns heads and freezes words in mouths and his topcoat alone is stylish beyond the aggregate of every stitch of clothing in the place. The daydream is pathetic and he casts it off, but not before noting that a doctor/lawyer could never galvanize such a response.

The table is full of other cavemen, dressed as carelessly as he. A dozen of them sit straight against the backs of their chairs, rigid in this house of curves, heads cocked, listening. Some have notebooks like his. They look to be Tristan’s age, which means that really they are eighteen, nineteen. There is one empty chair, at the foot of the table, and at the head, speaking, is a man who can only be Professor Pendergast. Tristan sees the glossy black back of his hair first.

The teacher pauses, turns, and smiles. “Brodsky, is it?” he intones with a hint of melody, clearly the master of his own voice. Tristan nods. Pendergast is dressed for a night on the town. Even his thin mustache looks exquisitely groomed, as if a tiny luxurious animal, perhaps an infant mink, has crawled onto his face and stretched out for a nap. A cigarette smolders in the ashtray at his fingertips, and the pack of smokes lying by his other hand, next to a burnished gold lighter, is a brand Tristan has never seen. He is beautiful, in a way no man Tristan knows would ever allow himself to be.

“Welcome to Contemporary Literature.” Pendergast gestures to the empty chair and checks his watch as Tristan takes a seat. “Let’s begin, shall we? No—wait—a thousand pardons. Not until we procure Brodsky a drink.” He spins a finger in the air before Tristan can consider protesting, and a moment later a glass of amber liquid is deposited by Tristan’s elbow. The other cavemen have been similarly feted.

Tristan lifts the heavy glass, takes a cautious nip, pulls back his lips and twitch-winces casually as he has seen men do in movies. Now Tristan understands why. The scotch burns, and he holds it in his mouth a moment, waiting for it to mellow before swallowing. His form, he feels, is excellent. A small warmth ripples through him.

“As some of you gentlemen have no doubt taken note,” says Pendergast, “this is not a conventional classroom.” A pause as the class chuckles and the professor smiles indulgently. He is younger than his bearing would suggest. Thirty, Tristan would guess.

“Nor, I regret to inform, will we be meeting here at the redoubtable Oswald’s again. Tonight is a reward which I hope, over the course of the semester, you will earn.” He halts once more, this time lowering his face to browbeat them. “I am a new breed of teacher,” Pendergast declares, raising his eyebrows, “and this, with your cooperation, will be a new kind of class.” He straightens, magisterial again. “You will read no contemporary literature this semester. Rather, gentlemen, you will write it.”

Pendergast taps the ash from his cigarette and waits, as if expecting the students to turn to one another and begin stage-whispering in excitement. Instead, they sit with the air of undecided jurors, and Tristan almost laughs. Cavemen they may seem, here at Oswald’s, but City College kids are far from dumb. These are the choicest members of New York City’s bumper crop of underprivileged Hebrews, and their reputation is for aggressive intellectualism, for educating themselves and one another when the school’s instructors prove unequal to the task.

You can find any debate you like being waged in the dining alcoves of the school cafeteria, passionately and at maximum volume. The Stalinists of Alcove One and the Trotskyites of Alcove Two go home hoarse every day, whether they’ve been arguing among themselves or against one another. Politics is the new religion. Tristan listens to the sermons as he wolfs down his homemade sandwiches, but he remains an atheist, believing only in himself.

For a moment, faced with the table’s silence, it seems that Pendergast has prepared nothing further. Then: “Here is life,” he proclaims, raising his arms like a king at a feast. “Here are men and women, drink and song. I wrote the first words of my novel in this very room, sitting in that corner, listening to the sounds you hear right now and some you will hear soon. I want all of you to find that spark, to feel the urge to press pencil to paper and invent.”

So this place is Pendergast’s muse. It is a cheap trick, trying to inspire them by showing them his lair, cheap and self-serving. And yet Tristan has to force himself not to fall for it; the ease and glimmer of the life Pendergast is putting on display are that seductive. Only the professor’s satisfaction with himself prevents the siren song from taking hold. The scotch glass is in Tristan’s hand again, and when he takes it from his lips, he finds it empty. He wants more.

“Montaigne said, ‘I write to compose myself,’” Pendergast announces. “Writing creates us, gentlemen, even as we create it. Certainly it can calm, as Montaigne suggests, but believe me when I tell you, lads: it can also inflame.”

Tristan flags the waiter himself, using only his eyes. A slurred energy is beginning to fill him, and it’s not the booze. If anything, the fresh drink in Tristan’s hand will mitigate against the expanding desire to squeeze Pendergast’s words into paper balls, set them on fire, and watch them shrivel. From some unspelunked chamber inside Tristan a righteous fury is beginning to well, in defense of things he didn’t know he held so holy. Pendergast cannot be a real writer. He’s too comfortable, too handsome, too much on the inside of things, and what’s more, he’s a fool for laying all this Let’s Be Writers drivel out before a tableful of kids who signed up for a regular three-papers-and-a-final-exam English class.

Only a phony would bandy such ideas so carelessly, attempt to baptize everyone immediately in what should be sacred, hidden waters. Who the hell is Pendergast to throw open the temple doors? Tristan thinks of his mother’s grandfather and her stories of the old craftsmen’s guilds, the years of toil and apprenticeship a man endured before he attained even Journeyman status. Pendergast, you wileless schmuck, has your race no such standards?

He sips his new drink, blinks back his thoughts, and finds the professor has stopped talking. Pendergast is sitting with his legs crossed at the knee and his chin lifted to the stage. The other cavemen, too, have turned toward the narrow bandstand. Two colored men in suits are up there; one sits down at the piano bench and plays a nimble snatch of melody, then turns and looks into the room, making an arcane gesture at an unseen accomplice. The other clasps the neck of an upright bass with one hand and runs two long fingers against the strings with the other, loosing a low, pleasing thrum.

Tristan watches the class watch them, and sees in the students’ eyes a childish vacancy. They cannot define this in the language they know. It is not prelaw or premed or pre-anything; it is fully formed and alien, and they are unequipped. The sight should not surprise him, but it does, and Tristan clasps his hands in his lap and tightens them until the bones of his fingers ache, as if to compress the ambition surging through him into as small a space as possible.

He surveys the room and attempts to think in words, not sensory impressions, mind sprinting to translate what he sees, hears, feels. He can’t do it, not at all. The failure fills him with resolve. He thinks of the lunchroom politicians, shouting at one another, trying to bore their way into hearts and minds, and of the lawyers-and doctors-in-training laboring to master their small portions of the world. They have their limits, all of them. But a writer can strive to know anything—can tell his own story as if it is another man’s, another man’s as if it is his own.

Tristan’s thirst returns, but there is not a waiter in sight. He notices the drink at the adjacent caveman’s elbow; the glass is still full, and the fellow’s head is turned. Tristan swaps their glasses, takes another sip, and reflects. A writer can wrestle with the snarled, mystifying whole, with the fact that nothing is simple, that no answer is right, that life is twinned and layered and everything contradicts everything else. A writer, if he is good, might do justice to the complexity of the truth—reconcile, for instance, the simultaneity of Tristan’s desires to punch Pendergast in the face and to be him.

The problem with this firecracker string of epiphanies is not the rending of expectations or the sloughing off of everything Tristan has been told about himself. The problem is that they have come in Pendergast’s presence, and could even be said, by one with a muddled sense of cause and effect, to have been inspired by him. Tristan resolves to borrow the professor’s novel from the library tomorrow, read it, and despise it.

Pendergast is banging his hands together for the saxophonist, who has now mounted the stage and stands with his back turned, conversing with the bassist. “This cat is going to be famous soon,” he tells the class over his shoulder. Immediately, Tristan doubts it. Cat?

The man hears, and turns. “Lady Pete,” he says, bending at the waist to shake Pendergast’s hand.

“Lady Les.” The professor clasps the musician’s palm in both of his.

“This your class?” Lady Les surveys the table with a dimpled smile, and Tristan grins back like everyone else. Pendergast could not be more pleased at his friend’s attention; he’s still holding on to Lady Les’s hand, as if he wants to make certain everyone sees the embrace before consenting to end it.

“Thanks for making the scene tonight, y’all,” Lady Les says, reclaiming his hand and tucking his thin, casually knotted tie more tightly into the vest of his rumpled charcoal suit. “I’m glad to have you here. You prick up your rabbits at what Lady Pete lays on you, now. This is my main man right here.” He tugs the brim of his porkpie hat in punctuation, or perhaps irony—and here it is, camaraderie and disdain together, the one beside the other, stratum upon stratum, the full weave of life revealing itself for an instant—then straightens and nods to the band. Behind him, the drummer counts off the song, and then a lushness spreads over the room, washing over conversation and eroding it to whispers: soft cymbals and piano, soft chocolaty bass, and then the most intimate, softest sound of all coming from the man’s horn, a tone so sweet and warm and light and airy that it feels as if he’s breathing right in Tristan’s ear.

It is astounding that such a contraption as Lady Les’s saxophone can produce these tender notes—softness from hardness, the full weave visible for an instant more. The song makes Tristan want to move very slowly with a girl he loves hard, pressed as close to her as possible. Lady Les stands with his eyes shut and his eyebrows prancing, immobile from the neck down except for his strolling fingers on the metal pedals. His arms are rigid, holding the horn away from his body like a first-time dance partner, and the instrument curves up and connects with the corner of his mouth like a forgotten toothpick.

The band does not pause between songs to share the titles, just swings into the next tune, as if playing only for itself. Pendergast is right: this man is something special. Tristan knows only a thimbleful about jazz music, but that only fortifies his certainty. He’s heard Benny Goodman on the radio—a Jew, a Jew, the Bronx jumps to its feet—and seen Louis Armstrong’s impossibly white teeth glinting from advertisement posters. His high school band played an arrangement of a Fats Waller novelty hit once. But this is nothing like any of that.

Even the Benny Goodman stuff, nobody’s all that affected by it. Music isn’t so important, unless it’s the cantor singing in shul. Such a voice, the women say, touching their fingertips to sternums. Plenty of kids suffer through piano lessons, but only about three adults in the whole neighborhood play instruments, guitars and bugles. Whenever the bugler tries to practice, he is shouted into silence within minutes, from four directions. Tristan imagines living in a neighborhood where music thrives, where men like these emerge from their apartments at night and stand on the corners playing songs instead of craps.

The whole room flares into applause when the band calls it quits, and Lady Les and his partners bow and step offstage, still unintroduced. Pendergast cautions his brood that class is far from over, that they will reconvene in five minutes and discuss the aims of fiction, and he leaps up from his chair to follow Lady Les backstage and wring his hand some more.

Tristan, too, would like to speak to Lady Les, or any one of the musicians, if only so he doesn’t have to sit there like a fan. The drummer is onstage still, packing his trap set into its cases. Tristan stands, pockets his hands, and ambles over.

“Thank you.”

The drummer glances up from the leather strap he’s fastening across the top of the bass drum’s box. “Our pleasure.” He is a small, lithe-limbed fellow, perhaps twenty-five, with skin the color of teak and a long scar over his left eye.

“They make you pack the drums?” Tristan asks, bracing to be indignant.

The drummer chuckles. “They’re my drums. I gotta haul ’em uptown now, to play a rent party.”

“Y’all”—Tristan tries to say the word sharp and quick like Lady Les did, but his tongue can’t make it work—“y’all are playing again?”

“Yessir. This was just to warm up.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“Ain’t no name. We play and the cat who owns the pad charges some bread at the door so he can pay his house note. We jam as long as folks wanna dance. His wife be cookin’ up a hurricane, too, man. Plenty of food, plenty of liquor, plenty of women.”

“Are you leaving right now?”

“Soon as I can. Matter fact, if you want to tag along, we can split a taxi. The cats always stiff me, ’cause with these drums there’s only room for one more in the car. They split a cab three ways and leave me dangling. Never no girls left neither by the time I pack up. I’m telling you, I’m gonna do like Lester did and switch over to horn. I already got a tenor I been practicing on. So what do you say?”

Tristan fingers the change in his pocket, yesterday’s craps profits, and wonders what the ride will cost. “I’m with you—as far as thirty cents will get me.”

The drummer flashes him a smile, hands over a case. The cavemen gaze at Tristan as he walks past them, as though he is carrying the choicest slab of flame-charred mastodon on which they have ever laid eyes. Not until he’s clear of the table does one of them pipe up, a prodigiously nosed fellow who might be Sammy Fischer’s older brother.

“Dropping out to join the band?” he calls.

Tristan spins, heat rising to his face, and almost floors a passing waitress with the snare. The cavemen are all smiles, and it takes Tristan a moment to understand that the attention is friendly.

He sets down the drum case, lifts a hand to his upper lip, and smoothes the tips of an imaginary mustache. “I am inflamed,” Tristan declares. “By men and women, drink and song.” The cavemen erupt in laughter. The sound is loud enough to dominate the room, and all around Oswald’s, heads turn.

“Godspeed,” says Fischer’s double, and Tristan nods and hefts his parcel. The troll opens the door for him, and Tristan exits the club and stands on the corner, guarding the drum. The name stenciled in white on the black box reads Albert Van Horn.

“So why is the saxophone player called Lady Les?” Tristan asks him when they’re both wedged into the cab, drum cases atop and between their knees.

Albert shrugs. “Just Lesterese. He calls everybody Lady. Reefer is ettuce, like lettuce without the l, cops are Bob Crosbys, the bridge to a tune is a George Washington, anything depressing is a Von Hangman. Just keeping up with his jive is a job in itself. Sometimes I be figuring junk out weeks late. Les always used to talk about his people after a gig, like ‘Boy, my people were smooth tonight.’ One time, I said to Paul, ‘I didn’t see Les talking to anybody. What’s all this about his people?’ Paul told me, ‘Man, his people is what Lester calls his finger pedals.’”

Albert shakes his head. Tristan stares out the window, turning over the idioms of Lesterese in his mind and enjoying the ride. He’s been in a cab only once before, the time his brother broke a wrist playing street football and had to be rushed to the hospital. Medical bills are a luxury this family cannot afford, Jacob had lectured the kids afterward, pacing back and forth before the dinner table with the hospital release form rolled in his hand like a diploma. From now on, I expect all you kids to be more careful.

Harlem slides by outside the dirty windows, block after block of artful brownstones, snatches of angry noise and melody, dark liquid silhouettes. Albert taps his hands against the flat top of the drum case on his lap, reprising the rhythm of the set’s last tune.

“So can you dance?” he asks.

“No, but I can eat.” The cab pulls up to a four-story building on a leafy residential street, a block down from the bright commercial strip. The third-floor windows are a shadow theater of backlit bodies, and as he steps from the cab, Tristan can already hear a thump piano, the clamor of conversation.

Between the two of them, he and Albert manage to haul the trap set up the bald-carpeted stairs. A man with shoulder muscles that must earn him his living greets them at the top of the third landing. The sleeves of his white crewneck are pushed to the elbows, and one of his leather suspender straps keeps slipping down his arm. He holds a floppy newsboy hat in one hand, a wax-paper cup swishing with some kind of liquor in the other. “Al Van!” he says, draining the cup and donning the hat. “Our prayers have been answered!” He relieves Albert of his burdens, leads the way inside.

Tristan follows, lugging the snare and the leather cymbal bag, and finds himself in a small living room dense with people. An L-shaped sofa beneath the front windows is crammed tight with couples leaning forward to talk over the notes and voices. Two tired-looking women, one old and one young, bookend the couch, fanning themselves against the rising body heat. The old woman uses her hat, the young one her hand.

Plates, drinks, and the ghosts of drinks litter the coffee table, and everything jumps when the portly, sweat-soaked man sitting at the piano by the opposite wall, a personal cemetery of crushed paper cups and empty plates around his own feet, digs in and starts swinging fast and loose and the dancing picks up. Young men in their shirtsleeves stand close to women, whether dancing or just talking, and everyone is shouting and drinking and half-hearing one another. Gumbo and bottled beer and cayenne pepper and fried chicken and whiskey and gin and cologne and sweat and almond cake and cigarette smoke funky up the hot air but the smell is good.

A big woman is jitterbugging to the music as Tristan struggles through the room, toward the alcove where Albert is unpacking the drums. “Uh-oh,” and “Watch out,” people exclaim, stepping back as much as they can to make room as the heavy dame and the pianist lock eyes and he ratchets the tempo skyward. Tristan has never seen such a large woman move so well. There are plenty of them in his neighborhood, his mother being one, but they all walk arthritically and act as if they went to grade school with Methuselah, and he can’t picture any of them cutting loose.

Tristan mutters a stream of excuse mes as he walks, but after the first few fellows hear him, an awareness ripples through the crowd and folks clear a path, smiling and nodding and lifting their drinks as he passes, saying, “Right this way” and “All right, now.”

Tristan smiles back. Beneath the fear and excitement of being here—alone, alive, half-drunk, useful, unique—there lies, in the pit of his stomach, an unprovable suspicion that these people are like him, or like he wants to be. He feels a wrenching lust for a life like theirs, a life lived in the present moment, an American life. The Bronx shadows Tristan, staggering like a golem, a motley amalgam of old customs, new realities, the bargains and concessions forged between the two. The people here stand with both feet in the here and now—for horrible reasons, to be sure, but it is brave and wonderful. Or perhaps, Tristan thinks, recoiling from his own certainty, that’s a load of bullshit and there is no freedom here in which to immerse himself, and this kind of broad fantasy is just what a writer must reject. Or both.

Albert takes the drums from Tristan, sets them down, shows him how to undo the taut leather cords. Tristan fumbles at the task, his awkwardness becoming harder to bear.

“Hey,” says the drummer, “meet Charles, our host. Charles, Tristan.” Albert winks. “My valet.”

“Pleased to meet you.” The man who let them in pumps Tristan’s hand. “I’ll set ’em up if you please, Al. You know I know how. You fellows go grab yourselves a plate and a drink.”

“Don’t forget a woman,” says Albert, and strolls off toward the brightly lit kitchen. Tristan stays where he is, hunched over the equipment, hoping he can continue to look useful for a moment longer.

“You a musician, too?” Charles speaks over his shoulder, unfolding the tripod legs of Albert’s cymbal stand.

“No,” Tristan says, apologetic. “I’m in school.” A pause, and then he summons the courage to add, “I’d like to be a writer.”

Charles steals a backward glance at him. “Yeah? Good for you. You know who was up in here last month? Langston Hughes. I know you’ve read some Langston. No? Man, before you leave, remind me to show you one of his books.”

The drums are ready to be played. Charles folds his arms, surveys the room. “Never know who’s gonna show up here,” he says. “Wouldn’t surprise me none if I looked up and saw Joe Stalin standing in my living room, holding a plate of pigs’ feet and doing the shake with Miz Clarke.” He points at the big woman with his chin, then shoots Tristan a look that seems intended to put him at ease, and thus doesn’t. “That’s why I didn’t bat an eye when I saw you comin’ up my stairs.” He chuckles. “Who knows, maybe you’ll write about me someday.”

Tristan smiles for as long as Charles does, then says, “I think I’ll get something to eat.”

“Sure. Go on in and fix yourself a plate. Don’t be shy. Have a drink, too. No Bob Crosbys here.”

The pale green kitchen is full of people, mostly women. The window is open to the fire escape, where three men in suits are standing and passing something back and forth, and the room is cooler by far than the other. In the center squats a card table like the Brodskys’, every inch covered with serving trays and pots, ladles and tongs. Albert strolls over from across the room, where he’s been leaning up against the counter, ankles crossed, chatting up two pretty young things. He corrals Tristan and walks him through the menu as if his charge has never eaten before. Soon Tristan’s paper plate is buckling beneath the weight of all the chicken, macaroni and cheese, heavy-dressed salad, buttered corn, and string beans Albert has piled on “for starters.” The girls watch the whole thing, shaking their heads as the heap of food grows.

“Now honey, you ain’t got to eat all that,” the taller of the two assures Tristan when Albert finally hands the plate over.

“But if you don’t,” warns Albert, “no dessert.” The four of them laugh, and Tristan freezes the moment in his mind, breaks it apart. They are all laughing for different and numerous reasons, he thinks, thrilled that he notices. The girls’ laughter is hospitable, but also mocking; they are in on the joke of his oddness, getting a kick out of how a misfit makes them feel more vibrantly themselves. Albert—whose laugh is wild-eyed, raucous, leaves the rest of them behind—is showing off for the girls. Tristan is his pet and he knows he must strike the proper balance between care and disregard; too much of either will make him appear unmanly. Tristan, for his part, laughs to please and to connect, to communicate his willingness to play his role and because he is relaxed and tense and wildly delighted.

Albert snaps his fingers and takes Tristan’s elbow. “I got somebody I want you to meet,” he says, lifting the plate from Tristan’s hands and setting it down atop the stove.

“You better let that child eat,” the shorter girl protests.

“Got to work up an appetite first,” Albert calls back, leading Tristan down the dark hall that connects the kitchen to the rest of the apartment. “Down here is the card game,” he explains as they near a doorway, but Tristan doesn’t need to be told. Gambling sounds the same in Harlem as it does in the Bronx.

The air above the table is blue-gray with smoke. Three of the five players grip plump cigars with their teeth, the other two puff cigarettes. On couches in the dim recesses of the room lounge others, studying the game and waiting for a vacant chair. A serene girl who could be Tristan’s age sits on a stool in the far corner, next to a makeshift bar. No one looks up from the cards for longer than a second when Albert and Tristan enter.

“Dolores.” The drummer beckons. “Come here a second, sugar.” She walks over to them, and Albert lays an arm across her thin shoulders. Dolores is every inch the schoolgirl: petite, with big brown cat eyes and obedient hair tied back into a ponytail that just brushes the collar of a blue cotton blouse. “Last call for food and drink, gents,” Albert announces. “Dolores’s going on a little break.”

“Thank you for taking such good care of us, honey,” says one man. He stands, wobbily, and bends across the table to hand her a folded bill. Dolores takes it quickly, slides it into her skirt pocket. “You know Dee’s my lucky charm,” he tells the others. “I was smart, I’d cash out right now.”

“But you ain’t smart, Earl,” somebody calls from a couch.

“No, I’m not,” roars Earl, lifting his glass. “Sling the cards, Doc, sling the goddamn cards.”

Albert shuts the door behind them. “Tristan, meet Dolores. Figured the two of you might like some company your own age.”

Dolores flicks her eyes at Tristan and then crinkles her forehead at the drummer. “How old is he?”

“Don’t ask me, girl, ask him.” Albert struts off toward the kitchen, leaving them alone.

Dolores drops her hands to her hips and gives Tristan the same impatient yet resigned look his cousin Gerty used to wear when she came to baby-sit.

“Well? How old are you?”

It’s a fight-or-flight scenario. He’s a nuisance and a fool and it is time he got back home. But Tristan draws himself up and says, “Old enough.”

Dolores giggles. “Old enough for what?”

Tristan is stumped. A Yiddish phrase his mother uses when she scolds the young ones jumps into his mind and then right out of his mouth.

“Old enough to know better.”

“Better than me?” Dolores folds her arms over her chest in a posture of aggression, or mock aggression. Tristan is not sure which, and he doesn’t want to make any assumptions.

He raises his palms chest-high. “Old enough to know when to give up.”

“You give up pretty easy,” she replies with a wicked smile. “So what are you, anyway?”

“Well, I want to be a writer.” Saying it is easier this time, but no less exhilarating.

“No.” Dolores leans forward at the waist without uncrossing her arms, as if he is dumb or hard of hearing. “I mean what are you. Irish? Italian?”

“Oh.” Isn’t it obvious? “I’m Jewish.”

She raises her hand to Tristan’s face, so close that his cheek tingles in unfulfilled anticipation. “But you haven’t got those curly things.”

“That’s only if you’re very religious,” he explains, charmed by her ignorance. This is the dream of every boxed-in kid in the neighborhood: to be around people who know nothing of him. “I’m hardly religious at all.”

The hall is empty save the two of them, and Tristan feels the space acutely after all the bodies he’s brushed up against tonight. “I never go to synagogue,” he continues in the silence—in the noise, rather, which is loud and just around both corners, but in the silence of her voice. “I don’t think I even believe in God. Not the Jewish God, anyway, the one who cares whether you eat meat and milk from the same dish.” A nervous laugh snorts from him. “I mean, the milk touches the meat when they’re both part of the cow, right? And whose fault is that?”

It’s an old joke, but not to Dolores. She laughs, and Tristan wonders what else he can reveal or retell to impress her. The joke about the alta kocker stuck on the desert island is a good one, but he doubts she’d understand the punch line about the guy building two shuls, one of which he prays in and the other of which he wouldn’t be caught dead in. He imagines her repeating it to her friends at school on Monday, thinks about how the joke would change shape in her possession, and puts it from his mind.

“So this is your job?” he asks.

“Only once a month. The rest of the time, I just live here.”

“Oh. So Charles is your…” He waits for Dolores to fill in the blank with brother, uncle, cousin. Charles is too young, too agile and untrammeled, to fit with Tristan’s conception of father.

Nonetheless: “My dad.” She narrows her eyes. “You know him?”

“We just met.”

“Oh. Can I ask you something? Is it true that Jewish people have to do it through a bedsheet with a hole cut out?”

With the exception of Leah Krasner, who lets boys touch her for money, no girl Tristan knows would ever say anything so bawdy in mixed company, and hearing Dolores ask the question so casually, so easily, is enough to make his dick stiffen. Tristan clamps his notebook under his arm, slides both hands into his trouser pockets, and tamps himself down, firing off a quick volley of cover-up laughter.

“Where in the world did you hear that?”

“It’s not true, then?” He can’t tell whether Dolores is relieved or disappointed. What else does she think about him? Then again, until a minute ago, the only folk Dolores recognized as Jewish were the Hasidim. A little imagination a few moments back, and Tristan could be a goy right now, footloose and fancy-free.

“Maybe if you’re extremely, extremely religious. And by extremely religious, I mean crazy.” Dolores gives him a strange, sad smile.

“You’re very curious,” he tells her, wanting to wipe the pity from her face.

“If I want to know something, I ask. What about you? Isn’t there anything you want to know about us?”

The truth is, there is plenty, but nothing Tristan can put into words. Instead, he is surprised to hear himself say, “Can I see your room?”

It is not what Dolores expects, either. She gives him another of her odd, bemused looks, then says, “Sure,” and leads him down the hall. They stop before a narrow, unlit staircase. “It’s up here.”

“You have two floors?” Another idiotic question from the young ambassador, but such luxury is so foreign to Tristan that he cannot stop himself.

The steps creak with each footfall, and Tristan is compelled to silence. There is a sweet sneakiness to this mission, this escape into private, and Tristan emboldens himself by remembering that he initiated it.

The upstairs is smaller, all bedrooms, and smells faintly of dampness, mold. Dolores leads him through the hall until they reach the end, and the only closed door. The floor buzzes with the noise of the party downstairs, but the click of the doorknob turning in Dolores’s palm echoes through the corridor. Tristan stands behind her, trying to get a whiff of her hair, but it is saturated with the smoke of the gambling room, and he can only imagine the sweet haze he’s sure encircled her before the guests arrived.

Tristan does not have to imagine for long, because as they enter the room, he is met with a blast of just the kind of womanly scent he’s been trying to conjure. A little tray table full of cosmetics sits in one corner of the room with a plastic-framed vanity mirror atop it, tilted against the wall. It is so low that Dolores must have to kneel to see herself. The rest of the room, too, is almost miniature. The mattress is narrower even than his bunk bed; it lies on the floor below a down-sloping plane of ceiling, against a window covered with pink paper blinds. The bureau is stuffed with clothes, the open drawers jutting out almost halfway to the opposite wall.

It may be a glorified linen closet, but it is hers alone. He folds his hands behind his back and turns in a slow, appreciative circle, as if in a museum.

“My sister Lillian got married last year. Before that, I shared a room with my little sister Ida, down the hall.”

“How many kids in your family?” Tristan notices some pictures taped up by the bedside, clipped from newspapers and magazines. They are all of colored women. The only one he can identify is Josephine Baker, smiling coyly from beneath her feather plumes.

“Six. Seven, but my brother Michael died when he was a baby. You can sit down if you want.” Dolores is perched on the edge of the bed, her legs jutting out in front of her and her hands in her lap. She pats the place beside her and Tristan tosses his notebook to the ground and folds himself into it.

“Thanks.” He crosses his legs, rests his hands on his thighs. It is the only option the space offers.

“You know,” Dolores says, “I’m older than I look. I’ll be eighteen November first. I’ll bet you thought I was younger.”

Some neighborhood putz, quite possibly Sammy Fischer, once told Tristan that women always want to be mistaken for younger than they are. He wonders if that applies now; it seems doubtful. And anyway, you could fill Yankee Stadium with what Fischer doesn’t know.

“I hadn’t really given it much thought.”

She turns and grabs his hand. “My cousin Freda in Chicago is twenty-one. She has her own apartment and everything, and she said as soon as I finish school, I can come out and room with her. She’s got a job as a cigarette girl in a supper club, and she’s going to get me one, too, and introduce me to all the stars she knows.”

“That’s great,” says Tristan with all the gusto he can put forth. The simple touch of her hand is wreaking havoc on his bodily self-control, and the last thing Tristan wants is for Dolores to notice what’s going on beneath his strategically placed forearm. “What stars does your cousin know?” he asks, determined to keep Dolores’s mind on the glitzy midwestern future until his dick realizes, as he does, that this girl is merely being friendly.

“Well, Freda told me that every weekend—” she is saying when the doorknob turns. Her voice cuts out abruptly, like a radio when the power fails, and her hand snaps back into her lap. Both of them stare at the rotating lump of brass for a moment, and then, as the door swings open and slams against the wall, Tristan and Dolores leap to their feet and stand as far apart as possible.

Standing at the threshold, with an unlit cigar wedged between two thick fingers and a woozy shimmer playing in his eyes, is one of the gamblers, a stout man with a pumpkin of a head. Perspiration beads where his hairline would begin, if he had one.

“Earl!” Dolores crosses her thin arms. “What do you want?”

It is no invitation, but Earl begins to shamble across the tiny distance between the door and the bed anyway.

“Thas jus’ what I was gonna ask yo’ friend here,” he drawls, the words soaked in liquor and a sluggish southernness. Earl pokes the cigar at Tristan and then parks it in his mouth while he retrieves a handkerchief from his back pocket and sops the moisture from his brow. “Little late to be collectin’ the rent, ain’t it?”

Earl is smiling as he says it, so Tristan smiles back. “The rent?”

“Thas what you’re here for, ain’t it? A nigger’s money?” He turns to Dolores. “They like to wipe they ass with it. Own every damn building in Harlem and don’t never repair shit. Just come around on payday. Tell her, Hymie.”

Tristan’s hands clench and flex by his sides. Only the persistence of Earl’s smile keeps them there.

“I think you’ve got the wrong man. My name’s not Hymie, and I don’t own a thing, pal.”

“Yeah, sure.” Earl splays a hand over his belly, rubs a small circle. “My mistake. Must be yo’ daddy, owns this place. And I guess Charles fell behind on his payments, so your pa send you over to have a little fun with my niece here.”

He grabs at her elbow, but Dolores pulls away. “You’re drunk, Earl. And I’m not your niece. Go downstairs. I’ll bring you a coffee.”

Instead, Earl steps closer: right in front of Tristan, nose-to-nose—a distance that, in the Bronx anyway, in every schoolyard and on every street corner Tristan has ever known, implies the imminent failure of diplomacy. Tristan’s stomach tightens and a lone drop of sweat eases its way down the curve of his armpit. Earl’s face is still plastered with that fool’s grin, but his eyes have changed. Or perhaps Tristan has failed to notice, until now, that there is something sharp and probing underneath the glassiness.

“You like colored poontang, huh?” He leans forward even farther, halving the space between them. The p pops, spraying Tristan with moisture. “You sheenies chase the dark meat every time.” Earl eye-checks Dolores, then rises to his tiptoes and hisses in Tristan’s ear. “Think on what your daddy’d do, he caught me with his daughter. Cuz thas exactly what’s gon’ happen to you.”

What? Tristan thinks deliriously. My father would shake your hand, then go into his room and slam the door and scream at his wife about schwartzes and how she raised the kids wrong, until he keeled over on his face with a heart seizure.

“My father,” he says in a low voice, filled with pride and shame, “wouldn’t do a thing.”

Earl throws back his head and cackles. Two flecks of gin spittle jump out of the fat man’s maw and land on Tristan’s lip, and the pride of the Jews thinks, Enough. Taunting he can handle, but to be cat-and-moused, fucked with for sport, is something else again.

“Your father—” Earl starts up, and when his hot breath hits Tristan, Tristan hits back: lifts both palms to Earl’s chest and shoves, hard. The fat man careens backward, unprepared, and stumbles against the vanity tray table, flipping it end over end. Lipsticks and compacts sail through the air.

“Motherfucker!” He throws his saliva-soaked cigar to the ground and charges forward, right hand already cocked by his ear—a ridiculous posture, and a clear indication that Earl has not fought in years. He might as well send over a telegram detailing his plan of attack.

The fat man’s arm uncoils with surprising speed, obvious power, but getting clear of the blow’s trajectory requires only the simplest of sidesteps, and before Earl can regain his balance, Tristan’s own fist is in motion and then a painful sting is surging through his hand as his knuckles slam into the hard bone of his antagonist’s blubbery cheek.

Earl staggers. Dolores lets loose with a piercing scream, and Tristan glances over at her—foolishly, since another quick blow might have dropped Earl and now, instead, he’s ratcheted himself into a boxer’s pose, bent at the knees, protecting his face with his forearms, remembering whatever he once knew about scrapping or maybe just doing his best Joe Louis impression as blood pools beneath his nose.

“Come on, boy.” Earl beckons with a fist. “You ain’t no Maxie Baer. I’ll—” But his agenda goes undivulged, interrupted by shouts of “Dolores!” and stampeding footsteps on the staircase, and then the room is filling up with men and Charles is pushing through them, striding straight for Tristan, seizing him by the shirt, pinning him against the wall. The back of Tristan’s skull thuds into the plaster, and exploding lights spangle his vision. He blinks himself toward clarity, each blink a stroke against a current that wants to pull him out to sea.

As he comes within reach of the shore, Dolores’s screams sound in his ears like seagulls’ caws. She is flailing at her father’s rigid arm, his hand now clamped around the base of Tristan’s throat in a near chokehold. The mere anticipation of being strangled robs Tristan of breath. Charles begins to shake him back and forth. Again and again, Tristan’s head hammers the plaster. Flakes fall from the wall like snow, dusting the ground.

Tristan stares back at his aggressor bug-eyed, wondering what the fuck Charles thinks is going on and whether he is mad enough to kill, snap Tristan’s skinny neck like one of those dangling shtetl-butchered chickens.

“You just calm the hell down,” Charles growls, giving Tristan a final shake and then shoving him against the wall and letting go. “I don’t know where the hell you come from, but nobody fights in my house, understand?”

Before Tristan can wheeze a breathless assent, Earl lurches into view behind the host, hand cupped to his nose. “He was tryna put the make on Dee, Charles. If I hadn’t got suspicious and come up, who knows what—”

Charles’s eyes snap over to Earl, silencing him, then back to Tristan, who opens his mouth to defend himself and finds he cannot muster words. The looped internal protest of his innocence. I did nothing! I did nothing! pounds through his head, blending with a deeper, contrary, wholly unexpected rumble of understanding for Charles—sympathy even, because in some strange new crevice of his soul, Tristan understands that he can be guilty of everything and nothing all at once.

Tristan’s guts, tormented with alcohol and terror, knot and rebel. He stares into Charles’s livid, searing eyes for an instant, and then Tristan buckles and a torrent of vomit gushes out of him and splashes onto Charles and the carpet.

“Goddamn it!” Charles darts back too late, raises his hands to his shoulders, and grimaces down at his ruined trousers. Tristan peers up, doubled over, his hands on his knees, a tendril of drool still connecting him to the reeking puddle. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, waits for a blow to explode against his jaw and drop him to the floor.

Instead, there’s a commotion, and a commanding male voice says, “Charles. Get ahold of yourself.” Tristan opens his eyes and sees feet, bodies, a man dragging Charles backward by the waist, and then Dolores’s stockings planted between himself and her father. Tristan stumbles; the wall catches him and he straightens against it, stomach clenched with nausea.

There, sure enough, stands Dolores, her face streaked with tears. Behind her is Charles, wrapped up in a pair of suit-jacketed arms, violence glowing in his eyes.

“Take it easy,” counsels the man behind him, working to lock his hands around Charles’s broad, heaving chest. Not for a second does it look like he is any match for Charles if Charles will not allow himself to be restrained. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Tristan knows the voice. He has been rescued by Peter Pendergast.

“Get off me,” Charles says through his teeth. “This is none of your damn business. You’re in my house, Peter, and I’ll do what I want with this son of a bitch.” He twists at the waist, shakes free of the professor’s arms.

Pendergast takes a step back. Tristan sees a flash of something like fear cross his face, and then the professor regains control.

“I think you ought to let it go, old man.”

“Let it go? Man, where the hell do you get off? He was trying to—” He glances at Dolores, who has turned toward him now to plead with her eyes, and Charles cannot utter the words. He looks the other way. “Trying to—”

“No he wasn’t,” Pendergast says, edging forward. “Ask her yourself. They were only talking. You don’t have to like it, but it’s certainly no grounds for murder.”

“Murder? What the hell you talkin’ ’bout, murder?” Charles stares at Pendergast as if the professor is crazy, but Peter doesn’t appear to notice.

A tall man emerges from the shadow just outside the threshold. “All right,” he says, brushing past the others in the room until he reaches the host’s side. “Come on, Charles. Let’s get you into some new clothes, huh?”

“Good idea,” says Pendergast. “And while you do that, I’ll get this son of a bitch out of here.”

“You do that.” The tall man reaches for Charles’s elbow, and he allows himself to be led away.

“I see you again, your sheeny ass is dead,” calls Earl by way of farewell as he, too, is escorted from the room, flanked by two more men.

Dolores throws a final inscrutable look Tristan’s way, then follows the procession, pulling the door shut behind her. Only Tristan and Pendergast remain in the room, the moat of vomit between them.

Pendergast spreads his legs, sweeps back his suit jacket, and drops his hands onto his belt.

“I’m willing to let it go this time, Brodsky. But if you leave my class early again, I’ll have no choice but to mark you absent.”

Tristan forces a smile. “Won’t happen again,” he promises, and swipes his sleeve across his mouth.

“Good man. Now then. Let’s get you out of here, shall we?”

“Shouldn’t we clean this up?” The smell of Tristan’s own breath makes his eyes water. He stares down at the floor. “We can’t just leave it here.”

The professor’s forehead wrinkles. “How thoughtful of you. No. Come on. Someone will take care of it.”

Reluctantly, Tristan high-steps the puddle. “Where’s Albert?” he asks. “I’d like to say good-bye.”

“This is no time for pleasantries. And anyway, he was embarking on an errand when I arrived. Seems the party had run low on some of his favorite delicacies.” Pendergast studies him. “You keep fast company, Brodsky. Hurry up.”

A minute later, they are standing on the curb. The tonic water Tristan guzzles splashes cold into his empty stomach, powerless to wash the bitterness out of his mouth. Pendergast sucks down another fancy cigarette, blinking up at his smoke as it curls in the beam of the street-lamp, as if enchanted by every single thing that comes out of his mouth.

As soon as he polishes off the drink the professor was thoughtful enough to grab on their way out, Tristan will have to look him in the eye and thank him. The bottle pops off his lips and Tristan takes a deep breath. “I want to—”

“Don’t bother.” Pendergast glances out into the darkness from within his shaft of light. “Charles is my friend. I came upstairs to help him, Brodsky, not you.”

Tristan mulls this over, wondering if Pendergast even knows how close Charles came to taking a pop at him, too. “Well, at least now I’ll have something to write about,” he offers.

In one incredible motion, Pendergast flicks his cigarette into the shadows and spins on his heel to point the flicking finger at his student. “Quite right. If you want my advice, you’ll find someplace quiet and empty your mind into a notebook.”

Tristan feels his chest swell up with hope again. His head throbs harder, not just from the pain but the fresh blood coursing to it.

“Yes, sir. That’s just what I was thinking about doing.”

“Good. Keep my name out of it.” Pendergast wags his haircut at the ground. “I am not wholly unimpressed with you, Brodsky. I hope tonight’s events have not soured you on…” He pauses, and Tristan hears the professor’s lighter, in his pocket, click open and closed. “On adventure.”

Pendergast slides another cigarette from his pack, taps it. The sizzle of a cymbal escapes the house, and both of them look up at it. “I’d better head back in. You’ll find your way home, I trust?” Tristan nods. “Of course. Until Tuesday, then.” Pendergast cups his hands, lights his smoke, and strolls back toward the house, untouched by any of this.

Tristan’s hand flutters and he remembers something.

“Professor?” Pendergast stops but does not turn around.

“Brodsky.”

“I left my notebook upstairs. By Dolores’s bed.”

“One moment.” He lopes up the steps. The building bulges with people, music, laughter, and Tristan thinks of Moses standing on the mountain overlooking the Promised Land, forbidden entry as punishment for his sins. A minute passes, and then a notebook and a pencil sail out of a top-floor window and fall to the ground, paces from Tristan’s feet. He picks them up, drifts toward the subway.

For hours he rides, down through Brooklyn and back uptown again, with his pencil clutched and poised over the page. Tristan’s brain pulses in its sheath, and his entire throat is tender to the touch, beginning to bruise. It is an act of great willpower to avoid thinking about what his mother will do when she sees him, but Tristan manages. The darkness of the night grows dilute and he stumbles off the train, walks through the silent streets of the neighborhood until he reaches his building. He sits down atop the stoop, wedges himself against a wall, and finds his fatigue burned away, his mind clear, his frustration with himself acute.

There is so much he wants to write, but Tristan does not know what any of it is. He feels as if ghosts or elves or angels are following him, flitting in and out of shadows, cackling, and every time he stops and whirls around, he’s too slow and they disappear. The world feels heavy with life, the air thunderstorm-electric with a potency that won’t last. He leans against the cold stone and feels the desire to capture everything overtake and erode all he has ever felt—his protector love for Benjamin at its strongest, the most intense, restless, disgusted claustrophobia that’s ever gripped him at his parents’ dinner table, the lift-and-crush-the-world-and-let-its-juice-gush-down-your-chin rush of elation he’s felt at the moments when his brain and body have best served him.

The only thing that has the power to endow existence with meaning is the very game of trying to transcribe it, and nothing has ever sliced through Tristan like not being able to play. He blinks in the dawn light, rubs the goose pimples from his arms, and catches sight of a ghastly future: a lifetime of sitting here, incapable of filling these pages and unable to stop trying, until he is catatonic, frozen on the outside and still burning uselessly within.