Chapter two

 

He stood smoking outside the OTB parlor on 23rd, his uniform in surprisingly decent shape given a night on the trains. He said good morning to a few people from the neighborhood heading to work before he stepped into Bickford's. Customers ate breakfast and read the paper in peace. He took a seat near the elbow of the counter.

"Morning, Con."

"How you doing, May?"

She poured him a cup. "Eating?"

"Two over easy."

"Bacon crisp?"

"Please."

The sun reflected off the Lamston's sign across the street, shot into the diner, and bounced off the mirror behind the counter, cutting Bickford's airspace in half with a smoky cylindrical beam, reminiscent of a movie house projector.

Connie generally resented food when he was on a drunk, and he knew such thoughts did not speak well of his character—what kind of troubled soul gets offended by an offer to break bread?—but other times he could eat with the best of them.

"And let me get an orange juice, and, oh yeah, some home fries if you don't mind."

"I don't mind at all, Con. With the eggs and bacon right there on the plate?"

"All right, fine, all together, one big happy family on the plate. And then, also, an English muffin."

"You got it."

He took a large gulp of water and May refilled it. "Dying of thirst here," he said, and took another gulp.

Someone seated at the counter in the corner against the wall lowered his paper. He wore glasses and was about Connie's age. He looked around, took a sip of coffee, then lifted the cigarette from his ashtray and took a pull off it. Connie and the guy looked at each other.

"Good morning," the man said.

"Good morning to you," Connie said.

"Water's important," the man said. "To flush out the internal organs."

"Are you a doctor?"

"No, but I played a doctor on The Edge of Night once."

"Is that right?" Connie said. "My wife's favorite."

"Thank you," the man said.

Connie considered him. "Why are you saying thank you? It's not your compliment. It's a compliment to the show. They gave you a white smock and a clipboard and a couple lines. Nurse, when is so-and-so scheduled to be discharged? A bit player, correct?"

"Yes. A bit player," the man conceded.

"What are you, Greek?" Connie said.

"Romanian Jew."

"Born in Romania?"

"Bucharest. Grew up in Sunnyside."

"Queens?"

"Why is that so difficult to comprehend?"

"Did you go to Sunnyside Gardens?"

"My grandfather took me to the wrestling matches."

"That's strange, don't you think, going to the wrestling matches with your grandfather?"

"In what respect?"

"Skip it," Connie said, grinning with mischief.

"You have an interesting conversational style. Did they teach you that in doorman school?"

"Good one," Connie said, "doorman school. What the hell's your name?"

They introduced themselves, and the man's name was David.

"Romanian Jew from Sunnyside by way of Bucharest. Aren't you proud. What high school?"

"Stuyvesant," David said.

"Ah," Connie said, "a brainiac."

"Something of a prodigy, yes."

"Prodigy of WHAT, you son of a bitch."

David exploded with laughter. "Mathematics."

"Is that right?"

"And music."

"Listen to you. One area of expertise isn't enough. And here you sit," Connie said, "in Bickford's with me. What a fall you've taken, what depths you've plunged."

"Speaking of which," David said, "are there any openings where you work?"

"Leaving your prodigious math and music skills aside for the moment," Connie said, "what qualifies you for the job I do?"

"More coffee, hon?" May said to David. She filled both their cups. David spooned in heavy sugar.

"Tell me the most difficult thing about being a doorman, let's start there," David said.

"All right. Take me, for example. Let's talk turkey and go into detail with specifics."

"Fine," David said, "I'm unemployed."

Connie looked for his food, lit another smoke. "You have to know people."

"Uh-huh," David said. "Know people."

"Not juggle them, because people don't like to be juggled. Do you like to be juggled?"

"I'm not sure I know what you mean, but for the sake of your argument, let's say I don't."

"Point is . . ." Connie said, and he thought, What the hell is my point? before resigning himself to cliché. "You have to be a people person." The space no longer received a direct hit of light, while the mingling aromas of breakfast foods, smoke, and coffee continued to permeate.

"Are you a people person, David?" Connie said.

"I'm talking to you."

"And why is that, do you think?"

"Teach me, Socrates."

"You're talking to me because I am the one who is a people person. If I was not me, you'd be sitting here in silence."

"And you as well. Two to tango."

"Do you have a résumé?"

"On me?"

"I'd be curious to take a look at it and see what I can do for you," Connie said, and at this they both laughed.

"Two over easy," May said, "bacon crisp, home fries, with an English muffin. Jelly, Con?"

"Please, May." To David, Connie said, "Ketchup." David passed him the bottle of Heinz.

"Do you see how I speak to people?" Connie said to David. "Personable, not obtrusive. Do you understand how to behave in such a manner?"

"Bon appétit," David said.

Connie started to dig in. "I can't remember my last meal." He went to pour some ketchup onto the side of his plate but none came out.

David said, "Hold the bottle at a forty-five-degree angle and gently tap the number 57—see it there, on the side—with the bottom of your palm."

The ketchup flowed. "Son of a sea biscuit," Connie said. "Something new every day."

Connie mixed the ketchup with the yolks of his over-easy eggs, and got some jelly involved, using the English muffin to scoop it all up. He ordered another English muffin, they were so small, really, and sat at the counter with David. They drank coffee and smoked and talked for two hours.

David's mother and father brought him and an older sister to New York when David was seven years old. A mathematics whiz as a child, he played the violin with natural élan as well. He broke his parents' hearts when he chose to pursue acting at a school called the Neighborhood Playhouse. After a while he made a little money and some small headway as an actor. He married a beautiful young woman he met at the Playhouse who came from theatrical aristocracy and had family money. David told Connie he used to live in an apartment house where Connie himself might have worked, on 82nd and Park, and that it all came tumbling down six months ago.

"Where do you live now?" Connie said.

"In a rooming house around the corner."

"Anything available?"

"You serious?"

"Got kicked out," Connie said, holding up the Hefty bag. "I slept on the subway last night, a bench the night before."

"I'm on welfare," David said.

"I grew up on welfare."

"What is this, a competition?"

"Are you getting food stamps?"

"Should I?"

"My guess is you're going to be up and running better than before. You got too much to offer with all that so-called talent you claim to possess."

"True."

"Tell me about this rooming house."

"Better yet," David said, "I'll show it to you. I think she might have something."

Connie grabbed David's check.

"No," David said.

"Relax. Who is she?"

"Mrs. Cook, the manager. And if I say you're a friend of mine, well, you can imagine."

They left Bickford's and walked around the corner on a beautiful spring morning in Chelsea. The rooming house, on 22nd between Eighth and Ninth, didn't look bad, if a bit faded, with only the strange variety of window dressings suggesting a lack of internal cohesion.

Connie followed David into the vestibule. Just inside on the left was a door which David knocked on. They waited a good while before it slowly opened.

"Mrs. Cook."

"Oh, hello, David," an old lady said.

"Mrs. Cook, this is my friend Connie, he's a doorman as you can tell, and he's looking for a room."

"Nice to meet you," Connie said.

"Are you a doorman?" Mrs. Cook said.

"Yes, yes I am," Connie replied with false modesty.

"Well," David said, "I'll leave you two alone," starting for the staircase. "I'm ready for my midmorning nap." He stopped, came back, and said to them both, "What's nice about this house is that it's very quiet."

"Good," Connie said, "I like quiet."

David shook Connie's hand. "Thank you for breakfast," he said, and, "He's a good man, Mrs. Cook."

She looked at Connie, letting her eyes scan him head to foot. "Come in." She stood back and opened her door. Connie entered the front room, which smelled of old lady. "Sit down if you like."

He took a seat in a saggy chair, the room too darkly curtained for the brilliant day. He made a show of removing his doorman's cap and holding it in his hands: you don't wear your cap in front of a lady.

Mrs. Cook disappeared through a curtain as Connie continued to feign behavior. He watched himself act the innocent, holding his cap as if a simple immigrant who never had a sexual thought in his life, instead of the deranged American deviant he knew himself to be. Because if Mrs. Cook apprehended the truth concerning that which persisted in Connie's wretched heart and mind, how could she in good conscience offer him a room? She returned with some Pepperidge Farm cookies fanned out on a tray.

"Would you like a cookie?"

"I'd love a cookie."

Mrs. Cook moved slow, spoke slow, and Connie wanted to strangle her. She might have been in her eighties—but you don't ask a woman her age. Through the room's shadows Connie spotted a portrait of John's father on the wall, the man gone ten-plus years. It looked as if the photograph had been retouched with some cheap colorization: a little rouge had been applied to the assassinated president's cheeks, with a faint dab of lipstick.

Mrs. Cook placed the tray of cookies between them on the coffee table, and took a seat across from Connie. "David told me you were a nice man," she said.

"That's nice of him."

"And you're a doorman."

"Yes," Connie said, modestly touching the lapel of his uniform.

"Could your supervisor provide a reference?"

"Sure, Mr. Mezzola. No problem. Would it be possible," Connie ventured, "to move in today?"

"I don't see why not," Mrs. Cook said, "but you haven't seen the room yet. Let me get the key."

"I'm sure it's lovely," Connie said, and wondered who just said that. He smiled at Mrs. Cook, eager to have the question of shelter resolved, when he flashed on the bedroom he shared with Maureen, bringing forth the room's scent as well, of love and home and the small touches of comfort his wife attempted to provide—but no, he would not miss the mirror of her eyes reflecting the failure of his life back at him.

He let Mrs. Cook lead him up the staircase. She took one step at a time. Connie noticed her left shoe had an orthopedic lift, and the sight of it helped to temper his impatience.

"I hope I brought the right key with me," she said.

"Me too," Connie chuckled, and again he thought, Why am I being such a phony? It's just a room in a rooming house. Mrs. Cook, he realized, reminded him of his mother, if only in that she was an older Irish-American woman.

Connie had done a dance for his mother his entire life, until he started to avoid her altogether, and when she died he felt enormous relief, which he felt inclined to keep hidden. Thank God, he had thought. Finally. Let her be dead already. About fucking time. These sentiments became part of the guilt cloud under which he roamed.

How did I come to hate my mother? he wondered. Do a lot of people hate their mothers? Did he really hate his mother? Was it more common than he suspected? My sainted mother. With her one tattered housecoat, always talking about what a saint her own mother was, and therefore, what, I should talk about what a saint you are?

Connie spotted a black-haired, blue-eyed woman at the top of the stairs. Beautiful and disturbed, in a sexy way, to Connie. Black and blue, a rare steak. Mrs. Cook didn't see her, but Connie did, and when he locked eyes with the woman she moved out of view, and Connie heard a door shut on the floor.

Mrs. Cook fumbled with the key but managed to open a door at the top of stairs.

"Nice and bright," Connie said.

"It might be a little noisy in the front."

"I was raised on noise's knee."

"I can find you a pair of clean sheets and, let's see, a pillowcase, and a blanket or two, unless you have your own linen."

"No, I could use some linen, thank you," and this he said in a voice closer to his own.

Mrs. Cook said the room cost $155 a month, Con Ed included. It was May 15, so she said, "Let's say seventy dollars for the month of May."

Connie told her he would give her the money tomorrow if that was all right, and Mrs. Cook said it wouldn't be a problem.

"It's a very easygoing house," she said. "And I have a feeling you're a decent man." She placed the key to the room flat in the palm of Connie's hand, and started back downstairs.

"Oh, would you like a few towels?" she called.

"Yes please."

He turned, looked at the room. The ceiling was high and the window was large, its scale a nod to former grandeur, and Connie imagined the house prior to its getting chopped into cubicles, seeing its bearded sea-captain patriarch surrounded by a half-dozen rosy-cheeked children clamoring for his attention after his return from a long voyage.

A rush of exhaustion hit him. He sat on the room's naked mattress, smaller than a twin, closer to the size of a cot. He took off his cap, removed his shoes. He bent over, head in hands, and said a quick prayer to some god he did not believe in, not really, a word of thanks for a place to sleep. "Thank you, Lord," Connie said, "for this room, for this spring day."

He went to the window and shucked it open. A lovely tree-lined block, what it was. And there, where a branch the height of Connie's window met the trunk of a tree, a nest. Connie watched one bird bouncing. He saw two chicks pop into view. Sure enough, here came another bird, and this one's got something in its mouth. Beak-to-beak they eat. Connie watched the chicks get fed and found it too marvelous for words.

If a bird knows how to live. If a bird can make a nest.

He had learned, he feared, from his mother how not to get involved in the world or its people in any intimate way. What a terribly sad thing. My poor mother. To wind up with a man like Pete Cullen, you have to be sick, no? Such a locked-down life, and Connie picked up on it, the art of isolation. In the middle of some party, surrounded by people who only wanted to love and care for you, and there you stood behind the wall of your apartness, there but not there.

People along the way had showed Connie love. His sense of humor and other positive traits did not spring from the head of Zeus after all, but finally he could not stand people looking to be in his life in any authentic way.

He watched the birds with a smile, and the people walking down the block. He daintily produced his work schedule, and realized it was a Wednesday. He had the day off.

Out in the hallway a door opened and closed. Connie pushed away from the window and went to his room's threshold. The woman with the black hair and blue eyes came into view from the far side of the floor.

"Hello," Connie said.

The woman said, "Hello," moving toward the staircase, and Connie said, "What's your name?"

"Susan," she said.

"I'm Connie. Do you live here?"

"I do. Did you just move in?"

"Got the key from Mrs. Cook two seconds ago."

"Welcome to our humble abode."

"Thank you," Connie said.

They smiled at one another, then Susan turned down the staircase.

Connie watched her descend, and without looking back she said, "I like your socks, by the way."

A pair of green argyles adorned Connie's feet. And he knew with Susan's compliment the possibility of them making love existed. It's how his mind worked. What's more, he oftentimes proved himself correct in these matters. Connie became instantly taken with this woman named Susan, and since they now lived together, so to speak, it only made sense they should get to know one another in that special way.

He closed the door. The thought of trekking down to Mrs. Cook's for linen seemed too much. Let me just lie down here a minute, he thought. The naked mattress cradled his body decently enough, before he sat up with a sudden force of will to remove his jacket, shirt, and pants. He went to the window, closed it most of the way, returned to the bed, and curled up on his right side.

His mother always told him to sleep on his right side. When he coughed his head off at night she'd appear in the doorway of the bedroom he shared with Danny and Patrick and Edward. His mother would say, Who's coughing?

Con, his brothers would say.

Turn on your right side, his mother would say, and disappear.

He lay down and, tired as he was, his mind ran. He did the thing he read about: he stepped onto an imaginary escalator heading south, an escalator of wooden steps with large spaces between its teeth, like the ones in Gimbels. Only this, an infinite escalator, traveling to forever. Slowly, slowly he descended, and his mind eased up, unhinged itself from the workaday world, the escalator's gentle, steady movement gliding his body down, down, and Connie thought, I'm falling asleep, when he suddenly twitched from an incident in an already-forgotten dream, and it stirred him back to the texture of his naked mattress. He readjusted his body, curled tight onto his right side, like a fetus in the womb of the world, a grown man yet unborn, and stepped onto the escalator in his mind.

Four hours later he woke to a knock at the door.

* * *

"My mother likes you."

"Does she?"

"Heard her on the phone."

"Surprised."

"What you did to the lobby floor. Could get you a job across the street, she said"—meaning the Met—"restoring works of art."

"Hardly says boo to me."

"It's kind of how she is sometimes, Con. She's been through a lot."

"I know she has, John."

"Check."

"Check how check?"

"My rook. And my bishop."

"What's that?"

"A bowl of hashish. Your Zippo needs more lighter fluid."

"Nah, it's the flint gone bad."

* * *

He rolled onto his back and through the window's upper-left pane saw a patch of blue with hints of pink in the northwestern sky of Manhattan.

"Who's there?"

"Did I wake you?" David said from the hall.

"No—I mean . . . yes," Connie said, thick with sleep.

"One flight up," David said, "number seven."

Connie's extended nap brought access to a simple appreciation for this stopgap roof over his head. He went into the shared bathroom on the floor. He knew Susan had a connection to it. It smelled feminine. The shower curtain displayed frogs on rocks, big toothy grins on their froggy-but-also-human faces. He went up the off-kilter staircase through a wispy cloud of Lysol and knocked on seven.

"Get some shut-eye?"

"Like a baby."

David sat with a man about fifty years old.

"This is Justin, he's in the room next door."

Justin wore a corduroy blazer and khakis, and looked the part of a disheveled intellect. Connie's first thought about him was, He's flattering us with his presence, but then the way Justin tapped his cigarette at the ashtray suggested a genuine kindness.

"Sit."

Connie sat next to David on the bed, with Justin facing them in the room's chair: a hub of six knees knocking.

"Cozy," he said.

"That it is, that it is," David said. "What can you do? We're a close-knit family. We've all come down a peg."

"Or two," Justin said.

Connie lit up and they sat there smoking. David jarred the window as open as the layered coats of paint permitted.

"Connie moved in this morning. He's a doorman."

"Welcome," Justin said.

"Thank you. How long you been here?"

"Thanksgiving," Justin said.

"And what about yourself?" Connie said to David.

"Christmas."

"Holidays are a time of change," Justin said.

"Shit goes down come the holidays," David said.

"Lives collapse, families dissolve before perfectly cooked hams and turkeys," Justin said.

"What about me?" Connie said. "I need a holiday to mark my move into Mrs. Cook's rooming house, which, by the way, did I thank you, David, sufficiently?"

"No, you did not."

"Sunday is Mother's Day," Justin said.

"Fuck Mother's Day," Connie said.

"Said the bishop to the queen," Justin said, pursing his lips slightly.

"Does Mrs. Cook have children?" David wondered.

"She set out a tray of Pepperidge Farm cookies on my behalf," Connie said.

"Something out of Tennessee Williams," Justin said.

"Susan likes the theater," David said.

"Wait now," Connie said. "Hold on a second."

"She's on your floor," Justin said, "room five."

"Right below me," David said. "I wish we had a woman on our floor."

"She complimented my socks," Connie said.

"I leave the bathroom as I find it," Justin said.

"She's a beauty," Connie said.

"She has her charms," David said. "A beauty she's not."

"She's my beauty. Tell me about her in great detail."

Susan worked as a proofreader and copy editor through a temp agency Justin had referred her to. She smoked Sherman cigarettes, the sweet brown filterless ones. Her people were from Oklahoma but she grew up outside DC. She had two older brothers, one of whom ran a small hotel in Florida. The other, a professor, lived with his family in the high desert east of San Diego. Every once in a while a mouthwatering aroma escaped her door. A miracle, they concurred, to produce such gastronomical wonders on a rooming house hot plate. David said Susan moved in on the Fourth of July and they laughed.

"Has she had, our Susan, any gentlemen callers?" Justin asked.

"None that I'm aware of," David said.

"Does she like men," Justin said, "or does she hate men?"

"That she was quite interested in me I can state without equivocation," David said.

A short bark of astonishment escaped Connie.

"I could have had her," David said, "no question, but I'm taking a year off."

"A year off?" Connie said.

"Not getting involved with anyone for a year."

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," Connie said. "I'm not taking any time off. She paid me an unsolicited compliment on my argyle socks, from which I envision a lovemaking session in our very near future."

"Forgive me, I say it to spare you, but the woman liked your socks."

"Exactly," Connie said. "A woman doesn't say things like I like your socks for no reason. Ah, David," Connie said, "you'll learn," and they laughed some more.

To a barely audible knock David said, "Come in, Mrs. Cook."

Connie reached for the knob. The old lady held a small stack of folded laundry in her arms.

"Thank you, Mrs. Cook. What do I owe you?"

"Seventy-five cents. I ran out of fabric softener, so I deducted a quarter."

"They feel plenty soft," David said, and placed the clothes on top of the dresser.

Connie followed Mrs. Cook downstairs for linen. He returned to his room and made his bed before dumping the contents of the Hefty bag onto it. Next to a small sink, a hot plate sat atop a half-pint fridge. Connie emptied his pockets—money, wallet, smokes, change, keys—into the chipped six-inch skillet on the plate. The room's furnishings suggested a deeply ingrained futility in the late-afternoon light, like pieces in a museum honoring the history of sad people. He started to undress, hanging his uniform and other clothes in the closet. Maureen had tossed his favorite items into the bag, things she knew he preferred, more evidence of a still-caring touch, which Connie took as a hopeful sign for the survival of their marriage.

For Connie, a hot shower with strong water pressure described a key amenity of heaven. He stood in the tub and let it burn down on him. He scoured his body with a soapy washcloth, performing the whole shebang of personal care and hygiene. He let his toiletry products mingle with the toiletry products of, he felt sure, Susan, there on the shower's convenient chest-high window ledge. It crossed his mind to masturbate but he didn't want to indiscriminately discard his chi like that. There's a place in the world for a good jerk, but a steady diet of it gets played out. Besides, he wanted to save himself for Susan, bring the entire catalog of his lust, the full brunt of his desire, directly to her this very night. I'll ravish her in a way she has never been ravished before, he thought, not without a fair amount of sexual self-importance. Now that they shared the same bathroom he felt an intimacy had established itself, and that in some essential way he already practically possessed her, their carnal connection a done deal. These were his thoughts, relayed from self to self, when he nicked himself, and a spot of red appeared at his jaw and brought him back to where he stood, naked before the bathroom mirror, the cap of his small circumcised dick at rest against the chilly porcelain rim of the sink basin. He chuckled at the nature of his own fantastical mind and continued to shave.

* * *

He waited outside the rooming house in his favorite button-down sweater, leaning against the fin of a car in a holdover pose from teenage times, smoking. People headed home up and down the block. New York bloomed through its filth and decay and somewhere in the city Andy Warhol was saying yes to money.

He waited not ten minutes. Something in him knew she would appear. He believed he summoned her, evoked her presence, and here she came, carrying a bag of groceries from International Supermarket, offering a smile.

"I knew I'd see you," Connie said.

"Did you?" Susan said.

"Like what they call a karma thing, maybe, synchronicity or something. I said, She's going to show any second."

"Funny, my schedule's off today."

"I wanted to ask you something," Connie said.

"Yes?"

"Would you like to take a walk downtown and have dinner tonight . . . Can I buy you dinner?"

"Tonight?"

"If it's okay with you."

A moment's silence, as if someone, somewhere, was counting to three.

"That would be nice," Susan said.

"Beautiful."

"Can you give me a few minutes?"

* * *

She came down in a dress, a casual one, swapping out her sneakers for a pair of sandals. Also, she had applied a little makeup around the eyes, and some lipstick.

"You look terrific."

"Thank you," she said, and what was nice, it seemed to Connie, was her sincerity. She appreciated the compliment, and with it he knew they might very well sleep together if he could manage not to sabotage the situation.

They walked down Ninth Avenue and Connie touched her, a brief hand at the wrist to switch positions on the sidewalk. He wanted to walk closest to the street, in the event a truck jumped the curb, in which case he could push Susan to safety and die a heroic death. When he touched her, Susan didn't flinch, and what Connie truly thought was, I'm in.

"You smell good," he said.

"Thank you."

"Thank you for going out with me."

"Thank you for inviting me."

"All right, enough!" Connie cried out, startling passersby, and Susan laughed a good one from her belly. "No more thank yous," he said. "Enough with the heartfelt appreciation. All this predictable well-mannered nonsense. Thank you this, thank you that. If I hear one more, one more thank you . . ." Connie held her for a moment in the palm of his hand. "Seriously though," he said.

Susan, with coy trepidation, said: "Yes?"

"Do you like how I walk, by the way, how I take each step in stride?" He made a grand sweeping gesture with his arm as they headed south together.

"Yes," Susan said, "you're quite accomplished."

The talk was small, subservient to the walk. Susan was working on a book project for McGraw-Hill about woodworking—a snooze, but hey, it paid the rent. Connie flew over his personal circumstances without emotion, spoke of his kids and troubled marriage, saying that although he had just separated, things had been rocky for ages, and he tied the subject up with a whattayagonnado shrug of the shoulders.

"Would you like to take a look at the river?"

They walked beneath the abandoned West Side Highway and found an abandoned pier, it being a time of great abandonment. The scene had tetanus shot written all over it. Connie extended his hand to help Susan negotiate the broken bottles, nails, and uneven planks. She reached for him, her palm just a little moist with nerves—not clammy, not some clinical disorder like what they said Connie's father had before he turned on the oven. The note written on the back of a letter from Bellevue. As a nine-year-old the irony was not lost on Connie, to write your suicide note on the back of a notice from Bellevue confirming your appointment as regards your nervous disorder.

They stood at the pier's end, the river serene if you didn't look straight down into the water where terrible filth floated, nasty man-made pollution banging up against itself, trying to get away from itself. The poor Hudson.

"This is nice," Susan said, good sport.

"Have you been to Hoboken?"

"No."

"We should go one day, take the tubes, get some steamers at the Clamhouse. Do you like seafood?"

"I can't think of any food I don't much like."

He studied her profile as she studied the water. By no means overweight, nor was she frail. She had good height for a woman, not small-boned but well-proportioned, and something vaguely tragic about her look as well. Connie couldn't put a finger on it, yet he was drawn to her because like attracts like, they say. The space between her nose and mouth turned him on. A woman like this, in a rooming house: how sad is that?

They walked south and east, cutting through the Village.

"I prefer 4th to Bleecker for some reason," Connie said, but the for some reason part was disingenuous: he got his ass kicked badly on Bleecker Street when he was nineteen. Some kid attacked him, sly-rapped him dead in his face, a blunt object to the bridge of his nose, blinding him. Connie swung a few times in pathetic defense, listening to vicious laughter. He tried to flee onto Carmine Street, stumbled in the black snow on the steps to Our Lady of Pompeii, while the kid continued to kick and punch. A performance for his peers, Connie figured. The beating itself nothing in light of the emotional aftereffects, a result of the attack's randomness, the entropic nature of the violence forever altering his take on the world below the level of consciousness. The mob's laughter. Did the guy say, Watch this, before striking the first blow, or did Connie layer the line in during countless mental replays? He limped around like an old raccoon with two severely blackened eyes for a month, his olfactory connection to the world permanently dampened, one more loss he had yet to mourn.

They decided on Chinatown. They saw a place on the Bowery with a photograph of Muhammad Ali taped in a slapdash fashion to its window and entered on a lark.

Connie used a fork, Susan chopsticks. She ate without pretension, nothing birdlike about it, and Connie knew she was good in bed. They drank tea and Coca-Cola, ate soup and dumplings and noodles, a chicken dish and a pork dish with sautéed vegetables. They could see the blinking lights of the Manhattan Bridge from their table. They smoked and watched the waiters work. One very tall waiter towered over his comrades, holding plates of food high above his head, letting them swoop down onto tables. Customers applauded him, and Connie spotted another waiter in the shadows grimacing with universal envy.

They hailed a Checker cab and Connie asked the driver if he could take the FDR.

"A lot of river tonight," Susan said.

They turned and took in the sight of the bridges receding out the rear window.

"Thank you," Susan said, and she offered him a soft kiss on the lips.

Connie unfolded the jump seat facing her and hopped onto it. He pulled her gently by the legs toward him, and they started to make out.

Connie followed her up the rooming house staircase.

"There's a bottle in my room."

"Get it," she said.

Susan produced two glasses on a table and placed them in front of Connie. She kissed him and quietly left. To use the bathroom, Connie thought. That visit women often make before sex. He hummed with anticipation, poured some bourbon. He glanced out the window, into the backyards, saw a dilapidated bicycle built for two chained to a fence.

Susan returned, gently closed the door. She sat next to Connie on the bed and he offered her a drink.

He looked at her, and he didn't know why, but his eyes got glassy. He took a swallow of booze and said, "Who are you?"

"Who am I?"

"Proofreader . . . small college in Vermont . . . good with a hot plate, so they say. Two brothers . . . father something called an economist . . . mother a librarian."

"Are you getting philosophical with me?" Susan said.

A vacuum of silence suddenly filled the space.

"Quiet in the back," he said.

He reached for her. They adjusted their bodies on the bed, the better to kiss. He took her jaw in hand and lined her face up to appropriate the full benefit of her mouth. She reached for his dick, found it, and made a noise as he continued to kiss her. He broke from her, got up, and took his pants off.

"I need to unrestrict my balls," he said.

Susan laughed and reached to shut off the lamp. The room lit now by dirty moonlight.

"Can people hear?" he whispered.

"Who cares?" She stood up, shook her sandals off, let the dress fall from her body. Connie kissed her stomach, held her by the back of her thighs.

"Something about you," he said. He sat on the room's chair. "Straddle me, would you?" And she did. "You're so light. The weight of you."

"Am I?"

He started to kiss her nipples, first with some dry, getting-acquainted kisses, simple and slow, before folding in some tongue and saliva.

"Are they sensitive?"

"Yes," she said earnestly. She made little sex noises which were genuine, and her breath caught, as Connie continued to kiss and suck.

He had been with women who felt compelled to act turned on when Connie sensed they were not turned on, and it threw him. He himself liked sex quite a bit, when not completely shame-scalded by it. He'd been on the make his whole life. Others, it seemed, were more successful in transmuting their sex drive, going on to achieve a full platter of accomplishments: careers, country homes, pilot licenses, PTA participation, qualifying for Olympic teams, you name it. There was so much to tackle, so much to learn, and be, and do, when you weren't looking to get laid round the clock. Connie's lifelong sexuality had carried with it a sorrowful burden, and the tyranny of compulsion as well.

Oddly, given its obsessive prominence in his life, he had never made a serious study of it. It essentially remained a mystery to him, a woman's vagina, which was maybe part of its appeal. He did his best to help women come, he took natural pleasure in it, he loved the taste and smell of pussy, it turned him on to watch a woman's face when she came, yet the whole business simultaneously made him uptight.

He himself only came once as a rule, during what he assumed would be quantified as a stand-alone lovemaking session. Growing up, shooting the shit with the fellas over a game of pool, or anywhere else guys who bragged about how many times they came during a described blow-by-blow fuck-fest congregated, he personally never understood coming more than once. After he came once he was done, he had no interest in coming twice. The French had a phrase for what he felt after his lonely little orgasm. And since he knew he was done once he came once, he felt beholden to his partner that she come before he come, if she were going to come at all. Soon after penetration there arrived a moment, generally within those first eighteen or twenty seconds, when he had to stay mindful. Wait, wait a minute now, he'd say, hold tight, and he did something he learned as a kid: he thought about his dead aunt Loretta, who represented in Connie's mind all things unhorny, unsexy, and anticlimactic, the vision of Aunt Loretta serving to distract the blood-rush to his dick for the necessary split-second in which he might manage to circumvent the onslaught of orgasm. He would lie on top of his partner, stock-still in the eye of a premature ejaculatory storm, until the threat moved on. After which he could resume for what he thought would be considered a decent stretch.

He liked to delay penetration, and he enjoyed kissing, and the use of his hands, and sixty-nine-ing he found quite gratifying as well, plus he could eat a woman's ass for an hour if it be her pleasure. He enjoyed all this and more, and it filled him with a white-hot shame.

He kissed and licked Susan's nipples which sat in front of his face. It was good stuff, and Susan for her part had a difficult time sitting still on his lap. He liked her agitation and periodically kissed her deeply. He alternated from nipples to mouth, and it seemed to be working out okay. He made a jumping-type move out of the chair, to quickly position his hand between her legs. The softness of skin inside her thigh: tender is the flesh. The smell of her made him hard as a rock. She started to moan and groan. He reached for her vagina, grabbed it with audacity, her box his possession to do with what he wished for, let's say, the next six minutes if they were both lucky.

"I can't wait to get the taste of your sweet pussy in my mouth, if it's all right to say so," Connie said.

She got up and went to the bed and scooched her body against the wall, to make room for Connie. They pressed together. To feel a connection, to be close to one another, their legs intertwined, her wetness, how wrong is that?

Sometimes he feared his lovemaking technique was a little by-the-book. Usually he liked to kiss for a while, before he started in on the nipples, combined with deep tongue kissing. Then, after a time, cunnilingus would go down.

"Would you hold it open for me?" Connie said, and Susan spread the lips of her vagina, otherwise known as the labia, he believed. He admired her fleshy drapery, took in a deep whiff of its delicious pungency, started to ever so gently kiss and lick. He snorted and made a physical adjustment to his body on the bed and said, "I need to orientate myself."

Susan chuckled and said, "Would you like a compass?" and they both laughed, and it was good laughter, it made the sex relaxed and easy and fun. "A sextant?" she said, more to herself, a husk in her voice. "My clit is true north," she said, and with helpful instruction which Connie gratefully accepted, she came without too much fanfare. Her body tensed and shook, and she pushed Connie's mouth away from her, grabbed him by the wrist to stop his hand.

Connie looked confused, his face red and sweating. "Is it all right?" he said. She pulled him toward her, wrapped her arms around him. She reached for his dick, gave it a confident pump. He liked the way she held it. He had a five-point-two-five-inch erection, super firm, the tip of it swollen like a small bruised plum. She brought her other hand to her mouth, gave her palm a thorough lick, and with this wet hand cupped his balls. She went down on him, started to suck his dick with wonderful delight and eagerness, and what a singular pleasure to have a woman suck your dick who really, you could tell, wanted to.

"Careful, careful," Connie said, "don't forget I want to fuck you," as if mentioning one more item on their to-do list.

"Lie back," she said, and Connie obeyed, and never letting go of him, she straddled and slid down onto him. She rose up, getting into a position of maximum fuckability, gripping the wall behind Connie's head.

"Fuck me," he said, and Susan started to do so. He watched her face, older now in the moonlight, and from this angle of body and light he knew she had had a baby from the faint trace of stretch marks around her breasts and belly, knew also this baby-having was part of the tragic sorrow she carried in her heart and somehow informed her presence in the rooming house, and he reached to kiss her, and Susan rose up again and Connie stayed stock-still and let her gain greater purchase.

"Give me your cock," she said over and over, louder, and she started to scream, and she crescendoed, went and came full out, and Connie came too, came with her, but it was nothing compared to how she came, Susan gone altogether, crying out with abandonment. Her juices flowed from her, flooding Connie's genitalia, his balls flooding wet and warm. She collapsed onto him, her cries of pleasure transforming into tears. She wept, and Connie held her, her body rocking and sobbing, her belly jiggling against his.

"Ow," she said, and shook out a cramping leg. She pushed away to look at him, smiled, and held his head. Connie brushed the hair from her face, kissed her eyebrows. She scooted down, rested herself against him, and together they fell asleep for fifteen minutes.

* * *

"How old were you?"

"Me? Fifteen. Yeah. Me and my wife. Fifteen both." Connie shuffled the cards. "But you don't have to worry about that stuff."

"Huh?"

"I'm saying you got time for all that. No rush."

"Already been laid," John said.

"Already been laid?"

"Like, last year."

"Last year. You're thirteen. Last year you were twelve."

"So?" John laughed.

"Hell you getting laid at twelve years old for?"

"What am I supposed to do, Con? They throw themselves at me." They laughed. "I know. Because of my name. Mostly. Probably."

"No. Not just your name. You're a good-looking kid with a good personality. All right," Connie said. "Now let me tell you something. And this is all I have to say on the subject. You know what an aphrodisiac is?"

"Makes you more horny."

"Correct. Even more horny, imagine that, if such a thing were possible. And do you know what the greatest aphrodisiac is?"

"The greatest?"

"The greatest aphrodisiac . . . is when you really like somebody. To be really fond of somebody. You want to have great sex? Find somebody you totally dig. I mean, from the ground up. Somebody you just like talking to, you know. Trust me—the main ingredient. And that's all I have to say on the matter."

"I hear you, Con."

In his attempt to say something helpful and paternal, Connie, given his own track record in the realm of sex and love, felt like a hypocrite, yet he also believed what he said to be true.

* * *

He looked out onto 22nd Street, his body shrouded in a Zen-like, after-lovemaking calm. And yet. A strangeness remained, a vague dread persisted. He smoked and drank and his future whispered vexations. The stillness of the night and his mind clamored. Ever so. His heart a discordant murmur all the days of his life. An achy muscle or two from the time with Susan, and yesterday's pursuit of the Frisbee, the pain not a bad pain, serving to ground him.

After they awoke and Susan invited him to leave, he took himself and the bottle back to his room. He studied the front parlor of a brownstone across the street, unsure if he heard a ringing telephone, when a soft knock came.

"I saw your light on," David said.

"I didn't see you coming."

"The light beneath your door. I was upstairs."

"Want a drink?"

"No thank you—I have a job interview tomorrow."

"For what?"

"Acting teacher."

"Is that right, acting teacher? I can see that," Connie said.

David sat on the bed and watched him take a swallow of bourbon. "Forgive me," David said. He smiled and rubbed his face. "But you might not know . . . given your recent arrival."

"Spit it out."

"These walls," David said, "are like tissue," and let himself expel laughter.

"I'm not sure it happened, if that makes any sense."

"Oh, it happened," David said, "it happened."

They walked the midnight streets at David's suggestion, theirs a quick and trustworthy connection. David expounded on the mythology of his life, his rise and fall. The pressure-cooker expectations cast upon him by his parents. His talent for all things musical and mathematical. The bullying from the Irish boys in Sunnyside, running to and from his building, hugging his violin. His boredom at elementary school, these American children so entirely slow. He picked up the English language like a glass of water and watched himself soar. He studied and nailed the entrance exam to Stuyvesant High School. He flourished there, found himself popular, a boy taller than most and, would you believe it, he could dance. Precocious, bespectacled, and funny, and the girls ate it up.

They headed east, passing Madison Square Park, which had been commandeered as a base by drug addicts and the homeless. Connie let him talk. From eleven on he waited tables, David and his sister, alongside their mother and father, the family waiting tables, a Romanian joint on 46th Street, the children cracking the books in a back booth when it got slow. Working, studying, playing the violin in the All-City band, the final concert performed at Carnegie Hall a brief eight years after the jet wheels touched American soil.

"Not a solo performance," Connie ribbed.

"First chair—have you played Carnegie Hall?"

They made a left onto Third Avenue. David told of the moment he learned what he wanted to do with his life, a subtle epiphany in an acting class at the Playhouse, and the subsequent breaking of his parents' hearts, though maybe his father's heart broke slightly less, with the announcement of his plans to become a—

"What? What did he say?" his mother said.

"An actor," David said.

"Is he crazy?" his mother said to his father.

"I have found my calling," David said, standing before them like Edwin Booth on the kitchen's cracked linoleum. "Be happy for me, why don't you?"

David's father reached for David's throat. His mother gripped the back of a chair lest she collapse.

"The tables we have waited on," she wailed.

"I've waited on tables too," David cried.

He had rejected a full musical scholarship to Julliard, in order to attend the Neighborhood Playhouse.

"Where you will have to pay!" his mother said. "Are you stupid? Are you trying to drive us crazy? All right, if not music, do business like your sister. But to put paint on your face, some hyena, for people to laugh at you? Please, David. Please. Consider us," she beseeched in Romanian. "I beg you, consider us." It sounded like Latin, but with strong Jewish roots accenting the more desperate syllables.

David led Connie into a place called the Starlit Diner on 36th and Third. A waiter shook David's hand and sat them at a rather large table in the back.

David remained steadfast in his desire, and henceforth his parents withheld their love, the mother more so, their words clipped with disappointment, a frugality of tone. The passive-aggressive silences on the overseas phone calls to this day. He had broken the family contract and got branded a blood traitor, the emotional abbreviation from his parents for years on end taking a toll. But such was the power of his calling to the stage. He wanted to act, period, cost what it may—even family. David's sister earned an MBA and JD from Penn State, followed by enormous real estate success, and the family returned to Romania.

"They left me here," David said.

"God almighty," Connie said. "Can you pass the syrup?"

Connie ordered what the menu called a Farmer's Boy Special, two breakfasts rolled into one: pancakes and eggs, toast and butter, bacon and sausage. The waiter kept the coffee coming.

David cited the names of Playhouse alumni to his parents, which to his mother meant nothing, but David caught the spark in his father's eye at the mention of certain names, this same father who had taken David as a child to all the old cinema houses of Bucharest, and later Greenwich Village.

"Father, please," David said, "explain it to Mother."

The movies were their special time, father and son. David's sister, mother-bound, did not attend these outings.

"You know, Father, why I need to pursue this. You know. Please. I know you know."

They would walk together hand in hand, discussing the just-seen pictures, David a precocious six-year-old, asking so many questions of his father on their way home. The father carrying figs for them in a small brown bag in the pocket of his long black overcoat.

The father torn between wife and son. He looked from one to the other, David's future hanging in the balance, not to mention the love of the parents for each other, and their love for David himself. The look in his mother's eyes.

You should right now spit in my face, because that's what you've done. That stupid 7 train, seven days a week, that lousy restaurant, in a language that sounded like the voice of God.

David ordered a black-and-white milkshake and Connie told the waiter to put it on his ticket. One forty-five a.m. on a nothing weeknight and the Starlit was jumping. The city's mentally ill spilled out into the mix, and Connie spotted one such man heading straight to the bathroom, a scuffed briefcase in hand, the man attempting to look industrious, Connie realizing the man was jobless and homeless, the thread of his life having snapped a good ways back.

"And then I met the woman who was to become my wife, my first class at the Playhouse, summer of '61," David said.

"The one from theater royalty?"

"Turns out she couldn't act, not a lick, so she bowed out with grace, and at the moment she's interning at Lenox Hill in geriatrics. So beautiful, if you saw her."

David wrapped up his life's story: the start of his career, some early soap-opera work, his marriage, a string of B movies he refused to divulge the names of due to a previous run of obesity, his divorce.

After some quiet, when Connie had cleaned his plate, he sat back, lit a cigarette, and said, "I don't get it. There's a gap in your story."

Fourteen people stormed into the rear of the diner, laughing, addressing David, slapping him on the back, fourteen men and women haranguing him about his whereabouts.

"Who spoke?" David asked.

"Guy named Louie from Pax," somebody said.

"Powerful," another said. "Powerful qualification."

A guy looked at Connie and said, "What do you got here, a wet one?" and Connie laughed, embarrassed and confused. There were too many of them, they talked all at once and their eyes shone funny, this gang of fourteen bombing their way into the back of the Starlit. They surrounded Connie and David at the table, the crowd running the gamut from old-man-banker-in-a-suit to young-slut-in-a-minidress, the group as a whole defying strata altogether, there in the back of the Starlit.

They had come from a midnight AA meeting at the Moravian Church on 30th Street and Lexington Avenue. Some sober for days, some others, decades. Some ordered big, some just coffee. They talked all at once, telling pope jokes and rabbi jokes, jokes about all kinds of animals, about people, places, and things walking into bars.

A fountain pen walks into a bar.

Half of a horse's ass walks into a bar.

Down the table Connie heard, "I wanted to drink so bad I thought my face was going to explode." He exchanged looks with David through the din.

"What's up?" Connie said.

"Nothing. I know them."

"Yeah, I put that much together."

"Fuck a higher power," somebody said, "I just don't want to wet the bed anymore."

Connie grabbed his head as if his foxhole had taken a direct mortar hit.

"Sexually," another guy said, "I don't know if I'm coming or going," and the guy across from him said, "You're in the right place," and this brought more laughter.

Next to Connie a guy with thick eyeglasses whose leg would not stop bouncing beneath the table said, "How many days you got?"

Connie snatched at his check, sprang from his chair.

* * *

He felt disembodied on his way back to the rooming house, moving through the streets under some inarticulate threat. Two nuns a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar. Connie didn't like them telling bar jokes. A mother-in-law walks into a bar with a hunk of Swiss cheese tied around her neck.

He'd been wetting the bed for years. It probably had as much to do with Maureen changing the lock as his infidelity.

He smoked and walked west and thought of a moment, circa '57, fifteen years old, up on Maureen's roof, waiting for her to come up and make out with him. They had come back around to each other, having known each other forever, Connie taken anew by the sight of her at a table with the girls at the previous November's Parish Night. Those were the days. Simple appointments, simple agendas. There you were, kissing so sweet, a summer's afternoon. An ocean liner glided slowly between buildings down the Hudson. In his hand, that first cold beer of the day. The blueness of sky, the raw smell of life up his nose, the slow glide of the ocean liner, the taste of that beer. He worked as a helper for a trucking company called REA Express, so he had a little money. But the thought that stuck, the thought he never shook from that moment up on Maureen's roof: I cannot picture life without it. It meaning not love, or sex, or Maureen, or kissing, or a blue sky, or ocean liners, or money, or health—but alcohol. Can't imagine life without it. A drink, a beer, something. Wrapped up tight already, fifteen years old. In his gut, he knew. Otherwise, went the premonition, I just won't make it.

And who the hell is this David anyway?

Back in his room the bourbon tasted like someone had watered the bottle down. He wondered where the kick had gone, the sting at the back of the throat.

The Starlit Diner as a destination contained an element of surprise Connie did not care for. "Why didn't you let me know, David?" Connie whispered to himself. "What kind of sneak-attack nonsense is that?" He sat in the dark, whispering, smoking, drinking.

He went to the closet, reached up to a shelf, and produced by its handle a tiny portable television. A thirteen-inch screen, the weight of a man's bowling ball. He pushed the hot plate back out of the way, unraveled the TV's cord. After the tubes warmed he sat transfixed by the muted black-and-white images of a Combat! rerun. Connie would not have been surprised if a guy like Vic Morrow enjoyed a drink. Again came a respectful knock.

"Yes?" Connie said, going for an official tone.

"You took off abruptly. Are you all right?" David said, popping his head into the room.

"Why would I be anything other than all right?" Connie said. "Come in if you're coming in."

David sat down and said, "You seemed to leave all of a sudden, that's all."

"You knew they were coming."

"Yes."

"Your cronies."

"Cronies?"

"Do you have something you want to say to me?" Connie asked, his voice going thin with vulnerability.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Uh-huh."

"We took a walk together."

"Go on," Connie said, draining his glass and refilling it. "Don't worry, I can drink and listen at the same time."

"I think you're being a little—"

"What? A little what?" Connie pulled on his cigarette, boxed it up, blew the smoke out with ill-defined hostility. "Go ahead, explain it. Was it something about me, personally?"

"I don't know what you want explained."

"Me, at Bickford's this morning with my Hefty bag. What, if a room opens up, you get your mark settled in, that how it works?" His voice didn't slur, but there was something wild in his eyes, his movements subtly possessed.

"My mark?"

"You a friend of my wife's?" Connie said.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Why would you, hmm?"

"You're drunk, and somehow got it into your head I set out to shanghai you in some way."

"You said it, not me. Your words," and somewhere in the far reaches of his mind Connie thought, Poor David, having to put up with my nonsense. "Did you hear one of your pals, what he said to me?"

"What?"

"Am I a wet one, David? Is that what this is about?"

"Look, I'm sorry if you thought—"

"Live and let live," Connie said. "Isn't that one of your organization's dictums?"

Vic Morrow gave orders in the battlefield to someone on the TV. Connie polished off the contents of his glass, poured another, and said, "Don't you think I've given some thought as to the nature of my drinking, vis-à-vis its ramifications?"

"Really, it's not my—"

"I met your leaders, believe me. Years ago. Sure, Alcoholics Anonymous. Yeah. I know the deal. I sold newspapers to those guys started the whole fucking thing. Early fifties, I was a kid. Used to be a clubhouse right over here on 24th."

"You know about that clubhouse?" David said.

"It's gone: 24th, Ninth and Eighth. They tore the whole block down, but the main guy—"

"Bill?"

"With the big ears. He used to grab the stack of newspapers out of my arms, peel off a five-dollar bill—I'm nine years old."

"You sold them newspapers?"

"He'd throw a football around with me out on the street, Bill. First place I ever saw a television set, front room of that clubhouse. They all wore suits, the men, like a custom of the time. I'd walk out of there with a five-dollar bill and a bottle of Coca-Cola. See, the thing is," Connie said, and poured some more liquor into his glass, "there's a couple type of drinkers. Says so in your Big Book."

"You're familiar with the Big Book?" David said. It was the affectionate name of the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, officially titled Alcoholics Anonymous.

Connie had attended an AA meeting or two on his own visits to Bellevue years ago and was handed some of the literature. "I am. Are you?"

"Yes."

"You should be—you're a member, correct?"

"Correct," David said, glancing around, as if planning his escape.

"I have no personal grudge against the outfit. Besides which, the book says it plain: they draw a line, crystal clear, between what they describe as an alcoholic—they, follow me—as opposed to what you might call a hard or let's say heavy drinker. And I would say, my case, long as we're talking"—and here Connie broke wind, let one rip, a perverse punctuation mark in service to his speech, which sounded like a cardboard box getting violently ripped open—"would, according to their standards, fall somewhere in the category of what might be called a hard or heavy drinker. Granted. You know, speaking generally."

David looked at him a moment before bursting into laughter.

"Don't hurt yourself there, David," Connie said. "Easy does it," he added with a bizarre wink.

After a little while David could not stop yawning, and Connie said, "Go ahead and yawn your way out of here."

* * *

He sat alone in the dark, save for the snow on the television screen. He got to his feet and considered this question: how does a nonalcoholic get ready for bed? He decided to brush his teeth. He reserved toothbrushing for the morning as a rule, but given the night's events he thought he'd brush before bed as a demonstration of his nonalcoholic nature. People of an alcoholic nature go to bed without brushing, he figured, and given the fact that he was not an alcoholic, he probably should brush. And then he thought, What else does a person who's not an alcoholic do? His mind drew a blank. Then he thought, I know what I can do, I can prepare my clothes for the morning. I can lay my clothes out so when I wake up I know what I'm going to wear. People of nonalcoholic natures do such things. If I'm not an alcoholic, he thought, and I'm not, I can lay my clothes out like a nonalcoholic in preparation for tomorrow's nonalcoholic day. Granted, I like to drink. Vic Morrow probably enjoys a drink himself. He got up and looked at his clothes in the closet and thought, What a strange thing to do, and decided against it. I'm not going to put my clothes out for tomorrow just to prove I'm not an alcoholic. If I'm not an alcoholic, why do I have to prove it? I don't have to prove my nonalcoholic nature to anybody. And who would I be proving it to anyway? And even if I am an alkie, whose business is that?

They had tried to help his father, those men in suits. They came up to the house, spoke to his mother, the half-heard conversations lodged in Connie's memory. A strange word when you're seven years old: anonymous. Their clean-shaven faces, their pressed suits, a lucidity in the eye. Whispered words between his mother and those men, seeping through fabric hanging from doorway curtain rods, one doorless doorway after the next in those railroad flats, curtain after curtain through which muffled words floated.

Did they know Connie's father killed himself? Of course they knew. They came to the house, tried to help, prior to the move uptown. They knew Sammy. And then, back in Chelsea, after the six-month nightmare that was Harlem, they paid Connie and his siblings special attention. They bought out Connie's stack of newspapers nightly, tipped him heavily, gave him cold bottles of Coca-Cola from the red machine that tasted so good. Those men in suits, that AA clubhouse right there on 24th, they tried, didn't they?

Motherfuckers at that diner, and David playing dumb. Go ahead, David, keep playing dumb, see what happens.

He decided on some light housecleaning like a nonalcoholic might. He picked up the ashtray, escorted it across the room, and was going to dump its contents out the window—but caught himself about to perform the act of an alcoholic. Your first night in the house and you want to dump your ashtray directly over the entranceway?

He laid down and prayed aloud: "Lord God Father, please hear my prayer. Bless Maureen and Artie and Stevie, grant them peace and watch over them, Father." He called his god Father because he liked it that way. He never did have too much of an earthly father.

That man for a time up in Harlem, after Sammy and Edward passed, the man who taught Connie how to find the constellations in the sky. From that spot in St. Nicolas Park, surrounded by the night, away from the streetlamps (to let the stars shine more bright, the man said). The man's breath on Connie's neck, crouching behind him, the heaviness of an arm on Connie's shoulder. The smell of talc on the man, a porkpie hat on his head. Did the man show Connie care and concern—was he really about astronomy? Holding Connie in a specific manner by the arms, directing his body to face a certain angle, to line up a constellation in the sky. The guy had his hands on me quite a bit: like that priest who taught me how to make free throws. They always position themselves behind you, these short eyes. They sure know how to pick out a fatherless kid, let me tell you. Eagle eyes for the fatherless ones. See a kid with no father coming a mile off, a short eyes can. The special talent of any moderately gifted pedophile.

I cannot picture life without it. He tried to feel out in his mind for an image of himself as a person who did not drink, and nothing came. The construct of a character named Connie Sky who lived a sober life eluded him, terrified him down to the ground, made him shudder.

An alcoholic walks into a bar.

He felt his consciousness abandoning itself, the gears of his thoughts slipping, failing to catch altogether, and his last internal ramble came as a refrain, a fervent appeal tinged by the martyrdom of his suffering.

Let me go, Connie's heart cried, let me go, let me go.