AUTOGRAPH

YESTERDAY WAS MY wife’s birthday, and, according to our custom, I woke up before dawn and sneaked out of bed. Our custom is that the birthday person sleeps until the family tiptoes in and wakes her up with singing and banging on pans and hauls her smiling to the table and sits her down to a perfect candlelit breakfast next to a stack of gifts. It was 6 A.M. I put on water for tea and sliced some nectarines, which she likes to eat with goat yogurt, and got out a block of her favorite cheese, which gives off an aroma like yesterday’s hiking socks. The kids had baked rolls the night before. I set the glass-top table on the terrace with white plates, wineglasses for the orange juice, candles, and American-flag napkins, and then, because it was too early to wake the household and also because I am a cook who believes that too much is just barely enough, I decided to go out and find fresh bagels and lox and some more fruit. Also because that’s a sweet time for a Midwesterner to walk around town. New York at six o’clock on Saturday morning is as close to being like Minneapolis as New York ever gets.

I headed toward a bagel bakery on Broadway around 81st, thinking I would come across an all-night fruit market along the way, and I was swinging down Amsterdam Avenue when a man called to me from behind. He said, “Mister? Sir?” I’ve lived in New York long enough to be able to ignore panhandlers when I want to: the New Testament doesn’t say a person has to be at the beck and call of the needy every waking moment, you know. But, feeling Midwesternly, I turned, and he came up to make his pitch. “I’m not bad,” he was saying. “I’m not going to rob you, or anything.” A young black man in an old tweed coat, torn sneakers, jeans; his hair was long, and tangled in long snarls. He smiled at me sweetly. He smelled slightly rancid, and he spoke fast, with a Southern accent and a slight lisp. He said, “I’m sorry. I don’t like to do this. But I didn’t have anyplace to sleep last night. I spent the night in the Park. Today is my twenty-ninth birthday. It really is. I’m from North Carolina, and I’ve been trying to get into a shelter—you know where the cathedral is? I tried up there, but they were full. There’s another one on Ward’s Island I’m trying to get to. My grandpa is in Bellevue. He’s dying with cancer, and I want to be with him—that’s why I’m here. My name is Kevin. I have this aunt who lives in Hoboken. If I had five or six dollars, I could go over there and look her up and stay with her until I can get back on my feet. I’m sorry to take your time like this, but I just need some help. Now, I’ve got these books.” He brought out a handful of paperbacks from under his coat. “If you’d like to buy one, I’d sure appreciate it.”

Incredibly, one of the books was by me. I saw it right away, of course. One was a romance in a pinkish cover, and one was a Danielle Steel, and one was my book. The cover was torn off, but not the inside cover, which had my picture on it, with me in clear-rim glasses, squinting, in jeans and a green sweater, sitting on the white steps of a house on West 22nd Street, where we used to live. He was telling me how he’d come by these books honestly. I reached into my pocket and pulled out all the money I had—about twenty-eight dollars. I had to do this. I gave it to him. “That’s my book,” I said. He handed it to me. “No, you keep it,” I said. “I just meant that it’s my book. I wrote it.” He looked at the photograph: it was me.

He seemed astonished to be holding a book with a picture of a man who had just given him a small wad of money. Then he touched my arm and said, “I want you to sign it for me.” He dug in his pockets and got out a ballpoint. He said, “Make it out to Kevin and Anthony—he’s my best friend. Oh, he’s not going to believe this! This is incredible!” But the pen didn’t work. “Oh, no, this is terrible!” he cried. He looked up and down the street. He moaned, “I got to find a pen.” He approached a woman walking toward us—“Lady, could I borrow your pen?”—and she glanced away from him and walked on.

I had never seen panhandling from that perspective, and it struck me as genteel the way the beggar shut up when there was no eye contact. He didn’t press his case even slightly. Kevin tried to borrow a pen from two more passersby, with no luck. I believe that if you were out walking at 6 A.M. in Minneapolis and a panhandler asked to borrow a pen you’d be interested—but never mind. We finally went into a deli a block away and got a pen from the clerk. I signed the book “With every good wish for a long & happy life,” thinking that perhaps I should give him my phone number. Twenty-eight dollars doesn’t go far in New York. But I didn’t.

Back home, I made tea and woke up the kids, and we paraded into the bedroom, where she was still asleep, and rattled our pans and sang “Happy Birthday.” It was cool and still on the terrace. We lit the candles. The city out beyond our little potted trees looked serene, though hazy. She opened her gifts: a poster, a scarf, a book of pictures, and a green balloon that inflated so big you couldn’t get your arms around it. It looked like a giant grape. We also had individual balloons, with whistles in their necks, which when the balloons exhaled made loud cawing sounds. The day bounced along; we drove to Bear Mountain for a long hike, came home, slept, and took a major dinner that night at a restaurant. I thought several times, in a sentimental way, about Kevin out there in the city, as if somehow I could have made things right for him. He is, after all, my only homeless reader as far as I am aware. I’ve thought of him often since. Whatever his reason for getting my autograph, my signing the book means just one thing to me, and that is that I know his name: Kevin. Two years in this city, and finally I have met a homeless person.