GUYS & DOLLS

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                          GUYS AND DOLLS

 

     On a Friday night, Manny fabricates a visiting colleague from Philadelphia.  Why Philadelphia?  Because Florence would never doubt that a soul condemned to such a place must not be refused help.  She has not been to Philadelphia but knows, as all New Yorkers do, that it is a borough that failed to thrive.  Manny can not excuse himself; it would be irresponsible. The doctor would be hurt.  His would not be an adult response.

     He names him Blum.  Manny calls Florence from his office and says he has to show him around, that he is eager to see the sights.  Doctor Blum has been to New York before, but Manny has divined from his voice over the phone that this is an intimidated man who can not boast any adventures in this city. Without him, Dr. Blum would be confined to his hotel room. 

     Doctor Blum.  Manny thinks Bloom as he names him, but a glummer Bloom, a glum Bloom.  A Blum.  This Bloom is not destined to bloom; he is not in the hands of a mythologist, and he is not from Dublin.  He is from Philadelphia and Manny can leave his story right there, the rest is too glum.

     On the cab ride downtown, Manny sits glumly.  He notices that in this fugitive’s game he is playing with Florence, he is accompanied by his creation.  He is acting as Blum, seeing partially with Blum's eyes.  Philadelphia is Brooklyn of yore, shroud in winter, brick and scuttling paper and drifting ash.  Blum is one of the shadowy figures he left behind when he went to Harvard. He regrets summoning Blum.  He is quickly too complete. Blum could as easily be playing Manny as the other way around.

     He has the cab let him off a block north of Sheridan Square. It was drizzling, the avenue glistened and halos surrounded the streetlights.  He knows where he is going.  It was a piano bar.  If it has shut down he and Blum can come up with no further mischief. He is relieved to find it still there. He and Florence had been taken there by friends after seeing a play in the neighborhood as long as twenty years ago. He had remembered where it was, an accomplishment in the village where the city's grid went through deceptive refractions, skewing the four directions. The bar was across the square from where the theater had been, that had made it easier.  

     He had to squeeze into the saloon. It was a narrow room with tables pushed to the walls on either side, and he was confined to a goat trail along with a caravan moving single-file towards the bathrooms in back and the bar maid, who somehow could find a trail inside the trail and weave through the shuffling patrons.  The place was not as dark as he remembered it.  The years between had tarred the memory, or romanticized it.  It was dim; weak bulbs in sconces cast wane yolks of light, and a single candle in a red lamp on each of the little tables rouged the lower halves of faces. He had remembered it as being dark as a theater with faces appearing suddenly in the nimbus of a lit match, cheeks hollowed out, caught in the cabals smokers shared when lighting one cigarette from another.  It smelled of beer and damp wool and there was a cozy, stagnant feel to it, like a closet where off-season clothes are stored.         

     The tables were full and he filtered back to the rod that served as breakwater between the knots of patrons and the piano. The wet bar with its foggy, near milk-glass mirror behind it was to his right.  The bar tender was a young man with broad shoulders and big hands who leaned on the counter when he took orders. He had a heavy brow and with his fleshy hands planted on the bar he might anchor a place where strangers got drunk. Some Christmas and New Year's decorations were still hanging over the bar: Bands of aluminum fringes were scotch taped to the shelves of bottles. They managed to look brave rather than seedy, as if they were flying against the odds, not ready to surrender: Stoic sentimentality or stalwart nostalgia. 

     He found a free seat at the piano bar.  It was still early and these seats facing the piano with their backs to the room were taken by people who came in alone. Beside him was a woman of about his age, her hair a frizzy mop, either grey or blond or blond in the half light. Small, piggish eyes that sparkled; she crinkled them at him when he said "May I?"  as if they must sparkle in stronger light.  Blue eyes, he thought, and in spite of dewlaps and floppy jowls she had never gotten over their caprice.

     Manny got the impression he amused her.  He was not at ease in a bar, and maybe he had the air of a truant.  Her shoulders were covered by a wool poncho which agreed so completely with his anachronistic image of the Village he thought she must be as much of an interloper here as he, costumed in her old romances.  Still, she could not be as much of a stranger to a bar, and under her gaze he self-consciously began fingering the bar like a keyboard to demonstrate his legitimate claim on this seat. The bar maid asked him what he would like to drink; his rent was due. Manny, conscience of the bluff involved, ordered a scotch and soda, though he never drank hard liquor. For the first time that evening he was disregarding Doctor Blum’s bitter counsel.            "And would you permit me the pleasure of buying you a drink?” boldly facing the old woman now that he had assumed the stance of veteran tippler. 

    "No thank you, but thank you just the same."

     Surprising himself, Manny grabbed the bar maid's arm as she turned to continue her rounds. She was an interesting piece of work, he noted, underfed, with what he would have called an Appalachian's shape-whittling asceticism to her, somewhat impenetrable, hollow eyes. He spoke to her with the theatrical, sage chivalry of a real scotch drinker.

     "I must make amends.  I've gotten away with terrible omissions. If only she would allow me, it would be a favor.  Could we possibly conspire to refresh her drink over her protests, and if she must, then she can let it sit there? Please, madam."

     "All right, but it will just sit there.  Sherry."

     "Thank you.  And it is always best to be sure that whatever sits there un-drunk is what you're drinking."               

     Tip-toeing from the claustrophobia of disease, he found himself in a troupe of old actors he would have thought had retired long ago.  The artist of chivalrous smarm was his father, the tie salesman.   His route had included Philadelphia.  Manny had gotten his height from him, though not his broad shoulders and square chin. He had been a large boned man with sensual features; Manny had inherited his long-lashed, glistening eyes and full lips.  And, it seemed likely, his attention to clothes. He called himself a clothes horse; it was typical of the sarcasm he used around the apartment. He was restless when he was confined in Brooklyn, an unhappily stabled racer, too well-made, too bluff or capable of being taken for bluff, athletic and hale, to be holed up with a soggy wife and owl-eyed, quiet little boy who abided him with quiet fear and distaste, having been warned about him by his mother.  By clothes horse he meant he pulled the milk wagon, his tie samples, from town to town.  But he was a clothes horse, square framed and graceful, and he must have been relieved to leave the house and be out, a man who would now live by his charm and looks.  He would be free to practice his matinee idol imitation on those low-lives who would believe it, believe the lacquering of svelte theatricality that overlay the immigrant hustler, including women in bars-said Manny's mother-who he deserved and no better, floozies who saw right through him but could do no better and for whom a tin idol was good enough. (He would never be able to see that, he was too vain, he believed they believed him, but he was wrong, they were laughing at him and his need to be adored by losers.  No one believed it up and down the coast, Mister Big Shot, the Jew in gentile clothing who took himself so seriously they had to bust a gut. He is desperate to please, she told Manny.  Others.  Strangers.  Their judgment matters.  For us he saves the rest.)       

     A swarthy man in a Homburg who wore garters for his socks, French cuffs and cufflinks, portaging his suitcases of samples to the Lincoln, relieved to be off, miraculously still employed during the Depression, quite willing in his sardonic irony, in his bitter bonhomie, to play into and at all travelling salesman jokes, Manny could imagine.  And into knock, knock jokes too.  Who stood more often outside the door uninvited than his father? Who's there indeed, never who they expected he would have made sure.  Ready to have the laugh be on him but to have the last laugh as well, the foreigner who had insinuated himself into the American scene in a clownish, sly, folkloric role.  This circuit virtuoso and drummer of pizzazz as a rejoinder to defeat, who made himself at home in hotel rooms and diners and bars, those asylums for ghosts, now this figure had Manny by the elbow, as if dying had just been escape to his preferred haunts.             In front of him the empty piano and the dark terminus of the saloon, the walls here painted black to make a stage.  He could smell the dust in this corner, it tickled his nose.

     "Do you come here often?" he asked.

     "Goodness, didn't that used to be a line? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  It's almost insulting to look so in need of rescue, but you mean well. What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this? Don't be a bad sport. You saved my life and now you're going to have to get used to me...Ah?      

     "Manny."

     "Manny.  Eugenia."

     The bar maid arrived with their drinks on a small tray cluttered with empty beer bottles, glasses, crumpled napkins and bills.  The shot glass felt like a solid ingot in his hand; Manny was used to the stems of wine glasses.

     The old woman raised her glass for a toast.

     "Eugenia and Manny, to inauspicious starts."

     They touched glasses and Manny took too large a swallow and his eyes got teary and he coughed.      

     "Manny, it's a disgrace, the junk they serve. You have to be careful.  This sherry should be named Nellie, or Gypsy Rose, or, how do they christen their poor daughters these days?  Vanessa?  Contessa? "

     "Sherry's already in the same crowd as Vanessa."

     "I was going to wallow in sentimentality and you've put me back on my feet."

     "I can't really see you wallowing.  More like Esther Williams.  Back stroking in a fountain."

     "Balls.  I'm a great sea cow.  You have to hear me honking and moaning.  My boys roll their eyes.  The girls milk my tears. They get a kick out of ruining me. They think it's their duty. They won't have me escaping my venerable office.  Revenge I suspect. I go to pieces over ‘Danny Boy’. They need only breathe the overture and I’m a sopping mess.  The boys have fled; they're ever so objective about their father.  I think that's what it is or maybe they think he deserves something more majestic. A toast maybe. Let's have another, to make my boys proud of me.  Manny, let's toast this sad anniversary."

     "I'm sorry."

     "Don't be. I was married nearly forty years. Every day is an anniversary of something, sad and happy. This toast is to one of them. I forgot what. A feeling, Manny, of sadness, sir, for the way things are.  I think that's mature of us and not one bit glib."

     "You're a widow, then?"

     "To my brave, swift, boys.  Gazelles.  Impalas. You would never have guessed them for sprinters but they can outrun even a rumor of misfortune, my timid athletes.  I am a widow.  I'm sixty-five and Irish.  I'm being redundant."

     "I am a widower, myself."

     A widower? He had meant to escape Florence and their resigned generation and now he had disposed of her. How quickly it had sprung from his lips. He had said what he did from existing in fear.  He felt as if any effort to imagine Florence here depleted his remaining energy to believe himself here.  Imagining living was vital to actually living, and what you can recognize as a sure sign you were dying was this inability to persuasively imagine yourself alive, to place yourself among the living in ways that were not strained. You must save all your effort for this or you would fade and become impossible.  To import the real Florence was more lifting than the flickering ghost could expend.  The healthy arrived with their weight of real substance which broke apart conjured fogs.

     "Is that a sigh of relief I heard?"

     "I have trouble finding the balance; in being truly bereaved. I don't know what I should expect of myself. Maybe you ladies do it better.  Or you get the benefit of the doubt.  That could be from our masculine egos: We assume you're putting on a brave front.  Maybe it's not a front."

     "Manny, don't think so much.  These things are not fancy. He died of cancer. It meant trips to the potty and bathing him, horrible bed sores. It was a lot of work. He was in terrible pain.  We gave him pain killers.  He could sleep for a while.  I don't know what he dreamed.  I dreamt about him sometimes.  He often seemed angry.  I think it was confusion, the cancer moved to his brain, but maybe he still had good reasons.  Forty years. I dreamt he was red as hot metal and he had gotten out of bed, he always seemed to be tossing the covers off, and in the dream he got his wish and he stomped out of the house, furious at us all. He stamped out through the backyard and his fists were balled up. I suppose that was my wish.  It certainly would have been much easier if he'd just walked off in a snit, certainly convenient, no diapers to change. I might have wanted that, and him to blame, angry as hell and just storming out of our lives.  Is that a widow's skill?"

     "I was talking about getting on with it. A positive approach to loss. For everybody's sake.  But it gets messy.  Didn't we, honestly, start this whole widowing process long before, or is it only me, who thinks I signed a contract in my sleep, believing she was speeding me up?  Did you have that feeling? Of being tied to a stone and dragged down?      

     "Manny, I would have described it more as a wrestling match. Some days I'm on top and getting the boost, other times it's him. I guess you might have looked in the window and seen me stepping on his head sometimes.  I don't know what he would have said then, oh, I do, he said it often enough, but I had my reasons and didn't need more of his, not then, though other times it was my turn to say uncle."

     "My wife was more discouraged and tired, more ready to...to protest less, and so, in a dream, I think, I said, take her.  Then I won't have to carry her, against her will, which is killing me.  And now, just how am I to behave?"        

     "You have too many ideas.  I slept with him the last two weeks.  We had put him in one of the kids’ empty rooms.  I was sleeping with the canaries and the dog, the way I do now.  I didn't think it would be two weeks. I thought he would be dead by morning. He wouldn’t eat and was starving. I didn't want to lose him.  He already was lost, that's when I got into bed with him again.  He didn't know who I was.  Maybe, once in a while.  When he was asleep, he may have known me then like he always had when he was sleeping and we rolled together, when it doesn't wake you up as a stranger in bed would or his not being there woke me in my own bed.  But, for every time he did not know me, he knew me as someone he had loved. He thought I was his sister and asked her to leave the bed gently as he sometimes did my daughter when she bathed him. Just for a moment he'd realize he was naked in front of his daughter and he'd be offended, that's how he mistook me.  For his mother too, and he did not ask her to leave.  He was glad to have her. I think it was fine with him to be nursed by her, as if he had the measles. Never once did he mistake me for one of his nightmares.  I was afraid he would. I didn't wonder but that in half his dreams, childhood I hope they mercifully were, that into them a hideous figure of death pushed its way and sat there blighting the garden, but I was never taken for that figure and from that more than anything else I believe a bit in our romance at the end, more than I would have thought, when he couldn't see me and I was each woman who had loved him and he still believing in us with his last bones which is all he had left."

     An urchin had walked to the piano and was gazing at it.  She had huge eyes in a tiny, fine boned face, hugging herself in a big wool coat with its collar pulled up to her chin.  It was a pea coat, a thrift shop purchase, Manny guessed, and falling down below it to her ankles was a mid-night blue gown.  This delicate refugee stood gazing at the piano for a moment.  She gave the impression she did not know why she was here, as if she had sleep-walked into the bar, summoned there by the piano whose uses she did not understand.  She touched the keys gently, too softly to stir a note, maybe discovering a memory.  Then she turned and walked off the little stage, and Manny glimpsed her huddled form passing behind Eugenia heading for the bar.

     She was the singer. An overly dramatic girl it would seem, too steeped in her role as oracle and slave of the muse, but then, when she removes her coat and reveals her bird-like frame it no longer seems a conceit.  She has the deflated, extinguished look of a dead bird.  A pittance of rags, totally fall-broken.  She returns to the piano with an empty beer mug for tips; the bartender stashes her coat and purse behind the bar. Manny sees the sharp bones of her bare back.  She must have bought the gown at the same thrift shop.  It hangs loosely on her. He's looking at her around Eugenia and talks distractedly, not really noting if Eugenia is listening, looking at the singer.  

     "It was Alzheimer's.  She had always tried to meet expectations.  I retrieved her from her wanderings.  Neighbors called.  She was in their kitchen.  She had waited by their door until they let her in, now she was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, dipping biscuits.  She had a sweet forlorn look.  They did not want to hurt her feelings.  All she wanted was to sit in the kitchen, absorbing affection.  They felt guilty evicting her.  She had become such an inconspicuous old age; they felt obligated to support it so others would take her example.  She was lovely to the end.  Well, we are not so old; she was able to assume the role like an actress, with the same immunity from the reality.  Lovelier than ever.  Of course, the worry lines, so accusatory, would disappear, but they were not replaced by that blank mask which is typical of the disease.  She escaped the squalor; that was part of her popularity.  Such a lovely, domesticated old age.  Such courteous surrender.  She remained continent.  In fact, she became, how can I explain it? an idiot-savant of hygiene.  Fixated in a doting way on her vocation of inoffensive farewell.  She would not leave a smudge.  And none of the odor which gives old age away.  She smelled of soaps, lemony, herbal fragrances." 

     "They speak of saint's flesh remaining sweet even in the grave, it was like that.  I was privileged to witness it.  The essence of her was revealed.  Her face looked tenderly inquisitive, as if she was listening. That is the way it has always been.  She was not one to get the message right away.    Forgive me: her patient, trusting face, her soft eyes opened wide; the Alzheimer's freed her to listen as she had always tried, without any intention of hearing but only to cooperate and receive each word as a caress.  She had never before been at a loss for words, with age especially, and nobody finally willing to listen, and then this botrytis of the brain vetted her.  No more chatter.  Wonderful silence.  Confetti of silence, and then full arias of it.  Such a forgiving old age, neither musk nor yammer.  Everybody loved and forgot her, gratefully at first, and then as their due." 

     The small klieg reflects on the singer’s gown and hair.  Her hair was chestnut. The stage was shallow, and the baby grand faced sideways and she sat in profile to them, and he could see her arched ribs and the stippled ridge of her spine.       

     She began to play, an informal overture, a medley of tunes strung together by a coincidence of chords, warming up her fingers.  Eugenia smiled; she had probably decided he was a man who turned into a windbag with a few sips of booze. 

     "Manny, you'll have to ask her for `Danny Boy'.  She's Irish, she looks like my daughter, Victoria.  She'll be furious. I hope so. Her skin will catch fire. Her mother is the last person she wants to see throwing the old sod at her.   She'll be beautiful mad."

     The dress was vented to her knee.  Her calf was shapely; she might have been a ballerina, and her shoulder, though pointy, showed firm muscle, as did her arm.  She was small boned and it was deceptive.  Each juncture of her body was vanishingly narrow. She seemed to be strung between ankle and knee, wrist and elbow, elbow and shoulder, and then strummed into visibility.  Her taut body even had the transparent shimmer of humming strings.  It is what reminded him of dead gulls; her being depended on inspiration.  Without it she would crumple into wire and dowel.

     She would be a temperamental girl; there was no insulation around her feelings.  They would show through, and she would be swept along by them. Maybe that is why she paid that somber visit to the piano.  Anticipating the hither and yon tossing she would get by following requests.  But then, her dancer's muscles; she would not be so easy to up end.   

     Manny thought: death loves beauty more than virtue does.  Loyalty gets a dog's face.  The patience required of tenderness enamels the face with boredom.

     The pianist was singing "Stormy Weather" in honor of the damp dreariness outside or maybe in consonance with similar weather inside herself.  She kept it subdued. He had heard it done as a valedictory wail and he liked this version better.  Maybe she was simply not warmed up enough to trumpet, but he liked her introspective, private melancholy.  She had a strong hold on quiet mood, her voice full and pliable in those registers that do not get the boost of calisthenic exuberance.

     Eugenia squinted skeptically at the singer. She must look as much like her daughter as she said, and that girl for all her wit and rebellion had no case to make for such a sadly weathered recall of her life.  Manny looked at her fleshy face and was angry with her for presuming maternity.

     Eugenia burrowed in her big knit purse and brought out a shabby leather wallet.  She gave Manny a five dollar bill.    

     "Just a minute, we're going to draw up a list."

     She started to empty balled kleenex stamped with smudges of lipstick onto the bar, searching for a pen.  Manny returned the bill to her and took a five from his own wallet. 

     "He who pays the piper."  

     "I have some I want to hear."

     "I know, `Danny Boy'"

     Manny got up from his chair. 

     "I'll make the deposit, and we can flag her from here."

     His joints had stiffened while sitting and it is a relief to unfold.  He wobbles.  The scotch has gotten to him; he did not notice it sitting. A slip of numbness has been pulled over him.

     She is singing `Mad about the Boy'. He waits for her to finish and then three numb steps take him to the piano, close to her bare back with its feather-work of muscles.  He slips the bill into the mug. She looks smaller close up and more angular. She no longer enjoys the transformation of an actress coalescing on stage.

     "Do you know `I'm looking for an Angel'?" 

     She hums a few bars. He sees the vein in her throat flush blue.  It is like feeding a bird; he sees the song like a lump of bread in her throat.

     "`East Side, West Side'."  It's Eugenia.  She is his partner in the deposit and is staking her claim. He hates that see-saw, sing-song tune.  She could not really like it either.  She is teasing him for `Danny Boy' or is she teasing him for his credulous choice? The Irish. They don't permit sentiment in any one but themselves. 

     By the time he gets back to his seat she is fully into `Angel'.  Her voice has shed the wet wool of her first songs and follows the primrose, garden path of his request, its Sunday promenade wooing. It is a wistful song laced into fastidious pomp and studied breeziness.  He listens for a note of recognition from her, a sign she noticed their mutual thinness and its intimations of talented grace.  She stays within the song's glib whimsy and self-satisfaction, its blotted-ink neatness.  Safe in his seat with his anonymous back turned towards the saloon, disappointed with the effect of his choice, he wishes he could recant and call out, "Lily Marlene", which he knows in German and which he sings under duress to Florence, his Lily of the Lamplight, which he sang to her in livid irony more than forty years ago for the first time, lying together on rumpled sheets during those months between their plunge into the bushes after the kiss beneath the streetlight and their marriage; lying naked, the radiator hissing, a sense of sated gluttony and gloom saturating him to the bone, Florence's skin patchy with red from her hours in sensual tossing, purple spots on her thighs and calves and buttocks, blooming as cryptically as lichen, fitted to his fingertips but whose actual printing is impossible to recall.

     The singer might purge the song of satire during its trance of rumpled past and future. As she sits beneath the spotlight glowing chestnut, white and blue she might even insert herself into the song and from then on become his new Lily, materializing with the music.   

     The singer follows with "East Side, West Side" and Eugenia sings along in a hoarse whisper, and then the singer is tacking from request to request, pulled away from any chance of Manny's putting in a second bid.  The five dollars reserved her for a surprisingly short time.  People from the saloon lean over the bar and stick bills into the mug until the money begins to look like a fern origami. "Over the Rainbow" is requested, and "Chances Are".  The singer eddies in the shallows. The bar must have made it into a guide book: A quaint anachronism in which to experience old village ambience.  Manny hears `Miss O'Leary's Cow' touted from behind him, and another athletic voice saying, "That's Mrs."  Then the sound of lip farting and "Give me a break", and then in the bellowing baritones of a pack of young men, comes "One fine night when we were all in bed" breaking up in guffaws, huffs, hoots and howls.  The singer continues as if she has not heard them.  She ignores "Swanee" tossed up in Jolson's ersatz minstrel voice, probably from the crowd of beer busting hearties that had tried "Mrs, O'Leary's Cow", intramural sports who had run out of patience for the sanctimony of old songs and for the life-daunted who plead for them.  She sings "Moonlight on the Wabash" which is barely a better song, another schmaltzy elegy about a river, but the request had been slipped in shyly, Manny had not heard it, and the singer seemed to have an ear for silent prayers. 

     Her face was thin and sharp.  Like most Irish faces Manny had seen, it seemed a variation on mug, faces for scrappers.  Not a face that solicited secrets, it did not look to have the dreariness to wait on confessions.  A face that could defend them, though, if she choose.  There were supplicants here.  Mysteriously, they took up no room.  It was a skill they had practiced.  They were skirted and flinched, and even in the crowded bar where any movement caused a kind of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" reverberation in surrounding bodies, they subtracted their presence.  Their already completed leave-taking needed to requisition nothing to go on forever.  Their requests must have arrived in an unusual way, a mold scooped out of the singer's ear, some swishing of sea-shell surf in her ear that needed a song poured in to fill the place they had emptied.  And the size of that excavation where they had been?-a cavern, a cathedral, at least it would seem that way from the sudden appearance of "Forever Young" from out of that nowhere, a soprano so free of meaty lung that it verged on inaudible, a clairvoyant keen that the ear could barely last through hearing, and whose disappearing edges seemed to fingertip a roofless vault.

     After that she seemed inured to any request and sang songs of her own choosing, which could have been a feminist rebuttal of the historically passive role of taxi singer, and she did get cockier or spikier, a little taunting, typical signs of political statement, but Manny thought she was not concerned with the crowd any more, or hardly.  Their come-uppance was included, but she was practiced enough, not in performance alone but in adversity generally, that it was an aside.  She was taking advantage of the crowd's antagonistic desires to let in her own character.  She was triggered for contest.  She seemed girlish, feisty and eager. She sang "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", "Sunny Side of the Street", "Let's Fall In Love" "I like it, How About You" and there was a virtuoso of pluck in it, a chin up, want-to-make-something-out-of-it spunkiness in it. She was skating on the slip way of her own christening. 

     She sang ‘I Don't Know Why I love You Like I do’ and Manny thought he must have danced with his mother when this song was playing.  When the singer reached "You never want my romancing, The only time you hold me is when we're dancing" he felt his mother pull him out of a chair in the dark living room and they danced together, barely touching, almost at arms length, and his mother had closed her eyes and there had been a little smile on her lips and with her eyes closed and her head rocking a little to the music, she had stepped closer and pressed against him and his arms stuck out straight behind her as if they were in splints, and her cheek touched his and he saw her with her eyes closed and her face dreamy and serene.  And then he was sure this dance had never happened.  He thought he must have seen her listening to this song on the radio and softening and her eyes had been closed and she may have been swaying to the music and he would have watched for a moment and then left the room so he could pretend he had not seen because he could not fill this space where a dance partner would have stood, and had to act like he knew nothing about that untapped nectar, her secret of restored maidenhead. 

     And then he felt it had all happened, a charity had been commuted into the song, and it would happen every time the song was played, that it was these imagined moments that were the amber in songs, not the moments themselves, but the wishes that had hovered around them and were never let in.  His mother had heard this song and poured her daydream into it and it incubated there until it spilled back into his ear, or he may only have imagined her, trembling Narcissus-like on its silky membrane, imagined for them both a moment of intolerable innocence that absolved them both, and that was enough to accomplish it, and to place alongside their lives a place of omniscient longing both could regain in the aphasia of a song. 

     The phrase came again, "You never seem to want my romancing, the only time you hold me is when we're dancing"  and once again the two shadows revolved in the gloom lighted only by the borealis glow of the radio dial, gathering the black heaven stranded between the lights of the Milky Way where ten times the amount of love may lie unlit than all the love ever touched, and whose tarry constellation stenciled by the stars seems more the image of the sloughing body at seventy than the belt of Orion or the crown of Cassiopeia.

     She finished the set with "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", a dead sober version, starkly literal, with the tune so compacted into the clean words that it seemed she was speaking in the iron heavy, spaded-up voice of those who resort to speech only when forced. 

     She took the money from the glass and straightened it into leaves, picked up her empty water glass and walked to the wet bar to transfer the bills to her purse.  

     "This place is too boisterous for me", Eugenia said.

     "Home?"

     "I wasn't planning on staying so late, anyway.  I met my daughter for lunch. Shopping."  She kicked some shopping bags stuffed in around her feet.  "And here I am.  I must have gotten in a mood. And the poor dog's been out all day."

     "Not today.  It's raining."

     It was the singer behind them, carrying her glass of water.

     "I didn't know it was going to rain."

     "The poor guy."

     She walked around the bar and found a folding chair and sat down in front of them.  The singer's voice, even in conversation has a three dimensional physicality to it. Manny feels he is inside a corporal present tense. The roundness of the words is an essence that can be rhymed musically; a kind of scat that is a periodic table for verbal evolution including gut and lung. This round present tense is like a navel for all tenses and he might exit this abeyant interval into an octave where "would have" has no note of regret. It might be a declarative, pulled taut into "must". 

     At seventy-the singer flung boyishly gangly on the folding chair-how did he get here?     

     He eloped this evening from the verdict of three score and ten. Somber note, susurrant veils: Dogs their sadness sharply perceived, or their tenderness, or mischief, or patience. The soul naked in exile and separation, vulnerable to attachment, most surely glimpsed and felt when its trust goes unmet or its loyalty is unused, vividly in a ruined living creature, in the full expenditure of itself in acts or casualty of faith. Expressed, too, in the distortion of the simple symmetries the body might have had, had once, before the advent of sexuality, its neat self-containment ruptured by this never yielding grappling desire pushing through. 

     Gangly girl, mermaid, soul androgynous with dreams, a pun being played on seventy when it is declared three score and ten. A pun that only works in a dream or song: A pun on soul and solid, so that this matter of soul so soon to be tested for endurance is balanced from hand to hand against solid in compulsive repetition and to no possible resolution. 

     And at seventy while sifting soul from hand to hand, has also come the image of his father pasted, collage like, on an Italian beach. A fire-plug of a guy, standing fully dressed, angry, arms crossed, gazing out to the horizon, hostile to interruption, his head not clearing the gunwales of the fishing dories hauled on the shore, too short, too solid in adamantine resistance to broach the hulls, to shove off and leave the shore. Some patch his undelivered soul makes in the day, this still too solid vapor consigned to his son.

     "He can't make up his mind.  He wants to be out unless he is outside and then he wants to come in.  So, I made up his mind for him.  I thought I'd be back by now", Eugenia said.

     "But you're not.  Tsk. Tsk."

     "He's a great big dog who'd do fine on the tundra."

     "He's waiting by the door right now." 

     "You, dear, have no idea what a soft heart I've got.  My house is Noah's ark.  My girls think I'm fated to be lonely if they don't pile pets on me. I have three cats.  They have first and last names, thank you very much.  The kids named them.  When they were kids.  They should have called them Methuselah. They gave me a cockatiel.  It's pride.  They think I should want to be eccentric in old age."

     "Don't you?"

     "I don't need coaching in that department."

     "They beg to differ.  Our mom tends to rest on her laurels, too.  You have to stay ahead of the wave.  It's different than kitsch."

     "I can tell the difference, my dear."

     "It changes over-night."

     "Au contraire, it never does.  When one has chosen wisely."

     "We get in this fight all the time.  Either she's sanctifying junk or she's purging the house of relics.  It changes with her moods."

     "It's her house?"

     "She regrets it soon enough.  If she's taken advantage of his absence to throw out his junk, then she feels bad.  She'll think, did she forget he's dead?  Who's she been arguing with?  This is no opportunity to have the last word, did she forget that?  She doesn't like thinking she's that lonely, she'd rather be loopy."

     "My dear, you have to strike a balance. His clothes, I really had to think about them.  I decided: too immediate was perilous. I wouldn't have those things still where he'd last put them; as if he's just stepped out. I admit, his clothes hung in the closet for several months, oh that coat last rode his shoulders before he lay on the bed. I told the boys to take what they wanted and give the rest to the Church.  Five years, and then we painted.  I had the boys again, they moved like sleep walkers.  I finally hired a professional. I should have called a priest for an exorcism. I don't let my kids make presumptions about me. I live there, that's already a decision, but I’ve decided it’s a realistic one. I think stubborn is defiance enough. It reaches as far as I’ll admit and for the rest-back off you’ll find no welcome here."

     "I walked by a bakery” the singer said. “It smelled so good and I started crying because it smelt good and he can't smell it anymore, he doesn't have a nose. Poor daddy, no nose, not even a carrot like Frosty, and I had to laugh. All he has is eternity, and it gets tedious. I don't think I'm made to hold a straight face that long. I don't think he's good at it either. He would roll his eyes, charcoal if they dare. I go walking on the shore. I have my brother's faded khakis.  They have oil stains on them, they look wet there, and I roll up the cuffs. I've got my brother's work shirt and his navy blue sweat shirt and I like sinking my feet in the wet sand with the froth sizzling around my ankles. When it goes out you feel you're flying or ice skating. That's as close to eternity as I care to get, and what I'm looking forward to most is sitting on the edge of the car seat and brushing the sand from my feet, it feels like you're making them out of clay."

     "Good for you, dear.  You remind me of my Victoria.  We always say that her report on Judgment day will follow the list of what she was wearing when the trumpet sounded."

     While Eugenia and the singer were talking, Manny finding himself sidelined had finished off his scotch.  Then, he had bottomed it up and looked through the syrupy spyglass at the ceiling, a saloon veteran's clowning gesture, he thought. His father was his first and virtually his only model for a drinker. Manny's mother leaves a bottle of scotch for him in the house, tells Manny it is his medicine, knowing Manny knows what it is.  He must drink his own medicine. She leaves it for him in her total victory: he can not face her without it or face what he had not been able to shoulder: the boast, promise, and transgression which produced Manny.  She can easily encourage his tippling-on the big chair with his shoes off in the sleeveless undershirts of the time, a tie still around his neck, looking brave or grandly injured-he may reach for the gesture of a man filling a tragic role. A big bluff, this man big in stature but too weak to protest or bear the weight of a great love.  Square shoulders with their epaulets of woolly hair, athletic legs in boxer trunks still wearing his black socks with their garters-he was no drinker, the fifth would last for months. Had he been guilty of everything his wife accused he might have been able to face himself, but imprisoned in green hope, in a kind of romantic optimism, he could not understand what had failed.  He was not a ruin, if only he had been.  But, he had failed himself and his belief in love without a full expenditure of his being, and for the remainder of his life mocked and humiliated himself.  It was this thespian drinker who Manny imitated when he began to drink, imitating as well the fake drunkenness and probably as a chemical destiny, his father's faith in recovered innocence for the sincere.               

     What catches in our throats that surpasses confession and strangles its lies? What has despised our disruption and tardy train? Were we always unnecessary lyrics to the song?

     Manny begins to speak:

     "Your interpretations of songs from the thirties and forties-I think you have a special affinity for them."

     "They were my dad's favorites."

     "They sound like they're yours, too. The attention you give them seems personal.”

     "It depends, a lot of them are hammy or corny, but some of them lighten my mood."

     "My sentiments exactly. Of course they weren't period pieces when I heard them. I immediately liked them because they were exactly right for a general mood. And then, they've lasted, the right ones, when it might have seemed they could only be relevant for that day, or really, not have lasted more than their assigned hour. But, maybe, we don’t either and the rest is recall and that’s what we are here to know, each stumbling on it at our own hour. Something in common, even though they were just clever sometimes, simple rhymes like we are day by day. And consider the accomplishment considering what they were up against-between wars during the depression-to get that litheness. These were not happy men. Light, graceful, they were anything but, and I think that's it-beneath all those songs is the life they did not have but somehow never soured on. They still believed in it. They never really had a chance, but they had the hour. I wouldn't hear it when you sing if you did not understand.."

     "Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph", Eugenia said.  "My dear, this is Manny becoming an old fool.  He's fallen in love.  The pity if it weren't so ridiculous.  Be gentle on him, he means every word from the heart. Look at you, Manny, if you don't have tears in your eyes. Child, I had one, they're a lot of work, at least start with a young one who's still got some starch. Come on now, make yourself useful. You'll bore her to an early old age."

     Eugenia, with much crinkling of paper gathered up her shopping bags and stuffed one into Manny's lap. He was secretly grateful. Better to disappear, donning the cloak of invisibility pressed onto the old like an inverted leper's bell, then sit thoroughly winded by wish alone.

     He carries Eugenia's bags to the street.  Eugenia manages the small miracle of flagging a cab.  He forgets to give her the bag.  Likely, he forgets to say good-bye.  He is not sure.  She pulls the bag out of his hands.  An expression on her face, indignation.  He has ignored her in his distraction. She does not excuse it. She has left his life forever with a residue of contempt for him. Welcome back, Manny. The time in the bar would have to be measured by a cycle, a spin around the sun, and he has stepped out into the same hour but in the next night leaving himself behind in that interval and now will shadow himself led down empty lanes every city has for the daily Lent.

     He has walked past the loading docks in the meat market, under the metal awnings with their tracks for meat hooks, the pavement slippery with suet.  The streets had opened up there; they were brick and lumpy and splayed in a warped grid. The buildings were squat and shanty-town like and in spite of hosing squalid smells lingered. He was lost there and had the cleansing transparency being lost can bring, a deeper solitude where inner chatter quieted.  

     People occasionally disappeared in Manhattan.  Searchers never found them.  They disappeared after New Year's parties, a little drunk, always only vaguely posting their intended destination, always figures that in later testimony were not distinctly known or at least recently had been fading.  This may have been the trail they stumbled on during the wee hour, enveloping foggy brine stinging their lips and whispering broken promises.         

     Large, blocky buildings, an industrial and business quarter. Between two of these blank massifs, so out massed it looked as if it were destined to be crushed, was a two story, stucco building with gables and black shingle roof, and standing in the gloom near its entrance was a group of men smoking, their cigarette ends bobbing and streaking.  As Manny stepped into the street to avoid them, someone called out and came after him onto the tarmac. 

     "What took you? These fellows don't even smoke.  We're killing time. And then whoops-You. What is it with you?  You were going to slip away. `I prefer not.' Because they're all queer?  It's the best gentiles can do to be interesting."

     "I will not go on without you. What'll they do? They have no inner resources. Well, they can rot as far as we're concerned. We're getting out of here.  In a self-righteous huff, we are.  Where will we go?  Lead on, McNuggets."

     He was walking alongside Manny, who in the tried and true method New Yorkers used with psychotics was ignoring him.  He was taller than Manny and built thinly like him, but broader, one of those two-dimensional Jamaican bodies, square shouldered and flat chest. He wore a wrinkled seersucker coat rolled up over his butterscotch-colored forearms.  He walked with a nervous amble, or it was hard to tell what his gait was, it was layered.  He was capable of a willowy grace, a silky stroll that depended from his shoulders and it might have been his natural gait, but he gave it little chance, and minced or flicked off small quick steps, fracturing the lyric, and then Manny recognized himself, an improvised effigy.  He had rounded his shoulders, slung his head forward, and his long arms looked brittle, he was pacing Manny not just step by step, but toe to head, literally shadowing him.

     "Where are you taking me?"

     Manny stopped.  From where they stood in the street he could still have yelled back to the bar and attracted the attention of the smokers, but another few steps and any yells would have been beyond the range of a Manhattan conscience. 

     "Is this a hold-up?"

     "Forsooth?  But it hurts. The quaintness.  You make racism seem noblesse-oblige."

     For the first time Manny looked his companion in the face.  Manny had that discombobulating flush of embarrassment heterosexual men experience in the presence of beauty in a man. The young man's face was sharp boned but its fine angles melded without abutment, maybe answering a wish, and as always, these lucky, seemingly beyond luck fusions made the face recede leaving one feature to enchant the viewer, in this case the eyes which looked to be calligraphy. It was tricky light, the street lamps throw a tangerine hue, but Manny felt the eyes were sea green. The wish would have them sea green.

     His companion planted himself in the street and pouted or it could have been an expression of Negro cogitation or skepticism, they had a vernacular of expressions that were puzzles to Manny. He seemed to be blinking back tears, but his eyes, like Florence's might readily brim with fleeting raptures. Because he must be gay and because he was beautiful, Manny felt the danger of robbery was remote.  He had the traditional male's belief that homosexuals could not look a real man in the eye, and beauty does not seem compatible with misdemeanors, mayhem, yes, but nothing that can be acquitted for fifty dollars. Then a sweep of his hand presented Manny with the empty street. 

     He had walked another quarter block when he heard a commotion behind him. A vision of flapping seersucker and flashing bare ankles in canvas deck shoes dashed past, running powerfully and lightly.  A hundred feet ahead the runner stopped, becoming engrossed in knee-bends and shoulder stretches, and then walked about in tight figure-eights with that air of grave meditation the amateur athlete affects after exertion.

     The stick figure in the distance propped himself against a light pole with one heel resting on its staunch pedestal, and in the gold tulip of match flare lights a cigarette. Manny is certain a few steps will subtract enough distance and the figure will not be so ridiculously longed for anymore-balancing off there on a cusp of recollection-but the fellow seems to brilliantly stage manage the associations he lifts from the unconscious. He has placed himself beneath a lamp light, he has struck a cigarette, and it is not an outrageous idea considering the camp use these gays make of cultural nostalgia, that he is acting ‘Lily of the Lamp Light’ as it pops into Manny's mind.   

     "Remember me?" he asks, drawing deeply on the cigarette.

     Manny nodded. 

     "You haven't changed.  Still think you have so much to lose.  All you've got to lose is your ellipses." 

     "You're one of my ellipses?"   

     "Bingo. I can't afford to mug you for more amnesia; I'm running on half empty already-my inheritance from you:  Timely amnesia.  Doing pretty well.  Six foot two-obviously the memory of you doesn't weigh me down. Everybody wishes they'd done harm, but I'm afraid we exorcised your lugubrious ass from our lives. I have a three foot vertical jump. Lettered in two sports-I couldn't have done it with you on my shoulders."

     "Anyway, tah tah, got to get back. I'll get you comped. Come on, get me off your conscience. Pretend you need to.  Make it a professional courtesy.  My dad was a shrink, Jewish like you.  I see him every time I look in the mirror. Trying to hide out.  Come on.  Bail him out." 

     Manny returned with him. The boy was willing to share his beauty, insisting Manny sired him and their layered encounter was collaborative and this was a dedication. He was offered a life serving beauty. Spellbound in its presence his hesitations and caution had been vocation, not cowardice, and all its years a chimera’s sentimental pilgrimage.

     Manny remembered a dream that he knew recurred dozens of times during his life: A shore. A rotted wharf.  Abandoned vender stands with tattered awnings.  Summer season over.  Time unraveled stitch by stitch into its component atoms, each microcosm this arid scene. The shore of lost moments; they go here immediately to wait in suspension, those moments when everything was trembling on an edge and it would take only a look and then immediately it's impossible and they are left orphaned of occurrence, spliced from time. Sere grass, yellow sand, even dust gets its wings pulled off and idles here, the green chance parched. As soon as he enters this endless stagnation he feels a premonition. Suddenly, that dead calm sea, waves are rolling in, diluvian combers summated by stormy light. Sea green coffers, all the green vaults that have been lost to the sea coming back, the green hills and valleys of paradise. The moment green again, that's all, but now the labor of titans and returned only for a heartbeat, before forever gone reclaims it.        

     As they approached the little gabled building, his shepherd sang out "Let me entertain you" and the throng rallied around them and swept back into the club. 

     He was pushed towards a table near a small dance floor.  The table was already occupied but there was a free chair and he was pressed into it, the green eyed boy, and green in fact his eyes were, saying "This is my father.  He's not queer so leave him alone."      

     "Give us a break.  Have a seat, for god sakes.  We're not rabid.  And we're not rude either, present company excepted, Nathan", said the man at the table in a voice that seemed to relish the theater in its own exasperation. His head was shaved over bushy eyebrows and brush mustache.  He could have played a constable in a British movie or a trolley car conductor; his pate seemed to cry out for its missing cap.  He looked trustworthy, a combination of obedient and stalwart tinged by anachronism.  His manners turned out to be the small played large, or prissy made regimental ritual; he raised his beer mug from the shoulder, sitting straight-backed, and still straight backed, dabbed a napkin at his moustache to remove the suds.  He dressed like a country gentleman, herringbone sport jacket with green vest, and there was a plumy voluptuousness to the way he held the napkin, and Manny realized it was not a napkin at all, which were paper at the bar, but a white handkerchief he had brought with him. 

     Manny looked around so he would not have to meet the eyes of the “Brit” sitting across from him. Likely, Nathan introduced any older man as his "father", but there was some chance an explanation might be asked and he did not feel up to providing it.

     He could not have said exactly why-he had never been in a gay bar before and had no idea of what was trendy decor-but he sensed that this bar was dated. It just seemed that this saloon either took advantage of its isolation buried in an industrial section or had been made obsolescent by its location against its will. There were Halloween decorations near the shuttered windows, black cats with arched backs, snag toothed witches with warty hooked noses and  conical hats, and two foot tall cardboard skeletons dangling from the lintels.  On almost every available surface,  on top of the radiator cover, on the juke box, on the shelves next to the gin and scotch bottles, religious icons stood. They were Medieval in flavor, large crucifixes, one silver, another wood, some with a severely wounded and heavily bleeding Jesus nailed to them. And angels and the Virgin Mary, she as frequently as Jesus, statues that appeared in gardens and graveyards. And check to jowl with these icons were biological grotesques, a stuffed skunk and bats and snakes, animal skulls with snarling canines. Why should this be old fashioned? A polished sensibility was cloistered here, a tongue in cheek decadence that pretended aristocracy while mocking it, an intention to parody Victorianism and its prudish repressions while fulfilling them, and this intention pointed to a literary education. That was the parchment crinkle-this place wanted to be an aesthetic retreat. It either ignored AIDS or rather than let it convert its patrons to politics, regarded it as a form of homosexual hemophilia, an affliction of over refinement.

     Couples are dancing on the small dance floor. Most seem well passed youth’s bloom. Some are well rehearsed, mechanically synchronized, executing a giant cat's cradle with their whole body.  They are in the minority; the larger part is bent on exhibiting unabated lust. Maybe they are fighting back at the confession of defeat or marginality or inane parody that homosexuality always endures, but they grab each other's butts militantly, and stagger about in wrestling clenches bumping into the clock work dancers with a deliberate obliviousness, as if it takes solid will to hold a place on this dance floor. They kiss as they teeter around. They accuse those shyly sitting at the tables.    

     At another table, a couple.  A man in his forties, unhealthy pallor.  Strange monk's tonsure of thready hair.  The hair in front has been transplanted. His ugliness is royal, an accumulation of sins and ennui and selfless pity. His eyes are small and unfinished, as if only gesso had yet been applied.  He looks as if perhaps an accident has stripped him of his former life, that he is just up from the bed, the bandages removed like a cocoon revealing this pupa, but in all, little question is left that this invalidism was caused by love and that he returns with penitent tenderness and almost no self-regard.  He will give all he has left, this term of life left to him, to aid and comfort, to nurture.  And the object of his solicitude sits beside him, a boy in his twenties made of honeycomb and amber, Hispanic by the refulgence of him, a thick shock of hair falling over one eye.  He has the look of a faun, a creature perfected for the sensual. His overflow of languishing sensuality seems violent or from the same source as violence, a beauty careless of self-love dwelling inside a passive nature. 

     Manny meets gray eyes that are regarding him. An otherworldly, sick-child look, the appearance of short, sweet visit filled with longing and adoring empathy and only half-reluctant farewell. Manny knows him, a patient from years ago who hoped Manny could add some relevance to his love, some draconian masculinity, a martial arts fitness. His love was fanciful and too grateful to be born by others. Manny had tried to talk him away from homosexuality, this figure of scant masculinity with the manner of a debutante including their lips tremulous with incipient emotion and their coltish skittishness, at least as Manny conceived them via this boy from Virginia who had fallen from that world.  He left therapy after a couple of months with gracious apologies.  He felt it was probably all in vain; he did not have the heart to discipline love and would have to suffer the consequences. 

     Is it possible he has not aged in twenty years? So gracious, he must have died from AIDS, and this figure would be a re-written literary premonition letting the dead patient forgive Manny and balance justice with mercy. In this antipodal loony bin poignantly dressed in tribute to the ideal male they nursed the dementia of love at first sight.  There was no Cassandra as in the other asylums their eyes opening into a whirlwind of blackness and the menstrual divination of grief and abandonment. In this theater of pomp and lightened being, an islet in an oxbow of the Styx, were becalmed those who had chosen an endless startled meeting protected by biological satire from any thing but keen and freshening disappointment never to be cursed by the finished knowledge of each other as procreative utensil.   

     The music stops abruptly. The dancers look around angrily or sleepily, and some decide to ignore the change and carry on.   

     Nathan glares at the dancers and then starts weaving fecklessly about the perimeter, he has his hands out and is strumming the air with his fingers and it looks supercilious and effete, a persnickety conniption fit, but suddenly, he has summoned the banshee screech of microphone feedback, and then his amplified baritone is flowing over the saloon.

     "We can do it nice, or we can do it ugly."

     The couples cede the dance floor to him. 

     "Attitude versus attitude.  I'm a professional.  Who'd you think you were dealing with?"          

     He has the small dance floor to himself. The sounds in the saloon continue.  Conversations and laughter, glasses clinking, chairs scrapping along the floor. No attention is being paid to Nathan and Manny wonders if he really has been hired to perform or if he is just a street buster who has brought in his own amplifier and microphone and in the tradition of make-believe that reigns here he is going to play stand-up comic or lounge singer or whatever he wants while things swirl on around him, accepted, if not quite welcomed, as another example of extravagant pageantry.

     "Guys, what I want is those old mikes with the long chord, remember? What is it about dragging that chord around, not to mention the mike?  It was love.  It was a dance.  He'd look at that chord dangling onto his shoe tips and he'd toss it off, and it was so chivalrous, like flourishing a cape. You really feel, watching it on reruns: He's doing it for us.  There's got to be a sacrifice or no performer becomes a success. They all got to pay. And they're paying their love.  We're paying to get it and they're losing it, losing it for off stage because they must meet expectations any given night to fall in love, at least, and to lose love and to remember it again right then and there, and what would that be if it happened to you?  A miracle. And this guys supposed to do it every night.  For you.  Don't you notice?  They wither in a minute and it is up to us to rescue them, like humming birds caught out in an early winter, we must cradle them in our hands.  They retire from the stage reluctantly, returning for encores we toss at them, singing to us as we file from the theater, afraid to let us go, and afterwards dragging through life in that stumble-bum walk of singed moths.  The ones who've surrendered to our dreams and been remade by them, and who, let's face it, we can't feed on the fumes of our wishes. Are you with me now?  Can I trust your consciences?" 

     He moved off stage to Manny's table and put his hand on the shiny dome of the "train conductor" sitting near him.

     "Can I trust you, Joe, to admit your wish fulfillments?  I don't think so.  Don't think any of you are safe.  I might lunge this way or that.  Eyes closed, if I toss a pencil, I stick a guilty party.  

     "Joe, I wonder why we let you be queer.  It's obvious it's a last resort for you.  What makes you think you deserve anything better than respectability?  Your taste?  I mean, really, when oh when will you learn that acquired taste is not a contribution?   Pa-th-et-ic.  To witness you tripping the light fantastic with your heavy thighs and cast iron head, so eager to be gay.  So boring, Joe, so very boring.  No escape for you darling, you're a middle class bore without a singular imagination." 

     He returned to the dance floor, sanding his palms together.

     "What have I put my hands in, Joe?  It is Shinola, I hope."      "He's not the only one. Don't think I haven't noticed.  There is a strong air of anonymity in this room.  What about you? Who aren't you tonight?  You're neat, compact.  Clean cut. What's the latest? We queers are middle America impersonators?  Lord, Lord.  Take advantage of how little sense we were expected to make before AIDS. Recapture our nonsense. None of the breeders can get away dressing like this. They're all in leather and spandex with tattoos we can only guess where.  And you in your polyester t-shirt and your crew cut and penny loafers.  Dear, you look quite insane.  I promise you, everybody thinks you have no chance of bringing it off. It's a complete cover-up, sweetheart, and everybody, just everybody knows it.  Please, let's get down. It is a dirty, dirty thing we do, you transvestite of the mainstream, and all the trappings of white bread will not clean it up. Chicken shit. You don't have the courage of your convictions.  Where's the peril?  Don't you miss it?  Thousands of us died for love. And you don't miss it. I'm sure they're all delighted to have you back.  It's quite a relief.  You really might have been a threat.  They were willing to believe anything of you.  Ten or fifteen screws in a night were considered an average quota for you, while the poor dears had run out of schemes for revival save imagining your transgressions. And now you're back and all combed down and looking ever so completely good and decent and patriotic.  And the only sedition you offer is to parody every manly image so that no one can possibly tell who's who anymore and every banker and farmer and candlestick maker can imagine himself a dangerous queer, and then the poor ones who can not handle the strain of decadence, who just won't pierce their ears or nipples and have oodles of angst trying to cope with female satire and revenge have entered a new celibacy and fade to extinction.  You've dropped the flag and become so decent there really is no hope and they're stuck in sex that ends. Oh, that ends, ends, ends.  The sound of traffic returns, the sweat dries on their skin, and they have not moved an inch and there is no culture shock to be back here, to find themselves alive again, none of that, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, they've had a nooner and the clock never stopped ticking. Thanks to you, abandoning your post at the frontier of inanity, you gutless shit.

     Doing your best to forget the trenches, hah, me heartys.  The shadows, the dungeons.  Bathrooms at bus stations.  Love in Limbo.  On the docks.  The water slides on the pilings like oil. Nights where mirrors spill out. Remember the voices in the dark, could we have been sure then they were not dead souls intermingling with us?  Remember how each sentence was a last confession?  We took Supreme Unction then.  Remember, ye of little faith, our voices in the dark?"

     "You wouldn't be here otherwise, honey."

     "Don't need to be grabbed."

     "You're drifting."

     "I'm not drifting."

     "Jes floatin' along.  Quit fussin."

     "Can't see a damn thing."

     "See everything, baby, like your eyes closed."

     "Wait a minute."

     "What wait a minute?"

     "Talk. A minute."

     "Don't have a minute to lose."

     "Whose cryin'?  I hear someone cryin’."

     "You're looking for love?  Here?"

     "Scared?  I'm not.  I'll know.  I always do."

     "I don't know if it's just us echoing a hundred times."

     "A kiss?"

     "Who'se crying?  Who'se doing it?  You, crying, stop it.  Somebody wake him up.  I think he's sleeping."

     I can hear the sea oozing around the pilings and then I could have been deaf. I'm sure I was and I could hear his cock in my ass because I was deaf and I could hear the space where a door had opened onto silence, and I could hear in there my body decaying, grains of it falling off into that open door and each grain was a day and I wasn't sad because it was as if I could see through each particle gone, or it was more that the blindness that was adhering to me atom by atom was absolutely sighted with eternities, and more than any of that, losing  all this meant I could hear and feel and see his cock completely.  So completely that I disappeared and knew I had fallen where my eyes had looked through the mirror and I had saved him."

    "Calico boy rescued from behind the closed lids of too many."     "We died in the latrines, me heartys, but no less than Luther, fighting to de-churchify transubstantiation."

     "I sing the body oxymoronic.  The mud man.  And for the empire of shit and shadow and charity.  When he has his druthers-Him, the little mollusk dangling, that crocus bulb, he's not bound for sunny Greece, he's heading to the sewer.  Self-interest speaking here, the man clothed in flesh unenlightened or only partly so, I'll speak it, and at its densest and most dreamless being, the butts two planetary halves and the anus buried in its charwoman's task.  Let the words do less and try more, let them be re-buried in the act, nouns only, including the grunts and moans tolling the body's rude awakening to itself." 

     He scooted off and over the speakers came nameless sounds.  He was between the tables. He was rummaging for something and people at various tables were bolting upright as he searched among their feet. Whatever he was looking for he could not remember which table he had left it under and no one was safe from his prospecting.

     "Here it is."

     He held a canvas carrying bag above his head and returned to the dance floor.  Unzipping it he removed a black tire pump.  He shook his head and bit his lower lip.  "You'll laugh."  And they did.  And whooped and whistled.  He removed a plastic doll from the bag.  "We ignore this part."  He attached the pump to a valve.  The pump had two flanges for the balls of the feet to stand on and keep it upright, and it was pumped by a plunging motion.  There was an echo of eroticism in the sounds from the   lubricated piston.  The doll had been folded like a cloth and as the air entered it sprang open in sudden climaxes, an arm or leg popping straight, the whole doll convulsing as it became tumescent. 

     "This is as good as it gets for her.  I'm a poor second.    How'd you describe her face?  Sunny, raving idiocy?  I didn't get the most expensive one. Actually, I got the cheapest one because that's the kind of girl I wanted.  I thought she'd have a better heart.  The expensive ones are going to be just miserable because they get less than they deserve.  I didn't want to have to temper my projections. But, I outfoxed myself.  I identify with her.       Look at these baby blues. She looks like she's being goosed.  And she's got this blond whatever it is and at the muff too.  Hypo-allergenic, I hope.  Do you think these blank eyes are some ideal? They could have drawn them closed. You have to imagine us at the moment.  Could I take the rejection if her eyes were closed? I mean if I were generous I could imagine her carried away in her own ecstasy, but the exile. You know that moment, even touch is numinous, and there she is, eyes opened wide, and really, fellas, given the Olympian vistas of the subjective at that second, deliverance as the brothers used to call it before they got arch, she can seem to be suddenly awakened, and her eyes can't be too buggy wide then.  Maybe all of us can appreciate what a painful thing we have brought her into.  Who isn't wrecked by tragedy just then and it would never do to have a sloe eyed jade just then.  No, absolutely exploded awake from that inert peace she was blessed with before, her big blue, mindless eyes opened wide. Of course, it could be for our ego.  Who wants a face that looks unaffected by your penetration?

     "Is it over sensitivity that I identify so completely with her in my Negritude?"

     "She's a real doll.  Not like the others who are living dolls. She's no imitation. What she is she isn't, but I can't throw stones being a sinner like that myself.  She is the artificial intelligence of the flesh, but what are we all?  Negroes, anyway. This talking mud identifies.  We should all identify who listen for our cocks to sing arias, but there are those of us among us, yoo whoo right here, who have been especially designated as utterances of the dirt.  You have put the spark in us and bear the responsibility and hope we will inform you of the secret intelligence of dark matter.  All right then, you asked for it.  Let me report.  `Tis a strange incarceration you have put on us to witness your own. It burns and burns.  But, you knew that.  And the peculiarities of it.  Squared in the queer, I hoped, and possibly original, for me, or self-willed.  I don't believe it, but there is that surplus which may be the only free will I can exert, like a suicide on death row.  This life is a peculiar institution: I bring you the question.  Is the narcissus buried head down and its blossom just excrement of the bulb?  A dream that manuured gonad dreams in the shit?" 

     He danced with the doll.  They could hear his rubber soles squeaking on the parquet floor and the stormy blasts of the plastic pressed against his lapel microphone.  The doll's feet were on top of his feet, as if he were dancing with a child.  Between the doll's buttocks a rectal hole had been provided.  Nathan spun gracefully around the small floor and Manny thought of dancing with Andrea and remembered how sweet and clumsy it had been, the unbridgeable difference in their height, her little face looking up at him, while he tried with her weight on his insoles to preserve her marzipan romance.

     "Ladies and gentlemen, sluts and cads, transgenders and transvesters.  Tonight, for your edification and stupefaction, a seance. The bi-colored comedian will commune with his dead father. He will accost him and accuse him and charge him and sentence him as charged, and there will be a catharsis and then we'll cut to the advertisements. My father and I are dream mongers, or he's a dream monger, I'm dream mangled.  Or mongrelled.  This should be interesting, failing that, painfully embarrassing for everybody which is a thrill on its own.  I give you Isadore Rosenfeld, who by another name might have smelled sweeter, but by this time anyway has been laundered or moldered into flowers and field, hallowed be thy name. 

     Sorry to put you on the spot like this, old chap, but one good turn deserves another.  Would I be wicked, would I be snide, if not for you?  I am sarcastic to my bones, which I think is a contradiction, one is not supposed to be sarcastic with conviction, but I am made that way.  One half can not believe in the other.  And then neither half can believe in itself, but that has been my choice, I think.  I'm too hyperactive.  I'm bored with consistency and animal nobility, and I probably wouldn't even conceive of Negritude symbolically if not for you. 

     We have managed, together, to have not interfered, from time to time, with a leap.  We've done even better.  We have been in love. Incapable of lying, us dad, who don't believe a word we say.  We've been rushed and quickened and green fuses have flared in us.  As near to whatever mischievous, sad heart beats through creation, us dad, grabbed as readily and with as happy results as was any one else by the impish god. But, I think, dad, this will happen less and less, and the considerable years left will be of another nature, our own, and unblessed.  Then I'll feel your purebred dissolution, that leukemia of spirit which is your pride of place in literary Europe or in acute, tender awareness, and which you obligated me to resist.  And then I'll have my Oedipal revenge, which is an older obligation. Inside the alloy I am I will more perfectly suffer your Semitic destiny than you ever could. More perfectly realizing your ambiguities in my fleshy adulteration, more the fallen angel or misused beast, and finer failure than you. Magnanimously, you wished heroism for me of the usual kind: Stupid actions completed without hazing by conscience.  And my revenge is being instead a completed you.  I am your action, and the palsy of your hand which continued even at the moment of my creation-I am proof you wavered.  I enter you at that very moment through the continuing whirl of your own mind at the time which continues in me, as much the child of your mind as loins.  You at the lip of chaos and destiny, hung on the edge of swirling light years and the hollow silence of mercies and salvation, I know you there, dad, where the dirt knows the face of its father who art in heaven yet. There you are, here you are still, above my mother while her face has gone to the deeper regions of her hatred where it lost itself in love.  I know that face, her jaw set out against you and determined to ask no quarter, her eyes in raving anger as she is split away from all her resolutions to be savvy and disdain.  Tears and moan and even shriek, I know her then, her belief, untapped until then, in redemption through drawing and quartering in faith; Spare her nothing, spare her nothing or be damned. How does her face become sweet in that rigor of resistance?  Herself revealed and lost, knowing herself only once and then dropping away. In her finally the ocean of herself in forever forgiveness to everything and hope for it.  And you hovering over this, over this coming of adoration and acceptance of destiny arriving through you, hovering above and away, because I know by what is me that before you fell into the time before you were born, you doubted and doubted again, and had the chance to wonder if that holiness on her face so visible to you was hers or yours and if you could ever trust your own sensing of the truth and adoration of beauty.      I shake with that palsy of your wavering hand forever, and each action in me is only a translation of you through me and all of them tremble with fear and refuse awe.

     I give you that you have sinned on this national ground, but your fondest wish for the indelible act I can't give you.  I give you the indelible diluted and never to exceed folly, not in me, its personification as I be, antic and antsy and true to your genius of wrathful doubt. I can not give you redemption through Eros, and roll your story like thunder that shivers the ground, but have found myself as much of nothing as you yourself.  Both of us interpreters of dreams and no closer to ourselves than listeners, stuck with our small voice of cringing conscience while the whirlwind issues from the chambers of others' preachers' hearts.

     “You wanted me to always be naked and first with myself.  Namer before babble and lies and dreams.  And I feel naked more and more, but in front of the mirror I am as dismayed by this creature as you.  More and more I feel the encroachment of phobias and hypochondria, those interpreters of flesh, and shame in my own presence as if I had stolen this likeness of a god.  Dad, I reiterate. Don sing da blues.  Don' cuss none."   

     He cantered off the dance floor. A cellophane storm of static poured from the speakers and then "Strangers in the Night" began playing.  Nathan drifted over to Manny looking sleepy and satisfied. He motioned for Manny to get up and follow him.  He led him to the street. The drizzle had stopped and a touch of early morning coolness was in the air.  Nathan lit a cigarette and leaned against a wall. The street was quick-silvered in places and tar pooled in others from the earlier rain.  The tall buildings loomed over them, bulky but insubstantial at the same time, rising into shadow. There was a cathedral-like peace to the city at this late hour, the dominion of stone seemed completed, but it did not seem threatening.  Rather, it seemed the stones had gathered into minions, and unobserved, late at night, they chanted the silence of an old order.  

     Nathan drew on the cigarette and when he spoke puffs of smoke accompanied the first words. 

     "My dad's black.  My mom's Jewish.  They met in law school.  My shrink looked like you.  Same gnawed on forehead and maidenly reserve. I quit therapy four years ago now."

     Manny blinked as if slapped.  Nathan was studying him; he rocked his head and put the tip of his tongue on his upper lip, raising his eyebrows.  "So, what are you gonna do about it?" the gesture said.  

     "I told him my father was white; he couldn't think straight otherwise.  Did him a favor.  Finally figured I shouldn't be paying to do him favors.  You identify?  I thought you would.  Anywhoo, this is a vicious business.  Got to grab your muses where you find them." 

     He pushed off the wall and faced Manny. He took Manny by the shoulders and held him at arms' length.

     "Then why'd you come?"

     "Is this my cue, Nathan?"

      The speaker, dressed in a well tailored summer suit cut full with pink silk shirt opened at the neck, a meticulously rendered late meddle age, a floral arrangement of the pastels in fading color.    

     "If you drove", answered Nathan.

     "How lucky for the two of us that I did.  I'm Roger.  How would you say it, Nathan, patron of the arts?  Chauffeur?"

     He offered Manny his soft hand. It was incomprehensible. Roger smelled of cologne, sweat and pipe tobacco, a pleasing aroma, but nonsensically complex. Decency nauseated him. it was another pollutant.  

     "Isn't Nathan a genius?  You did catch his show?"

     "I don't need that, Roger."

     "Of course not."

     "Where's the car?"

     Roger pointed up the street.

     "I got to collect my shit", and Nathan went ahead at a fast pace, leaving Roger behind, perhaps pointedly, done with older men and their deliberated motions. Roger turned back to Manny, his eyes soft and glistening.

     "Ridiculous, I know, but I suppose I'm head over heels, and frankly, I'm boring as hell without him. Even his abuse is interesting.  And I've never enjoyed anything as much as when Nathan flourishes it. I hope there are no hard feelings.  He's an expensive vice.  Very cultured, you can't just buy him colorful crap.  He really is a genius.  Oh, he wouldn't have to be to get tired of me.  I know.  It's made me quite pathetic, he tells me."

     He let a tear slide down his cheek and then in an indulgent gesture that Manny associated with old money with all its profligate liberties, he rubbed his nose on his sleeve glazing it with snot.    

     Every light is on in the apartment. Florence has been beating back imps.  It is after three.  She must have awaken and walked around the house looking for him, not a far-fetched idea as he often sat in the dark these last few months, and she laid these bridges of light to get from one dark room to the next.  

     He retraced her route back to the bedroom extinguishing the lights as he went, until there was Florence asleep, her bare arms on the covers, a book floating on the swells of her breathing, touchingly small in the big bed, like a child who had come there to escape a nightmare or rumbling thunder.  

     A tiny voice issued from the radio.  

     He undressed, careful not to rattle the hangers when he hung his clothes. He had a drunk's guilty conscience and elaborate and strategies to be considerate. He would turn off the bedside lamp before the radio, so that if either change were to awake her, her eyes would not smart from glare, but then he reasoned that would leave him a figure looming in the dark and might frighten her.  He solved the puzzle by sitting on the bed and turning off the light. There was a snag in her breathing, a knot of shallow snorts, she turned on her side and then the regular pace resumed. He turned off the radio and walked to his side of the bed and slipped in.    

     (Nearly a half century ago, he would return at these hours of the morning from his residency in god-forsaken precincts or god-infested ones, from the hellish asylums whose extremes of terror and horror nearly proved a godhead in the soul that could forsake or be forsaken, that proved a soul, a tissue made to suffer the presence of love in unending and unendurable faith. He returned, her young, tempest driven suitor, to throw himself on her for rescue, this small woman who slept bathing in repose, each limb, her breasts, her open mouth, more in sleep than in waking, reclining on the circumference of the round world).

     He decided to wake her, with a squeeze of her hand while whispering her name. 

     "It's me.  It's me", he whispered. She awoke without alarm and after the laborious climb old age endures to leave even its shallowest naps, fell into her usual petted cat swoon at waking, humming "umm", luxuriating in drowsiness. 

     "Back from Blum."

     "Ummm.  Blum."  Banking up beside him.

     "The bad Doctor Blum."

     She was heavy and boneless, maybe already back asleep.  For a small person, in her lavish embracing of sleep, she could occupy large sweeps of the bed, but she could always be molded into an accommodating shape, never protesting. Her slumber was instinctively generous. 

     "Are you awake?"

     "It must be late."

     "I miss our three a.m.'s."

     "Our three a.m.'s?"

     "Uh huh."

     "I don't remember our three a.m.'s.  Were they glorious?  Were we Nick and Nora?"

     She released a cavernous yawn and with it a cuff of sulfurous breath.

     "They were cozy.  And you chortled.  We talked about anything.  You sometimes brought the kids back with you."

     "I did?  Wasn't I gay?  Wish I could remember."

     "When they were little enough to be picked up, you were heroic in the wee hours. Brought them each on one arm; a valkyrie."

     "Marvelous.  You don't seem tired.  Aren't you tired?"

     "You brought them in, chortling."

     "Chortling children.  You must miss them."

     "You chortled."

     "I never chortled.  You're trying to wake me up.  You know I hate chortlers."

     She smiled what might have been a chortler's half smile, her lips closed in a lazy crescent, and from a landing on the stairway up and down from sleep made a timeless interpretation of his restlessness and random prattle, lost in other three a.m.'s he may have suggested to her when less asleep than she was now she had pretended a comatose state to let him use her in a truculent manner that was also curious and adoring and which she witnessed only through her lashes, stealing glimpses in the dark through quivering lids, his face puckered as if tasting something tart as he poked and stroked her, his eyes fixed in a dumbfounded trance. Passivity seeped into his sexuality, and he would enter her and lay beside her tracing her outline with his fingertips, only occasionally moving inside her, holding nearly still at the verge of transformation, agog at the arrogating push of rapture. Or he would roll her on her side and trace her spine and cup her buttocks tenderly, teasing his gluttony, postponing his squander, the stupid happiness in these globes licensing an uxorious earthiness in him, a surrender to absurdity and the squalid devices of fate, and she would feel him sawing between her buttocks and his mouth was buried in her hair and it was their fiction that she could not hear him intoning a coarse, reverent litany that ended with "sweet, stinking whore" and cold jelly daubing her back. When Manny carried this rutting into life to its conclusion and penetrated her, holding her hips, he arched away from her at the end and then his grumpy muttering over stubborn matter, the do-it-yourselfer's tantrum keen, ended with "angel ass" lifted from servitude, and all that transpired at three a.m. had no witness and no word ever spoken.

     From her drift beneath waking she brushed her hand along his thigh and took his penis in her palm.

     "Doctor Blum."

     "Hmmm?""

     "Doctor Blum."

     "Doctor Siggy Blum. He won’t forget the drayage horses from childhood, their gelding’s schlongs dangling, splattering tiaras off the cobblestones; never abandon them beaten to death by drovers, leaping to embrace them, the lash falling on his back. Into the steppes to redress their freezing in the drifts, and into hospitals he followed their blasted hearts, ruptured loins and offal to open the windows. And into brothels to hold the dying whores and open the curtained windows, and in the mad houses, wherever the shrouds fall and the body is nakedly soul as it is in heaven and hell. 

     Doctor Blum visits Holy Toledo in Spain. Linden trees burdened with leaves.  But in a wind they flash. Summer pierces him then; the glittering crowns sing a river song to him and fable women. His trembling awe is still in tact. The inner man has emerged; he is a scruff ball of eczema and dandruff, but his repulsiveness was always his project: Preserving his charity that was tested by indifference.

     Women come to poetic ends in his mind. Oriental women hold a special place. He assumes their obedience. He mentions their childish mannerisms. He has paid careful attention from a sacred distance. His recitations, doubtless taking him to dirty conclusions, but his sing-song monotone, it's the mass in Latin, no longer used by the irreligious. He visits Holy Toledo because of the Romance language and the painting by El Greco-the lightening pulsing behind the clouds."

     Florence is asleep. Manny talks to the ceiling. Let him empty this dream before he falls asleep. He is grateful for her beside him. He holds her hand while he talks.  

     "His vocation requires a toad not a prince. He goes to Toledo and finds the bogs on the hilltop.  I don't think he knows linden from oak, but he must have the gentler syllables to make a lyric.  A taxi drops him in the middle of nowhere. It's a mid-summers night dream in that dark wood. The cheapest whores serve their clients there, leaning against the tree trunks or cutting their backs on broken bottles littered from the highway. He held my shoulders when he told me.  The illegitimacy of the story gave him courage, even grace.  It had to be the worst.  He makes the point of the muteness, the onus on him.  Silence presses like a candle hood.  The place smells from piss and excrement. It seems El Greco did a lot of compensating. At this depth the people are stumpy. They are fortunate to have had an El Greco to stretch them, and to have Doctor Blum who looks after their...motivations.

     The old men watch the whores and their clients from behind the trees. Doctor Blum stands among them and their regret when they stare out of the shadows at the living make this act committed in the shit beautiful, that is his conceit, that it actually clothes it in reverence.  Thus he looks at the bindle sack of exile-responsible in the name of love and redemption for preserving the most rotted urges and rages, bound by ardent gaze lest he abandon his post and maroon these souls chugging in the shit towards grateful exit. He witnesses and we are written on the sky in indelible ink, caught prosecuting our undying love in the refuse."

     Manny soon is asleep. He is lost once again on the narrow streets of the city at night, gyring in eddies, bewildered for purpose in returning here. Place a window and hear ‘You never hold me unless we’re dancing’. A memory, a portrait of memory, so formal and framed is it inside a dream, certain of a mistaken flight from a rumpled bed-‘nothing better than a buck dressed for the night’ she says-a breezy window and a black lover who had yet to dress her long limbs in the room still lit by slanting, headlong morning light.

     Nature’s fools, through us life embraces death, that is our use, to requite the sun and moon. Peel me and skin the pages, let my shadow leap into the shinning river.

 

 

 

    

    

 

 

                          GUYS AND DOLLSPRIVATE

 

     On a Friday night, Manny fabricates a visiting colleague from Philadelphia.  Why Philadelphia?  Because Florence would never doubt that a soul condemned to such a place must not be refused help.  She has not been to Philadelphia but knows, as all New Yorkers do, that it is a borough that failed to thrive.  Manny can not excuse himself; it would be irresponsible. The doctor would be hurt.  His would not be an adult response.

     He names him Blum.  Manny calls Florence from his office and says he has to show him around, that he is eager to see the sights.  Doctor Blum has been to New York before, but Manny has divined from his voice over the phone that this is an intimidated man who can not boast any adventures in this city. Without him, Dr. Blum would be confined to his hotel room. 

     Doctor Blum.  Manny thinks Bloom as he names him, but a glummer Bloom, a glum Bloom.  A Blum.  This Bloom is not destined to bloom; he is not in the hands of a mythologist, and he is not from Dublin.  He is from Philadelphia and Manny can leave his story right there, the rest is too glum.

     On the cab ride downtown, Manny sits glumly.  He notices that in this fugitive’s game he is playing with Florence, he is accompanied by his creation.  He is acting as Blum, seeing partially with Blum's eyes.  Philadelphia is Brooklyn of yore, shroud in winter, brick and scuttling paper and drifting ash.  Blum is one of the shadowy figures he left behind when he went to Harvard. He regrets summoning Blum.  He is quickly too complete. Blum could as easily be playing Manny as the other way around.

     He has the cab let him off a block north of Sheridan Square. It was drizzling, the avenue glistened and halos surrounded the streetlights.  He knows where he is going.  It was a piano bar.  If it has shut down he and Blum can come up with no further mischief. He is relieved to find it still there. He and Florence had been taken there by friends after seeing a play in the neighborhood as long as twenty years ago. He had remembered where it was, an accomplishment in the village where the city's grid went through deceptive refractions, skewing the four directions. The bar was across the square from where the theater had been, that had made it easier.  

     He had to squeeze into the saloon. It was a narrow room with tables pushed to the walls on either side, and he was confined to a goat trail along with a caravan moving single-file towards the bathrooms in back and the bar maid, who somehow could find a trail inside the trail and weave through the shuffling patrons.  The place was not as dark as he remembered it.  The years between had tarred the memory, or romanticized it.  It was dim; weak bulbs in sconces cast wane yolks of light, and a single candle in a red lamp on each of the little tables rouged the lower halves of faces. He had remembered it as being dark as a theater with faces appearing suddenly in the nimbus of a lit match, cheeks hollowed out, caught in the cabals smokers shared when lighting one cigarette from another.  It smelled of beer and damp wool and there was a cozy, stagnant feel to it, like a closet where off-season clothes are stored.         

     The tables were full and he filtered back to the rod that served as breakwater between the knots of patrons and the piano. The wet bar with its foggy, near milk-glass mirror behind it was to his right.  The bar tender was a young man with broad shoulders and big hands who leaned on the counter when he took orders. He had a heavy brow and with his fleshy hands planted on the bar he might anchor a place where strangers got drunk. Some Christmas and New Year's decorations were still hanging over the bar: Bands of aluminum fringes were scotch taped to the shelves of bottles. They managed to look brave rather than seedy, as if they were flying against the odds, not ready to surrender: Stoic sentimentality or stalwart nostalgia. 

     He found a free seat at the piano bar.  It was still early and these seats facing the piano with their backs to the room were taken by people who came in alone. Beside him was a woman of about his age, her hair a frizzy mop, either grey or blond or blond in the half light. Small, piggish eyes that sparkled; she crinkled them at him when he said "May I?"  as if they must sparkle in stronger light.  Blue eyes, he thought, and in spite of dewlaps and floppy jowls she had never gotten over their caprice.

     Manny got the impression he amused her.  He was not at ease in a bar, and maybe he had the air of a truant.  Her shoulders were covered by a wool poncho which agreed so completely with his anachronistic image of the Village he thought she must be as much of an interloper here as he, costumed in her old romances.  Still, she could not be as much of a stranger to a bar, and under her gaze he self-consciously began fingering the bar like a keyboard to demonstrate his legitimate claim on this seat. The bar maid asked him what he would like to drink; his rent was due. Manny, conscience of the bluff involved, ordered a scotch and soda, though he never drank hard liquor. For the first time that evening he was disregarding Doctor Blum’s bitter counsel.            "And would you permit me the pleasure of buying you a drink?” boldly facing the old woman now that he had assumed the stance of veteran tippler. 

    "No thank you, but thank you just the same."

     Surprising himself, Manny grabbed the bar maid's arm as she turned to continue her rounds. She was an interesting piece of work, he noted, underfed, with what he would have called an Appalachian's shape-whittling asceticism to her, somewhat impenetrable, hollow eyes. He spoke to her with the theatrical, sage chivalry of a real scotch drinker.

     "I must make amends.  I've gotten away with terrible omissions. If only she would allow me, it would be a favor.  Could we possibly conspire to refresh her drink over her protests, and if she must, then she can let it sit there? Please, madam."

     "All right, but it will just sit there.  Sherry."

     "Thank you.  And it is always best to be sure that whatever sits there un-drunk is what you're drinking."               

     Tip-toeing from the claustrophobia of disease, he found himself in a troupe of old actors he would have thought had retired long ago.  The artist of chivalrous smarm was his father, the tie salesman.   His route had included Philadelphia.  Manny had gotten his height from him, though not his broad shoulders and square chin. He had been a large boned man with sensual features; Manny had inherited his long-lashed, glistening eyes and full lips.  And, it seemed likely, his attention to clothes. He called himself a clothes horse; it was typical of the sarcasm he used around the apartment. He was restless when he was confined in Brooklyn, an unhappily stabled racer, too well-made, too bluff or capable of being taken for bluff, athletic and hale, to be holed up with a soggy wife and owl-eyed, quiet little boy who abided him with quiet fear and distaste, having been warned about him by his mother.  By clothes horse he meant he pulled the milk wagon, his tie samples, from town to town.  But he was a clothes horse, square framed and graceful, and he must have been relieved to leave the house and be out, a man who would now live by his charm and looks.  He would be free to practice his matinee idol imitation on those low-lives who would believe it, believe the lacquering of svelte theatricality that overlay the immigrant hustler, including women in bars-said Manny's mother-who he deserved and no better, floozies who saw right through him but could do no better and for whom a tin idol was good enough. (He would never be able to see that, he was too vain, he believed they believed him, but he was wrong, they were laughing at him and his need to be adored by losers.  No one believed it up and down the coast, Mister Big Shot, the Jew in gentile clothing who took himself so seriously they had to bust a gut. He is desperate to please, she told Manny.  Others.  Strangers.  Their judgment matters.  For us he saves the rest.)       

     A swarthy man in a Homburg who wore garters for his socks, French cuffs and cufflinks, portaging his suitcases of samples to the Lincoln, relieved to be off, miraculously still employed during the Depression, quite willing in his sardonic irony, in his bitter bonhomie, to play into and at all travelling salesman jokes, Manny could imagine.  And into knock, knock jokes too.  Who stood more often outside the door uninvited than his father? Who's there indeed, never who they expected he would have made sure.  Ready to have the laugh be on him but to have the last laugh as well, the foreigner who had insinuated himself into the American scene in a clownish, sly, folkloric role.  This circuit virtuoso and drummer of pizzazz as a rejoinder to defeat, who made himself at home in hotel rooms and diners and bars, those asylums for ghosts, now this figure had Manny by the elbow, as if dying had just been escape to his preferred haunts.             In front of him the empty piano and the dark terminus of the saloon, the walls here painted black to make a stage.  He could smell the dust in this corner, it tickled his nose.

     "Do you come here often?" he asked.

     "Goodness, didn't that used to be a line? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  It's almost insulting to look so in need of rescue, but you mean well. What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this? Don't be a bad sport. You saved my life and now you're going to have to get used to me...Ah?      

     "Manny."

     "Manny.  Eugenia."

     The bar maid arrived with their drinks on a small tray cluttered with empty beer bottles, glasses, crumpled napkins and bills.  The shot glass felt like a solid ingot in his hand; Manny was used to the stems of wine glasses.

     The old woman raised her glass for a toast.

     "Eugenia and Manny, to inauspicious starts."

     They touched glasses and Manny took too large a swallow and his eyes got teary and he coughed.      

     "Manny, it's a disgrace, the junk they serve. You have to be careful.  This sherry should be named Nellie, or Gypsy Rose, or, how do they christen their poor daughters these days?  Vanessa?  Contessa? "

     "Sherry's already in the same crowd as Vanessa."

     "I was going to wallow in sentimentality and you've put me back on my feet."

     "I can't really see you wallowing.  More like Esther Williams.  Back stroking in a fountain."

     "Balls.  I'm a great sea cow.  You have to hear me honking and moaning.  My boys roll their eyes.  The girls milk my tears. They get a kick out of ruining me. They think it's their duty. They won't have me escaping my venerable office.  Revenge I suspect. I go to pieces over ‘Danny Boy’. They need only breathe the overture and I’m a sopping mess.  The boys have fled; they're ever so objective about their father.  I think that's what it is or maybe they think he deserves something more majestic. A toast maybe. Let's have another, to make my boys proud of me.  Manny, let's toast this sad anniversary."

     "I'm sorry."

     "Don't be. I was married nearly forty years. Every day is an anniversary of something, sad and happy. This toast is to one of them. I forgot what. A feeling, Manny, of sadness, sir, for the way things are.  I think that's mature of us and not one bit glib."

     "You're a widow, then?"

     "To my brave, swift, boys.  Gazelles.  Impalas. You would never have guessed them for sprinters but they can outrun even a rumor of misfortune, my timid athletes.  I am a widow.  I'm sixty-five and Irish.  I'm being redundant."

     "I am a widower, myself."

     A widower? He had meant to escape Florence and their resigned generation and now he had disposed of her. How quickly it had sprung from his lips. He had said what he did from existing in fear.  He felt as if any effort to imagine Florence here depleted his remaining energy to believe himself here.  Imagining living was vital to actually living, and what you can recognize as a sure sign you were dying was this inability to persuasively imagine yourself alive, to place yourself among the living in ways that were not strained. You must save all your effort for this or you would fade and become impossible.  To import the real Florence was more lifting than the flickering ghost could expend.  The healthy arrived with their weight of real substance which broke apart conjured fogs.

     "Is that a sigh of relief I heard?"

     "I have trouble finding the balance; in being truly bereaved. I don't know what I should expect of myself. Maybe you ladies do it better.  Or you get the benefit of the doubt.  That could be from our masculine egos: We assume you're putting on a brave front.  Maybe it's not a front."

     "Manny, don't think so much.  These things are not fancy. He died of cancer. It meant trips to the potty and bathing him, horrible bed sores. It was a lot of work. He was in terrible pain.  We gave him pain killers.  He could sleep for a while.  I don't know what he dreamed.  I dreamt about him sometimes.  He often seemed angry.  I think it was confusion, the cancer moved to his brain, but maybe he still had good reasons.  Forty years. I dreamt he was red as hot metal and he had gotten out of bed, he always seemed to be tossing the covers off, and in the dream he got his wish and he stomped out of the house, furious at us all. He stamped out through the backyard and his fists were balled up. I suppose that was my wish.  It certainly would have been much easier if he'd just walked off in a snit, certainly convenient, no diapers to change. I might have wanted that, and him to blame, angry as hell and just storming out of our lives.  Is that a widow's skill?"

     "I was talking about getting on with it. A positive approach to loss. For everybody's sake.  But it gets messy.  Didn't we, honestly, start this whole widowing process long before, or is it only me, who thinks I signed a contract in my sleep, believing she was speeding me up?  Did you have that feeling? Of being tied to a stone and dragged down?      

     "Manny, I would have described it more as a wrestling match. Some days I'm on top and getting the boost, other times it's him. I guess you might have looked in the window and seen me stepping on his head sometimes.  I don't know what he would have said then, oh, I do, he said it often enough, but I had my reasons and didn't need more of his, not then, though other times it was my turn to say uncle."

     "My wife was more discouraged and tired, more ready to...to protest less, and so, in a dream, I think, I said, take her.  Then I won't have to carry her, against her will, which is killing me.  And now, just how am I to behave?"        

     "You have too many ideas.  I slept with him the last two weeks.  We had put him in one of the kids’ empty rooms.  I was sleeping with the canaries and the dog, the way I do now.  I didn't think it would be two weeks. I thought he would be dead by morning. He wouldn’t eat and was starving. I didn't want to lose him.  He already was lost, that's when I got into bed with him again.  He didn't know who I was.  Maybe, once in a while.  When he was asleep, he may have known me then like he always had when he was sleeping and we rolled together, when it doesn't wake you up as a stranger in bed would or his not being there woke me in my own bed.  But, for every time he did not know me, he knew me as someone he had loved. He thought I was his sister and asked her to leave the bed gently as he sometimes did my daughter when she bathed him. Just for a moment he'd realize he was naked in front of his daughter and he'd be offended, that's how he mistook me.  For his mother too, and he did not ask her to leave.  He was glad to have her. I think it was fine with him to be nursed by her, as if he had the measles. Never once did he mistake me for one of his nightmares.  I was afraid he would. I didn't wonder but that in half his dreams, childhood I hope they mercifully were, that into them a hideous figure of death pushed its way and sat there blighting the garden, but I was never taken for that figure and from that more than anything else I believe a bit in our romance at the end, more than I would have thought, when he couldn't see me and I was each woman who had loved him and he still believing in us with his last bones which is all he had left."

     An urchin had walked to the piano and was gazing at it.  She had huge eyes in a tiny, fine boned face, hugging herself in a big wool coat with its collar pulled up to her chin.  It was a pea coat, a thrift shop purchase, Manny guessed, and falling down below it to her ankles was a mid-night blue gown.  This delicate refugee stood gazing at the piano for a moment.  She gave the impression she did not know why she was here, as if she had sleep-walked into the bar, summoned there by the piano whose uses she did not understand.  She touched the keys gently, too softly to stir a note, maybe discovering a memory.  Then she turned and walked off the little stage, and Manny glimpsed her huddled form passing behind Eugenia heading for the bar.

     She was the singer. An overly dramatic girl it would seem, too steeped in her role as oracle and slave of the muse, but then, when she removes her coat and reveals her bird-like frame it no longer seems a conceit.  She has the deflated, extinguished look of a dead bird.  A pittance of rags, totally fall-broken.  She returns to the piano with an empty beer mug for tips; the bartender stashes her coat and purse behind the bar. Manny sees the sharp bones of her bare back.  She must have bought the gown at the same thrift shop.  It hangs loosely on her. He's looking at her around Eugenia and talks distractedly, not really noting if Eugenia is listening, looking at the singer.  

     "It was Alzheimer's.  She had always tried to meet expectations.  I retrieved her from her wanderings.  Neighbors called.  She was in their kitchen.  She had waited by their door until they let her in, now she was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, dipping biscuits.  She had a sweet forlorn look.  They did not want to hurt her feelings.  All she wanted was to sit in the kitchen, absorbing affection.  They felt guilty evicting her.  She had become such an inconspicuous old age; they felt obligated to support it so others would take her example.  She was lovely to the end.  Well, we are not so old; she was able to assume the role like an actress, with the same immunity from the reality.  Lovelier than ever.  Of course, the worry lines, so accusatory, would disappear, but they were not replaced by that blank mask which is typical of the disease.  She escaped the squalor; that was part of her popularity.  Such a lovely, domesticated old age.  Such courteous surrender.  She remained continent.  In fact, she became, how can I explain it? an idiot-savant of hygiene.  Fixated in a doting way on her vocation of inoffensive farewell.  She would not leave a smudge.  And none of the odor which gives old age away.  She smelled of soaps, lemony, herbal fragrances." 

     "They speak of saint's flesh remaining sweet even in the grave, it was like that.  I was privileged to witness it.  The essence of her was revealed.  Her face looked tenderly inquisitive, as if she was listening. That is the way it has always been.  She was not one to get the message right away.    Forgive me: her patient, trusting face, her soft eyes opened wide; the Alzheimer's freed her to listen as she had always tried, without any intention of hearing but only to cooperate and receive each word as a caress.  She had never before been at a loss for words, with age especially, and nobody finally willing to listen, and then this botrytis of the brain vetted her.  No more chatter.  Wonderful silence.  Confetti of silence, and then full arias of it.  Such a forgiving old age, neither musk nor yammer.  Everybody loved and forgot her, gratefully at first, and then as their due." 

     The small klieg reflects on the singer’s gown and hair.  Her hair was chestnut. The stage was shallow, and the baby grand faced sideways and she sat in profile to them, and he could see her arched ribs and the stippled ridge of her spine.       

     She began to play, an informal overture, a medley of tunes strung together by a coincidence of chords, warming up her fingers.  Eugenia smiled; she had probably decided he was a man who turned into a windbag with a few sips of booze. 

     "Manny, you'll have to ask her for `Danny Boy'.  She's Irish, she looks like my daughter, Victoria.  She'll be furious. I hope so. Her skin will catch fire. Her mother is the last person she wants to see throwing the old sod at her.   She'll be beautiful mad."

     The dress was vented to her knee.  Her calf was shapely; she might have been a ballerina, and her shoulder, though pointy, showed firm muscle, as did her arm.  She was small boned and it was deceptive.  Each juncture of her body was vanishingly narrow. She seemed to be strung between ankle and knee, wrist and elbow, elbow and shoulder, and then strummed into visibility.  Her taut body even had the transparent shimmer of humming strings.  It is what reminded him of dead gulls; her being depended on inspiration.  Without it she would crumple into wire and dowel.

     She would be a temperamental girl; there was no insulation around her feelings.  They would show through, and she would be swept along by them. Maybe that is why she paid that somber visit to the piano.  Anticipating the hither and yon tossing she would get by following requests.  But then, her dancer's muscles; she would not be so easy to up end.   

     Manny thought: death loves beauty more than virtue does.  Loyalty gets a dog's face.  The patience required of tenderness enamels the face with boredom.

     The pianist was singing "Stormy Weather" in honor of the damp dreariness outside or maybe in consonance with similar weather inside herself.  She kept it subdued. He had heard it done as a valedictory wail and he liked this version better.  Maybe she was simply not warmed up enough to trumpet, but he liked her introspective, private melancholy.  She had a strong hold on quiet mood, her voice full and pliable in those registers that do not get the boost of calisthenic exuberance.

     Eugenia squinted skeptically at the singer. She must look as much like her daughter as she said, and that girl for all her wit and rebellion had no case to make for such a sadly weathered recall of her life.  Manny looked at her fleshy face and was angry with her for presuming maternity.

     Eugenia burrowed in her big knit purse and brought out a shabby leather wallet.  She gave Manny a five dollar bill.    

     "Just a minute, we're going to draw up a list."

     She started to empty balled kleenex stamped with smudges of lipstick onto the bar, searching for a pen.  Manny returned the bill to her and took a five from his own wallet. 

     "He who pays the piper."  

     "I have some I want to hear."

     "I know, `Danny Boy'"

     Manny got up from his chair. 

     "I'll make the deposit, and we can flag her from here."

     His joints had stiffened while sitting and it is a relief to unfold.  He wobbles.  The scotch has gotten to him; he did not notice it sitting. A slip of numbness has been pulled over him.

     She is singing `Mad about the Boy'. He waits for her to finish and then three numb steps take him to the piano, close to her bare back with its feather-work of muscles.  He slips the bill into the mug. She looks smaller close up and more angular. She no longer enjoys the transformation of an actress coalescing on stage.

     "Do you know `I'm looking for an Angel'?" 

     She hums a few bars. He sees the vein in her throat flush blue.  It is like feeding a bird; he sees the song like a lump of bread in her throat.

     "`East Side, West Side'."  It's Eugenia.  She is his partner in the deposit and is staking her claim. He hates that see-saw, sing-song tune.  She could not really like it either.  She is teasing him for `Danny Boy' or is she teasing him for his credulous choice? The Irish. They don't permit sentiment in any one but themselves. 

     By the time he gets back to his seat she is fully into `Angel'.  Her voice has shed the wet wool of her first songs and follows the primrose, garden path of his request, its Sunday promenade wooing. It is a wistful song laced into fastidious pomp and studied breeziness.  He listens for a note of recognition from her, a sign she noticed their mutual thinness and its intimations of talented grace.  She stays within the song's glib whimsy and self-satisfaction, its blotted-ink neatness.  Safe in his seat with his anonymous back turned towards the saloon, disappointed with the effect of his choice, he wishes he could recant and call out, "Lily Marlene", which he knows in German and which he sings under duress to Florence, his Lily of the Lamplight, which he sang to her in livid irony more than forty years ago for the first time, lying together on rumpled sheets during those months between their plunge into the bushes after the kiss beneath the streetlight and their marriage; lying naked, the radiator hissing, a sense of sated gluttony and gloom saturating him to the bone, Florence's skin patchy with red from her hours in sensual tossing, purple spots on her thighs and calves and buttocks, blooming as cryptically as lichen, fitted to his fingertips but whose actual printing is impossible to recall.

     The singer might purge the song of satire during its trance of rumpled past and future. As she sits beneath the spotlight glowing chestnut, white and blue she might even insert herself into the song and from then on become his new Lily, materializing with the music.   

     The singer follows with "East Side, West Side" and Eugenia sings along in a hoarse whisper, and then the singer is tacking from request to request, pulled away from any chance of Manny's putting in a second bid.  The five dollars reserved her for a surprisingly short time.  People from the saloon lean over the bar and stick bills into the mug until the money begins to look like a fern origami. "Over the Rainbow" is requested, and "Chances Are".  The singer eddies in the shallows. The bar must have made it into a guide book: A quaint anachronism in which to experience old village ambience.  Manny hears `Miss O'Leary's Cow' touted from behind him, and another athletic voice saying, "That's Mrs."  Then the sound of lip farting and "Give me a break", and then in the bellowing baritones of a pack of young men, comes "One fine night when we were all in bed" breaking up in guffaws, huffs, hoots and howls.  The singer continues as if she has not heard them.  She ignores "Swanee" tossed up in Jolson's ersatz minstrel voice, probably from the crowd of beer busting hearties that had tried "Mrs, O'Leary's Cow", intramural sports who had run out of patience for the sanctimony of old songs and for the life-daunted who plead for them.  She sings "Moonlight on the Wabash" which is barely a better song, another schmaltzy elegy about a river, but the request had been slipped in shyly, Manny had not heard it, and the singer seemed to have an ear for silent prayers. 

     Her face was thin and sharp.  Like most Irish faces Manny had seen, it seemed a variation on mug, faces for scrappers.  Not a face that solicited secrets, it did not look to have the dreariness to wait on confessions.  A face that could defend them, though, if she choose.  There were supplicants here.  Mysteriously, they took up no room.  It was a skill they had practiced.  They were skirted and flinched, and even in the crowded bar where any movement caused a kind of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" reverberation in surrounding bodies, they subtracted their presence.  Their already completed leave-taking needed to requisition nothing to go on forever.  Their requests must have arrived in an unusual way, a mold scooped out of the singer's ear, some swishing of sea-shell surf in her ear that needed a song poured in to fill the place they had emptied.  And the size of that excavation where they had been?-a cavern, a cathedral, at least it would seem that way from the sudden appearance of "Forever Young" from out of that nowhere, a soprano so free of meaty lung that it verged on inaudible, a clairvoyant keen that the ear could barely last through hearing, and whose disappearing edges seemed to fingertip a roofless vault.

     After that she seemed inured to any request and sang songs of her own choosing, which could have been a feminist rebuttal of the historically passive role of taxi singer, and she did get cockier or spikier, a little taunting, typical signs of political statement, but Manny thought she was not concerned with the crowd any more, or hardly.  Their come-uppance was included, but she was practiced enough, not in performance alone but in adversity generally, that it was an aside.  She was taking advantage of the crowd's antagonistic desires to let in her own character.  She was triggered for contest.  She seemed girlish, feisty and eager. She sang "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", "Sunny Side of the Street", "Let's Fall In Love" "I like it, How About You" and there was a virtuoso of pluck in it, a chin up, want-to-make-something-out-of-it spunkiness in it. She was skating on the slip way of her own christening. 

     She sang ‘I Don't Know Why I love You Like I do’ and Manny thought he must have danced with his mother when this song was playing.  When the singer reached "You never want my romancing, The only time you hold me is when we're dancing" he felt his mother pull him out of a chair in the dark living room and they danced together, barely touching, almost at arms length, and his mother had closed her eyes and there had been a little smile on her lips and with her eyes closed and her head rocking a little to the music, she had stepped closer and pressed against him and his arms stuck out straight behind her as if they were in splints, and her cheek touched his and he saw her with her eyes closed and her face dreamy and serene.  And then he was sure this dance had never happened.  He thought he must have seen her listening to this song on the radio and softening and her eyes had been closed and she may have been swaying to the music and he would have watched for a moment and then left the room so he could pretend he had not seen because he could not fill this space where a dance partner would have stood, and had to act like he knew nothing about that untapped nectar, her secret of restored maidenhead. 

     And then he felt it had all happened, a charity had been commuted into the song, and it would happen every time the song was played, that it was these imagined moments that were the amber in songs, not the moments themselves, but the wishes that had hovered around them and were never let in.  His mother had heard this song and poured her daydream into it and it incubated there until it spilled back into his ear, or he may only have imagined her, trembling Narcissus-like on its silky membrane, imagined for them both a moment of intolerable innocence that absolved them both, and that was enough to accomplish it, and to place alongside their lives a place of omniscient longing both could regain in the aphasia of a song. 

     The phrase came again, "You never seem to want my romancing, the only time you hold me is when we're dancing"  and once again the two shadows revolved in the gloom lighted only by the borealis glow of the radio dial, gathering the black heaven stranded between the lights of the Milky Way where ten times the amount of love may lie unlit than all the love ever touched, and whose tarry constellation stenciled by the stars seems more the image of the sloughing body at seventy than the belt of Orion or the crown of Cassiopeia.

     She finished the set with "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", a dead sober version, starkly literal, with the tune so compacted into the clean words that it seemed she was speaking in the iron heavy, spaded-up voice of those who resort to speech only when forced. 

     She took the money from the glass and straightened it into leaves, picked up her empty water glass and walked to the wet bar to transfer the bills to her purse.  

     "This place is too boisterous for me", Eugenia said.

     "Home?"

     "I wasn't planning on staying so late, anyway.  I met my daughter for lunch. Shopping."  She kicked some shopping bags stuffed in around her feet.  "And here I am.  I must have gotten in a mood. And the poor dog's been out all day."

     "Not today.  It's raining."

     It was the singer behind them, carrying her glass of water.

     "I didn't know it was going to rain."

     "The poor guy."

     She walked around the bar and found a folding chair and sat down in front of them.  The singer's voice, even in conversation has a three dimensional physicality to it. Manny feels he is inside a corporal present tense. The roundness of the words is an essence that can be rhymed musically; a kind of scat that is a periodic table for verbal evolution including gut and lung. This round present tense is like a navel for all tenses and he might exit this abeyant interval into an octave where "would have" has no note of regret. It might be a declarative, pulled taut into "must". 

     At seventy-the singer flung boyishly gangly on the folding chair-how did he get here?     

     He eloped this evening from the verdict of three score and ten. Somber note, susurrant veils: Dogs their sadness sharply perceived, or their tenderness, or mischief, or patience. The soul naked in exile and separation, vulnerable to attachment, most surely glimpsed and felt when its trust goes unmet or its loyalty is unused, vividly in a ruined living creature, in the full expenditure of itself in acts or casualty of faith. Expressed, too, in the distortion of the simple symmetries the body might have had, had once, before the advent of sexuality, its neat self-containment ruptured by this never yielding grappling desire pushing through. 

     Gangly girl, mermaid, soul androgynous with dreams, a pun being played on seventy when it is declared three score and ten. A pun that only works in a dream or song: A pun on soul and solid, so that this matter of soul so soon to be tested for endurance is balanced from hand to hand against solid in compulsive repetition and to no possible resolution. 

     And at seventy while sifting soul from hand to hand, has also come the image of his father pasted, collage like, on an Italian beach. A fire-plug of a guy, standing fully dressed, angry, arms crossed, gazing out to the horizon, hostile to interruption, his head not clearing the gunwales of the fishing dories hauled on the shore, too short, too solid in adamantine resistance to broach the hulls, to shove off and leave the shore. Some patch his undelivered soul makes in the day, this still too solid vapor consigned to his son.

     "He can't make up his mind.  He wants to be out unless he is outside and then he wants to come in.  So, I made up his mind for him.  I thought I'd be back by now", Eugenia said.

     "But you're not.  Tsk. Tsk."

     "He's a great big dog who'd do fine on the tundra."

     "He's waiting by the door right now." 

     "You, dear, have no idea what a soft heart I've got.  My house is Noah's ark.  My girls think I'm fated to be lonely if they don't pile pets on me. I have three cats.  They have first and last names, thank you very much.  The kids named them.  When they were kids.  They should have called them Methuselah. They gave me a cockatiel.  It's pride.  They think I should want to be eccentric in old age."

     "Don't you?"

     "I don't need coaching in that department."

     "They beg to differ.  Our mom tends to rest on her laurels, too.  You have to stay ahead of the wave.  It's different than kitsch."

     "I can tell the difference, my dear."

     "It changes over-night."

     "Au contraire, it never does.  When one has chosen wisely."

     "We get in this fight all the time.  Either she's sanctifying junk or she's purging the house of relics.  It changes with her moods."

     "It's her house?"

     "She regrets it soon enough.  If she's taken advantage of his absence to throw out his junk, then she feels bad.  She'll think, did she forget he's dead?  Who's she been arguing with?  This is no opportunity to have the last word, did she forget that?  She doesn't like thinking she's that lonely, she'd rather be loopy."

     "My dear, you have to strike a balance. His clothes, I really had to think about them.  I decided: too immediate was perilous. I wouldn't have those things still where he'd last put them; as if he's just stepped out. I admit, his clothes hung in the closet for several months, oh that coat last rode his shoulders before he lay on the bed. I told the boys to take what they wanted and give the rest to the Church.  Five years, and then we painted.  I had the boys again, they moved like sleep walkers.  I finally hired a professional. I should have called a priest for an exorcism. I don't let my kids make presumptions about me. I live there, that's already a decision, but I’ve decided it’s a realistic one. I think stubborn is defiance enough. It reaches as far as I’ll admit and for the rest-back off you’ll find no welcome here."

     "I walked by a bakery” the singer said. “It smelled so good and I started crying because it smelt good and he can't smell it anymore, he doesn't have a nose. Poor daddy, no nose, not even a carrot like Frosty, and I had to laugh. All he has is eternity, and it gets tedious. I don't think I'm made to hold a straight face that long. I don't think he's good at it either. He would roll his eyes, charcoal if they dare. I go walking on the shore. I have my brother's faded khakis.  They have oil stains on them, they look wet there, and I roll up the cuffs. I've got my brother's work shirt and his navy blue sweat shirt and I like sinking my feet in the wet sand with the froth sizzling around my ankles. When it goes out you feel you're flying or ice skating. That's as close to eternity as I care to get, and what I'm looking forward to most is sitting on the edge of the car seat and brushing the sand from my feet, it feels like you're making them out of clay."

     "Good for you, dear.  You remind me of my Victoria.  We always say that her report on Judgment day will follow the list of what she was wearing when the trumpet sounded."

     While Eugenia and the singer were talking, Manny finding himself sidelined had finished off his scotch.  Then, he had bottomed it up and looked through the syrupy spyglass at the ceiling, a saloon veteran's clowning gesture, he thought. His father was his first and virtually his only model for a drinker. Manny's mother leaves a bottle of scotch for him in the house, tells Manny it is his medicine, knowing Manny knows what it is.  He must drink his own medicine. She leaves it for him in her total victory: he can not face her without it or face what he had not been able to shoulder: the boast, promise, and transgression which produced Manny.  She can easily encourage his tippling-on the big chair with his shoes off in the sleeveless undershirts of the time, a tie still around his neck, looking brave or grandly injured-he may reach for the gesture of a man filling a tragic role. A big bluff, this man big in stature but too weak to protest or bear the weight of a great love.  Square shoulders with their epaulets of woolly hair, athletic legs in boxer trunks still wearing his black socks with their garters-he was no drinker, the fifth would last for months. Had he been guilty of everything his wife accused he might have been able to face himself, but imprisoned in green hope, in a kind of romantic optimism, he could not understand what had failed.  He was not a ruin, if only he had been.  But, he had failed himself and his belief in love without a full expenditure of his being, and for the remainder of his life mocked and humiliated himself.  It was this thespian drinker who Manny imitated when he began to drink, imitating as well the fake drunkenness and probably as a chemical destiny, his father's faith in recovered innocence for the sincere.               

     What catches in our throats that surpasses confession and strangles its lies? What has despised our disruption and tardy train? Were we always unnecessary lyrics to the song?

     Manny begins to speak:

     "Your interpretations of songs from the thirties and forties-I think you have a special affinity for them."

     "They were my dad's favorites."

     "They sound like they're yours, too. The attention you give them seems personal.”

     "It depends, a lot of them are hammy or corny, but some of them lighten my mood."

     "My sentiments exactly. Of course they weren't period pieces when I heard them. I immediately liked them because they were exactly right for a general mood. And then, they've lasted, the right ones, when it might have seemed they could only be relevant for that day, or really, not have lasted more than their assigned hour. But, maybe, we don’t either and the rest is recall and that’s what we are here to know, each stumbling on it at our own hour. Something in common, even though they were just clever sometimes, simple rhymes like we are day by day. And consider the accomplishment considering what they were up against-between wars during the depression-to get that litheness. These were not happy men. Light, graceful, they were anything but, and I think that's it-beneath all those songs is the life they did not have but somehow never soured on. They still believed in it. They never really had a chance, but they had the hour. I wouldn't hear it when you sing if you did not understand.."

     "Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph", Eugenia said.  "My dear, this is Manny becoming an old fool.  He's fallen in love.  The pity if it weren't so ridiculous.  Be gentle on him, he means every word from the heart. Look at you, Manny, if you don't have tears in your eyes. Child, I had one, they're a lot of work, at least start with a young one who's still got some starch. Come on now, make yourself useful. You'll bore her to an early old age."

     Eugenia, with much crinkling of paper gathered up her shopping bags and stuffed one into Manny's lap. He was secretly grateful. Better to disappear, donning the cloak of invisibility pressed onto the old like an inverted leper's bell, then sit thoroughly winded by wish alone.

     He carries Eugenia's bags to the street.  Eugenia manages the small miracle of flagging a cab.  He forgets to give her the bag.  Likely, he forgets to say good-bye.  He is not sure.  She pulls the bag out of his hands.  An expression on her face, indignation.  He has ignored her in his distraction. She does not excuse it. She has left his life forever with a residue of contempt for him. Welcome back, Manny. The time in the bar would have to be measured by a cycle, a spin around the sun, and he has stepped out into the same hour but in the next night leaving himself behind in that interval and now will shadow himself led down empty lanes every city has for the daily Lent.

     He has walked past the loading docks in the meat market, under the metal awnings with their tracks for meat hooks, the pavement slippery with suet.  The streets had opened up there; they were brick and lumpy and splayed in a warped grid. The buildings were squat and shanty-town like and in spite of hosing squalid smells lingered. He was lost there and had the cleansing transparency being lost can bring, a deeper solitude where inner chatter quieted.  

     People occasionally disappeared in Manhattan.  Searchers never found them.  They disappeared after New Year's parties, a little drunk, always only vaguely posting their intended destination, always figures that in later testimony were not distinctly known or at least recently had been fading.  This may have been the trail they stumbled on during the wee hour, enveloping foggy brine stinging their lips and whispering broken promises.         

     Large, blocky buildings, an industrial and business quarter. Between two of these blank massifs, so out massed it looked as if it were destined to be crushed, was a two story, stucco building with gables and black shingle roof, and standing in the gloom near its entrance was a group of men smoking, their cigarette ends bobbing and streaking.  As Manny stepped into the street to avoid them, someone called out and came after him onto the tarmac. 

     "What took you? These fellows don't even smoke.  We're killing time. And then whoops-You. What is it with you?  You were going to slip away. `I prefer not.' Because they're all queer?  It's the best gentiles can do to be interesting."

     "I will not go on without you. What'll they do? They have no inner resources. Well, they can rot as far as we're concerned. We're getting out of here.  In a self-righteous huff, we are.  Where will we go?  Lead on, McNuggets."

     He was walking alongside Manny, who in the tried and true method New Yorkers used with psychotics was ignoring him.  He was taller than Manny and built thinly like him, but broader, one of those two-dimensional Jamaican bodies, square shouldered and flat chest. He wore a wrinkled seersucker coat rolled up over his butterscotch-colored forearms.  He walked with a nervous amble, or it was hard to tell what his gait was, it was layered.  He was capable of a willowy grace, a silky stroll that depended from his shoulders and it might have been his natural gait, but he gave it little chance, and minced or flicked off small quick steps, fracturing the lyric, and then Manny recognized himself, an improvised effigy.  He had rounded his shoulders, slung his head forward, and his long arms looked brittle, he was pacing Manny not just step by step, but toe to head, literally shadowing him.

     "Where are you taking me?"

     Manny stopped.  From where they stood in the street he could still have yelled back to the bar and attracted the attention of the smokers, but another few steps and any yells would have been beyond the range of a Manhattan conscience. 

     "Is this a hold-up?"

     "Forsooth?  But it hurts. The quaintness.  You make racism seem noblesse-oblige."

     For the first time Manny looked his companion in the face.  Manny had that discombobulating flush of embarrassment heterosexual men experience in the presence of beauty in a man. The young man's face was sharp boned but its fine angles melded without abutment, maybe answering a wish, and as always, these lucky, seemingly beyond luck fusions made the face recede leaving one feature to enchant the viewer, in this case the eyes which looked to be calligraphy. It was tricky light, the street lamps throw a tangerine hue, but Manny felt the eyes were sea green. The wish would have them sea green.

     His companion planted himself in the street and pouted or it could have been an expression of Negro cogitation or skepticism, they had a vernacular of expressions that were puzzles to Manny. He seemed to be blinking back tears, but his eyes, like Florence's might readily brim with fleeting raptures. Because he must be gay and because he was beautiful, Manny felt the danger of robbery was remote.  He had the traditional male's belief that homosexuals could not look a real man in the eye, and beauty does not seem compatible with misdemeanors, mayhem, yes, but nothing that can be acquitted for fifty dollars. Then a sweep of his hand presented Manny with the empty street. 

     He had walked another quarter block when he heard a commotion behind him. A vision of flapping seersucker and flashing bare ankles in canvas deck shoes dashed past, running powerfully and lightly.  A hundred feet ahead the runner stopped, becoming engrossed in knee-bends and shoulder stretches, and then walked about in tight figure-eights with that air of grave meditation the amateur athlete affects after exertion.

     The stick figure in the distance propped himself against a light pole with one heel resting on its staunch pedestal, and in the gold tulip of match flare lights a cigarette. Manny is certain a few steps will subtract enough distance and the figure will not be so ridiculously longed for anymore-balancing off there on a cusp of recollection-but the fellow seems to brilliantly stage manage the associations he lifts from the unconscious. He has placed himself beneath a lamp light, he has struck a cigarette, and it is not an outrageous idea considering the camp use these gays make of cultural nostalgia, that he is acting ‘Lily of the Lamp Light’ as it pops into Manny's mind.   

     "Remember me?" he asks, drawing deeply on the cigarette.

     Manny nodded. 

     "You haven't changed.  Still think you have so much to lose.  All you've got to lose is your ellipses." 

     "You're one of my ellipses?"   

     "Bingo. I can't afford to mug you for more amnesia; I'm running on half empty already-my inheritance from you:  Timely amnesia.  Doing pretty well.  Six foot two-obviously the memory of you doesn't weigh me down. Everybody wishes they'd done harm, but I'm afraid we exorcised your lugubrious ass from our lives. I have a three foot vertical jump. Lettered in two sports-I couldn't have done it with you on my shoulders."

     "Anyway, tah tah, got to get back. I'll get you comped. Come on, get me off your conscience. Pretend you need to.  Make it a professional courtesy.  My dad was a shrink, Jewish like you.  I see him every time I look in the mirror. Trying to hide out.  Come on.  Bail him out." 

     Manny returned with him. The boy was willing to share his beauty, insisting Manny sired him and their layered encounter was collaborative and this was a dedication. He was offered a life serving beauty. Spellbound in its presence his hesitations and caution had been vocation, not cowardice, and all its years a chimera’s sentimental pilgrimage.

     Manny remembered a dream that he knew recurred dozens of times during his life: A shore. A rotted wharf.  Abandoned vender stands with tattered awnings.  Summer season over.  Time unraveled stitch by stitch into its component atoms, each microcosm this arid scene. The shore of lost moments; they go here immediately to wait in suspension, those moments when everything was trembling on an edge and it would take only a look and then immediately it's impossible and they are left orphaned of occurrence, spliced from time. Sere grass, yellow sand, even dust gets its wings pulled off and idles here, the green chance parched. As soon as he enters this endless stagnation he feels a premonition. Suddenly, that dead calm sea, waves are rolling in, diluvian combers summated by stormy light. Sea green coffers, all the green vaults that have been lost to the sea coming back, the green hills and valleys of paradise. The moment green again, that's all, but now the labor of titans and returned only for a heartbeat, before forever gone reclaims it.        

     As they approached the little gabled building, his shepherd sang out "Let me entertain you" and the throng rallied around them and swept back into the club. 

     He was pushed towards a table near a small dance floor.  The table was already occupied but there was a free chair and he was pressed into it, the green eyed boy, and green in fact his eyes were, saying "This is my father.  He's not queer so leave him alone."      

     "Give us a break.  Have a seat, for god sakes.  We're not rabid.  And we're not rude either, present company excepted, Nathan", said the man at the table in a voice that seemed to relish the theater in its own exasperation. His head was shaved over bushy eyebrows and brush mustache.  He could have played a constable in a British movie or a trolley car conductor; his pate seemed to cry out for its missing cap.  He looked trustworthy, a combination of obedient and stalwart tinged by anachronism.  His manners turned out to be the small played large, or prissy made regimental ritual; he raised his beer mug from the shoulder, sitting straight-backed, and still straight backed, dabbed a napkin at his moustache to remove the suds.  He dressed like a country gentleman, herringbone sport jacket with green vest, and there was a plumy voluptuousness to the way he held the napkin, and Manny realized it was not a napkin at all, which were paper at the bar, but a white handkerchief he had brought with him. 

     Manny looked around so he would not have to meet the eyes of the “Brit” sitting across from him. Likely, Nathan introduced any older man as his "father", but there was some chance an explanation might be asked and he did not feel up to providing it.

     He could not have said exactly why-he had never been in a gay bar before and had no idea of what was trendy decor-but he sensed that this bar was dated. It just seemed that this saloon either took advantage of its isolation buried in an industrial section or had been made obsolescent by its location against its will. There were Halloween decorations near the shuttered windows, black cats with arched backs, snag toothed witches with warty hooked noses and  conical hats, and two foot tall cardboard skeletons dangling from the lintels.  On almost every available surface,  on top of the radiator cover, on the juke box, on the shelves next to the gin and scotch bottles, religious icons stood. They were Medieval in flavor, large crucifixes, one silver, another wood, some with a severely wounded and heavily bleeding Jesus nailed to them. And angels and the Virgin Mary, she as frequently as Jesus, statues that appeared in gardens and graveyards. And check to jowl with these icons were biological grotesques, a stuffed skunk and bats and snakes, animal skulls with snarling canines. Why should this be old fashioned? A polished sensibility was cloistered here, a tongue in cheek decadence that pretended aristocracy while mocking it, an intention to parody Victorianism and its prudish repressions while fulfilling them, and this intention pointed to a literary education. That was the parchment crinkle-this place wanted to be an aesthetic retreat. It either ignored AIDS or rather than let it convert its patrons to politics, regarded it as a form of homosexual hemophilia, an affliction of over refinement.

     Couples are dancing on the small dance floor. Most seem well passed youth’s bloom. Some are well rehearsed, mechanically synchronized, executing a giant cat's cradle with their whole body.  They are in the minority; the larger part is bent on exhibiting unabated lust. Maybe they are fighting back at the confession of defeat or marginality or inane parody that homosexuality always endures, but they grab each other's butts militantly, and stagger about in wrestling clenches bumping into the clock work dancers with a deliberate obliviousness, as if it takes solid will to hold a place on this dance floor. They kiss as they teeter around. They accuse those shyly sitting at the tables.    

     At another table, a couple.  A man in his forties, unhealthy pallor.  Strange monk's tonsure of thready hair.  The hair in front has been transplanted. His ugliness is royal, an accumulation of sins and ennui and selfless pity. His eyes are small and unfinished, as if only gesso had yet been applied.  He looks as if perhaps an accident has stripped him of his former life, that he is just up from the bed, the bandages removed like a cocoon revealing this pupa, but in all, little question is left that this invalidism was caused by love and that he returns with penitent tenderness and almost no self-regard.  He will give all he has left, this term of life left to him, to aid and comfort, to nurture.  And the object of his solicitude sits beside him, a boy in his twenties made of honeycomb and amber, Hispanic by the refulgence of him, a thick shock of hair falling over one eye.  He has the look of a faun, a creature perfected for the sensual. His overflow of languishing sensuality seems violent or from the same source as violence, a beauty careless of self-love dwelling inside a passive nature. 

     Manny meets gray eyes that are regarding him. An otherworldly, sick-child look, the appearance of short, sweet visit filled with longing and adoring empathy and only half-reluctant farewell. Manny knows him, a patient from years ago who hoped Manny could add some relevance to his love, some draconian masculinity, a martial arts fitness. His love was fanciful and too grateful to be born by others. Manny had tried to talk him away from homosexuality, this figure of scant masculinity with the manner of a debutante including their lips tremulous with incipient emotion and their coltish skittishness, at least as Manny conceived them via this boy from Virginia who had fallen from that world.  He left therapy after a couple of months with gracious apologies.  He felt it was probably all in vain; he did not have the heart to discipline love and would have to suffer the consequences. 

     Is it possible he has not aged in twenty years? So gracious, he must have died from AIDS, and this figure would be a re-written literary premonition letting the dead patient forgive Manny and balance justice with mercy. In this antipodal loony bin poignantly dressed in tribute to the ideal male they nursed the dementia of love at first sight.  There was no Cassandra as in the other asylums their eyes opening into a whirlwind of blackness and the menstrual divination of grief and abandonment. In this theater of pomp and lightened being, an islet in an oxbow of the Styx, were becalmed those who had chosen an endless startled meeting protected by biological satire from any thing but keen and freshening disappointment never to be cursed by the finished knowledge of each other as procreative utensil.   

     The music stops abruptly. The dancers look around angrily or sleepily, and some decide to ignore the change and carry on.   

     Nathan glares at the dancers and then starts weaving fecklessly about the perimeter, he has his hands out and is strumming the air with his fingers and it looks supercilious and effete, a persnickety conniption fit, but suddenly, he has summoned the banshee screech of microphone feedback, and then his amplified baritone is flowing over the saloon.

     "We can do it nice, or we can do it ugly."

     The couples cede the dance floor to him. 

     "Attitude versus attitude.  I'm a professional.  Who'd you think you were dealing with?"          

     He has the small dance floor to himself. The sounds in the saloon continue.  Conversations and laughter, glasses clinking, chairs scrapping along the floor. No attention is being paid to Nathan and Manny wonders if he really has been hired to perform or if he is just a street buster who has brought in his own amplifier and microphone and in the tradition of make-believe that reigns here he is going to play stand-up comic or lounge singer or whatever he wants while things swirl on around him, accepted, if not quite welcomed, as another example of extravagant pageantry.

     "Guys, what I want is those old mikes with the long chord, remember? What is it about dragging that chord around, not to mention the mike?  It was love.  It was a dance.  He'd look at that chord dangling onto his shoe tips and he'd toss it off, and it was so chivalrous, like flourishing a cape. You really feel, watching it on reruns: He's doing it for us.  There's got to be a sacrifice or no performer becomes a success. They all got to pay. And they're paying their love.  We're paying to get it and they're losing it, losing it for off stage because they must meet expectations any given night to fall in love, at least, and to lose love and to remember it again right then and there, and what would that be if it happened to you?  A miracle. And this guys supposed to do it every night.  For you.  Don't you notice?  They wither in a minute and it is up to us to rescue them, like humming birds caught out in an early winter, we must cradle them in our hands.  They retire from the stage reluctantly, returning for encores we toss at them, singing to us as we file from the theater, afraid to let us go, and afterwards dragging through life in that stumble-bum walk of singed moths.  The ones who've surrendered to our dreams and been remade by them, and who, let's face it, we can't feed on the fumes of our wishes. Are you with me now?  Can I trust your consciences?" 

     He moved off stage to Manny's table and put his hand on the shiny dome of the "train conductor" sitting near him.

     "Can I trust you, Joe, to admit your wish fulfillments?  I don't think so.  Don't think any of you are safe.  I might lunge this way or that.  Eyes closed, if I toss a pencil, I stick a guilty party.  

     "Joe, I wonder why we let you be queer.  It's obvious it's a last resort for you.  What makes you think you deserve anything better than respectability?  Your taste?  I mean, really, when oh when will you learn that acquired taste is not a contribution?   Pa-th-et-ic.  To witness you tripping the light fantastic with your heavy thighs and cast iron head, so eager to be gay.  So boring, Joe, so very boring.  No escape for you darling, you're a middle class bore without a singular imagination." 

     He returned to the dance floor, sanding his palms together.

     "What have I put my hands in, Joe?  It is Shinola, I hope."      "He's not the only one. Don't think I haven't noticed.  There is a strong air of anonymity in this room.  What about you? Who aren't you tonight?  You're neat, compact.  Clean cut. What's the latest? We queers are middle America impersonators?  Lord, Lord.  Take advantage of how little sense we were expected to make before AIDS. Recapture our nonsense. None of the breeders can get away dressing like this. They're all in leather and spandex with tattoos we can only guess where.  And you in your polyester t-shirt and your crew cut and penny loafers.  Dear, you look quite insane.  I promise you, everybody thinks you have no chance of bringing it off. It's a complete cover-up, sweetheart, and everybody, just everybody knows it.  Please, let's get down. It is a dirty, dirty thing we do, you transvestite of the mainstream, and all the trappings of white bread will not clean it up. Chicken shit. You don't have the courage of your convictions.  Where's the peril?  Don't you miss it?  Thousands of us died for love. And you don't miss it. I'm sure they're all delighted to have you back.  It's quite a relief.  You really might have been a threat.  They were willing to believe anything of you.  Ten or fifteen screws in a night were considered an average quota for you, while the poor dears had run out of schemes for revival save imagining your transgressions. And now you're back and all combed down and looking ever so completely good and decent and patriotic.  And the only sedition you offer is to parody every manly image so that no one can possibly tell who's who anymore and every banker and farmer and candlestick maker can imagine himself a dangerous queer, and then the poor ones who can not handle the strain of decadence, who just won't pierce their ears or nipples and have oodles of angst trying to cope with female satire and revenge have entered a new celibacy and fade to extinction.  You've dropped the flag and become so decent there really is no hope and they're stuck in sex that ends. Oh, that ends, ends, ends.  The sound of traffic returns, the sweat dries on their skin, and they have not moved an inch and there is no culture shock to be back here, to find themselves alive again, none of that, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, they've had a nooner and the clock never stopped ticking. Thanks to you, abandoning your post at the frontier of inanity, you gutless shit.

     Doing your best to forget the trenches, hah, me heartys.  The shadows, the dungeons.  Bathrooms at bus stations.  Love in Limbo.  On the docks.  The water slides on the pilings like oil. Nights where mirrors spill out. Remember the voices in the dark, could we have been sure then they were not dead souls intermingling with us?  Remember how each sentence was a last confession?  We took Supreme Unction then.  Remember, ye of little faith, our voices in the dark?"

     "You wouldn't be here otherwise, honey."

     "Don't need to be grabbed."

     "You're drifting."

     "I'm not drifting."

     "Jes floatin' along.  Quit fussin."

     "Can't see a damn thing."

     "See everything, baby, like your eyes closed."

     "Wait a minute."

     "What wait a minute?"

     "Talk. A minute."

     "Don't have a minute to lose."

     "Whose cryin'?  I hear someone cryin’."

     "You're looking for love?  Here?"

     "Scared?  I'm not.  I'll know.  I always do."

     "I don't know if it's just us echoing a hundred times."

     "A kiss?"

     "Who'se crying?  Who'se doing it?  You, crying, stop it.  Somebody wake him up.  I think he's sleeping."

     I can hear the sea oozing around the pilings and then I could have been deaf. I'm sure I was and I could hear his cock in my ass because I was deaf and I could hear the space where a door had opened onto silence, and I could hear in there my body decaying, grains of it falling off into that open door and each grain was a day and I wasn't sad because it was as if I could see through each particle gone, or it was more that the blindness that was adhering to me atom by atom was absolutely sighted with eternities, and more than any of that, losing  all this meant I could hear and feel and see his cock completely.  So completely that I disappeared and knew I had fallen where my eyes had looked through the mirror and I had saved him."

    "Calico boy rescued from behind the closed lids of too many."     "We died in the latrines, me heartys, but no less than Luther, fighting to de-churchify transubstantiation."

     "I sing the body oxymoronic.  The mud man.  And for the empire of shit and shadow and charity.  When he has his druthers-Him, the little mollusk dangling, that crocus bulb, he's not bound for sunny Greece, he's heading to the sewer.  Self-interest speaking here, the man clothed in flesh unenlightened or only partly so, I'll speak it, and at its densest and most dreamless being, the butts two planetary halves and the anus buried in its charwoman's task.  Let the words do less and try more, let them be re-buried in the act, nouns only, including the grunts and moans tolling the body's rude awakening to itself." 

     He scooted off and over the speakers came nameless sounds.  He was between the tables. He was rummaging for something and people at various tables were bolting upright as he searched among their feet. Whatever he was looking for he could not remember which table he had left it under and no one was safe from his prospecting.

     "Here it is."

     He held a canvas carrying bag above his head and returned to the dance floor.  Unzipping it he removed a black tire pump.  He shook his head and bit his lower lip.  "You'll laugh."  And they did.  And whooped and whistled.  He removed a plastic doll from the bag.  "We ignore this part."  He attached the pump to a valve.  The pump had two flanges for the balls of the feet to stand on and keep it upright, and it was pumped by a plunging motion.  There was an echo of eroticism in the sounds from the   lubricated piston.  The doll had been folded like a cloth and as the air entered it sprang open in sudden climaxes, an arm or leg popping straight, the whole doll convulsing as it became tumescent. 

     "This is as good as it gets for her.  I'm a poor second.    How'd you describe her face?  Sunny, raving idiocy?  I didn't get the most expensive one. Actually, I got the cheapest one because that's the kind of girl I wanted.  I thought she'd have a better heart.  The expensive ones are going to be just miserable because they get less than they deserve.  I didn't want to have to temper my projections. But, I outfoxed myself.  I identify with her.       Look at these baby blues. She looks like she's being goosed.  And she's got this blond whatever it is and at the muff too.  Hypo-allergenic, I hope.  Do you think these blank eyes are some ideal? They could have drawn them closed. You have to imagine us at the moment.  Could I take the rejection if her eyes were closed? I mean if I were generous I could imagine her carried away in her own ecstasy, but the exile. You know that moment, even touch is numinous, and there she is, eyes opened wide, and really, fellas, given the Olympian vistas of the subjective at that second, deliverance as the brothers used to call it before they got arch, she can seem to be suddenly awakened, and her eyes can't be too buggy wide then.  Maybe all of us can appreciate what a painful thing we have brought her into.  Who isn't wrecked by tragedy just then and it would never do to have a sloe eyed jade just then.  No, absolutely exploded awake from that inert peace she was blessed with before, her big blue, mindless eyes opened wide. Of course, it could be for our ego.  Who wants a face that looks unaffected by your penetration?

     "Is it over sensitivity that I identify so completely with her in my Negritude?"

     "She's a real doll.  Not like the others who are living dolls. She's no imitation. What she is she isn't, but I can't throw stones being a sinner like that myself.  She is the artificial intelligence of the flesh, but what are we all?  Negroes, anyway. This talking mud identifies.  We should all identify who listen for our cocks to sing arias, but there are those of us among us, yoo whoo right here, who have been especially designated as utterances of the dirt.  You have put the spark in us and bear the responsibility and hope we will inform you of the secret intelligence of dark matter.  All right then, you asked for it.  Let me report.  `Tis a strange incarceration you have put on us to witness your own. It burns and burns.  But, you knew that.  And the peculiarities of it.  Squared in the queer, I hoped, and possibly original, for me, or self-willed.  I don't believe it, but there is that surplus which may be the only free will I can exert, like a suicide on death row.  This life is a peculiar institution: I bring you the question.  Is the narcissus buried head down and its blossom just excrement of the bulb?  A dream that manuured gonad dreams in the shit?" 

     He danced with the doll.  They could hear his rubber soles squeaking on the parquet floor and the stormy blasts of the plastic pressed against his lapel microphone.  The doll's feet were on top of his feet, as if he were dancing with a child.  Between the doll's buttocks a rectal hole had been provided.  Nathan spun gracefully around the small floor and Manny thought of dancing with Andrea and remembered how sweet and clumsy it had been, the unbridgeable difference in their height, her little face looking up at him, while he tried with her weight on his insoles to preserve her marzipan romance.

     "Ladies and gentlemen, sluts and cads, transgenders and transvesters.  Tonight, for your edification and stupefaction, a seance. The bi-colored comedian will commune with his dead father. He will accost him and accuse him and charge him and sentence him as charged, and there will be a catharsis and then we'll cut to the advertisements. My father and I are dream mongers, or he's a dream monger, I'm dream mangled.  Or mongrelled.  This should be interesting, failing that, painfully embarrassing for everybody which is a thrill on its own.  I give you Isadore Rosenfeld, who by another name might have smelled sweeter, but by this time anyway has been laundered or moldered into flowers and field, hallowed be thy name. 

     Sorry to put you on the spot like this, old chap, but one good turn deserves another.  Would I be wicked, would I be snide, if not for you?  I am sarcastic to my bones, which I think is a contradiction, one is not supposed to be sarcastic with conviction, but I am made that way.  One half can not believe in the other.  And then neither half can believe in itself, but that has been my choice, I think.  I'm too hyperactive.  I'm bored with consistency and animal nobility, and I probably wouldn't even conceive of Negritude symbolically if not for you. 

     We have managed, together, to have not interfered, from time to time, with a leap.  We've done even better.  We have been in love. Incapable of lying, us dad, who don't believe a word we say.  We've been rushed and quickened and green fuses have flared in us.  As near to whatever mischievous, sad heart beats through creation, us dad, grabbed as readily and with as happy results as was any one else by the impish god. But, I think, dad, this will happen less and less, and the considerable years left will be of another nature, our own, and unblessed.  Then I'll feel your purebred dissolution, that leukemia of spirit which is your pride of place in literary Europe or in acute, tender awareness, and which you obligated me to resist.  And then I'll have my Oedipal revenge, which is an older obligation. Inside the alloy I am I will more perfectly suffer your Semitic destiny than you ever could. More perfectly realizing your ambiguities in my fleshy adulteration, more the fallen angel or misused beast, and finer failure than you. Magnanimously, you wished heroism for me of the usual kind: Stupid actions completed without hazing by conscience.  And my revenge is being instead a completed you.  I am your action, and the palsy of your hand which continued even at the moment of my creation-I am proof you wavered.  I enter you at that very moment through the continuing whirl of your own mind at the time which continues in me, as much the child of your mind as loins.  You at the lip of chaos and destiny, hung on the edge of swirling light years and the hollow silence of mercies and salvation, I know you there, dad, where the dirt knows the face of its father who art in heaven yet. There you are, here you are still, above my mother while her face has gone to the deeper regions of her hatred where it lost itself in love.  I know that face, her jaw set out against you and determined to ask no quarter, her eyes in raving anger as she is split away from all her resolutions to be savvy and disdain.  Tears and moan and even shriek, I know her then, her belief, untapped until then, in redemption through drawing and quartering in faith; Spare her nothing, spare her nothing or be damned. How does her face become sweet in that rigor of resistance?  Herself revealed and lost, knowing herself only once and then dropping away. In her finally the ocean of herself in forever forgiveness to everything and hope for it.  And you hovering over this, over this coming of adoration and acceptance of destiny arriving through you, hovering above and away, because I know by what is me that before you fell into the time before you were born, you doubted and doubted again, and had the chance to wonder if that holiness on her face so visible to you was hers or yours and if you could ever trust your own sensing of the truth and adoration of beauty.      I shake with that palsy of your wavering hand forever, and each action in me is only a translation of you through me and all of them tremble with fear and refuse awe.

     I give you that you have sinned on this national ground, but your fondest wish for the indelible act I can't give you.  I give you the indelible diluted and never to exceed folly, not in me, its personification as I be, antic and antsy and true to your genius of wrathful doubt. I can not give you redemption through Eros, and roll your story like thunder that shivers the ground, but have found myself as much of nothing as you yourself.  Both of us interpreters of dreams and no closer to ourselves than listeners, stuck with our small voice of cringing conscience while the whirlwind issues from the chambers of others' preachers' hearts.

     “You wanted me to always be naked and first with myself.  Namer before babble and lies and dreams.  And I feel naked more and more, but in front of the mirror I am as dismayed by this creature as you.  More and more I feel the encroachment of phobias and hypochondria, those interpreters of flesh, and shame in my own presence as if I had stolen this likeness of a god.  Dad, I reiterate. Don sing da blues.  Don' cuss none."   

     He cantered off the dance floor. A cellophane storm of static poured from the speakers and then "Strangers in the Night" began playing.  Nathan drifted over to Manny looking sleepy and satisfied. He motioned for Manny to get up and follow him.  He led him to the street. The drizzle had stopped and a touch of early morning coolness was in the air.  Nathan lit a cigarette and leaned against a wall. The street was quick-silvered in places and tar pooled in others from the earlier rain.  The tall buildings loomed over them, bulky but insubstantial at the same time, rising into shadow. There was a cathedral-like peace to the city at this late hour, the dominion of stone seemed completed, but it did not seem threatening.  Rather, it seemed the stones had gathered into minions, and unobserved, late at night, they chanted the silence of an old order.  

     Nathan drew on the cigarette and when he spoke puffs of smoke accompanied the first words. 

     "My dad's black.  My mom's Jewish.  They met in law school.  My shrink looked like you.  Same gnawed on forehead and maidenly reserve. I quit therapy four years ago now."

     Manny blinked as if slapped.  Nathan was studying him; he rocked his head and put the tip of his tongue on his upper lip, raising his eyebrows.  "So, what are you gonna do about it?" the gesture said.  

     "I told him my father was white; he couldn't think straight otherwise.  Did him a favor.  Finally figured I shouldn't be paying to do him favors.  You identify?  I thought you would.  Anywhoo, this is a vicious business.  Got to grab your muses where you find them." 

     He pushed off the wall and faced Manny. He took Manny by the shoulders and held him at arms' length.

     "Then why'd you come?"

     "Is this my cue, Nathan?"

      The speaker, dressed in a well tailored summer suit cut full with pink silk shirt opened at the neck, a meticulously rendered late meddle age, a floral arrangement of the pastels in fading color.    

     "If you drove", answered Nathan.

     "How lucky for the two of us that I did.  I'm Roger.  How would you say it, Nathan, patron of the arts?  Chauffeur?"

     He offered Manny his soft hand. It was incomprehensible. Roger smelled of cologne, sweat and pipe tobacco, a pleasing aroma, but nonsensically complex. Decency nauseated him. it was another pollutant.  

     "Isn't Nathan a genius?  You did catch his show?"

     "I don't need that, Roger."

     "Of course not."

     "Where's the car?"

     Roger pointed up the street.

     "I got to collect my shit", and Nathan went ahead at a fast pace, leaving Roger behind, perhaps pointedly, done with older men and their deliberated motions. Roger turned back to Manny, his eyes soft and glistening.

     "Ridiculous, I know, but I suppose I'm head over heels, and frankly, I'm boring as hell without him. Even his abuse is interesting.  And I've never enjoyed anything as much as when Nathan flourishes it. I hope there are no hard feelings.  He's an expensive vice.  Very cultured, you can't just buy him colorful crap.  He really is a genius.  Oh, he wouldn't have to be to get tired of me.  I know.  It's made me quite pathetic, he tells me."

     He let a tear slide down his cheek and then in an indulgent gesture that Manny associated with old money with all its profligate liberties, he rubbed his nose on his sleeve glazing it with snot.    

     Every light is on in the apartment. Florence has been beating back imps.  It is after three.  She must have awaken and walked around the house looking for him, not a far-fetched idea as he often sat in the dark these last few months, and she laid these bridges of light to get from one dark room to the next.  

     He retraced her route back to the bedroom extinguishing the lights as he went, until there was Florence asleep, her bare arms on the covers, a book floating on the swells of her breathing, touchingly small in the big bed, like a child who had come there to escape a nightmare or rumbling thunder.  

     A tiny voice issued from the radio.  

     He undressed, careful not to rattle the hangers when he hung his clothes. He had a drunk's guilty conscience and elaborate and strategies to be considerate. He would turn off the bedside lamp before the radio, so that if either change were to awake her, her eyes would not smart from glare, but then he reasoned that would leave him a figure looming in the dark and might frighten her.  He solved the puzzle by sitting on the bed and turning off the light. There was a snag in her breathing, a knot of shallow snorts, she turned on her side and then the regular pace resumed. He turned off the radio and walked to his side of the bed and slipped in.    

     (Nearly a half century ago, he would return at these hours of the morning from his residency in god-forsaken precincts or god-infested ones, from the hellish asylums whose extremes of terror and horror nearly proved a godhead in the soul that could forsake or be forsaken, that proved a soul, a tissue made to suffer the presence of love in unending and unendurable faith. He returned, her young, tempest driven suitor, to throw himself on her for rescue, this small woman who slept bathing in repose, each limb, her breasts, her open mouth, more in sleep than in waking, reclining on the circumference of the round world).

     He decided to wake her, with a squeeze of her hand while whispering her name. 

     "It's me.  It's me", he whispered. She awoke without alarm and after the laborious climb old age endures to leave even its shallowest naps, fell into her usual petted cat swoon at waking, humming "umm", luxuriating in drowsiness. 

     "Back from Blum."

     "Ummm.  Blum."  Banking up beside him.

     "The bad Doctor Blum."

     She was heavy and boneless, maybe already back asleep.  For a small person, in her lavish embracing of sleep, she could occupy large sweeps of the bed, but she could always be molded into an accommodating shape, never protesting. Her slumber was instinctively generous. 

     "Are you awake?"

     "It must be late."

     "I miss our three a.m.'s."

     "Our three a.m.'s?"

     "Uh huh."

     "I don't remember our three a.m.'s.  Were they glorious?  Were we Nick and Nora?"

     She released a cavernous yawn and with it a cuff of sulfurous breath.

     "They were cozy.  And you chortled.  We talked about anything.  You sometimes brought the kids back with you."

     "I did?  Wasn't I gay?  Wish I could remember."

     "When they were little enough to be picked up, you were heroic in the wee hours. Brought them each on one arm; a valkyrie."

     "Marvelous.  You don't seem tired.  Aren't you tired?"

     "You brought them in, chortling."

     "Chortling children.  You must miss them."

     "You chortled."

     "I never chortled.  You're trying to wake me up.  You know I hate chortlers."

     She smiled what might have been a chortler's half smile, her lips closed in a lazy crescent, and from a landing on the stairway up and down from sleep made a timeless interpretation of his restlessness and random prattle, lost in other three a.m.'s he may have suggested to her when less asleep than she was now she had pretended a comatose state to let him use her in a truculent manner that was also curious and adoring and which she witnessed only through her lashes, stealing glimpses in the dark through quivering lids, his face puckered as if tasting something tart as he poked and stroked her, his eyes fixed in a dumbfounded trance. Passivity seeped into his sexuality, and he would enter her and lay beside her tracing her outline with his fingertips, only occasionally moving inside her, holding nearly still at the verge of transformation, agog at the arrogating push of rapture. Or he would roll her on her side and trace her spine and cup her buttocks tenderly, teasing his gluttony, postponing his squander, the stupid happiness in these globes licensing an uxorious earthiness in him, a surrender to absurdity and the squalid devices of fate, and she would feel him sawing between her buttocks and his mouth was buried in her hair and it was their fiction that she could not hear him intoning a coarse, reverent litany that ended with "sweet, stinking whore" and cold jelly daubing her back. When Manny carried this rutting into life to its conclusion and penetrated her, holding her hips, he arched away from her at the end and then his grumpy muttering over stubborn matter, the do-it-yourselfer's tantrum keen, ended with "angel ass" lifted from servitude, and all that transpired at three a.m. had no witness and no word ever spoken.

     From her drift beneath waking she brushed her hand along his thigh and took his penis in her palm.

     "Doctor Blum."

     "Hmmm?""

     "Doctor Blum."

     "Doctor Siggy Blum. He won’t forget the drayage horses from childhood, their gelding’s schlongs dangling, splattering tiaras off the cobblestones; never abandon them beaten to death by drovers, leaping to embrace them, the lash falling on his back. Into the steppes to redress their freezing in the drifts, and into hospitals he followed their blasted hearts, ruptured loins and offal to open the windows. And into brothels to hold the dying whores and open the curtained windows, and in the mad houses, wherever the shrouds fall and the body is nakedly soul as it is in heaven and hell. 

     Doctor Blum visits Holy Toledo in Spain. Linden trees burdened with leaves.  But in a wind they flash. Summer pierces him then; the glittering crowns sing a river song to him and fable women. His trembling awe is still in tact. The inner man has emerged; he is a scruff ball of eczema and dandruff, but his repulsiveness was always his project: Preserving his charity that was tested by indifference.

     Women come to poetic ends in his mind. Oriental women hold a special place. He assumes their obedience. He mentions their childish mannerisms. He has paid careful attention from a sacred distance. His recitations, doubtless taking him to dirty conclusions, but his sing-song monotone, it's the mass in Latin, no longer used by the irreligious. He visits Holy Toledo because of the Romance language and the painting by El Greco-the lightening pulsing behind the clouds."

     Florence is asleep. Manny talks to the ceiling. Let him empty this dream before he falls asleep. He is grateful for her beside him. He holds her hand while he talks.  

     "His vocation requires a toad not a prince. He goes to Toledo and finds the bogs on the hilltop.  I don't think he knows linden from oak, but he must have the gentler syllables to make a lyric.  A taxi drops him in the middle of nowhere. It's a mid-summers night dream in that dark wood. The cheapest whores serve their clients there, leaning against the tree trunks or cutting their backs on broken bottles littered from the highway. He held my shoulders when he told me.  The illegitimacy of the story gave him courage, even grace.  It had to be the worst.  He makes the point of the muteness, the onus on him.  Silence presses like a candle hood.  The place smells from piss and excrement. It seems El Greco did a lot of compensating. At this depth the people are stumpy. They are fortunate to have had an El Greco to stretch them, and to have Doctor Blum who looks after their...motivations.

     The old men watch the whores and their clients from behind the trees. Doctor Blum stands among them and their regret when they stare out of the shadows at the living make this act committed in the shit beautiful, that is his conceit, that it actually clothes it in reverence.  Thus he looks at the bindle sack of exile-responsible in the name of love and redemption for preserving the most rotted urges and rages, bound by ardent gaze lest he abandon his post and maroon these souls chugging in the shit towards grateful exit. He witnesses and we are written on the sky in indelible ink, caught prosecuting our undying love in the refuse."

     Manny soon is asleep. He is lost once again on the narrow streets of the city at night, gyring in eddies, bewildered for purpose in returning here. Place a window and hear ‘You never hold me unless we’re dancing’. A memory, a portrait of memory, so formal and framed is it inside a dream, certain of a mistaken flight from a rumpled bed-‘nothing better than a buck dressed for the night’ she says-a breezy window and a black lover who had yet to dress her long limbs in the room still lit by slanting, headlong morning light.

     Nature’s fools, through us life embraces death, that is our use, to requite the sun and moon. Peel me and skin the pages, let my shadow leap into the shinning river.

 

 

 

    

    

 

 

                          GUYS AND DOLLS

 

     On a Friday night, Manny fabricates a visiting colleague from Philadelphia.  Why Philadelphia?  Because Florence would never doubt that a soul condemned to such a place must not be refused help.  She has not been to Philadelphia but knows, as all New Yorkers do, that it is a borough that failed to thrive.  Manny can not excuse himself; it would be irresponsible. The doctor would be hurt.  His would not be an adult response.

     He names him Blum.  Manny calls Florence from his office and says he has to show him around, that he is eager to see the sights.  Doctor Blum has been to New York before, but Manny has divined from his voice over the phone that this is an intimidated man who can not boast any adventures in this city. Without him, Dr. Blum would be confined to his hotel room. 

     Doctor Blum.  Manny thinks Bloom as he names him, but a glummer Bloom, a glum Bloom.  A Blum.  This Bloom is not destined to bloom; he is not in the hands of a mythologist, and he is not from Dublin.  He is from Philadelphia and Manny can leave his story right there, the rest is too glum.

     On the cab ride downtown, Manny sits glumly.  He notices that in this fugitive’s game he is playing with Florence, he is accompanied by his creation.  He is acting as Blum, seeing partially with Blum's eyes.  Philadelphia is Brooklyn of yore, shroud in winter, brick and scuttling paper and drifting ash.  Blum is one of the shadowy figures he left behind when he went to Harvard. He regrets summoning Blum.  He is quickly too complete. Blum could as easily be playing Manny as the other way around.

     He has the cab let him off a block north of Sheridan Square. It was drizzling, the avenue glistened and halos surrounded the streetlights.  He knows where he is going.  It was a piano bar.  If it has shut down he and Blum can come up with no further mischief. He is relieved to find it still there. He and Florence had been taken there by friends after seeing a play in the neighborhood as long as twenty years ago. He had remembered where it was, an accomplishment in the village where the city's grid went through deceptive refractions, skewing the four directions. The bar was across the square from where the theater had been, that had made it easier.  

     He had to squeeze into the saloon. It was a narrow room with tables pushed to the walls on either side, and he was confined to a goat trail along with a caravan moving single-file towards the bathrooms in back and the bar maid, who somehow could find a trail inside the trail and weave through the shuffling patrons.  The place was not as dark as he remembered it.  The years between had tarred the memory, or romanticized it.  It was dim; weak bulbs in sconces cast wane yolks of light, and a single candle in a red lamp on each of the little tables rouged the lower halves of faces. He had remembered it as being dark as a theater with faces appearing suddenly in the nimbus of a lit match, cheeks hollowed out, caught in the cabals smokers shared when lighting one cigarette from another.  It smelled of beer and damp wool and there was a cozy, stagnant feel to it, like a closet where off-season clothes are stored.         

     The tables were full and he filtered back to the rod that served as breakwater between the knots of patrons and the piano. The wet bar with its foggy, near milk-glass mirror behind it was to his right.  The bar tender was a young man with broad shoulders and big hands who leaned on the counter when he took orders. He had a heavy brow and with his fleshy hands planted on the bar he might anchor a place where strangers got drunk. Some Christmas and New Year's decorations were still hanging over the bar: Bands of aluminum fringes were scotch taped to the shelves of bottles. They managed to look brave rather than seedy, as if they were flying against the odds, not ready to surrender: Stoic sentimentality or stalwart nostalgia. 

     He found a free seat at the piano bar.  It was still early and these seats facing the piano with their backs to the room were taken by people who came in alone. Beside him was a woman of about his age, her hair a frizzy mop, either grey or blond or blond in the half light. Small, piggish eyes that sparkled; she crinkled them at him when he said "May I?"  as if they must sparkle in stronger light.  Blue eyes, he thought, and in spite of dewlaps and floppy jowls she had never gotten over their caprice.

     Manny got the impression he amused her.  He was not at ease in a bar, and maybe he had the air of a truant.  Her shoulders were covered by a wool poncho which agreed so completely with his anachronistic image of the Village he thought she must be as much of an interloper here as he, costumed in her old romances.  Still, she could not be as much of a stranger to a bar, and under her gaze he self-consciously began fingering the bar like a keyboard to demonstrate his legitimate claim on this seat. The bar maid asked him what he would like to drink; his rent was due. Manny, conscience of the bluff involved, ordered a scotch and soda, though he never drank hard liquor. For the first time that evening he was disregarding Doctor Blum’s bitter counsel.            "And would you permit me the pleasure of buying you a drink?” boldly facing the old woman now that he had assumed the stance of veteran tippler. 

    "No thank you, but thank you just the same."

     Surprising himself, Manny grabbed the bar maid's arm as she turned to continue her rounds. She was an interesting piece of work, he noted, underfed, with what he would have called an Appalachian's shape-whittling asceticism to her, somewhat impenetrable, hollow eyes. He spoke to her with the theatrical, sage chivalry of a real scotch drinker.

     "I must make amends.  I've gotten away with terrible omissions. If only she would allow me, it would be a favor.  Could we possibly conspire to refresh her drink over her protests, and if she must, then she can let it sit there? Please, madam."

     "All right, but it will just sit there.  Sherry."

     "Thank you.  And it is always best to be sure that whatever sits there un-drunk is what you're drinking."               

     Tip-toeing from the claustrophobia of disease, he found himself in a troupe of old actors he would have thought had retired long ago.  The artist of chivalrous smarm was his father, the tie salesman.   His route had included Philadelphia.  Manny had gotten his height from him, though not his broad shoulders and square chin. He had been a large boned man with sensual features; Manny had inherited his long-lashed, glistening eyes and full lips.  And, it seemed likely, his attention to clothes. He called himself a clothes horse; it was typical of the sarcasm he used around the apartment. He was restless when he was confined in Brooklyn, an unhappily stabled racer, too well-made, too bluff or capable of being taken for bluff, athletic and hale, to be holed up with a soggy wife and owl-eyed, quiet little boy who abided him with quiet fear and distaste, having been warned about him by his mother.  By clothes horse he meant he pulled the milk wagon, his tie samples, from town to town.  But he was a clothes horse, square framed and graceful, and he must have been relieved to leave the house and be out, a man who would now live by his charm and looks.  He would be free to practice his matinee idol imitation on those low-lives who would believe it, believe the lacquering of svelte theatricality that overlay the immigrant hustler, including women in bars-said Manny's mother-who he deserved and no better, floozies who saw right through him but could do no better and for whom a tin idol was good enough. (He would never be able to see that, he was too vain, he believed they believed him, but he was wrong, they were laughing at him and his need to be adored by losers.  No one believed it up and down the coast, Mister Big Shot, the Jew in gentile clothing who took himself so seriously they had to bust a gut. He is desperate to please, she told Manny.  Others.  Strangers.  Their judgment matters.  For us he saves the rest.)       

     A swarthy man in a Homburg who wore garters for his socks, French cuffs and cufflinks, portaging his suitcases of samples to the Lincoln, relieved to be off, miraculously still employed during the Depression, quite willing in his sardonic irony, in his bitter bonhomie, to play into and at all travelling salesman jokes, Manny could imagine.  And into knock, knock jokes too.  Who stood more often outside the door uninvited than his father? Who's there indeed, never who they expected he would have made sure.  Ready to have the laugh be on him but to have the last laugh as well, the foreigner who had insinuated himself into the American scene in a clownish, sly, folkloric role.  This circuit virtuoso and drummer of pizzazz as a rejoinder to defeat, who made himself at home in hotel rooms and diners and bars, those asylums for ghosts, now this figure had Manny by the elbow, as if dying had just been escape to his preferred haunts.             In front of him the empty piano and the dark terminus of the saloon, the walls here painted black to make a stage.  He could smell the dust in this corner, it tickled his nose.

     "Do you come here often?" he asked.

     "Goodness, didn't that used to be a line? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  It's almost insulting to look so in need of rescue, but you mean well. What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this? Don't be a bad sport. You saved my life and now you're going to have to get used to me...Ah?      

     "Manny."

     "Manny.  Eugenia."

     The bar maid arrived with their drinks on a small tray cluttered with empty beer bottles, glasses, crumpled napkins and bills.  The shot glass felt like a solid ingot in his hand; Manny was used to the stems of wine glasses.

     The old woman raised her glass for a toast.

     "Eugenia and Manny, to inauspicious starts."

     They touched glasses and Manny took too large a swallow and his eyes got teary and he coughed.      

     "Manny, it's a disgrace, the junk they serve. You have to be careful.  This sherry should be named Nellie, or Gypsy Rose, or, how do they christen their poor daughters these days?  Vanessa?  Contessa? "

     "Sherry's already in the same crowd as Vanessa."

     "I was going to wallow in sentimentality and you've put me back on my feet."

     "I can't really see you wallowing.  More like Esther Williams.  Back stroking in a fountain."

     "Balls.  I'm a great sea cow.  You have to hear me honking and moaning.  My boys roll their eyes.  The girls milk my tears. They get a kick out of ruining me. They think it's their duty. They won't have me escaping my venerable office.  Revenge I suspect. I go to pieces over ‘Danny Boy’. They need only breathe the overture and I’m a sopping mess.  The boys have fled; they're ever so objective about their father.  I think that's what it is or maybe they think he deserves something more majestic. A toast maybe. Let's have another, to make my boys proud of me.  Manny, let's toast this sad anniversary."

     "I'm sorry."

     "Don't be. I was married nearly forty years. Every day is an anniversary of something, sad and happy. This toast is to one of them. I forgot what. A feeling, Manny, of sadness, sir, for the way things are.  I think that's mature of us and not one bit glib."

     "You're a widow, then?"

     "To my brave, swift, boys.  Gazelles.  Impalas. You would never have guessed them for sprinters but they can outrun even a rumor of misfortune, my timid athletes.  I am a widow.  I'm sixty-five and Irish.  I'm being redundant."

     "I am a widower, myself."

     A widower? He had meant to escape Florence and their resigned generation and now he had disposed of her. How quickly it had sprung from his lips. He had said what he did from existing in fear.  He felt as if any effort to imagine Florence here depleted his remaining energy to believe himself here.  Imagining living was vital to actually living, and what you can recognize as a sure sign you were dying was this inability to persuasively imagine yourself alive, to place yourself among the living in ways that were not strained. You must save all your effort for this or you would fade and become impossible.  To import the real Florence was more lifting than the flickering ghost could expend.  The healthy arrived with their weight of real substance which broke apart conjured fogs.

     "Is that a sigh of relief I heard?"

     "I have trouble finding the balance; in being truly bereaved. I don't know what I should expect of myself. Maybe you ladies do it better.  Or you get the benefit of the doubt.  That could be from our masculine egos: We assume you're putting on a brave front.  Maybe it's not a front."

     "Manny, don't think so much.  These things are not fancy. He died of cancer. It meant trips to the potty and bathing him, horrible bed sores. It was a lot of work. He was in terrible pain.  We gave him pain killers.  He could sleep for a while.  I don't know what he dreamed.  I dreamt about him sometimes.  He often seemed angry.  I think it was confusion, the cancer moved to his brain, but maybe he still had good reasons.  Forty years. I dreamt he was red as hot metal and he had gotten out of bed, he always seemed to be tossing the covers off, and in the dream he got his wish and he stomped out of the house, furious at us all. He stamped out through the backyard and his fists were balled up. I suppose that was my wish.  It certainly would have been much easier if he'd just walked off in a snit, certainly convenient, no diapers to change. I might have wanted that, and him to blame, angry as hell and just storming out of our lives.  Is that a widow's skill?"

     "I was talking about getting on with it. A positive approach to loss. For everybody's sake.  But it gets messy.  Didn't we, honestly, start this whole widowing process long before, or is it only me, who thinks I signed a contract in my sleep, believing she was speeding me up?  Did you have that feeling? Of being tied to a stone and dragged down?      

     "Manny, I would have described it more as a wrestling match. Some days I'm on top and getting the boost, other times it's him. I guess you might have looked in the window and seen me stepping on his head sometimes.  I don't know what he would have said then, oh, I do, he said it often enough, but I had my reasons and didn't need more of his, not then, though other times it was my turn to say uncle."

     "My wife was more discouraged and tired, more ready to...to protest less, and so, in a dream, I think, I said, take her.  Then I won't have to carry her, against her will, which is killing me.  And now, just how am I to behave?"        

     "You have too many ideas.  I slept with him the last two weeks.  We had put him in one of the kids’ empty rooms.  I was sleeping with the canaries and the dog, the way I do now.  I didn't think it would be two weeks. I thought he would be dead by morning. He wouldn’t eat and was starving. I didn't want to lose him.  He already was lost, that's when I got into bed with him again.  He didn't know who I was.  Maybe, once in a while.  When he was asleep, he may have known me then like he always had when he was sleeping and we rolled together, when it doesn't wake you up as a stranger in bed would or his not being there woke me in my own bed.  But, for every time he did not know me, he knew me as someone he had loved. He thought I was his sister and asked her to leave the bed gently as he sometimes did my daughter when she bathed him. Just for a moment he'd realize he was naked in front of his daughter and he'd be offended, that's how he mistook me.  For his mother too, and he did not ask her to leave.  He was glad to have her. I think it was fine with him to be nursed by her, as if he had the measles. Never once did he mistake me for one of his nightmares.  I was afraid he would. I didn't wonder but that in half his dreams, childhood I hope they mercifully were, that into them a hideous figure of death pushed its way and sat there blighting the garden, but I was never taken for that figure and from that more than anything else I believe a bit in our romance at the end, more than I would have thought, when he couldn't see me and I was each woman who had loved him and he still believing in us with his last bones which is all he had left."

     An urchin had walked to the piano and was gazing at it.  She had huge eyes in a tiny, fine boned face, hugging herself in a big wool coat with its collar pulled up to her chin.  It was a pea coat, a thrift shop purchase, Manny guessed, and falling down below it to her ankles was a mid-night blue gown.  This delicate refugee stood gazing at the piano for a moment.  She gave the impression she did not know why she was here, as if she had sleep-walked into the bar, summoned there by the piano whose uses she did not understand.  She touched the keys gently, too softly to stir a note, maybe discovering a memory.  Then she turned and walked off the little stage, and Manny glimpsed her huddled form passing behind Eugenia heading for the bar.

     She was the singer. An overly dramatic girl it would seem, too steeped in her role as oracle and slave of the muse, but then, when she removes her coat and reveals her bird-like frame it no longer seems a conceit.  She has the deflated, extinguished look of a dead bird.  A pittance of rags, totally fall-broken.  She returns to the piano with an empty beer mug for tips; the bartender stashes her coat and purse behind the bar. Manny sees the sharp bones of her bare back.  She must have bought the gown at the same thrift shop.  It hangs loosely on her. He's looking at her around Eugenia and talks distractedly, not really noting if Eugenia is listening, looking at the singer.  

     "It was Alzheimer's.  She had always tried to meet expectations.  I retrieved her from her wanderings.  Neighbors called.  She was in their kitchen.  She had waited by their door until they let her in, now she was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, dipping biscuits.  She had a sweet forlorn look.  They did not want to hurt her feelings.  All she wanted was to sit in the kitchen, absorbing affection.  They felt guilty evicting her.  She had become such an inconspicuous old age; they felt obligated to support it so others would take her example.  She was lovely to the end.  Well, we are not so old; she was able to assume the role like an actress, with the same immunity from the reality.  Lovelier than ever.  Of course, the worry lines, so accusatory, would disappear, but they were not replaced by that blank mask which is typical of the disease.  She escaped the squalor; that was part of her popularity.  Such a lovely, domesticated old age.  Such courteous surrender.  She remained continent.  In fact, she became, how can I explain it? an idiot-savant of hygiene.  Fixated in a doting way on her vocation of inoffensive farewell.  She would not leave a smudge.  And none of the odor which gives old age away.  She smelled of soaps, lemony, herbal fragrances." 

     "They speak of saint's flesh remaining sweet even in the grave, it was like that.  I was privileged to witness it.  The essence of her was revealed.  Her face looked tenderly inquisitive, as if she was listening. That is the way it has always been.  She was not one to get the message right away.    Forgive me: her patient, trusting face, her soft eyes opened wide; the Alzheimer's freed her to listen as she had always tried, without any intention of hearing but only to cooperate and receive each word as a caress.  She had never before been at a loss for words, with age especially, and nobody finally willing to listen, and then this botrytis of the brain vetted her.  No more chatter.  Wonderful silence.  Confetti of silence, and then full arias of it.  Such a forgiving old age, neither musk nor yammer.  Everybody loved and forgot her, gratefully at first, and then as their due." 

     The small klieg reflects on the singer’s gown and hair.  Her hair was chestnut. The stage was shallow, and the baby grand faced sideways and she sat in profile to them, and he could see her arched ribs and the stippled ridge of her spine.       

     She began to play, an informal overture, a medley of tunes strung together by a coincidence of chords, warming up her fingers.  Eugenia smiled; she had probably decided he was a man who turned into a windbag with a few sips of booze. 

     "Manny, you'll have to ask her for `Danny Boy'.  She's Irish, she looks like my daughter, Victoria.  She'll be furious. I hope so. Her skin will catch fire. Her mother is the last person she wants to see throwing the old sod at her.   She'll be beautiful mad."

     The dress was vented to her knee.  Her calf was shapely; she might have been a ballerina, and her shoulder, though pointy, showed firm muscle, as did her arm.  She was small boned and it was deceptive.  Each juncture of her body was vanishingly narrow. She seemed to be strung between ankle and knee, wrist and elbow, elbow and shoulder, and then strummed into visibility.  Her taut body even had the transparent shimmer of humming strings.  It is what reminded him of dead gulls; her being depended on inspiration.  Without it she would crumple into wire and dowel.

     She would be a temperamental girl; there was no insulation around her feelings.  They would show through, and she would be swept along by them. Maybe that is why she paid that somber visit to the piano.  Anticipating the hither and yon tossing she would get by following requests.  But then, her dancer's muscles; she would not be so easy to up end.   

     Manny thought: death loves beauty more than virtue does.  Loyalty gets a dog's face.  The patience required of tenderness enamels the face with boredom.

     The pianist was singing "Stormy Weather" in honor of the damp dreariness outside or maybe in consonance with similar weather inside herself.  She kept it subdued. He had heard it done as a valedictory wail and he liked this version better.  Maybe she was simply not warmed up enough to trumpet, but he liked her introspective, private melancholy.  She had a strong hold on quiet mood, her voice full and pliable in those registers that do not get the boost of calisthenic exuberance.

     Eugenia squinted skeptically at the singer. She must look as much like her daughter as she said, and that girl for all her wit and rebellion had no case to make for such a sadly weathered recall of her life.  Manny looked at her fleshy face and was angry with her for presuming maternity.

     Eugenia burrowed in her big knit purse and brought out a shabby leather wallet.  She gave Manny a five dollar bill.    

     "Just a minute, we're going to draw up a list."

     She started to empty balled kleenex stamped with smudges of lipstick onto the bar, searching for a pen.  Manny returned the bill to her and took a five from his own wallet. 

     "He who pays the piper."  

     "I have some I want to hear."

     "I know, `Danny Boy'"

     Manny got up from his chair. 

     "I'll make the deposit, and we can flag her from here."

     His joints had stiffened while sitting and it is a relief to unfold.  He wobbles.  The scotch has gotten to him; he did not notice it sitting. A slip of numbness has been pulled over him.

     She is singing `Mad about the Boy'. He waits for her to finish and then three numb steps take him to the piano, close to her bare back with its feather-work of muscles.  He slips the bill into the mug. She looks smaller close up and more angular. She no longer enjoys the transformation of an actress coalescing on stage.

     "Do you know `I'm looking for an Angel'?" 

     She hums a few bars. He sees the vein in her throat flush blue.  It is like feeding a bird; he sees the song like a lump of bread in her throat.

     "`East Side, West Side'."  It's Eugenia.  She is his partner in the deposit and is staking her claim. He hates that see-saw, sing-song tune.  She could not really like it either.  She is teasing him for `Danny Boy' or is she teasing him for his credulous choice? The Irish. They don't permit sentiment in any one but themselves. 

     By the time he gets back to his seat she is fully into `Angel'.  Her voice has shed the wet wool of her first songs and follows the primrose, garden path of his request, its Sunday promenade wooing. It is a wistful song laced into fastidious pomp and studied breeziness.  He listens for a note of recognition from her, a sign she noticed their mutual thinness and its intimations of talented grace.  She stays within the song's glib whimsy and self-satisfaction, its blotted-ink neatness.  Safe in his seat with his anonymous back turned towards the saloon, disappointed with the effect of his choice, he wishes he could recant and call out, "Lily Marlene", which he knows in German and which he sings under duress to Florence, his Lily of the Lamplight, which he sang to her in livid irony more than forty years ago for the first time, lying together on rumpled sheets during those months between their plunge into the bushes after the kiss beneath the streetlight and their marriage; lying naked, the radiator hissing, a sense of sated gluttony and gloom saturating him to the bone, Florence's skin patchy with red from her hours in sensual tossing, purple spots on her thighs and calves and buttocks, blooming as cryptically as lichen, fitted to his fingertips but whose actual printing is impossible to recall.

     The singer might purge the song of satire during its trance of rumpled past and future. As she sits beneath the spotlight glowing chestnut, white and blue she might even insert herself into the song and from then on become his new Lily, materializing with the music.   

     The singer follows with "East Side, West Side" and Eugenia sings along in a hoarse whisper, and then the singer is tacking from request to request, pulled away from any chance of Manny's putting in a second bid.  The five dollars reserved her for a surprisingly short time.  People from the saloon lean over the bar and stick bills into the mug until the money begins to look like a fern origami. "Over the Rainbow" is requested, and "Chances Are".  The singer eddies in the shallows. The bar must have made it into a guide book: A quaint anachronism in which to experience old village ambience.  Manny hears `Miss O'Leary's Cow' touted from behind him, and another athletic voice saying, "That's Mrs."  Then the sound of lip farting and "Give me a break", and then in the bellowing baritones of a pack of young men, comes "One fine night when we were all in bed" breaking up in guffaws, huffs, hoots and howls.  The singer continues as if she has not heard them.  She ignores "Swanee" tossed up in Jolson's ersatz minstrel voice, probably from the crowd of beer busting hearties that had tried "Mrs, O'Leary's Cow", intramural sports who had run out of patience for the sanctimony of old songs and for the life-daunted who plead for them.  She sings "Moonlight on the Wabash" which is barely a better song, another schmaltzy elegy about a river, but the request had been slipped in shyly, Manny had not heard it, and the singer seemed to have an ear for silent prayers. 

     Her face was thin and sharp.  Like most Irish faces Manny had seen, it seemed a variation on mug, faces for scrappers.  Not a face that solicited secrets, it did not look to have the dreariness to wait on confessions.  A face that could defend them, though, if she choose.  There were supplicants here.  Mysteriously, they took up no room.  It was a skill they had practiced.  They were skirted and flinched, and even in the crowded bar where any movement caused a kind of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" reverberation in surrounding bodies, they subtracted their presence.  Their already completed leave-taking needed to requisition nothing to go on forever.  Their requests must have arrived in an unusual way, a mold scooped out of the singer's ear, some swishing of sea-shell surf in her ear that needed a song poured in to fill the place they had emptied.  And the size of that excavation where they had been?-a cavern, a cathedral, at least it would seem that way from the sudden appearance of "Forever Young" from out of that nowhere, a soprano so free of meaty lung that it verged on inaudible, a clairvoyant keen that the ear could barely last through hearing, and whose disappearing edges seemed to fingertip a roofless vault.

     After that she seemed inured to any request and sang songs of her own choosing, which could have been a feminist rebuttal of the historically passive role of taxi singer, and she did get cockier or spikier, a little taunting, typical signs of political statement, but Manny thought she was not concerned with the crowd any more, or hardly.  Their come-uppance was included, but she was practiced enough, not in performance alone but in adversity generally, that it was an aside.  She was taking advantage of the crowd's antagonistic desires to let in her own character.  She was triggered for contest.  She seemed girlish, feisty and eager. She sang "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", "Sunny Side of the Street", "Let's Fall In Love" "I like it, How About You" and there was a virtuoso of pluck in it, a chin up, want-to-make-something-out-of-it spunkiness in it. She was skating on the slip way of her own christening. 

     She sang ‘I Don't Know Why I love You Like I do’ and Manny thought he must have danced with his mother when this song was playing.  When the singer reached "You never want my romancing, The only time you hold me is when we're dancing" he felt his mother pull him out of a chair in the dark living room and they danced together, barely touching, almost at arms length, and his mother had closed her eyes and there had been a little smile on her lips and with her eyes closed and her head rocking a little to the music, she had stepped closer and pressed against him and his arms stuck out straight behind her as if they were in splints, and her cheek touched his and he saw her with her eyes closed and her face dreamy and serene.  And then he was sure this dance had never happened.  He thought he must have seen her listening to this song on the radio and softening and her eyes had been closed and she may have been swaying to the music and he would have watched for a moment and then left the room so he could pretend he had not seen because he could not fill this space where a dance partner would have stood, and had to act like he knew nothing about that untapped nectar, her secret of restored maidenhead. 

     And then he felt it had all happened, a charity had been commuted into the song, and it would happen every time the song was played, that it was these imagined moments that were the amber in songs, not the moments themselves, but the wishes that had hovered around them and were never let in.  His mother had heard this song and poured her daydream into it and it incubated there until it spilled back into his ear, or he may only have imagined her, trembling Narcissus-like on its silky membrane, imagined for them both a moment of intolerable innocence that absolved them both, and that was enough to accomplish it, and to place alongside their lives a place of omniscient longing both could regain in the aphasia of a song. 

     The phrase came again, "You never seem to want my romancing, the only time you hold me is when we're dancing"  and once again the two shadows revolved in the gloom lighted only by the borealis glow of the radio dial, gathering the black heaven stranded between the lights of the Milky Way where ten times the amount of love may lie unlit than all the love ever touched, and whose tarry constellation stenciled by the stars seems more the image of the sloughing body at seventy than the belt of Orion or the crown of Cassiopeia.

     She finished the set with "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", a dead sober version, starkly literal, with the tune so compacted into the clean words that it seemed she was speaking in the iron heavy, spaded-up voice of those who resort to speech only when forced. 

     She took the money from the glass and straightened it into leaves, picked up her empty water glass and walked to the wet bar to transfer the bills to her purse.  

     "This place is too boisterous for me", Eugenia said.

     "Home?"

     "I wasn't planning on staying so late, anyway.  I met my daughter for lunch. Shopping."  She kicked some shopping bags stuffed in around her feet.  "And here I am.  I must have gotten in a mood. And the poor dog's been out all day."

     "Not today.  It's raining."

     It was the singer behind them, carrying her glass of water.

     "I didn't know it was going to rain."

     "The poor guy."

     She walked around the bar and found a folding chair and sat down in front of them.  The singer's voice, even in conversation has a three dimensional physicality to it. Manny feels he is inside a corporal present tense. The roundness of the words is an essence that can be rhymed musically; a kind of scat that is a periodic table for verbal evolution including gut and lung. This round present tense is like a navel for all tenses and he might exit this abeyant interval into an octave where "would have" has no note of regret. It might be a declarative, pulled taut into "must". 

     At seventy-the singer flung boyishly gangly on the folding chair-how did he get here?     

     He eloped this evening from the verdict of three score and ten. Somber note, susurrant veils: Dogs their sadness sharply perceived, or their tenderness, or mischief, or patience. The soul naked in exile and separation, vulnerable to attachment, most surely glimpsed and felt when its trust goes unmet or its loyalty is unused, vividly in a ruined living creature, in the full expenditure of itself in acts or casualty of faith. Expressed, too, in the distortion of the simple symmetries the body might have had, had once, before the advent of sexuality, its neat self-containment ruptured by this never yielding grappling desire pushing through. 

     Gangly girl, mermaid, soul androgynous with dreams, a pun being played on seventy when it is declared three score and ten. A pun that only works in a dream or song: A pun on soul and solid, so that this matter of soul so soon to be tested for endurance is balanced from hand to hand against solid in compulsive repetition and to no possible resolution. 

     And at seventy while sifting soul from hand to hand, has also come the image of his father pasted, collage like, on an Italian beach. A fire-plug of a guy, standing fully dressed, angry, arms crossed, gazing out to the horizon, hostile to interruption, his head not clearing the gunwales of the fishing dories hauled on the shore, too short, too solid in adamantine resistance to broach the hulls, to shove off and leave the shore. Some patch his undelivered soul makes in the day, this still too solid vapor consigned to his son.

     "He can't make up his mind.  He wants to be out unless he is outside and then he wants to come in.  So, I made up his mind for him.  I thought I'd be back by now", Eugenia said.

     "But you're not.  Tsk. Tsk."

     "He's a great big dog who'd do fine on the tundra."

     "He's waiting by the door right now." 

     "You, dear, have no idea what a soft heart I've got.  My house is Noah's ark.  My girls think I'm fated to be lonely if they don't pile pets on me. I have three cats.  They have first and last names, thank you very much.  The kids named them.  When they were kids.  They should have called them Methuselah. They gave me a cockatiel.  It's pride.  They think I should want to be eccentric in old age."

     "Don't you?"

     "I don't need coaching in that department."

     "They beg to differ.  Our mom tends to rest on her laurels, too.  You have to stay ahead of the wave.  It's different than kitsch."

     "I can tell the difference, my dear."

     "It changes over-night."

     "Au contraire, it never does.  When one has chosen wisely."

     "We get in this fight all the time.  Either she's sanctifying junk or she's purging the house of relics.  It changes with her moods."

     "It's her house?"

     "She regrets it soon enough.  If she's taken advantage of his absence to throw out his junk, then she feels bad.  She'll think, did she forget he's dead?  Who's she been arguing with?  This is no opportunity to have the last word, did she forget that?  She doesn't like thinking she's that lonely, she'd rather be loopy."

     "My dear, you have to strike a balance. His clothes, I really had to think about them.  I decided: too immediate was perilous. I wouldn't have those things still where he'd last put them; as if he's just stepped out. I admit, his clothes hung in the closet for several months, oh that coat last rode his shoulders before he lay on the bed. I told the boys to take what they wanted and give the rest to the Church.  Five years, and then we painted.  I had the boys again, they moved like sleep walkers.  I finally hired a professional. I should have called a priest for an exorcism. I don't let my kids make presumptions about me. I live there, that's already a decision, but I’ve decided it’s a realistic one. I think stubborn is defiance enough. It reaches as far as I’ll admit and for the rest-back off you’ll find no welcome here."

     "I walked by a bakery” the singer said. “It smelled so good and I started crying because it smelt good and he can't smell it anymore, he doesn't have a nose. Poor daddy, no nose, not even a carrot like Frosty, and I had to laugh. All he has is eternity, and it gets tedious. I don't think I'm made to hold a straight face that long. I don't think he's good at it either. He would roll his eyes, charcoal if they dare. I go walking on the shore. I have my brother's faded khakis.  They have oil stains on them, they look wet there, and I roll up the cuffs. I've got my brother's work shirt and his navy blue sweat shirt and I like sinking my feet in the wet sand with the froth sizzling around my ankles. When it goes out you feel you're flying or ice skating. That's as close to eternity as I care to get, and what I'm looking forward to most is sitting on the edge of the car seat and brushing the sand from my feet, it feels like you're making them out of clay."

     "Good for you, dear.  You remind me of my Victoria.  We always say that her report on Judgment day will follow the list of what she was wearing when the trumpet sounded."

     While Eugenia and the singer were talking, Manny finding himself sidelined had finished off his scotch.  Then, he had bottomed it up and looked through the syrupy spyglass at the ceiling, a saloon veteran's clowning gesture, he thought. His father was his first and virtually his only model for a drinker. Manny's mother leaves a bottle of scotch for him in the house, tells Manny it is his medicine, knowing Manny knows what it is.  He must drink his own medicine. She leaves it for him in her total victory: he can not face her without it or face what he had not been able to shoulder: the boast, promise, and transgression which produced Manny.  She can easily encourage his tippling-on the big chair with his shoes off in the sleeveless undershirts of the time, a tie still around his neck, looking brave or grandly injured-he may reach for the gesture of a man filling a tragic role. A big bluff, this man big in stature but too weak to protest or bear the weight of a great love.  Square shoulders with their epaulets of woolly hair, athletic legs in boxer trunks still wearing his black socks with their garters-he was no drinker, the fifth would last for months. Had he been guilty of everything his wife accused he might have been able to face himself, but imprisoned in green hope, in a kind of romantic optimism, he could not understand what had failed.  He was not a ruin, if only he had been.  But, he had failed himself and his belief in love without a full expenditure of his being, and for the remainder of his life mocked and humiliated himself.  It was this thespian drinker who Manny imitated when he began to drink, imitating as well the fake drunkenness and probably as a chemical destiny, his father's faith in recovered innocence for the sincere.               

     What catches in our throats that surpasses confession and strangles its lies? What has despised our disruption and tardy train? Were we always unnecessary lyrics to the song?

     Manny begins to speak:

     "Your interpretations of songs from the thirties and forties-I think you have a special affinity for them."

     "They were my dad's favorites."

     "They sound like they're yours, too. The attention you give them seems personal.”

     "It depends, a lot of them are hammy or corny, but some of them lighten my mood."

     "My sentiments exactly. Of course they weren't period pieces when I heard them. I immediately liked them because they were exactly right for a general mood. And then, they've lasted, the right ones, when it might have seemed they could only be relevant for that day, or really, not have lasted more than their assigned hour. But, maybe, we don’t either and the rest is recall and that’s what we are here to know, each stumbling on it at our own hour. Something in common, even though they were just clever sometimes, simple rhymes like we are day by day. And consider the accomplishment considering what they were up against-between wars during the depression-to get that litheness. These were not happy men. Light, graceful, they were anything but, and I think that's it-beneath all those songs is the life they did not have but somehow never soured on. They still believed in it. They never really had a chance, but they had the hour. I wouldn't hear it when you sing if you did not understand.."

     "Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph", Eugenia said.  "My dear, this is Manny becoming an old fool.  He's fallen in love.  The pity if it weren't so ridiculous.  Be gentle on him, he means every word from the heart. Look at you, Manny, if you don't have tears in your eyes. Child, I had one, they're a lot of work, at least start with a young one who's still got some starch. Come on now, make yourself useful. You'll bore her to an early old age."

     Eugenia, with much crinkling of paper gathered up her shopping bags and stuffed one into Manny's lap. He was secretly grateful. Better to disappear, donning the cloak of invisibility pressed onto the old like an inverted leper's bell, then sit thoroughly winded by wish alone.

     He carries Eugenia's bags to the street.  Eugenia manages the small miracle of flagging a cab.  He forgets to give her the bag.  Likely, he forgets to say good-bye.  He is not sure.  She pulls the bag out of his hands.  An expression on her face, indignation.  He has ignored her in his distraction. She does not excuse it. She has left his life forever with a residue of contempt for him. Welcome back, Manny. The time in the bar would have to be measured by a cycle, a spin around the sun, and he has stepped out into the same hour but in the next night leaving himself behind in that interval and now will shadow himself led down empty lanes every city has for the daily Lent.

     He has walked past the loading docks in the meat market, under the metal awnings with their tracks for meat hooks, the pavement slippery with suet.  The streets had opened up there; they were brick and lumpy and splayed in a warped grid. The buildings were squat and shanty-town like and in spite of hosing squalid smells lingered. He was lost there and had the cleansing transparency being lost can bring, a deeper solitude where inner chatter quieted.  

     People occasionally disappeared in Manhattan.  Searchers never found them.  They disappeared after New Year's parties, a little drunk, always only vaguely posting their intended destination, always figures that in later testimony were not distinctly known or at least recently had been fading.  This may have been the trail they stumbled on during the wee hour, enveloping foggy brine stinging their lips and whispering broken promises.         

     Large, blocky buildings, an industrial and business quarter. Between two of these blank massifs, so out massed it looked as if it were destined to be crushed, was a two story, stucco building with gables and black shingle roof, and standing in the gloom near its entrance was a group of men smoking, their cigarette ends bobbing and streaking.  As Manny stepped into the street to avoid them, someone called out and came after him onto the tarmac. 

     "What took you? These fellows don't even smoke.  We're killing time. And then whoops-You. What is it with you?  You were going to slip away. `I prefer not.' Because they're all queer?  It's the best gentiles can do to be interesting."

     "I will not go on without you. What'll they do? They have no inner resources. Well, they can rot as far as we're concerned. We're getting out of here.  In a self-righteous huff, we are.  Where will we go?  Lead on, McNuggets."

     He was walking alongside Manny, who in the tried and true method New Yorkers used with psychotics was ignoring him.  He was taller than Manny and built thinly like him, but broader, one of those two-dimensional Jamaican bodies, square shouldered and flat chest. He wore a wrinkled seersucker coat rolled up over his butterscotch-colored forearms.  He walked with a nervous amble, or it was hard to tell what his gait was, it was layered.  He was capable of a willowy grace, a silky stroll that depended from his shoulders and it might have been his natural gait, but he gave it little chance, and minced or flicked off small quick steps, fracturing the lyric, and then Manny recognized himself, an improvised effigy.  He had rounded his shoulders, slung his head forward, and his long arms looked brittle, he was pacing Manny not just step by step, but toe to head, literally shadowing him.

     "Where are you taking me?"

     Manny stopped.  From where they stood in the street he could still have yelled back to the bar and attracted the attention of the smokers, but another few steps and any yells would have been beyond the range of a Manhattan conscience. 

     "Is this a hold-up?"

     "Forsooth?  But it hurts. The quaintness.  You make racism seem noblesse-oblige."

     For the first time Manny looked his companion in the face.  Manny had that discombobulating flush of embarrassment heterosexual men experience in the presence of beauty in a man. The young man's face was sharp boned but its fine angles melded without abutment, maybe answering a wish, and as always, these lucky, seemingly beyond luck fusions made the face recede leaving one feature to enchant the viewer, in this case the eyes which looked to be calligraphy. It was tricky light, the street lamps throw a tangerine hue, but Manny felt the eyes were sea green. The wish would have them sea green.

     His companion planted himself in the street and pouted or it could have been an expression of Negro cogitation or skepticism, they had a vernacular of expressions that were puzzles to Manny. He seemed to be blinking back tears, but his eyes, like Florence's might readily brim with fleeting raptures. Because he must be gay and because he was beautiful, Manny felt the danger of robbery was remote.  He had the traditional male's belief that homosexuals could not look a real man in the eye, and beauty does not seem compatible with misdemeanors, mayhem, yes, but nothing that can be acquitted for fifty dollars. Then a sweep of his hand presented Manny with the empty street. 

     He had walked another quarter block when he heard a commotion behind him. A vision of flapping seersucker and flashing bare ankles in canvas deck shoes dashed past, running powerfully and lightly.  A hundred feet ahead the runner stopped, becoming engrossed in knee-bends and shoulder stretches, and then walked about in tight figure-eights with that air of grave meditation the amateur athlete affects after exertion.

     The stick figure in the distance propped himself against a light pole with one heel resting on its staunch pedestal, and in the gold tulip of match flare lights a cigarette. Manny is certain a few steps will subtract enough distance and the figure will not be so ridiculously longed for anymore-balancing off there on a cusp of recollection-but the fellow seems to brilliantly stage manage the associations he lifts from the unconscious. He has placed himself beneath a lamp light, he has struck a cigarette, and it is not an outrageous idea considering the camp use these gays make of cultural nostalgia, that he is acting ‘Lily of the Lamp Light’ as it pops into Manny's mind.   

     "Remember me?" he asks, drawing deeply on the cigarette.

     Manny nodded. 

     "You haven't changed.  Still think you have so much to lose.  All you've got to lose is your ellipses." 

     "You're one of my ellipses?"   

     "Bingo. I can't afford to mug you for more amnesia; I'm running on half empty already-my inheritance from you:  Timely amnesia.  Doing pretty well.  Six foot two-obviously the memory of you doesn't weigh me down. Everybody wishes they'd done harm, but I'm afraid we exorcised your lugubrious ass from our lives. I have a three foot vertical jump. Lettered in two sports-I couldn't have done it with you on my shoulders."

     "Anyway, tah tah, got to get back. I'll get you comped. Come on, get me off your conscience. Pretend you need to.  Make it a professional courtesy.  My dad was a shrink, Jewish like you.  I see him every time I look in the mirror. Trying to hide out.  Come on.  Bail him out." 

     Manny returned with him. The boy was willing to share his beauty, insisting Manny sired him and their layered encounter was collaborative and this was a dedication. He was offered a life serving beauty. Spellbound in its presence his hesitations and caution had been vocation, not cowardice, and all its years a chimera’s sentimental pilgrimage.

     Manny remembered a dream that he knew recurred dozens of times during his life: A shore. A rotted wharf.  Abandoned vender stands with tattered awnings.  Summer season over.  Time unraveled stitch by stitch into its component atoms, each microcosm this arid scene. The shore of lost moments; they go here immediately to wait in suspension, those moments when everything was trembling on an edge and it would take only a look and then immediately it's impossible and they are left orphaned of occurrence, spliced from time. Sere grass, yellow sand, even dust gets its wings pulled off and idles here, the green chance parched. As soon as he enters this endless stagnation he feels a premonition. Suddenly, that dead calm sea, waves are rolling in, diluvian combers summated by stormy light. Sea green coffers, all the green vaults that have been lost to the sea coming back, the green hills and valleys of paradise. The moment green again, that's all, but now the labor of titans and returned only for a heartbeat, before forever gone reclaims it.        

     As they approached the little gabled building, his shepherd sang out "Let me entertain you" and the throng rallied around them and swept back into the club. 

     He was pushed towards a table near a small dance floor.  The table was already occupied but there was a free chair and he was pressed into it, the green eyed boy, and green in fact his eyes were, saying "This is my father.  He's not queer so leave him alone."      

     "Give us a break.  Have a seat, for god sakes.  We're not rabid.  And we're not rude either, present company excepted, Nathan", said the man at the table in a voice that seemed to relish the theater in its own exasperation. His head was shaved over bushy eyebrows and brush mustache.  He could have played a constable in a British movie or a trolley car conductor; his pate seemed to cry out for its missing cap.  He looked trustworthy, a combination of obedient and stalwart tinged by anachronism.  His manners turned out to be the small played large, or prissy made regimental ritual; he raised his beer mug from the shoulder, sitting straight-backed, and still straight backed, dabbed a napkin at his moustache to remove the suds.  He dressed like a country gentleman, herringbone sport jacket with green vest, and there was a plumy voluptuousness to the way he held the napkin, and Manny realized it was not a napkin at all, which were paper at the bar, but a white handkerchief he had brought with him. 

     Manny looked around so he would not have to meet the eyes of the “Brit” sitting across from him. Likely, Nathan introduced any older man as his "father", but there was some chance an explanation might be asked and he did not feel up to providing it.

     He could not have said exactly why-he had never been in a gay bar before and had no idea of what was trendy decor-but he sensed that this bar was dated. It just seemed that this saloon either took advantage of its isolation buried in an industrial section or had been made obsolescent by its location against its will. There were Halloween decorations near the shuttered windows, black cats with arched backs, snag toothed witches with warty hooked noses and  conical hats, and two foot tall cardboard skeletons dangling from the lintels.  On almost every available surface,  on top of the radiator cover, on the juke box, on the shelves next to the gin and scotch bottles, religious icons stood. They were Medieval in flavor, large crucifixes, one silver, another wood, some with a severely wounded and heavily bleeding Jesus nailed to them. And angels and the Virgin Mary, she as frequently as Jesus, statues that appeared in gardens and graveyards. And check to jowl with these icons were biological grotesques, a stuffed skunk and bats and snakes, animal skulls with snarling canines. Why should this be old fashioned? A polished sensibility was cloistered here, a tongue in cheek decadence that pretended aristocracy while mocking it, an intention to parody Victorianism and its prudish repressions while fulfilling them, and this intention pointed to a literary education. That was the parchment crinkle-this place wanted to be an aesthetic retreat. It either ignored AIDS or rather than let it convert its patrons to politics, regarded it as a form of homosexual hemophilia, an affliction of over refinement.

     Couples are dancing on the small dance floor. Most seem well passed youth’s bloom. Some are well rehearsed, mechanically synchronized, executing a giant cat's cradle with their whole body.  They are in the minority; the larger part is bent on exhibiting unabated lust. Maybe they are fighting back at the confession of defeat or marginality or inane parody that homosexuality always endures, but they grab each other's butts militantly, and stagger about in wrestling clenches bumping into the clock work dancers with a deliberate obliviousness, as if it takes solid will to hold a place on this dance floor. They kiss as they teeter around. They accuse those shyly sitting at the tables.    

     At another table, a couple.  A man in his forties, unhealthy pallor.  Strange monk's tonsure of thready hair.  The hair in front has been transplanted. His ugliness is royal, an accumulation of sins and ennui and selfless pity. His eyes are small and unfinished, as if only gesso had yet been applied.  He looks as if perhaps an accident has stripped him of his former life, that he is just up from the bed, the bandages removed like a cocoon revealing this pupa, but in all, little question is left that this invalidism was caused by love and that he returns with penitent tenderness and almost no self-regard.  He will give all he has left, this term of life left to him, to aid and comfort, to nurture.  And the object of his solicitude sits beside him, a boy in his twenties made of honeycomb and amber, Hispanic by the refulgence of him, a thick shock of hair falling over one eye.  He has the look of a faun, a creature perfected for the sensual. His overflow of languishing sensuality seems violent or from the same source as violence, a beauty careless of self-love dwelling inside a passive nature. 

     Manny meets gray eyes that are regarding him. An otherworldly, sick-child look, the appearance of short, sweet visit filled with longing and adoring empathy and only half-reluctant farewell. Manny knows him, a patient from years ago who hoped Manny could add some relevance to his love, some draconian masculinity, a martial arts fitness. His love was fanciful and too grateful to be born by others. Manny had tried to talk him away from homosexuality, this figure of scant masculinity with the manner of a debutante including their lips tremulous with incipient emotion and their coltish skittishness, at least as Manny conceived them via this boy from Virginia who had fallen from that world.  He left therapy after a couple of months with gracious apologies.  He felt it was probably all in vain; he did not have the heart to discipline love and would have to suffer the consequences. 

     Is it possible he has not aged in twenty years? So gracious, he must have died from AIDS, and this figure would be a re-written literary premonition letting the dead patient forgive Manny and balance justice with mercy. In this antipodal loony bin poignantly dressed in tribute to the ideal male they nursed the dementia of love at first sight.  There was no Cassandra as in the other asylums their eyes opening into a whirlwind of blackness and the menstrual divination of grief and abandonment. In this theater of pomp and lightened being, an islet in an oxbow of the Styx, were becalmed those who had chosen an endless startled meeting protected by biological satire from any thing but keen and freshening disappointment never to be cursed by the finished knowledge of each other as procreative utensil.   

     The music stops abruptly. The dancers look around angrily or sleepily, and some decide to ignore the change and carry on.   

     Nathan glares at the dancers and then starts weaving fecklessly about the perimeter, he has his hands out and is strumming the air with his fingers and it looks supercilious and effete, a persnickety conniption fit, but suddenly, he has summoned the banshee screech of microphone feedback, and then his amplified baritone is flowing over the saloon.

     "We can do it nice, or we can do it ugly."

     The couples cede the dance floor to him. 

     "Attitude versus attitude.  I'm a professional.  Who'd you think you were dealing with?"          

     He has the small dance floor to himself. The sounds in the saloon continue.  Conversations and laughter, glasses clinking, chairs scrapping along the floor. No attention is being paid to Nathan and Manny wonders if he really has been hired to perform or if he is just a street buster who has brought in his own amplifier and microphone and in the tradition of make-believe that reigns here he is going to play stand-up comic or lounge singer or whatever he wants while things swirl on around him, accepted, if not quite welcomed, as another example of extravagant pageantry.

     "Guys, what I want is those old mikes with the long chord, remember? What is it about dragging that chord around, not to mention the mike?  It was love.  It was a dance.  He'd look at that chord dangling onto his shoe tips and he'd toss it off, and it was so chivalrous, like flourishing a cape. You really feel, watching it on reruns: He's doing it for us.  There's got to be a sacrifice or no performer becomes a success. They all got to pay. And they're paying their love.  We're paying to get it and they're losing it, losing it for off stage because they must meet expectations any given night to fall in love, at least, and to lose love and to remember it again right then and there, and what would that be if it happened to you?  A miracle. And this guys supposed to do it every night.  For you.  Don't you notice?  They wither in a minute and it is up to us to rescue them, like humming birds caught out in an early winter, we must cradle them in our hands.  They retire from the stage reluctantly, returning for encores we toss at them, singing to us as we file from the theater, afraid to let us go, and afterwards dragging through life in that stumble-bum walk of singed moths.  The ones who've surrendered to our dreams and been remade by them, and who, let's face it, we can't feed on the fumes of our wishes. Are you with me now?  Can I trust your consciences?" 

     He moved off stage to Manny's table and put his hand on the shiny dome of the "train conductor" sitting near him.

     "Can I trust you, Joe, to admit your wish fulfillments?  I don't think so.  Don't think any of you are safe.  I might lunge this way or that.  Eyes closed, if I toss a pencil, I stick a guilty party.  

     "Joe, I wonder why we let you be queer.  It's obvious it's a last resort for you.  What makes you think you deserve anything better than respectability?  Your taste?  I mean, really, when oh when will you learn that acquired taste is not a contribution?   Pa-th-et-ic.  To witness you tripping the light fantastic with your heavy thighs and cast iron head, so eager to be gay.  So boring, Joe, so very boring.  No escape for you darling, you're a middle class bore without a singular imagination." 

     He returned to the dance floor, sanding his palms together.

     "What have I put my hands in, Joe?  It is Shinola, I hope."      "He's not the only one. Don't think I haven't noticed.  There is a strong air of anonymity in this room.  What about you? Who aren't you tonight?  You're neat, compact.  Clean cut. What's the latest? We queers are middle America impersonators?  Lord, Lord.  Take advantage of how little sense we were expected to make before AIDS. Recapture our nonsense. None of the breeders can get away dressing like this. They're all in leather and spandex with tattoos we can only guess where.  And you in your polyester t-shirt and your crew cut and penny loafers.  Dear, you look quite insane.  I promise you, everybody thinks you have no chance of bringing it off. It's a complete cover-up, sweetheart, and everybody, just everybody knows it.  Please, let's get down. It is a dirty, dirty thing we do, you transvestite of the mainstream, and all the trappings of white bread will not clean it up. Chicken shit. You don't have the courage of your convictions.  Where's the peril?  Don't you miss it?  Thousands of us died for love. And you don't miss it. I'm sure they're all delighted to have you back.  It's quite a relief.  You really might have been a threat.  They were willing to believe anything of you.  Ten or fifteen screws in a night were considered an average quota for you, while the poor dears had run out of schemes for revival save imagining your transgressions. And now you're back and all combed down and looking ever so completely good and decent and patriotic.  And the only sedition you offer is to parody every manly image so that no one can possibly tell who's who anymore and every banker and farmer and candlestick maker can imagine himself a dangerous queer, and then the poor ones who can not handle the strain of decadence, who just won't pierce their ears or nipples and have oodles of angst trying to cope with female satire and revenge have entered a new celibacy and fade to extinction.  You've dropped the flag and become so decent there really is no hope and they're stuck in sex that ends. Oh, that ends, ends, ends.  The sound of traffic returns, the sweat dries on their skin, and they have not moved an inch and there is no culture shock to be back here, to find themselves alive again, none of that, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, they've had a nooner and the clock never stopped ticking. Thanks to you, abandoning your post at the frontier of inanity, you gutless shit.

     Doing your best to forget the trenches, hah, me heartys.  The shadows, the dungeons.  Bathrooms at bus stations.  Love in Limbo.  On the docks.  The water slides on the pilings like oil. Nights where mirrors spill out. Remember the voices in the dark, could we have been sure then they were not dead souls intermingling with us?  Remember how each sentence was a last confession?  We took Supreme Unction then.  Remember, ye of little faith, our voices in the dark?"

     "You wouldn't be here otherwise, honey."

     "Don't need to be grabbed."

     "You're drifting."

     "I'm not drifting."

     "Jes floatin' along.  Quit fussin."

     "Can't see a damn thing."

     "See everything, baby, like your eyes closed."

     "Wait a minute."

     "What wait a minute?"

     "Talk. A minute."

     "Don't have a minute to lose."

     "Whose cryin'?  I hear someone cryin’."

     "You're looking for love?  Here?"

     "Scared?  I'm not.  I'll know.  I always do."

     "I don't know if it's just us echoing a hundred times."

     "A kiss?"

     "Who'se crying?  Who'se doing it?  You, crying, stop it.  Somebody wake him up.  I think he's sleeping."

     I can hear the sea oozing around the pilings and then I could have been deaf. I'm sure I was and I could hear his cock in my ass because I was deaf and I could hear the space where a door had opened onto silence, and I could hear in there my body decaying, grains of it falling off into that open door and each grain was a day and I wasn't sad because it was as if I could see through each particle gone, or it was more that the blindness that was adhering to me atom by atom was absolutely sighted with eternities, and more than any of that, losing  all this meant I could hear and feel and see his cock completely.  So completely that I disappeared and knew I had fallen where my eyes had looked through the mirror and I had saved him."

    "Calico boy rescued from behind the closed lids of too many."     "We died in the latrines, me heartys, but no less than Luther, fighting to de-churchify transubstantiation."

     "I sing the body oxymoronic.  The mud man.  And for the empire of shit and shadow and charity.  When he has his druthers-Him, the little mollusk dangling, that crocus bulb, he's not bound for sunny Greece, he's heading to the sewer.  Self-interest speaking here, the man clothed in flesh unenlightened or only partly so, I'll speak it, and at its densest and most dreamless being, the butts two planetary halves and the anus buried in its charwoman's task.  Let the words do less and try more, let them be re-buried in the act, nouns only, including the grunts and moans tolling the body's rude awakening to itself." 

     He scooted off and over the speakers came nameless sounds.  He was between the tables. He was rummaging for something and people at various tables were bolting upright as he searched among their feet. Whatever he was looking for he could not remember which table he had left it under and no one was safe from his prospecting.

     "Here it is."

     He held a canvas carrying bag above his head and returned to the dance floor.  Unzipping it he removed a black tire pump.  He shook his head and bit his lower lip.  "You'll laugh."  And they did.  And whooped and whistled.  He removed a plastic doll from the bag.  "We ignore this part."  He attached the pump to a valve.  The pump had two flanges for the balls of the feet to stand on and keep it upright, and it was pumped by a plunging motion.  There was an echo of eroticism in the sounds from the   lubricated piston.  The doll had been folded like a cloth and as the air entered it sprang open in sudden climaxes, an arm or leg popping straight, the whole doll convulsing as it became tumescent. 

     "This is as good as it gets for her.  I'm a poor second.    How'd you describe her face?  Sunny, raving idiocy?  I didn't get the most expensive one. Actually, I got the cheapest one because that's the kind of girl I wanted.  I thought she'd have a better heart.  The expensive ones are going to be just miserable because they get less than they deserve.  I didn't want to have to temper my projections. But, I outfoxed myself.  I identify with her.       Look at these baby blues. She looks like she's being goosed.  And she's got this blond whatever it is and at the muff too.  Hypo-allergenic, I hope.  Do you think these blank eyes are some ideal? They could have drawn them closed. You have to imagine us at the moment.  Could I take the rejection if her eyes were closed? I mean if I were generous I could imagine her carried away in her own ecstasy, but the exile. You know that moment, even touch is numinous, and there she is, eyes opened wide, and really, fellas, given the Olympian vistas of the subjective at that second, deliverance as the brothers used to call it before they got arch, she can seem to be suddenly awakened, and her eyes can't be too buggy wide then.  Maybe all of us can appreciate what a painful thing we have brought her into.  Who isn't wrecked by tragedy just then and it would never do to have a sloe eyed jade just then.  No, absolutely exploded awake from that inert peace she was blessed with before, her big blue, mindless eyes opened wide. Of course, it could be for our ego.  Who wants a face that looks unaffected by your penetration?

     "Is it over sensitivity that I identify so completely with her in my Negritude?"

     "She's a real doll.  Not like the others who are living dolls. She's no imitation. What she is she isn't, but I can't throw stones being a sinner like that myself.  She is the artificial intelligence of the flesh, but what are we all?  Negroes, anyway. This talking mud identifies.  We should all identify who listen for our cocks to sing arias, but there are those of us among us, yoo whoo right here, who have been especially designated as utterances of the dirt.  You have put the spark in us and bear the responsibility and hope we will inform you of the secret intelligence of dark matter.  All right then, you asked for it.  Let me report.  `Tis a strange incarceration you have put on us to witness your own. It burns and burns.  But, you knew that.  And the peculiarities of it.  Squared in the queer, I hoped, and possibly original, for me, or self-willed.  I don't believe it, but there is that surplus which may be the only free will I can exert, like a suicide on death row.  This life is a peculiar institution: I bring you the question.  Is the narcissus buried head down and its blossom just excrement of the bulb?  A dream that manuured gonad dreams in the shit?" 

     He danced with the doll.  They could hear his rubber soles squeaking on the parquet floor and the stormy blasts of the plastic pressed against his lapel microphone.  The doll's feet were on top of his feet, as if he were dancing with a child.  Between the doll's buttocks a rectal hole had been provided.  Nathan spun gracefully around the small floor and Manny thought of dancing with Andrea and remembered how sweet and clumsy it had been, the unbridgeable difference in their height, her little face looking up at him, while he tried with her weight on his insoles to preserve her marzipan romance.

     "Ladies and gentlemen, sluts and cads, transgenders and transvesters.  Tonight, for your edification and stupefaction, a seance. The bi-colored comedian will commune with his dead father. He will accost him and accuse him and charge him and sentence him as charged, and there will be a catharsis and then we'll cut to the advertisements. My father and I are dream mongers, or he's a dream monger, I'm dream mangled.  Or mongrelled.  This should be interesting, failing that, painfully embarrassing for everybody which is a thrill on its own.  I give you Isadore Rosenfeld, who by another name might have smelled sweeter, but by this time anyway has been laundered or moldered into flowers and field, hallowed be thy name. 

     Sorry to put you on the spot like this, old chap, but one good turn deserves another.  Would I be wicked, would I be snide, if not for you?  I am sarcastic to my bones, which I think is a contradiction, one is not supposed to be sarcastic with conviction, but I am made that way.  One half can not believe in the other.  And then neither half can believe in itself, but that has been my choice, I think.  I'm too hyperactive.  I'm bored with consistency and animal nobility, and I probably wouldn't even conceive of Negritude symbolically if not for you. 

     We have managed, together, to have not interfered, from time to time, with a leap.  We've done even better.  We have been in love. Incapable of lying, us dad, who don't believe a word we say.  We've been rushed and quickened and green fuses have flared in us.  As near to whatever mischievous, sad heart beats through creation, us dad, grabbed as readily and with as happy results as was any one else by the impish god. But, I think, dad, this will happen less and less, and the considerable years left will be of another nature, our own, and unblessed.  Then I'll feel your purebred dissolution, that leukemia of spirit which is your pride of place in literary Europe or in acute, tender awareness, and which you obligated me to resist.  And then I'll have my Oedipal revenge, which is an older obligation. Inside the alloy I am I will more perfectly suffer your Semitic destiny than you ever could. More perfectly realizing your ambiguities in my fleshy adulteration, more the fallen angel or misused beast, and finer failure than you. Magnanimously, you wished heroism for me of the usual kind: Stupid actions completed without hazing by conscience.  And my revenge is being instead a completed you.  I am your action, and the palsy of your hand which continued even at the moment of my creation-I am proof you wavered.  I enter you at that very moment through the continuing whirl of your own mind at the time which continues in me, as much the child of your mind as loins.  You at the lip of chaos and destiny, hung on the edge of swirling light years and the hollow silence of mercies and salvation, I know you there, dad, where the dirt knows the face of its father who art in heaven yet. There you are, here you are still, above my mother while her face has gone to the deeper regions of her hatred where it lost itself in love.  I know that face, her jaw set out against you and determined to ask no quarter, her eyes in raving anger as she is split away from all her resolutions to be savvy and disdain.  Tears and moan and even shriek, I know her then, her belief, untapped until then, in redemption through drawing and quartering in faith; Spare her nothing, spare her nothing or be damned. How does her face become sweet in that rigor of resistance?  Herself revealed and lost, knowing herself only once and then dropping away. In her finally the ocean of herself in forever forgiveness to everything and hope for it.  And you hovering over this, over this coming of adoration and acceptance of destiny arriving through you, hovering above and away, because I know by what is me that before you fell into the time before you were born, you doubted and doubted again, and had the chance to wonder if that holiness on her face so visible to you was hers or yours and if you could ever trust your own sensing of the truth and adoration of beauty.      I shake with that palsy of your wavering hand forever, and each action in me is only a translation of you through me and all of them tremble with fear and refuse awe.

     I give you that you have sinned on this national ground, but your fondest wish for the indelible act I can't give you.  I give you the indelible diluted and never to exceed folly, not in me, its personification as I be, antic and antsy and true to your genius of wrathful doubt. I can not give you redemption through Eros, and roll your story like thunder that shivers the ground, but have found myself as much of nothing as you yourself.  Both of us interpreters of dreams and no closer to ourselves than listeners, stuck with our small voice of cringing conscience while the whirlwind issues from the chambers of others' preachers' hearts.

     “You wanted me to always be naked and first with myself.  Namer before babble and lies and dreams.  And I feel naked more and more, but in front of the mirror I am as dismayed by this creature as you.  More and more I feel the encroachment of phobias and hypochondria, those interpreters of flesh, and shame in my own presence as if I had stolen this likeness of a god.  Dad, I reiterate. Don sing da blues.  Don' cuss none."   

     He cantered off the dance floor. A cellophane storm of static poured from the speakers and then "Strangers in the Night" began playing.  Nathan drifted over to Manny looking sleepy and satisfied. He motioned for Manny to get up and follow him.  He led him to the street. The drizzle had stopped and a touch of early morning coolness was in the air.  Nathan lit a cigarette and leaned against a wall. The street was quick-silvered in places and tar pooled in others from the earlier rain.  The tall buildings loomed over them, bulky but insubstantial at the same time, rising into shadow. There was a cathedral-like peace to the city at this late hour, the dominion of stone seemed completed, but it did not seem threatening.  Rather, it seemed the stones had gathered into minions, and unobserved, late at night, they chanted the silence of an old order.  

     Nathan drew on the cigarette and when he spoke puffs of smoke accompanied the first words. 

     "My dad's black.  My mom's Jewish.  They met in law school.  My shrink looked like you.  Same gnawed on forehead and maidenly reserve. I quit therapy four years ago now."

     Manny blinked as if slapped.  Nathan was studying him; he rocked his head and put the tip of his tongue on his upper lip, raising his eyebrows.  "So, what are you gonna do about it?" the gesture said.  

     "I told him my father was white; he couldn't think straight otherwise.  Did him a favor.  Finally figured I shouldn't be paying to do him favors.  You identify?  I thought you would.  Anywhoo, this is a vicious business.  Got to grab your muses where you find them." 

     He pushed off the wall and faced Manny. He took Manny by the shoulders and held him at arms' length.

     "Then why'd you come?"

     "Is this my cue, Nathan?"

      The speaker, dressed in a well tailored summer suit cut full with pink silk shirt opened at the neck, a meticulously rendered late meddle age, a floral arrangement of the pastels in fading color.    

     "If you drove", answered Nathan.

     "How lucky for the two of us that I did.  I'm Roger.  How would you say it, Nathan, patron of the arts?  Chauffeur?"

     He offered Manny his soft hand. It was incomprehensible. Roger smelled of cologne, sweat and pipe tobacco, a pleasing aroma, but nonsensically complex. Decency nauseated him. it was another pollutant.  

     "Isn't Nathan a genius?  You did catch his show?"

     "I don't need that, Roger."

     "Of course not."

     "Where's the car?"

     Roger pointed up the street.

     "I got to collect my shit", and Nathan went ahead at a fast pace, leaving Roger behind, perhaps pointedly, done with older men and their deliberated motions. Roger turned back to Manny, his eyes soft and glistening.

     "Ridiculous, I know, but I suppose I'm head over heels, and frankly, I'm boring as hell without him. Even his abuse is interesting.  And I've never enjoyed anything as much as when Nathan flourishes it. I hope there are no hard feelings.  He's an expensive vice.  Very cultured, you can't just buy him colorful crap.  He really is a genius.  Oh, he wouldn't have to be to get tired of me.  I know.  It's made me quite pathetic, he tells me."

     He let a tear slide down his cheek and then in an indulgent gesture that Manny associated with old money with all its profligate liberties, he rubbed his nose on his sleeve glazing it with snot.    

     Every light is on in the apartment. Florence has been beating back imps.  It is after three.  She must have awaken and walked around the house looking for him, not a far-fetched idea as he often sat in the dark these last few months, and she laid these bridges of light to get from one dark room to the next.  

     He retraced her route back to the bedroom extinguishing the lights as he went, until there was Florence asleep, her bare arms on the covers, a book floating on the swells of her breathing, touchingly small in the big bed, like a child who had come there to escape a nightmare or rumbling thunder.  

     A tiny voice issued from the radio.  

     He undressed, careful not to rattle the hangers when he hung his clothes. He had a drunk's guilty conscience and elaborate and strategies to be considerate. He would turn off the bedside lamp before the radio, so that if either change were to awake her, her eyes would not smart from glare, but then he reasoned that would leave him a figure looming in the dark and might frighten her.  He solved the puzzle by sitting on the bed and turning off the light. There was a snag in her breathing, a knot of shallow snorts, she turned on her side and then the regular pace resumed. He turned off the radio and walked to his side of the bed and slipped in.    

     (Nearly a half century ago, he would return at these hours of the morning from his residency in god-forsaken precincts or god-infested ones, from the hellish asylums whose extremes of terror and horror nearly proved a godhead in the soul that could forsake or be forsaken, that proved a soul, a tissue made to suffer the presence of love in unending and unendurable faith. He returned, her young, tempest driven suitor, to throw himself on her for rescue, this small woman who slept bathing in repose, each limb, her breasts, her open mouth, more in sleep than in waking, reclining on the circumference of the round world).

     He decided to wake her, with a squeeze of her hand while whispering her name. 

     "It's me.  It's me", he whispered. She awoke without alarm and after the laborious climb old age endures to leave even its shallowest naps, fell into her usual petted cat swoon at waking, humming "umm", luxuriating in drowsiness. 

     "Back from Blum."

     "Ummm.  Blum."  Banking up beside him.

     "The bad Doctor Blum."

     She was heavy and boneless, maybe already back asleep.  For a small person, in her lavish embracing of sleep, she could occupy large sweeps of the bed, but she could always be molded into an accommodating shape, never protesting. Her slumber was instinctively generous. 

     "Are you awake?"

     "It must be late."

     "I miss our three a.m.'s."

     "Our three a.m.'s?"

     "Uh huh."

     "I don't remember our three a.m.'s.  Were they glorious?  Were we Nick and Nora?"

     She released a cavernous yawn and with it a cuff of sulfurous breath.

     "They were cozy.  And you chortled.  We talked about anything.  You sometimes brought the kids back with you."

     "I did?  Wasn't I gay?  Wish I could remember."

     "When they were little enough to be picked up, you were heroic in the wee hours. Brought them each on one arm; a valkyrie."

     "Marvelous.  You don't seem tired.  Aren't you tired?"

     "You brought them in, chortling."

     "Chortling children.  You must miss them."

     "You chortled."

     "I never chortled.  You're trying to wake me up.  You know I hate chortlers."

     She smiled what might have been a chortler's half smile, her lips closed in a lazy crescent, and from a landing on the stairway up and down from sleep made a timeless interpretation of his restlessness and random prattle, lost in other three a.m.'s he may have suggested to her when less asleep than she was now she had pretended a comatose state to let him use her in a truculent manner that was also curious and adoring and which she witnessed only through her lashes, stealing glimpses in the dark through quivering lids, his face puckered as if tasting something tart as he poked and stroked her, his eyes fixed in a dumbfounded trance. Passivity seeped into his sexuality, and he would enter her and lay beside her tracing her outline with his fingertips, only occasionally moving inside her, holding nearly still at the verge of transformation, agog at the arrogating push of rapture. Or he would roll her on her side and trace her spine and cup her buttocks tenderly, teasing his gluttony, postponing his squander, the stupid happiness in these globes licensing an uxorious earthiness in him, a surrender to absurdity and the squalid devices of fate, and she would feel him sawing between her buttocks and his mouth was buried in her hair and it was their fiction that she could not hear him intoning a coarse, reverent litany that ended with "sweet, stinking whore" and cold jelly daubing her back. When Manny carried this rutting into life to its conclusion and penetrated her, holding her hips, he arched away from her at the end and then his grumpy muttering over stubborn matter, the do-it-yourselfer's tantrum keen, ended with "angel ass" lifted from servitude, and all that transpired at three a.m. had no witness and no word ever spoken.

     From her drift beneath waking she brushed her hand along his thigh and took his penis in her palm.

     "Doctor Blum."

     "Hmmm?""

     "Doctor Blum."

     "Doctor Siggy Blum. He won’t forget the drayage horses from childhood, their gelding’s schlongs dangling, splattering tiaras off the cobblestones; never abandon them beaten to death by drovers, leaping to embrace them, the lash falling on his back. Into the steppes to redress their freezing in the drifts, and into hospitals he followed their blasted hearts, ruptured loins and offal to open the windows. And into brothels to hold the dying whores and open the curtained windows, and in the mad houses, wherever the shrouds fall and the body is nakedly soul as it is in heaven and hell. 

     Doctor Blum visits Holy Toledo in Spain. Linden trees burdened with leaves.  But in a wind they flash. Summer pierces him then; the glittering crowns sing a river song to him and fable women. His trembling awe is still in tact. The inner man has emerged; he is a scruff ball of eczema and dandruff, but his repulsiveness was always his project: Preserving his charity that was tested by indifference.

     Women come to poetic ends in his mind. Oriental women hold a special place. He assumes their obedience. He mentions their childish mannerisms. He has paid careful attention from a sacred distance. His recitations, doubtless taking him to dirty conclusions, but his sing-song monotone, it's the mass in Latin, no longer used by the irreligious. He visits Holy Toledo because of the Romance language and the painting by El Greco-the lightening pulsing behind the clouds."

     Florence is asleep. Manny talks to the ceiling. Let him empty this dream before he falls asleep. He is grateful for her beside him. He holds her hand while he talks.  

     "His vocation requires a toad not a prince. He goes to Toledo and finds the bogs on the hilltop.  I don't think he knows linden from oak, but he must have the gentler syllables to make a lyric.  A taxi drops him in the middle of nowhere. It's a mid-summers night dream in that dark wood. The cheapest whores serve their clients there, leaning against the tree trunks or cutting their backs on broken bottles littered from the highway. He held my shoulders when he told me.  The illegitimacy of the story gave him courage, even grace.  It had to be the worst.  He makes the point of the muteness, the onus on him.  Silence presses like a candle hood.  The place smells from piss and excrement. It seems El Greco did a lot of compensating. At this depth the people are stumpy. They are fortunate to have had an El Greco to stretch them, and to have Doctor Blum who looks after their...motivations.

     The old men watch the whores and their clients from behind the trees. Doctor Blum stands among them and their regret when they stare out of the shadows at the living make this act committed in the shit beautiful, that is his conceit, that it actually clothes it in reverence.  Thus he looks at the bindle sack of exile-responsible in the name of love and redemption for preserving the most rotted urges and rages, bound by ardent gaze lest he abandon his post and maroon these souls chugging in the shit towards grateful exit. He witnesses and we are written on the sky in indelible ink, caught prosecuting our undying love in the refuse."

     Manny soon is asleep. He is lost once again on the narrow streets of the city at night, gyring in eddies, bewildered for purpose in returning here. Place a window and hear ‘You never hold me unless we’re dancing’. A memory, a portrait of memory, so formal and framed is it inside a dream, certain of a mistaken flight from a rumpled bed-‘nothing better than a buck dressed for the night’ she says-a breezy window and a black lover who had yet to dress her long limbs in the room still lit by slanting, headlong morning light.

     Nature’s fools, through us life embraces death, that is our use, to requite the sun and moon. Peel me and skin the pages, let my shadow leap into the shinning river.

 

 

 

    

    

 

 

                     w Yorkers do, that it is a borough that failed to thrive.  Manny can not excuse himself; it would be irresponsible. The doctor would be hurt.  His would not be an adult response.

     He names him Blum.  Manny calls Florence from his office and says he has to show him around, that he is eager to see the sights.  Doctor Blum has been to New York before, but Manny has divined from his voice over the phone that this is an intimidated man who can not boast any adventures in this city. Without him, Dr. Blum would be confined to his hotel room. 

     Doctor Blum.  Manny thinks Bloom as he names him, but a glummer Bloom, a glum Bloom.  A Blum.  This Bloom is not destined to bloom; he is not in the hands of a mythologist, and he is not from Dublin.  He is from Philadelphia and Manny can leave his story right there, the rest is too glum.

     On the cab ride downtown, Manny sits glumly.  He notices that in this fugitive’s game he is playing with Florence, he is accompanied by his creation.  He is acting as Blum, seeing partially with Blum's eyes.  Philadelphia is Brooklyn of yore, shroud in winter, brick and scuttling paper and drifting ash.  Blum is one of the shadowy figures he left behind when he went to Harvard. He regrets summoning Blum.  He is quickly too complete. Blum could as easily be playing Manny as the other way around.

     He has the cab let him off a block north of Sheridan Square. It was drizzling, the avenue glistened and halos surrounded the streetlights.  He knows where he is going.  It was a piano bar.  If it has shut down he and Blum can come up with no further mischief. He is relieved to find it still there. He and Florence had been taken there by friends after seeing a play in the neighborhood as long as twenty years ago. He had remembered where it was, an accomplishment in the village where the city's grid went through deceptive refractions, skewing the four directions. The bar was across the square from where the theater had been, that had made it easier.  

     He had to squeeze into the saloon. It was a narrow room with tables pushed to the walls on either side, and he was confined to a goat trail along with a caravan moving single-file towards the bathrooms in back and the bar maid, who somehow could find a trail inside the trail and weave through the shuffling patrons.  The place was not as dark as he remembered it.  The years between had tarred the memory, or romanticized it.  It was dim; weak bulbs in sconces cast wane yolks of light, and a single candle in a red lamp on each of the little tables rouged the lower halves of faces. He had remembered it as being dark as a theater with faces appearing suddenly in the nimbus of a lit match, cheeks hollowed out, caught in the cabals smokers shared when lighting one cigarette from another.  It smelled of beer and damp wool and there was a cozy, stagnant feel to it, like a closet where off-season clothes are stored.         

     The tables were full and he filtered back to the rod that served as breakwater between the knots of patrons and the piano. The wet bar with its foggy, near milk-glass mirror behind it was to his right.  The bar tender was a young man with broad shoulders and big hands who leaned on the counter when he took orders. He had a heavy brow and with his fleshy hands planted on the bar he might anchor a place where strangers got drunk. Some Christmas and New Year's decorations were still hanging over the bar: Bands of aluminum fringes were scotch taped to the shelves of bottles. They managed to look brave rather than seedy, as if they were flying against the odds, not ready to surrender: Stoic sentimentality or stalwart nostalgia. 

     He found a free seat at the piano bar.  It was still early and these seats facing the piano with their backs to the room were taken by people who came in alone. Beside him was a woman of about his age, her hair a frizzy mop, either grey or blond or blond in the half light. Small, piggish eyes that sparkled; she crinkled them at him when he said "May I?"  as if they must sparkle in stronger light.  Blue eyes, he thought, and in spite of dewlaps and floppy jowls she had never gotten over their caprice.

     Manny got the impression he amused her.  He was not at ease in a bar, and maybe he had the air of a truant.  Her shoulders were covered by a wool poncho which agreed so completely with his anachronistic image of the Village he thought she must be as much of an interloper here as he, costumed in her old romances.  Still, she could not be as much of a stranger to a bar, and under her gaze he self-consciously began fingering the bar like a keyboard to demonstrate his legitimate claim on this seat. The bar maid asked him what he would like to drink; his rent was due. Manny, conscience of the bluff involved, ordered a scotch and soda, though he never drank hard liquor. For the first time that evening he was disregarding Doctor Blum’s bitter counsel.            "And would you permit me the pleasure of buying you a drink?” boldly facing the old woman now that he had assumed the stance of veteran tippler. 

    "No thank you, but thank you just the same."

     Surprising himself, Manny grabbed the bar maid's arm as she turned to continue her rounds. She was an interesting piece of work, he noted, underfed, with what he would have called an Appalachian's shape-whittling asceticism to her, somewhat impenetrable, hollow eyes. He spoke to her with the theatrical, sage chivalry of a real scotch drinker.

     "I must make amends.  I've gotten away with terrible omissions. If only she would allow me, it would be a favor.  Could we possibly conspire to refresh her drink over her protests, and if she must, then she can let it sit there? Please, madam."

     "All right, but it will just sit there.  Sherry."

     "Thank you.  And it is always best to be sure that whatever sits there un-drunk is what you're drinking."               

     Tip-toeing from the claustrophobia of disease, he found himself in a troupe of old actors he would have thought had retired long ago.  The artist of chivalrous smarm was his father, the tie salesman.   His route had included Philadelphia.  Manny had gotten his height from him, though not his broad shoulders and square chin. He had been a large boned man with sensual features; Manny had inherited his long-lashed, glistening eyes and full lips.  And, it seemed likely, his attention to clothes. He called himself a clothes horse; it was typical of the sarcasm he used around the apartment. He was restless when he was confined in Brooklyn, an unhappily stabled racer, too well-made, too bluff or capable of being taken for bluff, athletic and hale, to be holed up with a soggy wife and owl-eyed, quiet little boy who abided him with quiet fear and distaste, having been warned about him by his mother.  By clothes horse he meant he pulled the milk wagon, his tie samples, from town to town.  But he was a clothes horse, square framed and graceful, and he must have been relieved to leave the house and be out, a man who would now live by his charm and looks.  He would be free to practice his matinee idol imitation on those low-lives who would believe it, believe the lacquering of svelte theatricality that overlay the immigrant hustler, including women in bars-said Manny's mother-who he deserved and no better, floozies who saw right through him but could do no better and for whom a tin idol was good enough. (He would never be able to see that, he was too vain, he believed they believed him, but he was wrong, they were laughing at him and his need to be adored by losers.  No one believed it up and down the coast, Mister Big Shot, the Jew in gentile clothing who took himself so seriously they had to bust a gut. He is desperate to please, she told Manny.  Others.  Strangers.  Their judgment matters.  For us he saves the rest.)       

     A swarthy man in a Homburg who wore garters for his socks, French cuffs and cufflinks, portaging his suitcases of samples to the Lincoln, relieved to be off, miraculously still employed during the Depression, quite willing in his sardonic irony, in his bitter bonhomie, to play into and at all travelling salesman jokes, Manny could imagine.  And into knock, knock jokes too.  Who stood more often outside the door uninvited than his father? Who's there indeed, never who they expected he would have made sure.  Ready to have the laugh be on him but to have the last laugh as well, the foreigner who had insinuated himself into the American scene in a clownish, sly, folkloric role.  This circuit virtuoso and drummer of pizzazz as a rejoinder to defeat, who made himself at home in hotel rooms and diners and bars, those asylums for ghosts, now this figure had Manny by the elbow, as if dying had just been escape to his preferred haunts.             In front of him the empty piano and the dark terminus of the saloon, the walls here painted black to make a stage.  He could smell the dust in this corner, it tickled his nose.

     "Do you come here often?" he asked.

     "Goodness, didn't that used to be a line? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  It's almost insulting to look so in need of rescue, but you mean well. What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this? Don't be a bad sport. You saved my life and now you're going to have to get used to me...Ah?      

     "Manny."

     "Manny.  Eugenia."

     The bar maid arrived with their drinks on a small tray cluttered with empty beer bottles, glasses, crumpled napkins and bills.  The shot glass felt like a solid ingot in his hand; Manny was used to the stems of wine glasses.

     The old woman raised her glass for a toast.

     "Eugenia and Manny, to inauspicious starts."

     They touched glasses and Manny took too large a swallow and his eyes got teary and he coughed.      

     "Manny, it's a disgrace, the junk they serve. You have to be careful.  This sherry should be named Nellie, or Gypsy Rose, or, how do they christen their poor daughters these days?  Vanessa?  Contessa? "

     "Sherry's already in the same crowd as Vanessa."

     "I was going to wallow in sentimentality and you've put me back on my feet."

     "I can't really see you wallowing.  More like Esther Williams.  Back stroking in a fountain."

     "Balls.  I'm a great sea cow.  You have to hear me honking and moaning.  My boys roll their eyes.  The girls milk my tears. They get a kick out of ruining me. They think it's their duty. They won't have me escaping my venerable office.  Revenge I suspect. I go to pieces over ‘Danny Boy’. They need only breathe the overture and I’m a sopping mess.  The boys have fled; they're ever so objective about their father.  I think that's what it is or maybe they think he deserves something more majestic. A toast maybe. Let's have another, to make my boys proud of me.  Manny, let's toast this sad anniversary."

     "I'm sorry."

     "Don't be. I was married nearly forty years. Every day is an anniversary of something, sad and happy. This toast is to one of them. I forgot what. A feeling, Manny, of sadness, sir, for the way things are.  I think that's mature of us and not one bit glib."

     "You're a widow, then?"

     "To my brave, swift, boys.  Gazelles.  Impalas. You would never have guessed them for sprinters but they can outrun even a rumor of misfortune, my timid athletes.  I am a widow.  I'm sixty-five and Irish.  I'm being redundant."

     "I am a widower, myself."

     A widower? He had meant to escape Florence and their resigned generation and now he had disposed of her. How quickly it had sprung from his lips. He had said what he did from existing in fear.  He felt as if any effort to imagine Florence here depleted his remaining energy to believe himself here.  Imagining living was vital to actually living, and what you can recognize as a sure sign you were dying was this inability to persuasively imagine yourself alive, to place yourself among the living in ways that were not strained. You must save all your effort for this or you would fade and become impossible.  To import the real Florence was more lifting than the flickering ghost could expend.  The healthy arrived with their weight of real substance which broke apart conjured fogs.

     "Is that a sigh of relief I heard?"

     "I have trouble finding the balance; in being truly bereaved. I don't know what I should expect of myself. Maybe you ladies do it better.  Or you get the benefit of the doubt.  That could be from our masculine egos: We assume you're putting on a brave front.  Maybe it's not a front."

     "Manny, don't think so much.  These things are not fancy. He died of cancer. It meant trips to the potty and bathing him, horrible bed sores. It was a lot of work. He was in terrible pain.  We gave him pain killers.  He could sleep for a while.  I don't know what he dreamed.  I dreamt about him sometimes.  He often seemed angry.  I think it was confusion, the cancer moved to his brain, but maybe he still had good reasons.  Forty years. I dreamt he was red as hot metal and he had gotten out of bed, he always seemed to be tossing the covers off, and in the dream he got his wish and he stomped out of the house, furious at us all. He stamped out through the backyard and his fists were balled up. I suppose that was my wish.  It certainly would have been much easier if he'd just walked off in a snit, certainly convenient, no diapers to change. I might have wanted that, and him to blame, angry as hell and just storming out of our lives.  Is that a widow's skill?"

     "I was talking about getting on with it. A positive approach to loss. For everybody's sake.  But it gets messy.  Didn't we, honestly, start this whole widowing process long before, or is it only me, who thinks I signed a contract in my sleep, believing she was speeding me up?  Did you have that feeling? Of being tied to a stone and dragged down?      

     "Manny, I would have described it more as a wrestling match. Some days I'm on top and getting the boost, other times it's him. I guess you might have looked in the window and seen me stepping on his head sometimes.  I don't know what he would have said then, oh, I do, he said it often enough, but I had my reasons and didn't need more of his, not then, though other times it was my turn to say uncle."

     "My wife was more discouraged and tired, more ready to...to protest less, and so, in a dream, I think, I said, take her.  Then I won't have to carry her, against her will, which is killing me.  And now, just how am I to behave?"        

     "You have too many ideas.  I slept with him the last two weeks.  We had put him in one of the kids’ empty rooms.  I was sleeping with the canaries and the dog, the way I do now.  I didn't think it would be two weeks. I thought he would be dead by morning. He wouldn’t eat and was starving. I didn't want to lose him.  He already was lost, that's when I got into bed with him again.  He didn't know who I was.  Maybe, once in a while.  When he was asleep, he may have known me then like he always had when he was sleeping and we rolled together, when it doesn't wake you up as a stranger in bed would or his not being there woke me in my own bed.  But, for every time he did not know me, he knew me as someone he had loved. He thought I was his sister and asked her to leave the bed gently as he sometimes did my daughter when she bathed him. Just for a moment he'd realize he was naked in front of his daughter and he'd be offended, that's how he mistook me.  For his mother too, and he did not ask her to leave.  He was glad to have her. I think it was fine with him to be nursed by her, as if he had the measles. Never once did he mistake me for one of his nightmares.  I was afraid he would. I didn't wonder but that in half his dreams, childhood I hope they mercifully were, that into them a hideous figure of death pushed its way and sat there blighting the garden, but I was never taken for that figure and from that more than anything else I believe a bit in our romance at the end, more than I would have thought, when he couldn't see me and I was each woman who had loved him and he still believing in us with his last bones which is all he had left."

     An urchin had walked to the piano and was gazing at it.  She had huge eyes in a tiny, fine boned face, hugging herself in a big wool coat with its collar pulled up to her chin.  It was a pea coat, a thrift shop purchase, Manny guessed, and falling down below it to her ankles was a mid-night blue gown.  This delicate refugee stood gazing at the piano for a moment.  She gave the impression she did not know why she was here, as if she had sleep-walked into the bar, summoned there by the piano whose uses she did not understand.  She touched the keys gently, too softly to stir a note, maybe discovering a memory.  Then she turned and walked off the little stage, and Manny glimpsed her huddled form passing behind Eugenia heading for the bar.

     She was the singer. An overly dramatic girl it would seem, too steeped in her role as oracle and slave of the muse, but then, when she removes her coat and reveals her bird-like frame it no longer seems a conceit.  She has the deflated, extinguished look of a dead bird.  A pittance of rags, totally fall-broken.  She returns to the piano with an empty beer mug for tips; the bartender stashes her coat and purse behind the bar. Manny sees the sharp bones of her bare back.  She must have bought the gown at the same thrift shop.  It hangs loosely on her. He's looking at her around Eugenia and talks distractedly, not really noting if Eugenia is listening, looking at the singer.  

     "It was Alzheimer's.  She had always tried to meet expectations.  I retrieved her from her wanderings.  Neighbors called.  She was in their kitchen.  She had waited by their door until they let her in, now she was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, dipping biscuits.  She had a sweet forlorn look.  They did not want to hurt her feelings.  All she wanted was to sit in the kitchen, absorbing affection.  They felt guilty evicting her.  She had become such an inconspicuous old age; they felt obligated to support it so others would take her example.  She was lovely to the end.  Well, we are not so old; she was able to assume the role like an actress, with the same immunity from the reality.  Lovelier than ever.  Of course, the worry lines, so accusatory, would disappear, but they were not replaced by that blank mask which is typical of the disease.  She escaped the squalor; that was part of her popularity.  Such a lovely, domesticated old age.  Such courteous surrender.  She remained continent.  In fact, she became, how can I explain it? an idiot-savant of hygiene.  Fixated in a doting way on her vocation of inoffensive farewell.  She would not leave a smudge.  And none of the odor which gives old age away.  She smelled of soaps, lemony, herbal fragrances." 

     "They speak of saint's flesh remaining sweet even in the grave, it was like that.  I was privileged to witness it.  The essence of her was revealed.  Her face looked tenderly inquisitive, as if she was listening. That is the way it has always been.  She was not one to get the message right away.    Forgive me: her patient, trusting face, her soft eyes opened wide; the Alzheimer's freed her to listen as she had always tried, without any intention of hearing but only to cooperate and receive each word as a caress.  She had never before been at a loss for words, with age especially, and nobody finally willing to listen, and then this botrytis of the brain vetted her.  No more chatter.  Wonderful silence.  Confetti of silence, and then full arias of it.  Such a forgiving old age, neither musk nor yammer.  Everybody loved and forgot her, gratefully at first, and then as their due." 

     The small klieg reflects on the singer’s gown and hair.  Her hair was chestnut. The stage was shallow, and the baby grand faced sideways and she sat in profile to them, and he could see her arched ribs and the stippled ridge of her spine.       

     She began to play, an informal overture, a medley of tunes strung together by a coincidence of chords, warming up her fingers.  Eugenia smiled; she had probably decided he was a man who turned into a windbag with a few sips of booze. 

     "Manny, you'll have to ask her for `Danny Boy'.  She's Irish, she looks like my daughter, Victoria.  She'll be furious. I hope so. Her skin will catch fire. Her mother is the last person she wants to see throwing the old sod at her.   She'll be beautiful mad."

     The dress was vented to her knee.  Her calf was shapely; she might have been a ballerina, and her shoulder, though pointy, showed firm muscle, as did her arm.  She was small boned and it was deceptive.  Each juncture of her body was vanishingly narrow. She seemed to be strung between ankle and knee, wrist and elbow, elbow and shoulder, and then strummed into visibility.  Her taut body even had the transparent shimmer of humming strings.  It is what reminded him of dead gulls; her being depended on inspiration.  Without it she would crumple into wire and dowel.

     She would be a temperamental girl; there was no insulation around her feelings.  They would show through, and she would be swept along by them. Maybe that is why she paid that somber visit to the piano.  Anticipating the hither and yon tossing she would get by following requests.  But then, her dancer's muscles; she would not be so easy to up end.   

     Manny thought: death loves beauty more than virtue does.  Loyalty gets a dog's face.  The patience required of tenderness enamels the face with boredom.

     The pianist was singing "Stormy Weather" in honor of the damp dreariness outside or maybe in consonance with similar weather inside herself.  She kept it subdued. He had heard it done as a valedictory wail and he liked this version better.  Maybe she was simply not warmed up enough to trumpet, but he liked her introspective, private melancholy.  She had a strong hold on quiet mood, her voice full and pliable in those registers that do not get the boost of calisthenic exuberance.

     Eugenia squinted skeptically at the singer. She must look as much like her daughter as she said, and that girl for all her wit and rebellion had no case to make for such a sadly weathered recall of her life.  Manny looked at her fleshy face and was angry with her for presuming maternity.

     Eugenia burrowed in her big knit purse and brought out a shabby leather wallet.  She gave Manny a five dollar bill.    

     "Just a minute, we're going to draw up a list."

     She started to empty balled kleenex stamped with smudges of lipstick onto the bar, searching for a pen.  Manny returned the bill to her and took a five from his own wallet. 

     "He who pays the piper."  

     "I have some I want to hear."

     "I know, `Danny Boy'"

     Manny got up from his chair. 

     "I'll make the deposit, and we can flag her from here."

     His joints had stiffened while sitting and it is a relief to unfold.  He wobbles.  The scotch has gotten to him; he did not notice it sitting. A slip of numbness has been pulled over him.

     She is singing `Mad about the Boy'. He waits for her to finish and then three numb steps take him to the piano, close to her bare back with its feather-work of muscles.  He slips the bill into the mug. She looks smaller close up and more angular. She no longer enjoys the transformation of an actress coalescing on stage.

     "Do you know `I'm looking for an Angel'?" 

     She hums a few bars. He sees the vein in her throat flush blue.  It is like feeding a bird; he sees the song like a lump of bread in her throat.

     "`East Side, West Side'."  It's Eugenia.  She is his partner in the deposit and is staking her claim. He hates that see-saw, sing-song tune.  She could not really like it either.  She is teasing him for `Danny Boy' or is she teasing him for his credulous choice? The Irish. They don't permit sentiment in any one but themselves. 

     By the time he gets back to his seat she is fully into `Angel'.  Her voice has shed the wet wool of her first songs and follows the primrose, garden path of his request, its Sunday promenade wooing. It is a wistful song laced into fastidious pomp and studied breeziness.  He listens for a note of recognition from her, a sign she noticed their mutual thinness and its intimations of talented grace.  She stays within the song's glib whimsy and self-satisfaction, its blotted-ink neatness.  Safe in his seat with his anonymous back turned towards the saloon, disappointed with the effect of his choice, he wishes he could recant and call out, "Lily Marlene", which he knows in German and which he sings under duress to Florence, his Lily of the Lamplight, which he sang to her in livid irony more than forty years ago for the first time, lying together on rumpled sheets during those months between their plunge into the bushes after the kiss beneath the streetlight and their marriage; lying naked, the radiator hissing, a sense of sated gluttony and gloom saturating him to the bone, Florence's skin patchy with red from her hours in sensual tossing, purple spots on her thighs and calves and buttocks, blooming as cryptically as lichen, fitted to his fingertips but whose actual printing is impossible to recall.

     The singer might purge the song of satire during its trance of rumpled past and future. As she sits beneath the spotlight glowing chestnut, white and blue she might even insert herself into the song and from then on become his new Lily, materializing with the music.   

     The singer follows with "East Side, West Side" and Eugenia sings along in a hoarse whisper, and then the singer is tacking from request to request, pulled away from any chance of Manny's putting in a second bid.  The five dollars reserved her for a surprisingly short time.  People from the saloon lean over the bar and stick bills into the mug until the money begins to look like a fern origami. "Over the Rainbow" is requested, and "Chances Are".  The singer eddies in the shallows. The bar must have made it into a guide book: A quaint anachronism in which to experience old village ambience.  Manny hears `Miss O'Leary's Cow' touted from behind him, and another athletic voice saying, "That's Mrs."  Then the sound of lip farting and "Give me a break", and then in the bellowing baritones of a pack of young men, comes "One fine night when we were all in bed" breaking up in guffaws, huffs, hoots and howls.  The singer continues as if she has not heard them.  She ignores "Swanee" tossed up in Jolson's ersatz minstrel voice, probably from the crowd of beer busting hearties that had tried "Mrs, O'Leary's Cow", intramural sports who had run out of patience for the sanctimony of old songs and for the life-daunted who plead for them.  She sings "Moonlight on the Wabash" which is barely a better song, another schmaltzy elegy about a river, but the request had been slipped in shyly, Manny had not heard it, and the singer seemed to have an ear for silent prayers. 

     Her face was thin and sharp.  Like most Irish faces Manny had seen, it seemed a variation on mug, faces for scrappers.  Not a face that solicited secrets, it did not look to have the dreariness to wait on confessions.  A face that could defend them, though, if she choose.  There were supplicants here.  Mysteriously, they took up no room.  It was a skill they had practiced.  They were skirted and flinched, and even in the crowded bar where any movement caused a kind of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" reverberation in surrounding bodies, they subtracted their presence.  Their already completed leave-taking needed to requisition nothing to go on forever.  Their requests must have arrived in an unusual way, a mold scooped out of the singer's ear, some swishing of sea-shell surf in her ear that needed a song poured in to fill the place they had emptied.  And the size of that excavation where they had been?-a cavern, a cathedral, at least it would seem that way from the sudden appearance of "Forever Young" from out of that nowhere, a soprano so free of meaty lung that it verged on inaudible, a clairvoyant keen that the ear could barely last through hearing, and whose disappearing edges seemed to fingertip a roofless vault.

     After that she seemed inured to any request and sang songs of her own choosing, which could have been a feminist rebuttal of the historically passive role of taxi singer, and she did get cockier or spikier, a little taunting, typical signs of political statement, but Manny thought she was not concerned with the crowd any more, or hardly.  Their come-uppance was included, but she was practiced enough, not in performance alone but in adversity generally, that it was an aside.  She was taking advantage of the crowd's antagonistic desires to let in her own character.  She was triggered for contest.  She seemed girlish, feisty and eager. She sang "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", "Sunny Side of the Street", "Let's Fall In Love" "I like it, How About You" and there was a virtuoso of pluck in it, a chin up, want-to-make-something-out-of-it spunkiness in it. She was skating on the slip way of her own christening. 

     She sang ‘I Don't Know Why I love You Like I do’ and Manny thought he must have danced with his mother when this song was playing.  When the singer reached "You never want my romancing, The only time you hold me is when we're dancing" he felt his mother pull him out of a chair in the dark living room and they danced together, barely touching, almost at arms length, and his mother had closed her eyes and there had been a little smile on her lips and with her eyes closed and her head rocking a little to the music, she had stepped closer and pressed against him and his arms stuck out straight behind her as if they were in splints, and her cheek touched his and he saw her with her eyes closed and her face dreamy and serene.  And then he was sure this dance had never happened.  He thought he must have seen her listening to this song on the radio and softening and her eyes had been closed and she may have been swaying to the music and he would have watched for a moment and then left the room so he could pretend he had not seen because he could not fill this space where a dance partner would have stood, and had to act like he knew nothing about that untapped nectar, her secret of restored maidenhead. 

     And then he felt it had all happened, a charity had been commuted into the song, and it would happen every time the song was played, that it was these imagined moments that were the amber in songs, not the moments themselves, but the wishes that had hovered around them and were never let in.  His mother had heard this song and poured her daydream into it and it incubated there until it spilled back into his ear, or he may only have imagined her, trembling Narcissus-like on its silky membrane, imagined for them both a moment of intolerable innocence that absolved them both, and that was enough to accomplish it, and to place alongside their lives a place of omniscient longing both could regain in the aphasia of a song. 

     The phrase came again, "You never seem to want my romancing, the only time you hold me is when we're dancing"  and once again the two shadows revolved in the gloom lighted only by the borealis glow of the radio dial, gathering the black heaven stranded between the lights of the Milky Way where ten times the amount of love may lie unlit than all the love ever touched, and whose tarry constellation stenciled by the stars seems more the image of the sloughing body at seventy than the belt of Orion or the crown of Cassiopeia.

     She finished the set with "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", a dead sober version, starkly literal, with the tune so compacted into the clean words that it seemed she was speaking in the iron heavy, spaded-up voice of those who resort to speech only when forced. 

     She took the money from the glass and straightened it into leaves, picked up her empty water glass and walked to the wet bar to transfer the bills to her purse.  

     "This place is too boisterous for me", Eugenia said.

     "Home?"

     "I wasn't planning on staying so late, anyway.  I met my daughter for lunch. Shopping."  She kicked some shopping bags stuffed in around her feet.  "And here I am.  I must have gotten in a mood. And the poor dog's been out all day."

     "Not today.  It's raining."

     It was the singer behind them, carrying her glass of water.

     "I didn't know it was going to rain."

     "The poor guy."

     She walked around the bar and found a folding chair and sat down in front of them.  The singer's voice, even in conversation has a three dimensional physicality to it. Manny feels he is inside a corporal present tense. The roundness of the words is an essence that can be rhymed musically; a kind of scat that is a periodic table for verbal evolution including gut and lung. This round present tense is like a navel for all tenses and he might exit this abeyant interval into an octave where "would have" has no note of regret. It might be a declarative, pulled taut into "must". 

     At seventy-the singer flung boyishly gangly on the folding chair-how did he get here?     

     He eloped this evening from the verdict of three score and ten. Somber note, susurrant veils: Dogs their sadness sharply perceived, or their tenderness, or mischief, or patience. The soul naked in exile and separation, vulnerable to attachment, most surely glimpsed and felt when its trust goes unmet or its loyalty is unused, vividly in a ruined living creature, in the full expenditure of itself in acts or casualty of faith. Expressed, too, in the distortion of the simple symmetries the body might have had, had once, before the advent of sexuality, its neat self-containment ruptured by this never yielding grappling desire pushing through. 

     Gangly girl, mermaid, soul androgynous with dreams, a pun being played on seventy when it is declared three score and ten. A pun that only works in a dream or song: A pun on soul and solid, so that this matter of soul so soon to be tested for endurance is balanced from hand to hand against solid in compulsive repetition and to no possible resolution. 

     And at seventy while sifting soul from hand to hand, has also come the image of his father pasted, collage like, on an Italian beach. A fire-plug of a guy, standing fully dressed, angry, arms crossed, gazing out to the horizon, hostile to interruption, his head not clearing the gunwales of the fishing dories hauled on the shore, too short, too solid in adamantine resistance to broach the hulls, to shove off and leave the shore. Some patch his undelivered soul makes in the day, this still too solid vapor consigned to his son.

     "He can't make up his mind.  He wants to be out unless he is outside and then he wants to come in.  So, I made up his mind for him.  I thought I'd be back by now", Eugenia said.

     "But you're not.  Tsk. Tsk."

     "He's a great big dog who'd do fine on the tundra."

     "He's waiting by the door right now." 

     "You, dear, have no idea what a soft heart I've got.  My house is Noah's ark.  My girls think I'm fated to be lonely if they don't pile pets on me. I have three cats.  They have first and last names, thank you very much.  The kids named them.  When they were kids.  They should have called them Methuselah. They gave me a cockatiel.  It's pride.  They think I should want to be eccentric in old age."

     "Don't you?"

     "I don't need coaching in that department."

     "They beg to differ.  Our mom tends to rest on her laurels, too.  You have to stay ahead of the wave.  It's different than kitsch."

     "I can tell the difference, my dear."

     "It changes over-night."

     "Au contraire, it never does.  When one has chosen wisely."

     "We get in this fight all the time.  Either she's sanctifying junk or she's purging the house of relics.  It changes with her moods."

     "It's her house?"

     "She regrets it soon enough.  If she's taken advantage of his absence to throw out his junk, then she feels bad.  She'll think, did she forget he's dead?  Who's she been arguing with?  This is no opportunity to have the last word, did she forget that?  She doesn't like thinking she's that lonely, she'd rather be loopy."

     "My dear, you have to strike a balance. His clothes, I really had to think about them.  I decided: too immediate was perilous. I wouldn't have those things still where he'd last put them; as if he's just stepped out. I admit, his clothes hung in the closet for several months, oh that coat last rode his shoulders before he lay on the bed. I told the boys to take what they wanted and give the rest to the Church.  Five years, and then we painted.  I had the boys again, they moved like sleep walkers.  I finally hired a professional. I should have called a priest for an exorcism. I don't let my kids make presumptions about me. I live there, that's already a decision, but I’ve decided it’s a realistic one. I think stubborn is defiance enough. It reaches as far as I’ll admit and for the rest-back off you’ll find no welcome here."

     "I walked by a bakery” the singer said. “It smelled so good and I started crying because it smelt good and he can't smell it anymore, he doesn't have a nose. Poor daddy, no nose, not even a carrot like Frosty, and I had to laugh. All he has is eternity, and it gets tedious. I don't think I'm made to hold a straight face that long. I don't think he's good at it either. He would roll his eyes, charcoal if they dare. I go walking on the shore. I have my brother's faded khakis.  They have oil stains on them, they look wet there, and I roll up the cuffs. I've got my brother's work shirt and his navy blue sweat shirt and I like sinking my feet in the wet sand with the froth sizzling around my ankles. When it goes out you feel you're flying or ice skating. That's as close to eternity as I care to get, and what I'm looking forward to most is sitting on the edge of the car seat and brushing the sand from my feet, it feels like you're making them out of clay."

     "Good for you, dear.  You remind me of my Victoria.  We always say that her report on Judgment day will follow the list of what she was wearing when the trumpet sounded."

     While Eugenia and the singer were talking, Manny finding himself sidelined had finished off his scotch.  Then, he had bottomed it up and looked through the syrupy spyglass at the ceiling, a saloon veteran's clowning gesture, he thought. His father was his first and virtually his only model for a drinker. Manny's mother leaves a bottle of scotch for him in the house, tells Manny it is his medicine, knowing Manny knows what it is.  He must drink his own medicine. She leaves it for him in her total victory: he can not face her without it or face what he had not been able to shoulder: the boast, promise, and transgression which produced Manny.  She can easily encourage his tippling-on the big chair with his shoes off in the sleeveless undershirts of the time, a tie still around his neck, looking brave or grandly injured-he may reach for the gesture of a man filling a tragic role. A big bluff, this man big in stature but too weak to protest or bear the weight of a great love.  Square shoulders with their epaulets of woolly hair, athletic legs in boxer trunks still wearing his black socks with their garters-he was no drinker, the fifth would last for months. Had he been guilty of everything his wife accused he might have been able to face himself, but imprisoned in green hope, in a kind of romantic optimism, he could not understand what had failed.  He was not a ruin, if only he had been.  But, he had failed himself and his belief in love without a full expenditure of his being, and for the remainder of his life mocked and humiliated himself.  It was this thespian drinker who Manny imitated when he began to drink, imitating as well the fake drunkenness and probably as a chemical destiny, his father's faith in recovered innocence for the sincere.               

     What catches in our throats that surpasses confession and strangles its lies? What has despised our disruption and tardy train? Were we always unnecessary lyrics to the song?

     Manny begins to speak:

     "Your interpretations of songs from the thirties and forties-I think you have a special affinity for them."

     "They were my dad's favorites."

     "They sound like they're yours, too. The attention you give them seems personal.”

     "It depends, a lot of them are hammy or corny, but some of them lighten my mood."

     "My sentiments exactly. Of course they weren't period pieces when I heard them. I immediately liked them because they were exactly right for a general mood. And then, they've lasted, the right ones, when it might have seemed they could only be relevant for that day, or really, not have lasted more than their assigned hour. But, maybe, we don’t either and the rest is recall and that’s what we are here to know, each stumbling on it at our own hour. Something in common, even though they were just clever sometimes, simple rhymes like we are day by day. And consider the accomplishment considering what they were up against-between wars during the depression-to get that litheness. These were not happy men. Light, graceful, they were anything but, and I think that's it-beneath all those songs is the life they did not have but somehow never soured on. They still believed in it. They never really had a chance, but they had the hour. I wouldn't hear it when you sing if you did not understand.."

     "Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph", Eugenia said.  "My dear, this is Manny becoming an old fool.  He's fallen in love.  The pity if it weren't so ridiculous.  Be gentle on him, he means every word from the heart. Look at you, Manny, if you don't have tears in your eyes. Child, I had one, they're a lot of work, at least start with a young one who's still got some starch. Come on now, make yourself useful. You'll bore her to an early old age."

     Eugenia, with much crinkling of paper gathered up her shopping bags and stuffed one into Manny's lap. He was secretly grateful. Better to disappear, donning the cloak of invisibility pressed onto the old like an inverted leper's bell, then sit thoroughly winded by wish alone.

     He carries Eugenia's bags to the street.  Eugenia manages the small miracle of flagging a cab.  He forgets to give her the bag.  Likely, he forgets to say good-bye.  He is not sure.  She pulls the bag out of his hands.  An expression on her face, indignation.  He has ignored her in his distraction. She does not excuse it. She has left his life forever with a residue of contempt for him. Welcome back, Manny. The time in the bar would have to be measured by a cycle, a spin around the sun, and he has stepped out into the same hour but in the next night leaving himself behind in that interval and now will shadow himself led down empty lanes every city has for the daily Lent.

     He has walked past the loading docks in the meat market, under the metal awnings with their tracks for meat hooks, the pavement slippery with suet.  The streets had opened up there; they were brick and lumpy and splayed in a warped grid. The buildings were squat and shanty-town like and in spite of hosing squalid smells lingered. He was lost there and had the cleansing transparency being lost can bring, a deeper solitude where inner chatter quieted.  

     People occasionally disappeared in Manhattan.  Searchers never found them.  They disappeared after New Year's parties, a little drunk, always only vaguely posting their intended destination, always figures that in later testimony were not distinctly known or at least recently had been fading.  This may have been the trail they stumbled on during the wee hour, enveloping foggy brine stinging their lips and whispering broken promises.         

     Large, blocky buildings, an industrial and business quarter. Between two of these blank massifs, so out massed it looked as if it were destined to be crushed, was a two story, stucco building with gables and black shingle roof, and standing in the gloom near its entrance was a group of men smoking, their cigarette ends bobbing and streaking.  As Manny stepped into the street to avoid them, someone called out and came after him onto the tarmac. 

     "What took you? These fellows don't even smoke.  We're killing time. And then whoops-You. What is it with you?  You were going to slip away. `I prefer not.' Because they're all queer?  It's the best gentiles can do to be interesting."

     "I will not go on without you. What'll they do? They have no inner resources. Well, they can rot as far as we're concerned. We're getting out of here.  In a self-righteous huff, we are.  Where will we go?  Lead on, McNuggets."

     He was walking alongside Manny, who in the tried and true method New Yorkers used with psychotics was ignoring him.  He was taller than Manny and built thinly like him, but broader, one of those two-dimensional Jamaican bodies, square shouldered and flat chest. He wore a wrinkled seersucker coat rolled up over his butterscotch-colored forearms.  He walked with a nervous amble, or it was hard to tell what his gait was, it was layered.  He was capable of a willowy grace, a silky stroll that depended from his shoulders and it might have been his natural gait, but he gave it little chance, and minced or flicked off small quick steps, fracturing the lyric, and then Manny recognized himself, an improvised effigy.  He had rounded his shoulders, slung his head forward, and his long arms looked brittle, he was pacing Manny not just step by step, but toe to head, literally shadowing him.

     "Where are you taking me?"

     Manny stopped.  From where they stood in the street he could still have yelled back to the bar and attracted the attention of the smokers, but another few steps and any yells would have been beyond the range of a Manhattan conscience. 

     "Is this a hold-up?"

     "Forsooth?  But it hurts. The quaintness.  You make racism seem noblesse-oblige."

     For the first time Manny looked his companion in the face.  Manny had that discombobulating flush of embarrassment heterosexual men experience in the presence of beauty in a man. The young man's face was sharp boned but its fine angles melded without abutment, maybe answering a wish, and as always, these lucky, seemingly beyond luck fusions made the face recede leaving one feature to enchant the viewer, in this case the eyes which looked to be calligraphy. It was tricky light, the street lamps throw a tangerine hue, but Manny felt the eyes were sea green. The wish would have them sea green.

     His companion planted himself in the street and pouted or it could have been an expression of Negro cogitation or skepticism, they had a vernacular of expressions that were puzzles to Manny. He seemed to be blinking back tears, but his eyes, like Florence's might readily brim with fleeting raptures. Because he must be gay and because he was beautiful, Manny felt the danger of robbery was remote.  He had the traditional male's belief that homosexuals could not look a real man in the eye, and beauty does not seem compatible with misdemeanors, mayhem, yes, but nothing that can be acquitted for fifty dollars. Then a sweep of his hand presented Manny with the empty street. 

     He had walked another quarter block when he heard a commotion behind him. A vision of flapping seersucker and flashing bare ankles in canvas deck shoes dashed past, running powerfully and lightly.  A hundred feet ahead the runner stopped, becoming engrossed in knee-bends and shoulder stretches, and then walked about in tight figure-eights with that air of grave meditation the amateur athlete affects after exertion.

     The stick figure in the distance propped himself against a light pole with one heel resting on its staunch pedestal, and in the gold tulip of match flare lights a cigarette. Manny is certain a few steps will subtract enough distance and the figure will not be so ridiculously longed for anymore-balancing off there on a cusp of recollection-but the fellow seems to brilliantly stage manage the associations he lifts from the unconscious. He has placed himself beneath a lamp light, he has struck a cigarette, and it is not an outrageous idea considering the camp use these gays make of cultural nostalgia, that he is acting ‘Lily of the Lamp Light’ as it pops into Manny's mind.   

     "Remember me?" he asks, drawing deeply on the cigarette.

     Manny nodded. 

     "You haven't changed.  Still think you have so much to lose.  All you've got to lose is your ellipses." 

     "You're one of my ellipses?"   

     "Bingo. I can't afford to mug you for more amnesia; I'm running on half empty already-my inheritance from you:  Timely amnesia.  Doing pretty well.  Six foot two-obviously the memory of you doesn't weigh me down. Everybody wishes they'd done harm, but I'm afraid we exorcised your lugubrious ass from our lives. I have a three foot vertical jump. Lettered in two sports-I couldn't have done it with you on my shoulders."

     "Anyway, tah tah, got to get back. I'll get you comped. Come on, get me off your conscience. Pretend you need to.  Make it a professional courtesy.  My dad was a shrink, Jewish like you.  I see him every time I look in the mirror. Trying to hide out.  Come on.  Bail him out." 

     Manny returned with him. The boy was willing to share his beauty, insisting Manny sired him and their layered encounter was collaborative and this was a dedication. He was offered a life serving beauty. Spellbound in its presence his hesitations and caution had been vocation, not cowardice, and all its years a chimera’s sentimental pilgrimage.

     Manny remembered a dream that he knew recurred dozens of times during his life: A shore. A rotted wharf.  Abandoned vender stands with tattered awnings.  Summer season over.  Time unraveled stitch by stitch into its component atoms, each microcosm this arid scene. The shore of lost moments; they go here immediately to wait in suspension, those moments when everything was trembling on an edge and it would take only a look and then immediately it's impossible and they are left orphaned of occurrence, spliced from time. Sere grass, yellow sand, even dust gets its wings pulled off and idles here, the green chance parched. As soon as he enters this endless stagnation he feels a premonition. Suddenly, that dead calm sea, waves are rolling in, diluvian combers summated by stormy light. Sea green coffers, all the green vaults that have been lost to the sea coming back, the green hills and valleys of paradise. The moment green again, that's all, but now the labor of titans and returned only for a heartbeat, before forever gone reclaims it.        

     As they approached the little gabled building, his shepherd sang out "Let me entertain you" and the throng rallied around them and swept back into the club. 

     He was pushed towards a table near a small dance floor.  The table was already occupied but there was a free chair and he was pressed into it, the green eyed boy, and green in fact his eyes were, saying "This is my father.  He's not queer so leave him alone."      

     "Give us a break.  Have a seat, for god sakes.  We're not rabid.  And we're not rude either, present company excepted, Nathan", said the man at the table in a voice that seemed to relish the theater in its own exasperation. His head was shaved over bushy eyebrows and brush mustache.  He could have played a constable in a British movie or a trolley car conductor; his pate seemed to cry out for its missing cap.  He looked trustworthy, a combination of obedient and stalwart tinged by anachronism.  His manners turned out to be the small played large, or prissy made regimental ritual; he raised his beer mug from the shoulder, sitting straight-backed, and still straight backed, dabbed a napkin at his moustache to remove the suds.  He dressed like a country gentleman, herringbone sport jacket with green vest, and there was a plumy voluptuousness to the way he held the napkin, and Manny realized it was not a napkin at all, which were paper at the bar, but a white handkerchief he had brought with him. 

     Manny looked around so he would not have to meet the eyes of the “Brit” sitting across from him. Likely, Nathan introduced any older man as his "father", but there was some chance an explanation might be asked and he did not feel up to providing it.

     He could not have said exactly why-he had never been in a gay bar before and had no idea of what was trendy decor-but he sensed that this bar was dated. It just seemed that this saloon either took advantage of its isolation buried in an industrial section or had been made obsolescent by its location against its will. There were Halloween decorations near the shuttered windows, black cats with arched backs, snag toothed witches with warty hooked noses and  conical hats, and two foot tall cardboard skeletons dangling from the lintels.  On almost every available surface,  on top of the radiator cover, on the juke box, on the shelves next to the gin and scotch bottles, religious icons stood. They were Medieval in flavor, large crucifixes, one silver, another wood, some with a severely wounded and heavily bleeding Jesus nailed to them. And angels and the Virgin Mary, she as frequently as Jesus, statues that appeared in gardens and graveyards. And check to jowl with these icons were biological grotesques, a stuffed skunk and bats and snakes, animal skulls with snarling canines. Why should this be old fashioned? A polished sensibility was cloistered here, a tongue in cheek decadence that pretended aristocracy while mocking it, an intention to parody Victorianism and its prudish repressions while fulfilling them, and this intention pointed to a literary education. That was the parchment crinkle-this place wanted to be an aesthetic retreat. It either ignored AIDS or rather than let it convert its patrons to politics, regarded it as a form of homosexual hemophilia, an affliction of over refinement.

     Couples are dancing on the small dance floor. Most seem well passed youth’s bloom. Some are well rehearsed, mechanically synchronized, executing a giant cat's cradle with their whole body.  They are in the minority; the larger part is bent on exhibiting unabated lust. Maybe they are fighting back at the confession of defeat or marginality or inane parody that homosexuality always endures, but they grab each other's butts militantly, and stagger about in wrestling clenches bumping into the clock work dancers with a deliberate obliviousness, as if it takes solid will to hold a place on this dance floor. They kiss as they teeter around. They accuse those shyly sitting at the tables.    

     At another table, a couple.  A man in his forties, unhealthy pallor.  Strange monk's tonsure of thready hair.  The hair in front has been transplanted. His ugliness is royal, an accumulation of sins and ennui and selfless pity. His eyes are small and unfinished, as if only gesso had yet been applied.  He looks as if perhaps an accident has stripped him of his former life, that he is just up from the bed, the bandages removed like a cocoon revealing this pupa, but in all, little question is left that this invalidism was caused by love and that he returns with penitent tenderness and almost no self-regard.  He will give all he has left, this term of life left to him, to aid and comfort, to nurture.  And the object of his solicitude sits beside him, a boy in his twenties made of honeycomb and amber, Hispanic by the refulgence of him, a thick shock of hair falling over one eye.  He has the look of a faun, a creature perfected for the sensual. His overflow of languishing sensuality seems violent or from the same source as violence, a beauty careless of self-love dwelling inside a passive nature. 

     Manny meets gray eyes that are regarding him. An otherworldly, sick-child look, the appearance of short, sweet visit filled with longing and adoring empathy and only half-reluctant farewell. Manny knows him, a patient from years ago who hoped Manny could add some relevance to his love, some draconian masculinity, a martial arts fitness. His love was fanciful and too grateful to be born by others. Manny had tried to talk him away from homosexuality, this figure of scant masculinity with the manner of a debutante including their lips tremulous with incipient emotion and their coltish skittishness, at least as Manny conceived them via this boy from Virginia who had fallen from that world.  He left therapy after a couple of months with gracious apologies.  He felt it was probably all in vain; he did not have the heart to discipline love and would have to suffer the consequences. 

     Is it possible he has not aged in twenty years? So gracious, he must have died from AIDS, and this figure would be a re-written literary premonition letting the dead patient forgive Manny and balance justice with mercy. In this antipodal loony bin poignantly dressed in tribute to the ideal male they nursed the dementia of love at first sight.  There was no Cassandra as in the other asylums their eyes opening into a whirlwind of blackness and the menstrual divination of grief and abandonment. In this theater of pomp and lightened being, an islet in an oxbow of the Styx, were becalmed those who had chosen an endless startled meeting protected by biological satire from any thing but keen and freshening disappointment never to be cursed by the finished knowledge of each other as procreative utensil.   

     The music stops abruptly. The dancers look around angrily or sleepily, and some decide to ignore the change and carry on.   

     Nathan glares at the dancers and then starts weaving fecklessly about the perimeter, he has his hands out and is strumming the air with his fingers and it looks supercilious and effete, a persnickety conniption fit, but suddenly, he has summoned the banshee screech of microphone feedback, and then his amplified baritone is flowing over the saloon.

     "We can do it nice, or we can do it ugly."

     The couples cede the dance floor to him. 

     "Attitude versus attitude.  I'm a professional.  Who'd you think you were dealing with?"          

     He has the small dance floor to himself. The sounds in the saloon continue.  Conversations and laughter, glasses clinking, chairs scrapping along the floor. No attention is being paid to Nathan and Manny wonders if he really has been hired to perform or if he is just a street buster who has brought in his own amplifier and microphone and in the tradition of make-believe that reigns here he is going to play stand-up comic or lounge singer or whatever he wants while things swirl on around him, accepted, if not quite welcomed, as another example of extravagant pageantry.

     "Guys, what I want is those old mikes with the long chord, remember? What is it about dragging that chord around, not to mention the mike?  It was love.  It was a dance.  He'd look at that chord dangling onto his shoe tips and he'd toss it off, and it was so chivalrous, like flourishing a cape. You really feel, watching it on reruns: He's doing it for us.  There's got to be a sacrifice or no performer becomes a success. They all got to pay. And they're paying their love.  We're paying to get it and they're losing it, losing it for off stage because they must meet expectations any given night to fall in love, at least, and to lose love and to remember it again right then and there, and what would that be if it happened to you?  A miracle. And this guys supposed to do it every night.  For you.  Don't you notice?  They wither in a minute and it is up to us to rescue them, like humming birds caught out in an early winter, we must cradle them in our hands.  They retire from the stage reluctantly, returning for encores we toss at them, singing to us as we file from the theater, afraid to let us go, and afterwards dragging through life in that stumble-bum walk of singed moths.  The ones who've surrendered to our dreams and been remade by them, and who, let's face it, we can't feed on the fumes of our wishes. Are you with me now?  Can I trust your consciences?" 

     He moved off stage to Manny's table and put his hand on the shiny dome of the "train conductor" sitting near him.

     "Can I trust you, Joe, to admit your wish fulfillments?  I don't think so.  Don't think any of you are safe.  I might lunge this way or that.  Eyes closed, if I toss a pencil, I stick a guilty party.  

     "Joe, I wonder why we let you be queer.  It's obvious it's a last resort for you.  What makes you think you deserve anything better than respectability?  Your taste?  I mean, really, when oh when will you learn that acquired taste is not a contribution?   Pa-th-et-ic.  To witness you tripping the light fantastic with your heavy thighs and cast iron head, so eager to be gay.  So boring, Joe, so very boring.  No escape for you darling, you're a middle class bore without a singular imagination." 

     He returned to the dance floor, sanding his palms together.

     "What have I put my hands in, Joe?  It is Shinola, I hope."      "He's not the only one. Don't think I haven't noticed.  There is a strong air of anonymity in this room.  What about you? Who aren't you tonight?  You're neat, compact.  Clean cut. What's the latest? We queers are middle America impersonators?  Lord, Lord.  Take advantage of how little sense we were expected to make before AIDS. Recapture our nonsense. None of the breeders can get away dressing like this. They're all in leather and spandex with tattoos we can only guess where.  And you in your polyester t-shirt and your crew cut and penny loafers.  Dear, you look quite insane.  I promise you, everybody thinks you have no chance of bringing it off. It's a complete cover-up, sweetheart, and everybody, just everybody knows it.  Please, let's get down. It is a dirty, dirty thing we do, you transvestite of the mainstream, and all the trappings of white bread will not clean it up. Chicken shit. You don't have the courage of your convictions.  Where's the peril?  Don't you miss it?  Thousands of us died for love. And you don't miss it. I'm sure they're all delighted to have you back.  It's quite a relief.  You really might have been a threat.  They were willing to believe anything of you.  Ten or fifteen screws in a night were considered an average quota for you, while the poor dears had run out of schemes for revival save imagining your transgressions. And now you're back and all combed down and looking ever so completely good and decent and patriotic.  And the only sedition you offer is to parody every manly image so that no one can possibly tell who's who anymore and every banker and farmer and candlestick maker can imagine himself a dangerous queer, and then the poor ones who can not handle the strain of decadence, who just won't pierce their ears or nipples and have oodles of angst trying to cope with female satire and revenge have entered a new celibacy and fade to extinction.  You've dropped the flag and become so decent there really is no hope and they're stuck in sex that ends. Oh, that ends, ends, ends.  The sound of traffic returns, the sweat dries on their skin, and they have not moved an inch and there is no culture shock to be back here, to find themselves alive again, none of that, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes, they've had a nooner and the clock never stopped ticking. Thanks to you, abandoning your post at the frontier of inanity, you gutless shit.

     Doing your best to forget the trenches, hah, me heartys.  The shadows, the dungeons.  Bathrooms at bus stations.  Love in Limbo.  On the docks.  The water slides on the pilings like oil. Nights where mirrors spill out. Remember the voices in the dark, could we have been sure then they were not dead souls intermingling with us?  Remember how each sentence was a last confession?  We took Supreme Unction then.  Remember, ye of little faith, our voices in the dark?"

     "You wouldn't be here otherwise, honey."

     "Don't need to be grabbed."

     "You're drifting."

     "I'm not drifting."

     "Jes floatin' along.  Quit fussin."

     "Can't see a damn thing."

     "See everything, baby, like your eyes closed."

     "Wait a minute."

     "What wait a minute?"

     "Talk. A minute."

     "Don't have a minute to lose."

     "Whose cryin'?  I hear someone cryin’."

     "You're looking for love?  Here?"

     "Scared?  I'm not.  I'll know.  I always do."

     "I don't know if it's just us echoing a hundred times."

     "A kiss?"

     "Who'se crying?  Who'se doing it?  You, crying, stop it.  Somebody wake him up.  I think he's sleeping."

     I can hear the sea oozing around the pilings and then I could have been deaf. I'm sure I was and I could hear his cock in my ass because I was deaf and I could hear the space where a door had opened onto silence, and I could hear in there my body decaying, grains of it falling off into that open door and each grain was a day and I wasn't sad because it was as if I could see through each particle gone, or it was more that the blindness that was adhering to me atom by atom was absolutely sighted with eternities, and more than any of that, losing  all this meant I could hear and feel and see his cock completely.  So completely that I disappeared and knew I had fallen where my eyes had looked through the mirror and I had saved him."

    "Calico boy rescued from behind the closed lids of too many."     "We died in the latrines, me heartys, but no less than Luther, fighting to de-churchify transubstantiation."

     "I sing the body oxymoronic.  The mud man.  And for the empire of shit and shadow and charity.  When he has his druthers-Him, the little mollusk dangling, that crocus bulb, he's not bound for sunny Greece, he's heading to the sewer.  Self-interest speaking here, the man clothed in flesh unenlightened or only partly so, I'll speak it, and at its densest and most dreamless being, the butts two planetary halves and the anus buried in its charwoman's task.  Let the words do less and try more, let them be re-buried in the act, nouns only, including the grunts and moans tolling the body's rude awakening to itself." 

     He scooted off and over the speakers came nameless sounds.  He was between the tables. He was rummaging for something and people at various tables were bolting upright as he searched among their feet. Whatever he was looking for he could not remember which table he had left it under and no one was safe from his prospecting.

     "Here it is."

     He held a canvas carrying bag above his head and returned to the dance floor.  Unzipping it he removed a black tire pump.  He shook his head and bit his lower lip.  "You'll laugh."  And they did.  And whooped and whistled.  He removed a plastic doll from the bag.  "We ignore this part."  He attached the pump to a valve.  The pump had two flanges for the balls of the feet to stand on and keep it upright, and it was pumped by a plunging motion.  There was an echo of eroticism in the sounds from the   lubricated piston.  The doll had been folded like a cloth and as the air entered it sprang open in sudden climaxes, an arm or leg popping straight, the whole doll convulsing as it became tumescent. 

     "This is as good as it gets for her.  I'm a poor second.    How'd you describe her face?  Sunny, raving idiocy?  I didn't get the most expensive one. Actually, I got the cheapest one because that's the kind of girl I wanted.  I thought she'd have a better heart.  The expensive ones are going to be just miserable because they get less than they deserve.  I didn't want to have to temper my projections. But, I outfoxed myself.  I identify with her.       Look at these baby blues. She looks like she's being goosed.  And she's got this blond whatever it is and at the muff too.  Hypo-allergenic, I hope.  Do you think these blank eyes are some ideal? They could have drawn them closed. You have to imagine us at the moment.  Could I take the rejection if her eyes were closed? I mean if I were generous I could imagine her carried away in her own ecstasy, but the exile. You know that moment, even touch is numinous, and there she is, eyes opened wide, and really, fellas, given the Olympian vistas of the subjective at that second, deliverance as the brothers used to call it before they got arch, she can seem to be suddenly awakened, and her eyes can't be too buggy wide then.  Maybe all of us can appreciate what a painful thing we have brought her into.  Who isn't wrecked by tragedy just then and it would never do to have a sloe eyed jade just then.  No, absolutely exploded awake from that inert peace she was blessed with before, her big blue, mindless eyes opened wide. Of course, it could be for our ego.  Who wants a face that looks unaffected by your penetration?

     "Is it over sensitivity that I identify so completely with her in my Negritude?"

     "She's a real doll.  Not like the others who are living dolls. She's no imitation. What she is she isn't, but I can't throw stones being a sinner like that myself.  She is the artificial intelligence of the flesh, but what are we all?  Negroes, anyway. This talking mud identifies.  We should all identify who listen for our cocks to sing arias, but there are those of us among us, yoo whoo right here, who have been especially designated as utterances of the dirt.  You have put the spark in us and bear the responsibility and hope we will inform you of the secret intelligence of dark matter.  All right then, you asked for it.  Let me report.  `Tis a strange incarceration you have put on us to witness your own. It burns and burns.  But, you knew that.  And the peculiarities of it.  Squared in the queer, I hoped, and possibly original, for me, or self-willed.  I don't believe it, but there is that surplus which may be the only free will I can exert, like a suicide on death row.  This life is a peculiar institution: I bring you the question.  Is the narcissus buried head down and its blossom just excrement of the bulb?  A dream that manuured gonad dreams in the shit?" 

     He danced with the doll.  They could hear his rubber soles squeaking on the parquet floor and the stormy blasts of the plastic pressed against his lapel microphone.  The doll's feet were on top of his feet, as if he were dancing with a child.  Between the doll's buttocks a rectal hole had been provided.  Nathan spun gracefully around the small floor and Manny thought of dancing with Andrea and remembered how sweet and clumsy it had been, the unbridgeable difference in their height, her little face looking up at him, while he tried with her weight on his insoles to preserve her marzipan romance.

     "Ladies and gentlemen, sluts and cads, transgenders and transvesters.  Tonight, for your edification and stupefaction, a seance. The bi-colored comedian will commune with his dead father. He will accost him and accuse him and charge him and sentence him as charged, and there will be a catharsis and then we'll cut to the advertisements. My father and I are dream mongers, or he's a dream monger, I'm dream mangled.  Or mongrelled.  This should be interesting, failing that, painfully embarrassing for everybody which is a thrill on its own.  I give you Isadore Rosenfeld, who by another name might have smelled sweeter, but by this time anyway has been laundered or moldered into flowers and field, hallowed be thy name. 

     Sorry to put you on the spot like this, old chap, but one good turn deserves another.  Would I be wicked, would I be snide, if not for you?  I am sarcastic to my bones, which I think is a contradiction, one is not supposed to be sarcastic with conviction, but I am made that way.  One half can not believe in the other.  And then neither half can believe in itself, but that has been my choice, I think.  I'm too hyperactive.  I'm bored with consistency and animal nobility, and I probably wouldn't even conceive of Negritude symbolically if not for you. 

     We have managed, together, to have not interfered, from time to time, with a leap.  We've done even better.  We have been in love. Incapable of lying, us dad, who don't believe a word we say.  We've been rushed and quickened and green fuses have flared in us.  As near to whatever mischievous, sad heart beats through creation, us dad, grabbed as readily and with as happy results as was any one else by the impish god. But, I think, dad, this will happen less and less, and the considerable years left will be of another nature, our own, and unblessed.  Then I'll feel your purebred dissolution, that leukemia of spirit which is your pride of place in literary Europe or in acute, tender awareness, and which you obligated me to resist.  And then I'll have my Oedipal revenge, which is an older obligation. Inside the alloy I am I will more perfectly suffer your Semitic destiny than you ever could. More perfectly realizing your ambiguities in my fleshy adulteration, more the fallen angel or misused beast, and finer failure than you. Magnanimously, you wished heroism for me of the usual kind: Stupid actions completed without hazing by conscience.  And my revenge is being instead a completed you.  I am your action, and the palsy of your hand which continued even at the moment of my creation-I am proof you wavered.  I enter you at that very moment through the continuing whirl of your own mind at the time which continues in me, as much the child of your mind as loins.  You at the lip of chaos and destiny, hung on the edge of swirling light years and the hollow silence of mercies and salvation, I know you there, dad, where the dirt knows the face of its father who art in heaven yet. There you are, here you are still, above my mother while her face has gone to the deeper regions of her hatred where it lost itself in love.  I know that face, her jaw set out against you and determined to ask no quarter, her eyes in raving anger as she is split away from all her resolutions to be savvy and disdain.  Tears and moan and even shriek, I know her then, her belief, untapped until then, in redemption through drawing and quartering in faith; Spare her nothing, spare her nothing or be damned. How does her face become sweet in that rigor of resistance?  Herself revealed and lost, knowing herself only once and then dropping away. In her finally the ocean of herself in forever forgiveness to everything and hope for it.  And you hovering over this, over this coming of adoration and acceptance of destiny arriving through you, hovering above and away, because I know by what is me that before you fell into the time before you were born, you doubted and doubted again, and had the chance to wonder if that holiness on her face so visible to you was hers or yours and if you could ever trust your own sensing of the truth and adoration of beauty.      I shake with that palsy of your wavering hand forever, and each action in me is only a translation of you through me and all of them tremble with fear and refuse awe.

     I give you that you have sinned on this national ground, but your fondest wish for the indelible act I can't give you.  I give you the indelible diluted and never to exceed folly, not in me, its personification as I be, antic and antsy and true to your genius of wrathful doubt. I can not give you redemption through Eros, and roll your story like thunder that shivers the ground, but have found myself as much of nothing as you yourself.  Both of us interpreters of dreams and no closer to ourselves than listeners, stuck with our small voice of cringing conscience while the whirlwind issues from the chambers of others' preachers' hearts.

     “You wanted me to always be naked and first with myself.  Namer before babble and lies and dreams.  And I feel naked more and more, but in front of the mirror I am as dismayed by this creature as you.  More and more I feel the encroachment of phobias and hypochondria, those interpreters of flesh, and shame in my own presence as if I had stolen this likeness of a god.  Dad, I reiterate. Don sing da blues.  Don' cuss none."   

     He cantered off the dance floor. A cellophane storm of static poured from the speakers and then "Strangers in the Night" began playing.  Nathan drifted over to Manny looking sleepy and satisfied. He motioned for Manny to get up and follow him.  He led him to the street. The drizzle had stopped and a touch of early morning coolness was in the air.  Nathan lit a cigarette and leaned against a wall. The street was quick-silvered in places and tar pooled in others from the earlier rain.  The tall buildings loomed over them, bulky but insubstantial at the same time, rising into shadow. There was a cathedral-like peace to the city at this late hour, the dominion of stone seemed completed, but it did not seem threatening.  Rather, it seemed the stones had gathered into minions, and unobserved, late at night, they chanted the silence of an old order.  

     Nathan drew on the cigarette and when he spoke puffs of smoke accompanied the first words. 

     "My dad's black.  My mom's Jewish.  They met in law school.  My shrink looked like you.  Same gnawed on forehead and maidenly reserve. I quit therapy four years ago now."

     Manny blinked as if slapped.  Nathan was studying him; he rocked his head and put the tip of his tongue on his upper lip, raising his eyebrows.  "So, what are you gonna do about it?" the gesture said.  

     "I told him my father was white; he couldn't think straight otherwise.  Did him a favor.  Finally figured I shouldn't be paying to do him favors.  You identify?  I thought you would.  Anywhoo, this is a vicious business.  Got to grab your muses where you find them." 

     He pushed off the wall and faced Manny. He took Manny by the shoulders and held him at arms' length.

     "Then why'd you come?"

     "Is this my cue, Nathan?"

      The speaker, dressed in a well tailored summer suit cut full with pink silk shirt opened at the neck, a meticulously rendered late meddle age, a floral arrangement of the pastels in fading color.    

     "If you drove", answered Nathan.

     "How lucky for the two of us that I did.  I'm Roger.  How would you say it, Nathan, patron of the arts?  Chauffeur?"

     He offered Manny his soft hand. It was incomprehensible. Roger smelled of cologne, sweat and pipe tobacco, a pleasing aroma, but nonsensically complex. Decency nauseated him. it was another pollutant.  

     "Isn't Nathan a genius?  You did catch his show?"

     "I don't need that, Roger."

     "Of course not."

     "Where's the car?"

     Roger pointed up the street.

     "I got to collect my shit", and Nathan went ahead at a fast pace, leaving Roger behind, perhaps pointedly, done with older men and their deliberated motions. Roger turned back to Manny, his eyes soft and glistening.

     "Ridiculous, I know, but I suppose I'm head over heels, and frankly, I'm boring as hell without him. Even his abuse is interesting.  And I've never enjoyed anything as much as when Nathan flourishes it. I hope there are no hard feelings.  He's an expensive vice.  Very cultured, you can't just buy him colorful crap.  He really is a genius.  Oh, he wouldn't have to be to get tired of me.  I know.  It's made me quite pathetic, he tells me."

     He let a tear slide down his cheek and then in an indulgent gesture that Manny associated with old money with all its profligate liberties, he rubbed his nose on his sleeve glazing it with snot.    

     Every light is on in the apartment. Florence has been beating back imps.  It is after three.  She must have awaken and walked around the house looking for him, not a far-fetched idea as he often sat in the dark these last few months, and she laid these bridges of light to get from one dark room to the next.  

     He retraced her route back to the bedroom extinguishing the lights as he went, until there was Florence asleep, her bare arms on the covers, a book floating on the swells of her breathing, touchingly small in the big bed, like a child who had come there to escape a nightmare or rumbling thunder.  

     A tiny voice issued from the radio.  

     He undressed, careful not to rattle the hangers when he hung his clothes. He had a drunk's guilty conscience and elaborate and strategies to be considerate. He would turn off the bedside lamp before the radio, so that if either change were to awake her, her eyes would not smart from glare, but then he reasoned that would leave him a figure looming in the dark and might frighten her.  He solved the puzzle by sitting on the bed and turning off the light. There was a snag in her breathing, a knot of shallow snorts, she turned on her side and then the regular pace resumed. He turned off the radio and walked to his side of the bed and slipped in.    

     (Nearly a half century ago, he would return at these hours of the morning from his residency in god-forsaken precincts or god-infested ones, from the hellish asylums whose extremes of terror and horror nearly proved a godhead in the soul that could forsake or be forsaken, that proved a soul, a tissue made to suffer the presence of love in unending and unendurable faith. He returned, her young, tempest driven suitor, to throw himself on her for rescue, this small woman who slept bathing in repose, each limb, her breasts, her open mouth, more in sleep than in waking, reclining on the circumference of the round world).

     He decided to wake her, with a squeeze of her hand while whispering her name. 

     "It's me.  It's me", he whispered. She awoke without alarm and after the laborious climb old age endures to leave even its shallowest naps, fell into her usual petted cat swoon at waking, humming "umm", luxuriating in drowsiness. 

     "Back from Blum."

     "Ummm.  Blum."  Banking up beside him.

     "The bad Doctor Blum."

     She was heavy and boneless, maybe already back asleep.  For a small person, in her lavish embracing of sleep, she could occupy large sweeps of the bed, but she could always be molded into an accommodating shape, never protesting. Her slumber was instinctively generous. 

     "Are you awake?"

     "It must be late."

     "I miss our three a.m.'s."

     "Our three a.m.'s?"

     "Uh huh."

     "I don't remember our three a.m.'s.  Were they glorious?  Were we Nick and Nora?"

     She released a cavernous yawn and with it a cuff of sulfurous breath.

     "They were cozy.  And you chortled.  We talked about anything.  You sometimes brought the kids back with you."

     "I did?  Wasn't I gay?  Wish I could remember."

     "When they were little enough to be picked up, you were heroic in the wee hours. Brought them each on one arm; a valkyrie."

     "Marvelous.  You don't seem tired.  Aren't you tired?"

     "You brought them in, chortling."

     "Chortling children.  You must miss them."

     "You chortled."

     "I never chortled.  You're trying to wake me up.  You know I hate chortlers."

     She smiled what might have been a chortler's half smile, her lips closed in a lazy crescent, and from a landing on the stairway up and down from sleep made a timeless interpretation of his restlessness and random prattle, lost in other three a.m.'s he may have suggested to her when less asleep than she was now she had pretended a comatose state to let him use her in a truculent manner that was also curious and adoring and which she witnessed only through her lashes, stealing glimpses in the dark through quivering lids, his face puckered as if tasting something tart as he poked and stroked her, his eyes fixed in a dumbfounded trance. Passivity seeped into his sexuality, and he would enter her and lay beside her tracing her outline with his fingertips, only occasionally moving inside her, holding nearly still at the verge of transformation, agog at the arrogating push of rapture. Or he would roll her on her side and trace her spine and cup her buttocks tenderly, teasing his gluttony, postponing his squander, the stupid happiness in these globes licensing an uxorious earthiness in him, a surrender to absurdity and the squalid devices of fate, and she would feel him sawing between her buttocks and his mouth was buried in her hair and it was their fiction that she could not hear him intoning a coarse, reverent litany that ended with "sweet, stinking whore" and cold jelly daubing her back. When Manny carried this rutting into life to its conclusion and penetrated her, holding her hips, he arched away from her at the end and then his grumpy muttering over stubborn matter, the do-it-yourselfer's tantrum keen, ended with "angel ass" lifted from servitude, and all that transpired at three a.m. had no witness and no word ever spoken.

     From her drift beneath waking she brushed her hand along his thigh and took his penis in her palm.

     "Doctor Blum."

     "Hmmm?""

     "Doctor Blum."

     "Doctor Siggy Blum. He won’t forget the drayage horses from childhood, their gelding’s schlongs dangling, splattering tiaras off the cobblestones; never abandon them beaten to death by drovers, leaping to embrace them, the lash falling on his back. Into the steppes to redress their freezing in the drifts, and into hospitals he followed their blasted hearts, ruptured loins and offal to open the windows. And into brothels to hold the dying whores and open the curtained windows, and in the mad houses, wherever the shrouds fall and the body is nakedly soul as it is in heaven and hell. 

     Doctor Blum visits Holy Toledo in Spain. Linden trees burdened with leaves.  But in a wind they flash. Summer pierces him then; the glittering crowns sing a river song to him and fable women. His trembling awe is still in tact. The inner man has emerged; he is a scruff ball of eczema and dandruff, but his repulsiveness was always his project: Preserving his charity that was tested by indifference.

     Women come to poetic ends in his mind. Oriental women hold a special place. He assumes their obedience. He mentions their childish mannerisms. He has paid careful attention from a sacred distance. His recitations, doubtless taking him to dirty conclusions, but his sing-song monotone, it's the mass in Latin, no longer used by the irreligious. He visits Holy Toledo because of the Romance language and the painting by El Greco-the lightening pulsing behind the clouds."

     Florence is asleep. Manny talks to the ceiling. Let him empty this dream before he falls asleep. He is grateful for her beside him. He holds her hand while he talks.  

     "His vocation requires a toad not a prince. He goes to Toledo and finds the bogs on the hilltop.  I don't think he knows linden from oak, but he must have the gentler syllables to make a lyric.  A taxi drops him in the middle of nowhere. It's a mid-summers night dream in that dark wood. The cheapest whores serve their clients there, leaning against the tree trunks or cutting their backs on broken bottles littered from the highway. He held my shoulders when he told me.  The illegitimacy of the story gave him courage, even grace.  It had to be the worst.  He makes the point of the muteness, the onus on him.  Silence presses like a candle hood.  The place smells from piss and excrement. It seems El Greco did a lot of compensating. At this depth the people are stumpy. They are fortunate to have had an El Greco to stretch them, and to have Doctor Blum who looks after their...motivations.

     The old men watch the whores and their clients from behind the trees. Doctor Blum stands among them and their regret when they stare out of the shadows at the living make this act committed in the shit beautiful, that is his conceit, that it actually clothes it in reverence.  Thus he looks at the bindle sack of exile-responsible in the name of love and redemption for preserving the most rotted urges and rages, bound by ardent gaze lest he abandon his post and maroon these souls chugging in the shit towards grateful exit. He witnesses and we are written on the sky in indelible ink, caught prosecuting our undying love in the refuse."

     Manny soon is asleep. He is lost once again on the narrow streets of the city at night, gyring in eddies, bewildered for purpose in returning here. Place a window and hear ‘You never hold me unless we’re dancing’. A memory, a portrait of memory, so formal and framed is it inside a dream, certain of a mistaken flight from a rumpled bed-‘nothing better than a buck dressed for the night’ she says-a breezy window and a black lover who had yet to dress her long limbs in the room still lit by slanting, headlong morning light.

     Nature’s fools, through us life embraces death, that is our use, to requite the sun and moon. Peel me and skin the pages, let my shadow leap into the shinning river.