You know you will have to face her sooner or later, so it might as well be later. Much later. Your equilibrium is fragile. Perhaps you will meet over drinks someday and laugh about this whole thing. This antic chapter of your life, "Youthful Folly," will follow "Early Promise." The magazine, ever forgiving, will be proud to claim you as one of its own. You'd gladly sleep through the intervening years and wake up when this part is over. In the meantime, a truckload of Librium and a nice long coma.
You are studying your face in. the mirror when the door is opened by Walter Tyler, the travel editor. It's hard to know how to greet Tyler, whether he will stand On the dignity of his position and New England lineage or be just another guy who likes the Yankees. Either way, he'll be offended if you guess wrong. Sometimes the sound of his Christian name in an underling's mouth is sacrilege to his ears. At other times his sense of hale fellowship is offended by a formal address. So this time you nod and say hello.
"I've always wanted to ask someone from Fact," he says as he takes up his position in front of the urinal, "does Clara piss in the Men's Room or the Ladies'?"
Now you've got the cue. "I don't believe she pisses."
"Marvelous," he says. It's taking him a while to get going at the urinal. To fill in the silence he asks "So how do you like it down there?" as if you had joined the staff last week.
"All in all, I'd rather be in Fiction."
He nods and tends to business for a while, then says, "You write, don't you?"
"That seems to be a matter of opinion."
"Hmmmm." He shakes and zips. At the door he turns and fixes you with a serious look. "Read Hazlitt," he says. "That's my advice. Read Hazlitt and write before breakfast every day."
Advice to last a lifetime. Your advice to Walter Tyler is to give it an extra shake or two if he wants to return to his office with dry chinos.
You make for the elevator. Some troll you have never seen sticks his head out of an office door and immediately retracts it. Rounding the corner, you narrowly miss running down the Ghost.
The Ghost cocks his head to one side, peering, his eyelids fluttering. You say good afternoon and identify yourself.
"Yes," he says, as if he knew all along who it was. He likes to give the impression that his reclusiveness is an advantage, that he knows more than you could ever expect to. You've only seen him once before, this legend, this man who has been working on a single article for seven years.
You excuse yourself and slide past. For his part, the Ghost glides away silently, as if on wheels. You escape the building without incident. Your jacket, small ransom, is back in the Department.
It is a warm, humid afternoon. Spring, apparently. Late April or early May. Amanda left in January. There was snow on the ground the morning she called, a whiteness that turned gray and filthy by noon and then disappeared down the sewer grates. Later that morning the florist called about the bouquet you ordered for her return. Everything becomes symbol and irony when you have been betrayed.
You slip into a bar on Forty-fourth, a nice anonymous Irish place where no one has anything on his mind except drinking and sports. On a big video screen at the far end of the long wooden bar is some kind of sporting event. You take a stool and order a beer, then turn your attention to the screen. Basketball. You didn't realize basketball was in season this time of year, but you like the soothing back-and-forth movement of the ball. The guy sitting next to you swivels and says, "Those fucking bums don't know how to handle the full court press."
You nod and fill your mouth with beer. He seems to expect a response, so you ask him what period it is.
He looks you up and down, as if you were carrying a volume of poetry or wearing funny shoes. "Third quarter" he answers. Then he turns away.
You keep meaning to cultivate an expertise in spectator sport. More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country. You'd like to be the kind of guy who can walk into a bar or an eatery and break the ice with a Runyonism about the stupidity of a certain mid-season trade. Have something to hash out with truck drivers and stockbrokers alike. In high school, you went in for lone-wolf sports-tennis and skiing. You're not really sure what a zone defense is. You don't understand the sports metaphors in the political columns. Men don't trust a man who missed the Super Bowl. You would like to devote a year to watching every athletic event on ABC and reading all fifty-two issues of Sports Illustrated. In the meantime your strategy is to view one playoff game in each sport so as to manage remarks like, "How about that slap shot by LaFleur in the third period against Boston?" Third quarter?
It's five-twenty and raining when you leave the bar. You walk down to the Times Square subway station. You pass signs for GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS, and one that says YOUNG BOYS. Then, in a stationery store, DON'T FORGET MOTHER'S day. The rain starts coming down harder. You wonder if you own an umbrella. You've left so many in taxis. Usually, by the time the first raindrop hits the street, there are men on every corner selling umbrellas. Where do they come from, you have often wondered, and where do they go when it's not raining? You imagine these umbrella peddlers huddled around powerful radios waiting for the very latest from the National Weather Service, or maybe sleeping in dingy hotel rooms with their arms hanging out the windows, ready to wake at the first touch of precipitation. Maybe they have a deal with the taxi companies, you think, to pick up all the left-behind umbrellas for next to nothing. The city's economy is made up of strange, subterranean circuits that are as mysterious to you as the grids of wire and pipe under the streets. At the moment, though, you see no umbrella vendors whatsoever.
You wait fifteen minutes on the downtown platform. Everywhere you look you see the Missing Person. An announcement is made that the express is out of service. The tunnel smells of wet clothing and urine. The voice comes over the speaker again to say that the local will be delayed twenty minutes because of a fire on the tracks. You push through the crowd and ascend to the street.
It is still raining. Getting a cab is a long shot. Knots of people on every corner wave their arms at the passing traffic. You walk down Seventh to the bus stop, where some twenty souls huddle in the shelter. A bus packed with grim faces goes by and doesn't stop.
An old woman breaks from the shelter and chases her ride. "Stop! You stop here!" She whacks the rear of the bus with her umbrella.
Another bus pulls over and disgorges passengers. The sheltered mob clutch umbrellas, purses and briefcases, prepared to fight for seats; but once the bus unloads it's nearly empty. The driver, a massive black' man with sweat rings under his arms, says "Take it easy," and his voice commands respect.
You sit down up front. The bus lurches into traffic. Below Fortieth Street the signs on the corners change from Seventh Avenue to Fashion Avenue as you enter the garment district. Amanda's old stomping grounds. Above Forty-second they sell women without clothes and below they sell clothes with women.
At the Thirty-fourth Street stop there is a commotion at the door. "Zact change," the bus driver says. A young man standing by the change box is trying to work his hand into the pockets of his skin-tight Calvin Kleins. Peach Lacoste shirt, a mustache that looks like a set of plucked eyebrows. Under one arm he clutches a small portfolio and a bulky Japanese paper umbrella. He rests the umbrella against the change box. "Step aside," the bus driver says. "People getting wet out there."
"I know all about wet, big guy."
"I just bet you do, Queenie."
Finally he gets his change together and deposits the coins one at a time, with flourishes, and then cocks his hip at the bus driver.