"Did he say anything? I mean, about what happened?"
"Nothing coherent. He said something about being attacked by pygmies."
"They didn't call the, uh, police, did they?"
"Why would they?"
"Just wondering. Sounds to me like a weird deal all around." You start to relax. Alex is okay and the visions of cops at your door are fading.
"Another odd thing," Megan says. "There was a mink in the mailroom."
"A mink?"
"It was hiding in a mail bag full of rejected manuscripts. When the mail guy hoisted the bag this morning it started biting him. They had to call the ASPCA."
"Really strange." Poor Fred, you think.
"How are you coming?" she says, pointing at the desk.
"I think this calls for drastic measures." You stand up and collect all the wastebaskets in the room, lining them up beside the desk. You take a book from the desk and hand it to Megan. "Could you give this to Alex for me? Tell him it's one of the Young Turks." She takes the book. You pull open the drawers one by one and dump the contents, entire, into the steel buckets.
"That's done. Let's eat."
In the cab, you ask Megan where she wants to eat.
"How about my place?"
"You're going to cook?"
"You sound suspicious."
"It just seems like a radical idea."
"If you'd rather go out… "
"No. That sounds great."
You get out at Bleecker Street. Megan takes your hand and leads you into a delicatessen. She holds up a box for your approval. "Linguine," she says. You nod. "I'm going to teach you how to purchase and make a meal." In the next aisle she introduces you to two cans of clams. Ordinarily, she says, she would use fresh clams and fresh pasta, but she doesn't want to scare you on your first lesson.
From the deli you walk toward Sixth. Megan is telling you about the difference between fresh and dried pasta. Each step takes you closer to the old apartment on Cornelia Street, where you first lived with Amanda in New York. This was your neighborhood. These shops were your shops. You possessed these streets as securely as if you held title.
Now the vista is skewed slightly, someone has tilted the ground a few degrees, and everything is the same and not the same.
You pass Ottomanelli's Meats, where the corpses of small animals hang in the window: unskinned rabbits, hairless fetal pigs, plucked fowl with yellow feet. No ferrets. Amanda was always grossed out by this display. Already she was aspiring to the Upper East Side, where the butchers dress their wares in paper replicas of designer outfits.
At the corner of Jones and Bleecker a Chinese restaurant has replaced the bar whose lesbian patrons kept you awake so many summer nights when, too hot to sleep, you lay together with the windows open. Just before you moved out of the neighborhood a delegation of illiberal youths from New Jersey went into the bar with baseball bats after one of their number had been thrown out. The lesbians had pool cues. Casualties ran heavy on both sides and the bar was closed by order of the department of something or other.
Farther along, the obese gypsy Madame Katrinka beckons you to enter her storefront parlor with red velvet couch to have your fortune told. What would she have told you a year ago?
"Best bread in the city," Megan says, pointing to Zito's Bakery. The bell over the door rings as you enter. The fragrance of the interior reminds you of mornings on Cornelia when you woke to the smell of bread from the bakery ovens, Amanda sleeping beside you. It seems a lifetime ago, but you can see her sleeping. You just can't remember what you talked about.
"White or wheat," Megan asks.
"I don't know. White, I guess."
"You don't know what's good for you."
"All right, wheat. Wheat's better."
From the bakery you proceed to the vegetable stand. Why are all the vegetables in the city sold by Koreans? Boxes of tumescent produce glisten under the green awning. You wonder if they color-coordinate the displays according to secret Oriental principles of mind control. Maybe they know that the juxtaposition of red tomatoes and yellow squash will produce in the consumer an irresistible urge to buy a bag of expensive oranges. Megan buys fresh basil, garlic, romaine lettuce and tomatoes. "Now there's a tomato," she says, holding a large red vegetable up for your inspection. Or is it a fruit?
Megan lives in a big fifties building on Charlton and Sixth. Two large cats, a Siamese and a calico, are waiting at the door. She-introduces them as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Rose and Guildy for short, explaining that her first off-off Broadway role was Gertrude in a rock-and-roll version of Hamlet.
"I didn't know you were an actress."
"My first love. But I got tired of waitressing."
The apartment is a studio, not large, but furnished to give the impression of distinct areas. Against one wall is a double bed with patchwork quilt. In the center of the room a floral couch, and matching chairs are grouped in front of the largest window. At the other end of the room a rolltop desk is sheltered behind a row of bookcases. The tidiness of this arrangement is qualified by strident outbursts of plant life.
The cats stroke themselves on Megan's ankles while she hangs her shawl in a closet by the door. "How about a glass of wine?" she says.
"Sure. Thanks."
The cats follow her into the kitchen. You read the bookshelves In the examination of personal libraries is an entire hermeneutics of character analysis. Megan has functional blond maple shelves with a little bit of everything in them. The shelves themselves are just untidy enough to suggest actual use and just neat enough to indicate respect for the equipment. The books are organized according to broad categories: a shelf of poetry, a cluster of oversized art books, a long row of livre de poche French novels, music and opera books, scores of thin Samuel French drama scripts, and half a shelf of memoirs of life at the magazine. The latter is an entire genre. You pull out Franklin Woolcraft's chatty volume, Man about Town; the flyleaf is signed: "To Meg, who keeps me honest, with Love." Putting the book back, you catch sight of a spine that reads Exercise for Better Sex.
Megan returns with two glasses of red wine. "Give me a minute to change," she says. "Then I'm going to teach you how to make the world's easiest meal."
Megan goes over to the freestanding wardrobe beside the bed. Where is she going to change? Just how casual are we here? As she digs through the wardrobe, you can't help noticing that she has a terrific ass. You have worked with her for almost two years without noticing her ass.
How old is she anyway? She removes something from a hanger and tells you she'll be right back. She goes into the bathroom. The Siamese massages its head on your shin. Exercise for Better Sex.
Megan comes out wearing a maroon silk shirt with puffed sleeves which is not open to immediate interpretation. One less button buttoned might mean sexy, but what you see suggests casually dressy.
"Sit down," Megan says, gesturing toward the couch.
You both sit. "I like your place," you say.
"It's small, but I can't afford to move."
You hope the conversation improves. A few minutes ago you were colleagues headed out for a bite to eat. Now you are a man and a woman alone in a room with a bed.