West 4th St. station, loitering train dawdling to a stop or tottering to a halt or a mixture of those and I put the book into my coat pocket, stand at the door with the cook who’s reading another newsweekly, other slipped into a briefcase on the floor where I quickly saw inside a clipboard, scissors, rolled-up pair of socks. “The Iffy Decade,” the article’s headline says, which doesn’t make me want to read more: too broad. We get off, I race upstairs, turn around, he’s reading while limping and I see his right foot has a four- to six-inch platform to even his height. I jot down those introductory notes into a memo book, forget what I thought after “dawdling to a halt,” though remember it rhymed with “jot” but it was “stop,” and write the word down followed by a question mark. I go through the revolving exit gate. Token booth’s boarded up, its exterior vandalized. Urine smells so bad in the passageway to the street staircase that I hold my breath. At the bottom of the steps a woman wrapped in towels and with a styrofoam cup with no coins in it by her feet says “Sir, I could use a dollar or two for a hot meal.” I’d stop to look for a dime if it weren’t for the smell. I shake my head, start upstairs, shoelaces on one shoe flick against the steps. I lean the flowers and umbrella against the stair wall, tie the laces, drops land on my head but not much, long as I’m in this position other loosely tied shoe could be untied and tied tight too. “Sir,” from below, twisted face, shaking hand with the cup reaching up to me. Maybe some of it’s an act. I feel in my pockets. I could say “Here, catch,” or walk down and drop it into the cup. All I turn up are two quarters and a subway token. “Sorry.” Her look says look some more. “I have to go — good luck,” and run up the rest of the steps. Rain’s nearly stopped. Cook puts something into her hand and says “All I can spare,” and she says “My babies bless you.” I open the umbrella, look at the library steeple clock. Twenty to eleven or ten to seven? What’d the optometrist say that trying-on day last month? “You want to see long distances, your eyes aren’t in your head anymore but on your nose.” I put them on. Five to nine, so still some time. I head for a bookstore around the block. Bank’s time and temperature clock says 9:12 and 43 degrees. More like it. Cleaning store clock says quarter past. So it’s so. Should’ve left sooner. Now I won’t get to talk much with Diana. Sidewalk so narrow and crowded with people, parking meters, trash-cans and trash that I walk in the street most of the way and every other store selling shoes and western boots. New books in the window I might want to borrow from the library. Then one I at first can’t believe I’m seeing. Same title, different cover, my name at the bottom, little dust already on it. New Asiatic Women Poets I collected and translated, or for the languages I didn’t know, put into verse other people’s interlinears, and which was published in hardcover last year but no one told me was coming out in paperback. The store’s door is locked. Manager I’ve talked to before and who asked me to sign one of the two clothbounds the store bought—“Don’t want to get stuck with more than one copy”—waves my hand away from the door handle and points to the clock I can’t see from here. I point to the book he can’t see at the window corner. He taps his watchband and says “Nine” and slashes his hand through the air. I hold the flowers out to him and say “Please” and he bows and smiles as he shakes his head and reaches under the cash register and must touch the switch that shuts off most of the store lights at once. I get down almost on my knees to see who the publisher is, but with the window lights off it’s too dark. Monday I’ll phone the hardcover editor of that anthology at half-past ten. She never gets in before that. Her assistant will answer and say she’s not in yet and who’s calling and I’ll have to explain who I am again and why I’m calling and he’ll ask for my phone number and spelling of my last name and say she’ll get my message when she comes in. I’ll call at eleven and she’ll be away from her desk her assistant will say and maybe she didn’t see the message he left and he’ll make sure she gets it when she returns. I’ll call at quarter to twelve and the assistant to the editor in the next office will say my editor and her assistant are away from their desks this moment and since both their coats are still there she’s sure they haven’t left for lunch and is there a message and name and phone number I’d like to leave? I’ll call a few minutes after noon and she’ll be out for lunch her assistant will say and she got my last message and in fact got all of them but she’s been extremely busy today, but he will tell her I called once more. I’ll call at two and she’ll be in an editors’ conference. At four she’ll still be in the conference. At five Dolores will pick up the phone and say she was about to call me. Didn’t the rights people contact me about the paperback sale? Didn’t the paperback people send me a questionnaire? Didn’t I even get her note about the sale? The mail these days. Worse than the subways. Check my contract with them, even if she’s sure we both have a good idea what it stipulates, translators getting the worst shake of anybody in publishing other than their senior editors, and that’s that I signed all my rights away to hardcover royalties or a paperback sale when I sold them the manuscript for one not-so-gainful flat fee. What about the movie rights to the book? I’ll say and she’ll say it’s always enjoyable and a rare experience indeed to talk to an author with a sense of humor about his livelihood and with so little bitterness about the treatment of his book, but to be serious, with my next manuscript I should get an agent to handle the contractual details. I’ll say all an agent’s ever told me is I can probably sell poetry anthologies better than any agent, probably because my heart’s really in it, they usually say, and that they don’t like handling translated poetry of individual poets or any poetry for that matter when the poet isn’t a novelist, because there just isn’t enough money in it for them for all the time spent. Anyway, I’ll say, who’s calling about possible royalties or paperback fees? All I want are a few contributor copies to help fill up my barren bookshelves. She’ll say I’m a lot more than just a contributor with that wise and important book and she thinks some comps can be squeezed out of the paper people and if they can’t she’ll send me one of her own. I’ll say does she think each of the contributing poets can get one too? and she’ll say with them she doesn’t know, since the poets will be getting paid again for their poems in the paperback but have nothing in their contracts about complimentary books. But they do owe her a favor for a very successful cookbook she sent them first and they bought, so she’ll look into it and get back to me soon. And then how much she’s looking forward to my next anthology of contemporary poets from remote regions like Outer and Inner Mongolia and Pago Pago and Tierra del Fuego and our own and Greenland’s and even Eastern Siberia’s Eskimos, but without an agent she can’t promise my contract will be any better with that book. As for the Japanese poet I keep raving about and whom she knows I’m plodding away and counting so hard on, no matter how great she and the Asiatic experts eventually say he is she only hopes her house will think he can sell well to universities and libraries, because they’ve just about given up trying to push a poet’s poems on chains and ordinary bookstores. And we’ll have lunch one of these days, she’ll say, when she’s not so bogged down with the spring list and already another dozen authors for next fall, and I head for Diana’s building, rain still thin, wondering what paperback house took my book, which should do me some good in placing future manuscripts, someone recumbent in an empty refrigerator carton in the entrance of a closed sandal shop, around the corner, up her stoop, bell at the top, voice says “Yes?” and I say “Dan Krin” and there’s a pause, static crack, “Excuse me, I’m not used to this elaborate set,” and I’m buzzed in. I keep the door open with my foot, shake out and close the umbrella, start unbuttoning my coat as I climb the first flight. Have to pee. Don’t run or think about it. “Hello.” Diana, staring down the stairwell. “Hi,” I say, putting my glasses into the holder inside my pants pocket and she says “Oh, it’s you. Ringer who rung you in said it was my niece Andy. She didn’t come in with you?” “No.” “You’re one of the first. Come on up. Of course come on up. And of course you’re coming up. Still, you, of all people, Daniel, excluding Andy, I thought would come sooner. Shame on you both and I hope we get time to talk.” “Funny, but that’s what I was thinking just before, though not about Andy,” as I round the landing and start up the next flight. “How you doing?” and she says “Unready, and you?” “Couldn’t be better. But guess what I just saw in the Eighth Street Bookshop window?” and she doesn’t say “What?” Maybe she didn’t hear me. I’m now on her floor. Her door’s open. People chatting inside. Coatrack with three coats and a hat. Pair of man’s work-boots on the other tenant’s doormat. “Same boots were there the last time I was here,” and she says “They’re there permanently to scare off undesirable trespassers, and extra extra-large. He’s petite.” “Strange.” Rubbers and rubber rainboots and umbrella by her door. She’s staring at me. Man in her apartment saying “Say it again, Jane, and this time I swear by what’s his name in heaven I’ll laugh.” Still staring at me. Nodding approvingly. Wry smile arising. She’s about to give me a compliment. I’m about to deflect and if possible squelch it. I look over my shoulder. “What are you looking at?” she says. “Nobody I guess. Thought maybe someone who you were, for what were those ‘my isn’t it nice oh boy’ nods and look for?” “You of course, if you have to ask.”