Times. He only ordered the beer, with no intention of taking more than a few sips of it, so the bartender wouldn’t think he came in just for the phone book. “Pain in the ass,” he could imagine her thinking, “making me look for the fucking book and then put it back.” He’s still like this. If he’s on a city street and he has to pee, which he’s recently been having to do frequently, and goes into a bar to use its restroom, he always first orders a beer, if he doesn’t have to pee real bad, and leaves most of it. If it’s a coffee shop he goes into, he orders a coffee at the counter and drinks it after he pees. If he has to pee real bad for both those or all the stools at the counter are filled, then he goes straight to the restroom and usually leaves without ordering anything. Leaves fast, though, without looking at the person behind the counter. In other words, he never likes to use something in a bar or coffee shop or place like that, without buying something, but the cheapest drink they have, and when he does, he always leaves a tip, even if he only drinks a little of the coffee or beer. Part of that’s because…because of what? Lost the thought. Not tired, either. He thinks something to do with…about how relieved he is to have peed. That he was able to find, he probably means, a restroom that was free. He went back to the bar in the bar, the counter, whatever it should be called here so it’s clear what he went back to — suddenly he’s having trouble not only remembering what he was saying but putting his thoughts into words — and sat on a stool at it. Other customers in the bar? Thinks so; doesn’t remember, but can easily picture it. Bartender put his glass of draft beer in front of him — so she knew what she was doing, not drawing and putting it down before — and said something like “I was right, right? The phone book’s in the cubbyhole or dangling on the chain,” and he said something like “Chain’s there, book’s not, so it was probably stolen like you said. Look, I was once a bartender — not too long ago, either — and we always kept the Manhattan phone book under the bar’s counter. In fact, four of the five boroughs’ phone books. We didn’t keep Staten Island’s. I think we even had the Manhattan Yellow Pages, but all of them in case a customer wanted to look up a phone number or address.” “Then you must’ve not had a pay phone in your bar,” and he said “I think we did, in the three I worked at, and with the Manhattan phone book and Yellow Pages by it or resting on top of the phone. The books under the bar were mainly for the convenience of a customer who didn’t want to get off his stool to look something up. If he wanted to make a call, though, he had to use the pay phone.” She asked where he worked and he said “Main one was a restaurant-bar on West 57th between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Lunch-hour drinkers, mostly, and sort of the runoff from the Coliseum trade shows, and also the after-work crowd starting around five for a couple of hours. Subway entrance was right there, and for a while, at happy hour, we had a buffet table with free hors d’oeuvres.” “You must’ve made a bundle,” she said, “getting regulars. Here, it’s more than not customers I’ll never see again, so I usually get stiffed. Okay, though you’re making more work for me, so don’t be next asking me for Brooklyn,” and she went to the end of the bar, opened a cabinet under it and got out the Manhattan phone book and gave it to him. He checked, and it was the latest edition: 1978–79. He looked up Gwen’s name in it and it was there as she said it’d be: the only Gwendolyn Liederman in the book, at 425 Riverside Drive. Way uptown, he thought. Past Columbia? It could be that enormous curve-shaped Columbia-owned faculty residence he’d been in once, a few blocks south of 125th. He forgets the building’s number, if he ever knew it, since he was taken to this private piano recital by someone who was invited. The area didn’t seem that safe, and it might worry him going there to pick her up or take her home, if it ever came to that. But she did it, though maybe during the day it was safe and at night she always took a cab to her building, or called one from it, or got off at the 116th Street subway station on Broadway and then got a cab. Or the Riverside Drive bus — the number 5?—stopped right in front of her building and same with the downtown one across the street. But he remembered a way to figure out what street her building was at. For about two years when he was fourteen and fifteen, he was a delivery boy for a food market and catering service in the West Seventies. To help him make his deliveries, he had a street-location guide to find the cross-street a building was closest to for every avenue on the Upper West Side. He only delivered the smaller orders; the larger ones and anything to the East Side or any area that would have taken him a long time to get to, were delivered by truck. Central Park West and Riverside Drive were the two easiest avenues to use on the guide, and he still remembers how to do them now. For Riverside Drive, just lop off the last digit of the building number and add 72, the street the Drive started at, to what was left. For Central Park West, it was add 60. West End Avenue he remembers as being complicated to do, and he rarely delivered — maybe never — anything to Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, since those two hadn’t been gentrified yet, and the place he worked for was kind of fancy and expensive. He used the guide for Gwen’s building number and came up with a hundred-fourteen. So it might be Columbia-owned, he thought, and if so, a better and more convenient location and probably a more attractive building too than the institutional-type one near a 125th. He wrote her name and phone number on the folded-up sheet of typing paper he took from one of his pants pockets — most likely one of the back ones, which was where he usually kept it and still does, whenever he goes out; the pen, then and now, always in a side pocket so he doesn’t sit on it. He thinks he finished his beer and thought something like Hot damn — well, maybe not that. Just: Oh, boy, she was leveling with him after all. Now, what he wouldn’t give to have their first date, so to speak, and he could call it that because why else would she have given him her number if not to see him again, but to go well and then to start seeing each other regularly and for it to become serious between them and for them to start sleeping together exclusively, if he can put it that way—nobody else—and everything like that and for it to only get better and them closer and marriage, even, and for it to never end. It’s about time, and he can visualize it; foresee it as a possibility; something. For everything about her; everything; he just knows. And with a name like Liederman, he remembers thinking — maybe not the “Gwendolyn” so much, and not from anything about her mannerisms and face and voice and way she spoke and what she said — she’s probably Jewish, so even better. For all the women he got serious with and the three he lived with the past fifteen years, except one, Rhoda, whom he gradually didn’t much care for but it took a while to finally stop seeing her because she kept calling and was so good in bed, were Gentile, and most had a kid or two — actually only one had two — and the relationships always soured or sputtered out. And she didn’t seem to have a kid. In fact, it was obvious she didn’t; it would have come out. Good, because he already told himself after his last bad breakup more than a year ago that if he did get involved with another woman, and he was beginning to doubt he ever would, he wanted it to be with someone who had no kids and was a nonobserving Jew, among all the other things he wanted her to be — smart, interesting, sexy, gentle, and so on. Pretty, genuine, slim, intellectual. Was that asking too much? Was it asking for the wrong things? No, he doesn’t think so. The change could be good. And he wants to be happy with someone and have a relationship that’s easy for a change and lasts and goes on and the rest of it, and she seems perfect for him — again, in the short time they spoke and long time he observed her at the party, everything about her, everything, so this has to work. It’s got to, he means, got to. He put the folded-up sheet of paper into one of his pants pockets, paid up, gave an extra large tip for a single draft beer, said to the bartender, when she took the phone book off the bar to put it back in the cabinet, something like “Much thanks for the use of the book. You’ve no idea how important it was to me, which must sound silly to you but it’s the truth,” and left.