I learned a lot from that old boss. The old boss spent a lot of her time getting her roots dyed golden blonde. She said that if you were going to color your hair blonde, you couldn’t have roots. It was against the rules. You wouldn’t get waited on in shops if you had black roots. You wouldn’t get any service. You had to go once a week to have those roots dyed the same color as the rest of the hair. It had to look expensive or people would think you were cheap. The boss said it wouldn’t do and that I should see Andre. Everyone saw Andre for blonding. Those were the correct terms to use.

She said that when she started out, it was very competitive. Like now, but with more taste. Now she was almost seventy. She liked to talk while I arranged her shoe closet. I had to keep track of which shoes she had worn with which dress and when this had taken place. I had to remember handbags and bracelets. She had a diary and I wrote in it the next day. Getting dressed was an exhausting competition and it had to be just right, every time. You couldn’t slip up. It was competitive. It was in the papers. The boss’s husband had been a philanthropist, but he had died. The boss had been disorganized until I started cataloguing everything. I didn’t know what to call that on my resume. I couldn’t just say organized things.

I poked at the bell and waited until someone came to the door. The boss usually had a lot of people running around. There were three types of staff there. If you didn’t know any better, it seemed like the boss was running a real tight ship. The people who worked there always looked busy, but this was because Cleopatra never left her barge of a bed. You’d think it would work the other way around. You’d think people would be reading magazines in the living room, putting their feet on the upholstery. Instead, the boss kept them scooting around, looking for a hair clip or a receipt from Bergdorf’s that had been thrown out two weeks before.

When the boss did get out of bed, it was like an opening night. She had parties there. The lights came on. This had to be planned a month in advance. That was another part of my job. I had to schedule things. I had to get just the right lavender roses flown in. The flowers had to match the walls. This is what I like about you, the boss had said. You know about things. I don’t have to explain like I do with Nancy or Carmelita. It makes my life easier not to have to explain the difference between a good rose and a bad one. You know.

Yes, I do, I said.

I went right into the living room and sat down like I owned the place. Someone should arrange the magazines and water the plants. Someone should take care of details. It’s not that hard. It’s not my job anymore, but I pinched off a dead bloom and stuck it in my pocket. Attention to detail is important when you have this kind of job. It’s what keeps people coming back with smiles on their faces. The boss’s house was like a hotel or an ocean liner. It was exhausting to keep it looking fresh. It was plain old hard work. Someone had to do it or it wouldn’t get done. This room was the lobby for the rest of the house and another part of my job had been to keep the curtains drawn relative to the amount of sunlight coming in. The sun would bleach the carpet if you let it. You had to keep the curtains drawn in the morning and then open them little by little during the day. Whoever was doing it now had gone too far and half of the carpet had faded. I shut them partway and sat back down with one of the magazines. I read an article about how not to overcook fish and then looked at some pictures of a vacation home out in the Hamptons. This home was unusual in that it only used organic materials inside. It sounded as if it might go up in flames and as if it might be irksome to spend the weekend there.

After twenty minutes I got up and took the elevator up to the third floor where the boss’s bedroom was. Walked right in and said hello. Even though the boss lived like Mrs. Astor’s pet horse, she herself was pretty casual. Informal. She said she the simpler things were, the better. She said most people didn’t understand that idea and paid the price later. I probably shouldn’t have quit this job. When I walked in, the boss was getting her hair styled. There was a dress form in the corner that had been modeled after the boss’s exact measurements and the dress form was wearing a bright red suit. It was headless, this torso, so someone had put a black straw hat on top of the neck.

What a surprise! she said. Would you bring me a hand mirror? I need to see the back. The back is never right.

I didn’t want to waste her time, so I spilled it. I need a job reference, if you don’t mind, I said. That’s why I’m here. I don’t want to disturb you, but you said to drop by any time.

Of course, Sally! Don’t you worry about that. I handed her the mirror. She clucked and picked at a curl. The hairdresser fussed with the hair near the ears, saying that the hair had gotten thinner since last time. This was a new hairdresser. Andre had died and this new one was called Franco. Franco had on black slacks and a pink shirt and he patted the old boss on the top of head like you’d pat a small dog.

I am always happy to help, Sally, she said. Now, tell me, what did you do here? It is Sally, isn’t it? She motioned for me to sit down next to her.

Guess, I said.

She thought this over a bit, and then sat back and smiled. Yes, it’s Sally. You worked with Isabelle in the kitchen. Yes, I remember now. You are the girl who brought in that wonderful recipe for trout. You made an appetizer that everyone said was superb. I remember that party. That was your trout, wasn’t it?

No.

Now don’t fib, Sally. It was delicious. You’re not in catering any longer? Oh, dear. What are you doing now?

I was a waitress at a steakhouse, but I wanted something better this time around. It was better forked over plain. The boss would appreciate my asking for a reference directly. You couldn’t be mistaken for weak that way. That was another thing I learned on that job. I reached over and took one of the boss’s cigarettes and fired it up. I wasn’t used to smoking in anyone’s bedroom.

Sally, you were very good help. That steakhouse will be sorry to lose you, I can just tell. I always know when a waitress is good or not. It’s all about eye contact. Always look people right in the eye, Sally. I do understand, though, that you probably feel more at home in the kitchen. I think you have some real talent there.

We got a lot of Japanese tourists at the restaurant. They liked to drink and they liked to tell you that you reminded them of some mermaid painted on a sushi platter. They didn’t speak enough English to say mermaid, so instead they made the shape of a mermaid with their hands and then they laughed. When they paid the bill they left a key to their hotel room. The wrong person could get one of those keys and rob those businessmen blind so at the end of my shift I’d put the keys into an envelope and mail them to the hotel. I didn’t put a return address on the envelope.

I was used to addressing envelopes. I used to sit at this table every morning, listening to the boss dictate invitations and thank you notes. These all had to be done by hand, my hand, because I had won a penmanship award in the sixth grade. I did this well, better than most. You don’t realize how difficult it is to get it just right. It can be slow going. It has to do with geometry above all and then you worry about the thickness of the letters and how hard you have to bear down on the paper to get the right effect. Fat or thin, it made all the difference in the world.

The boss motioned at the dress form and asked what anyone thought about that red suit. Exquisite, Franco said. What can I say? Just exquisite. He asked the boss to shut her eyes while he shellacked her with a can of hairspray. He waved the fumes away by flipping his hands like he was going after a fly.

Where are you wearing that? I asked. It looked like one of her uptown suits. The red was too bright.

I am going home, she said. It was too hot in the city. The haze gave her a headache. She hated sitting in her town car while the heat throbbed off the asphalt. The city was a sweat-soaked mirror. You couldn’t bear to see your own reflection. Everyone went out of town in August anyway. People would think something about her if she didn’t go herself. They’d think she had money problems and they’d yammer it raw. Franco agreed with this. He had clients at Sag Harbor already and they’d be talking. The boss didn’t like Sag Harbor but had gone there anyway. Her husband had said it was expected. When the boss saw her picture in the papers, she’d use the word “dreadful.” There I am with that dreadful neighbor. And look at this, the dreadful Miller beach house. What a dreadful chore it all is. I am dreading this summer already, and it hasn’t even started.

I am very tired, she said.

She was going upstate. Her family had a summer house on the St .Lawrence river. She inherited the house and she despised it. It nagged her like a bad tooth, but she wouldn’t sell it. It just sat there waiting and nagging. The house was built of stone and it sat on a bank overlooking the river. It had thirty rooms all paneled in wood. There was a circular turret at the top of three flights of stairs. This turret had a view all the way into Canada. You could sit up there like a sentinel, alone as can be, and watch autumn creep over the border. The shadows would take a long time to fall, but when they did it was as if they’d never left in the first place. You’d find yourself back in the city, waiting out winter.

So why go? Franco asked. I, he said, would go in a heartbeat. I’d take Dennis and stay the whole month. Some people, he said, and he rolled his eyes. Some people don’t know when they have it good.

The stone house had been shut up like a mausoleum for the past thirty years. The boss said it cost a fortune to run, that’s why it was easier to lock it up and forget about it. There were no children. There was no one to take on the responsibility. Who’d want that anyway? There was more that came with it. She said the house reminded her of what it was like to be twenty and pretty. She’d been twenty and pretty in a straw hat and then she was not. She said what was the point of remembering something like that? When she was twenty, she had run off in the woods and had lost her hat and had not come home for two days. There was something out there she wanted to see.

She had heard about a girl who had drowned in the river. If she ran as fast as she could, she could almost pace the currents and imagine where the girl had flushed out into the sea. Even though she couldn’t see that far, she knew the girl had gone as far as the mouth and probably much farther.

She knew that the water was cool. She knew that much.

And they looked for that girl for weeks that summer. They thought she’d gotten lost and maybe was hurt, maybe had fallen and broken her ankle on a rock. She might sit out there in the woods until deer season. She might not know the way home.

And with everyone looking, the boss said, they forgot about the dancing. They forgot about the rowboats and the picnics and the fireflies. The girl’s mother thought the girl had been snatched away in the night. There had been a search party and then a mob. No one thought the girl had gone out on the tide.

The boss said that it had taken a while to see where the girl had gone into the water, but that she knew when she had found the exact spot. She had followed the shore for half a day when she came upon it. It was a little sandy dent that the river had lapped out of the bank. The water was clear there and very shallow, but there were some rocks that poked out of deeper water. Some of these rocks were quite smooth and others were larger and sharp. The boss sat on one of the rocks for a while and listened to the river nudge the bank. She trailed her fingers through the water and touched them to her lips. It was a place where you could watch the boats go by. She said she thought the girl had tripped and fallen, but you couldn’t be sure. It would have been easy to step out onto one of the rocks and slip. Or it might have been just as easy to step on one of those rocks and let yourself slip away like an otter. You could float on your back for a while, just staring at sky or nothing in particular, and then you could roll over onto your belly, flip your tail and be gone.

The boss said that she had taken her straw hat and had placed it where the water met the bank. At first the hat had dipped back towards the shore, but then it moved away. It stalled for a minute and then decided on its course. The boss watched it sail and then went home through the woods.

I wanted to know how the boss knew this was a pivotal moment in her life. What we were looking at here. That idea excited me. How you could tell those moments and when not to go back the way you came in. What it felt like to disappear from the shore like you never existed, like you had no weight in the world. How a boat couldn’t rescue that girl even though there were plenty of boats on the water that afternoon. How there was some delicacy to this, even though it was plenty appalling.

The water is very cold there, even in summer, was what the boss had to say. There’s a current. She put on her red jacket and frowned at herself in the mirror.

I don’t think I like this, Franco, she said. Her hair was rigid as aluminum. She touched it and pushed the sides towards her ears. I don’t think I’m going to tip you today. In fact, I think I’m going to wash it out. She hurried into her bathroom and turned on the taps. She bent over the sink while Franco watched. He stood there staring at her in her red jacket. It was how she had always had her hair done. It was or it wasn’t his fault. Water ran down her shirt and dripped on the floor at her feet.

That’s enough, Franco. That’s all. You can go. He paused. Her checkbook was on the desk. I said you could go now, Franco.

The boss sat on the edge of her bed and asked me if I didn’t think some of this stuff was ridiculous. Like what? I asked. Blowouts?

Oh, most of it. All of it, she said, motioning around the room. The spoils.. She pointed. The chaise longue. A Chinese screen with herons against a white background. A bloated gilt clock and most particularly the contents of a cedar closet that had its own thermostat.

Isn’t it silly, she said. A wine cellar for coats.

She said that I should take it all down to the street and leave it there. Someone would take it away. Someone always did. There’d be jackals before sunrise, after she’d left. You could count on that no matter where you were. It was maybe the one thing in life that was dependable. If there was anything remaining in the morning I was to put it into the dumpster and not leave it for people to trip over. We had to avoid attractive nuisance. And the birds? The boss had a cage of society finches, maybe twenty of them on little wooden perches. She told me to ask Hans to let the birds fly out the front door. Those finches were going to sing regardless, that was their job, even if it was only the males that made any music. The hens were tuneless. Hans would probably be smoking a cigarette in the pantry, his back turned towards the door, and I’d ask him to let those finches free. The boss said that Hans could take a coat for his wife if he wanted to. The black one was probably the best. His wife could wear it to bingo night and tie a scarf over her curlers.

You could auction it at Sotheby’s instead, I suggested. I could call them for you. I could call them and let them take the stuff off her hands. It was more dignified and ladylike. She ran her hand up my arm and stopped at the elbow. When she stopped, she clutched and I could feel her in my muscle.

She said that was what she was trying to avoid. Dignity. Dignity drowned in the river. Her hair was soaking wet and she mashed her straw hat down on top of it and stood up. She draped her red jacket across her shoulders and said it was time to go. I had come on that day. I didn’t want to bother about that reference. I was the one with good penmanship. That always impressed people. They thought you paid good money for something that with that much class. There were engraved note cards with her name inked across the top. I had practiced her signature until it was perfect. I could say that I had worked for her for two years, smoked in bedrooms, and that I was most often honest and reliable. Most of the time. I asked if she didn’t want me to drive with her, ride with her, just a little bit of the way. Not all the way there, but far enough.

The comfortable thing about this ongoing meeting, one thing that might explain its longevity, is that it is conducted completely in silence. Winslow Homer never says anything, ever. He communicates only with his eyes and his hands, and yet he is far from mute. Harry could speak, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. He communicates with Winslow Homer mostly the way Winslow Homer communicates with him, with his eyes and then with a warm nod. It’s far more complicated than the small jolt of excitement you get from recognizing a familiar face on the crosstown bus. What Harry and Winslow have is a legitimately solid friendship, the only important one in Harry’s life. What they have is love.

Winslow, on the other hand, has lots of friends, but the majority of these relationships aren’t nearly so sublime as the one he has with Harry. Children are a bit hesitant about Winslow, for reasons that will shortly become clear, at least in one certain instance. Others can be extremely critical of Winslow, a situation that Harry feels is a clear case of misunderstanding. Harry has defended Winslow and never tires of coming to Winslow’s defense should the occasion arise.

What makes Winslow so special is this quality of immutable comfort Harry finds in his presence. Both Winslow and Harry share the ability to sit in one place for a very long time. Harry has seen other such relationships suffer from a special type of catatonia, especially when new friends are brought into the circle. Occasionally, one friend suffers the stupor of overfamiliarity and must take a break from the friendship or seek out the company of others, but this has never occurred with Harry. No, he and Winslow are in it for the duration.

Harry wears, as is his custom, a brown-checked overcoat that is a size too large for his hunched shoulders, and underneath that the same light-blue collared shirt and green twill trousers that have seen many a bus ride, many a can of soup, many a raise in rent. The grayed thicket of hair near his ears is in need of a trim, but that’s a task for tomorrow. Today, Harry has come to say goodbye.

To this end he has brought a good Shepherd with him, a gentle canine guide who goes by the name of Jupiter. On Saturday, Harry will take Jupiter and move upstate near the Finger Lakes, where his sister has a room reserved especially for him. For years she’s been trying to persuade him to leave the city, more so after his sight started to go and he broke his hip falling in the bathtub. More often that not she calls him stubborn and foolish. A ridiculous old man, is what she said. Harry hasn’t seen his sister in thirty years, but she calls him twice a week, on Sunday afternoons and Thursday evenings, just to remind him that he has a living blood relation, and blood in this case would have to win out over independence and the recalcitrance of a geezer. His sister’s husband had died and there was no real reason in the world that Harry and she shouldn’t share each other’s sunset company.

Harry walks only marginally more steadily with Jupiter by his side. The dog has been something to be learned, yet Harry could find his way to Winslow if he had to walk backwards in a blackout. It’s been that long that Harry knows the exact number of measured steps to take to position himself in front of “The Gulf Stream,” a piece of Winslow Harry can now make out only as a dark, blurry shape. Harry can still construct every detail from memory, though.

“The Gulf Stream” is a particularly violent piece of Winslow Homer’s that depicts a lone sailor in a crippled vessel, lying in a mysteriously complacent pose while the small craft tips towards a sea that rages with angry sharks. His sail is gone, the mast is broken, and the shark nearest his boat has broken from the sea, pectoral fin flipped up. Already, there is blood in the water, fore and aft, with no suggestion of its origin. Had there originally been a companion sailor, one who has fallen overboard and been devoured? Just behind the boat, the light has changed. It’s the special yellow light of peril, like when death arrives before dawn. Or it might just be the calm before a storm, the eye, because behind this scene of ugly and imminent demise is a large waterspout, an oceanic tornado. Any way you look at it, it isn’t a particularly grand death. It’s bloody, all right, and certainly chillingly dramatic, but it isn’t likely to be reported in the newspaper since no bathers were similarly terrorized. There’s more: On the far left horizon, barely visible, is a jaunty three-masted schooner.

The lonely and savage end of the sailor is why small children cover their eyes and ask their mothers if there are sharks in neighborhood swimming pools, and why mothers most often entertain their offspring with the armor collection, which is much more easily related to by a kindergartener. Harry remembers the first time he saw the imperiled sailor. He was in college, far too old to be frightened, although it sent a chill up his spine nonetheless. Occasionally he’d bring a lady friend (he is far too gentlemanly to call any one of them “his woman”) to gauge her reaction, but the lady friends shuddered and were visibly unhappy. They were much more agreeable when planted in front of the avuncular Robert T. Nichol and his owlish pince-nez or the serene Palm Trees at Bordighera. The former made them feel as if they were in the company of a wise and kindly scholar and the latter caused them to silently recall that in their youths they had many an afternoon of gentle Italian dreams.

Harry hasn’t brought a lady friend here in at least a decade. His attempt to introduce any one of them to his steady passion and sheltered redoubt led him to see that he was made of a different energy than most, and when he got too old to be dragged to the dances—the hip!—he was happy that he had nothing to try to explain to another human. The socials, with the senior set creaking arthritically to fifty-year-old tunes, made him feel deteriorated and possibly terrorized. Winslow made him feel alive and safe. “The Gulf Stream” made him feel, for as long as he stood in front of it, just the same way he had felt when he was 22. In Winslow’s company, nothing changed. Even that special smell to a museum, the dampness of history, remained precisely as it always had been. Harry always felt it was a particularly welcoming mold.

It was Harry’s custom to mentally relive the details of the painting before resting his legs at a bench in the Atrium. Depending on the weather, he might enjoy the artwork for an hour or more, in the winter sometimes less due to the ache in the bones. And he’d always time it so that he could take another few moments at the painting just before closing. Here and there he’d bring a sandwich and a Thermos of black coffee and enjoy these in the cafeteria, but now with the dog it was a small burden in need of another free hand.

I wondered if Harry knew that he was sharing Winslow Homer with someone else. My favorite Homer, “Undertow,” was kept in Massachusetts and only made rare appearances elsewhere. “The Gulf Stream” ran a close second to “Undertow,” for thematic reasons. They both concerned the undeniable hazard of the sea, but in “Undertow” there was a definite statement about strong men and weak, Camille-like women that I found both appealing and upsetting. Plus, there was no rescue in the more southerly waters of “The Gulf Stream.” “Undertow” also offered some vaguely comic respite from near-tragedy in the muscleman pose of the savior, while “Gulf Stream” was most of the time just pleasurably hopeless.

No doubt Harry had overheard and witnessed people’s visceral reactions to the shark-infested waters: “Horrible!” “Well, that’s certainly depressing,” “Isn’t the blood a bit of overkill?” and “Where’s Water Lilies?” These types of people would never be able to recall the specific interplay of innocent sun upon water and of shadow upon blood and would be unknowingly all the poorer for it. All they’d remember was the primitive incivility of the marine life.

>”Most people,” Harry suddenly said, “prefer the Egyptians.”

“I don’t.” I came to the Met on Wednesdays myself, probably for precisely the same reason: One didn’t need to talk if one didn’t want to. It was a place, like a library, where silence was respected and perhaps honored as a form of higher communication. In a café, at a bookstore, on the bus, you could end up in a sudden unwanted dialogue about anything under the sun, but not here. Here, you didn’t have to explain yourself, the weather, or whether you knew how to get to the Central Park zoo. No one would interrupt you unless you looked as if you wanted to be interrupted.

“You’ve been visiting the Homers for quite some time now,” Harry observed. “I can tell your perfume, and you’re wearing heels today.”

He motioned for me to stand closer to him, and he looked up, eyes opaque with cataracts. “Why this Homer and not ‘Snap the Whip?’ Everyone likes ‘Snap the Whip,’ don’t they?”

” ‘Snap the Whip’ is too safe,” I answered. “I hate to say it, but sometimes I like an attitude of catastrophe. ‘Snap the Whip’ could only result in a dislocated shoulder at the most.”

“Nothing at risk,” he agreed. “It has a lot of emotion, but no exposure. There’s no interference.”

The way I see it, the sailor in the Gulf is poised between rescue and a second chance at vainglorious death by being sucked up into the waterspout, as if the oceanic cannibals weren’t quite enough on their own. The waterspout is a double-gotcha moment, and the nearly invisible schooner sails along well behind it, almost beyond perception, like it is really just a figment, a threadbare sketched hope. To me, it says that there is always a vague and infinitely abbreviated chance that things will turn out all right. Some people say the schooner was added as an afterthought, for an unlikely happy ending amid all that carnage.

Harry says that the schooner was deliberately added as faintly as it could possibly be; notice how it sits well in back of the funnel of water where it is barely visible to the naked eye. You could pass the painting without ever noticing it. The addition of the boat, he reasons, is nothing short of torture, and makes the painting a whole lot worse than had it never appeared in the first place. That, he says, happily tells you quite a bit about Winslow’s attitude to his buying public. He smiled and held out his thumb and forefinger, yellowed both, to show just how tiny the tiny vessel was.

“Like that.”

Harry says that today he will try to find something new in the painting, because this will be the last time before the work is permanently consigned to memory alone. What is new is not in the deepening shades of bluish-green or the way the water sprays off the flick of a shark’s tail. In Canandaigua, the only water will be fresh and the only fish will be frozen blocks from the supermarket freezer. It’s not in the strangely casual posture of the sailor or the fact that this shark’s dinner has his head turned away from the boiling waters as if the sharks were as dangerous as a pack of yapping teacup poodles or a flock of budgies. Instead, what Harry takes away upstate is that there is quite possibly something else going on here, some reason to be shrug and be nonchalant, if you would only turn your head towards the possibility.

Or, as he said in parting, if you take the sailor’s expression to be a dark scowl, “it very well may be that there is an even better Waterloo off to his left.”

The truth is that I don’t know how my brother became a music publisher or what sort of music he publishes. I only know that one day he called me up and said that he was no longer a music publisher and that he wanted to know if he could stay in my apartment until he straightened some things out. Sure, I said. Stay as long as you like. I owed him some blood, even if I couldn’t say why.

When I said he could stay in my apartment, I meant that he could stay on my couch. I have a small apartment that is made up of two rooms. There’s a smallish bedroom and then another slightly larger room that is both the living room and the kitchen. Each of these rooms has its own window. I got a little nervous, because my brother had never been inside my apartment. He might think it was too small or he might be surprised to find out that I had thought up some rules of conduct that were probably ridiculous; we are both adults and don’t need puerile regulations. Toilet seat, down!

Even so, it probably wasn’t the worst idea in the world to lay down some basic laws. We hadn’t shared space in thirty years and I know that in the interim I had developed some habits or routines that I would like to keep. I didn’t like to use an alarm clock. I didn’t go to work until four in the afternoon. I didn’t like to make a project out of getting out of bed. I liked to make a cup of tea and sit in the living room watching the television like a deaf man. Unless there was a tragedy, I liked to just sit there in silence while I drank the tea. I understood that with Dean sleeping on the couch I’d probably have to give up that particular part of the routine, and I expected that Dean might have to compromise as well. He might, for instance, want to listen to opera. Being in the music business, he might consider listening to music an important part of his agenda, but my building had a strict policy against playing music between the hours of ten at night and nine the following morning. I felt that I could explain this in a simple and effective way, but more than likely it wouldn’t come up at all and if it did I was sure Dean would be the first to say that all buildings had rules like that. It was just for keeping the peace when you lived in such tight surroundings.

I didn’t really expect Dean to be around that much. Even though he said he wasn’t a music publisher any longer, that stuff stays in your blood. He’d probably be spending quite a bit of time over by the sixteen hundred block of Broadway. I don’t know what I expected him to do otherwise. He wasn’t the bus driver.

My mother was excited that Dean was going to stay with me. When I called you could hear the anticipation. She said that Dean would be a good influence on me, but she never said how. Dean took her to the opening night of “Cats” and introduced her to all of the actors and pit musicians. He bought her a cast album and had it autographed. She kept a picture of Dean and herself at this event on top of her piano. If Dean were going to move in with me until whatever things Dean needed to straighten out got straightened out, then it would follow that my life would benefit in some positive way.

I’d been a little bit surprised to hear from Dean. I mostly heard about him from our mother or sometimes from a mutual friend who’d run into Dean eating steak Tartar at Sardi’s. He said Dean had a raw egg cracked over the steak. This friend said that Dean seemed to be very busy and was probably on a business lunch, but that he’d been kind enough to invite the friend to sit down and shoot the shit for a while. I’d always thought of Dean as verbally unarmed.

I thought with Dean around that maybe I could get back on track with my writing. I used to write plays, messy off-off-Broadway things that weren’t very good. I got my characters into a hole and then I’d be unable to get them out of it. I was terrible with dialogue and didn’t understand the simplest of rules: that I wasn’t writing for myself but for the audience.

I may have hated the audience. Most of the time the audiences liked a cheerier ending. I did hate the audience. I don’t know if Dean was even aware that I used to write, and now it had been so long since I had bothered that I felt sick thinking about it again. I got that feeling I used to get when I had an idea for a new play and the idea would make me scratch. It would start out all right, I suppose, and then within half an act it would deteriorate thanks to some bleak situation only I found enthralling. Then I’d spend four months trying to salvage it, fully aware of its inadequacies. The one time I had something produced—in a warehouse with no toilet facilities—the experience had made my bowels so nervous that I didn’t write again for over a year.

I got the impression that Dean had really stuck to what he was doing. That’s how my mother told it, anyway, but I can’t say that I recall any of the songs Dean’s company published. Some of them must have been on the radio or on someone’s living room turntable. I’m not even sure where Dean lived or why he asked to stay with me instead of staying at his summer house in Massachusetts. I’d only seen pictures of it, but it looked like a damn decent arrangement. It sat on some rolling acreage and had a barn and a small apple orchard. The pictures I’d seen had been taken in the fall and the place looked like a postcard. If you looked over a nearby hill, you could see where winter was coming in. That’s the kind of place I’d go if I needed to straighten things out.

Thursday afternoon, someone buzzed from downstairs. I live in a walk-up, up three flights, turn left, down a hallway and that’s me at the end, overlooking the street. I buzzed the guy up; what can you do? He didn’t speak any English and had a hell of a time hefting some metal clothes racks up those stairs, let me tell you. He had to go up and down three times to bring those racks in, and when he finished I felt like I should give him a tip, but instead I offered him a cold beer, which he accepted.

Those racks were the damndest things. I’d never seen anything like them, but I imagined them to be kind of thing you’d find backstage at a theatre with costumes hanging on them, or being rolled across Seventh Avenue in the garment district. They took up most of the living room and eventually I rolled one into the entryway so I could watch television.

I sat on the couch and something on one of the racks that was still in living room caught my eye. At first I thought it might be a skirt, a red velvet skirt, or maybe a tablecloth, but when I took the thing off its hanger it turned out to be a cape, something for the opera or a matador, take your pick. I couldn’t imagine where someone would wear this kind of thing, but I put it on anyway and took the trash down to the garbage chute. There were people in that building who wouldn’t bat an eyelash at that kind of attire. There was a guy on the first floor who moused around in pink ballet slippers that he tied around the ankle. The superintendent had a bulldog that he let eat sandwiches out of his mouth. It was a pretty average building in that respect. To every dog its bone.

Dean showed up later that night with a paper shopping bag clutched to his belly. So, he said to me. What’s going on with you? So it was going to be casual. Just like that. Not much, I said, and I took the bag from him, expecting that it might contain some booze or assorted imported salamis Dean couldn’t do without, but instead it held some neatly folded underwear, toilet paper, and a magazine. He said he had already eaten.

Okay, I said. Okay then. I’ll just go into the bedroom for a minute and let you get comfortable. That isn’t normally what I’d be doing at that time of day. Normally I’d be out taking a walk or frying up some eggs.

After a while I could hear him going into the bathroom, so I stepped back out into the living room and saw that he had arranged his underwear on top of a stereo speaker and had put his watch on the windowsill. He’d folded up his paper bag into a small square and had placed it in the trashcan. I could see a dark stain troubling one of the sofa cushions where Dean had just been lying down. The room smelled of iron ore.

“Are you going anywhere tonight?” he asked when he came out of the bathroom. “Going out?”

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I sometimes go for a walk and maybe grab a six-pack at the corner store, but I don’t really go anywhere, if that’s what you meant. Why?”

“No reason,” he answered. I asked if maybe he needed me to pick something up for him, like a razor or some Scotch tape, but he said he was fine.

“It’s the longest day of the year today,” I said, only because it was topical.

“Look, my stomach is killing me. I think I’ll just lie down and watch the television, if that’s all right with you. I need a vacation.” He was too tall to fit the length of the sofa and had to put his ankles up on the arm. I went back into the bedroom and shut the door. I should have moved the television into the bedroom before he showed up.

It was probably rough going from one neighborhood to another. They all had their stinks and rhythms, and sometimes it wasn’t easy to move from one to another without feeling as if you’d moved to another country. Same thing occurred when you changed a building, which is why I’d been in this one for so long. I imagined that Dean lived somewhere uptown near the park. I thought he might be used to more air and light. He’d definitely be used to more space. It was bound to be different here, no matter where he’d come from, so I took out a piece of paper and made him a little map that showed the coffee shop, the drugstore, and the corner market. If he wanted Chinese, I knew where to get that too.

It felt a little ugly to me. To think that he just showed up like he’d lived here all along, like a roommate. I made a further note that we were out of celery.

Our parents liked to take long trips by car. We spent fourteen, sixteen hours a day driving. We’d sleep in the car and end up in Texas. The heat could kill you. The trip was only fun for the first couple of hours, but then you’d get itchy for a Coke or an ice cream or a piss and you’d start to rustle around in the back with the hot sun splintering the side of your face. My mother said that Dean and I should play a game—any game—make something up. At first we did what everyone else did and tried to spot license plates from different states. When you’d get to a big state like Texas the game would get too predictable. Not like Rhode Island, the state everyone sped through without stopping. In Rhode Island you could at least get five states’ worth of plates, maybe more. But we both liked the idea of game, so we made up something where we’d have to say all of the lower forty-eight states without taking a breath, or at least see who could last the longest. We’d do this in reverse order also, from Wyoming on back. There were lots of other ways to make this game interesting. You could, for instance, say the state names backwards or in pig Latin.

That’s what I was doing, saying the state names in pig Latin and listening to Dean snore on the sofa. When I got to New Mexico I got up and peeked out the door, and I kept doing that all night, every hour or so, because I couldn’t remember how to go to sleep.

Early in the morning, I went past the sofa over to the drain board that stands in for a kitchen and I made a pimiento cheese sandwich on white bread. I wrapped it in Saran wrap and wrote this on an index card: Sorry if it’s soggy. I left both the sandwich and the card on the arm of the sofa that wasn’t propping up Dean’s feet.

By ten, there was a wound where Dean had been lying. This wound was like the body of Christ. It made an impression on the sofa and I believed in it, I sat on it.

There was a knock on the door, a Mr. Williams from the second floor. Mr. Williams said Mr. Williams as if he were the police. He had a coffee cup in his hand, but it was empty. His breath smelled of the black grounds from the bottom of the pot. His tongue was coated in short-pile mustard carpeting.

Is it you who has had the company? he wanted to know.

No, I said. I haven’t had any parties in five years.

I told them it was probably you. I don’t know what it is about you, I can’t put my finger on it, but I know it was you. He had the eyes of a Gaboon viper. I had the hangover of an A-bomb.

Sorry, I said, and shut the door in his face. I was just getting into the bathtub when the buzzer went off again.

We need to have a little talk, this second caller said. About the nature of the crime and the disposition of the body.

The other one standing there, the third caller, said condition of the body. You mean condition. How it was found and in what state and any other relative particulars, like dog hairs or faux Aztec bracelets they sell to tourists on the beach.

I meant disposition, the second replied. Disposal of the body.

It, this third person said, it was found with a hole in its belly. It was gutted like a fish. And we need to talk to you about it; at the very least we need you to formally identify it. We have it at the morgue, but we can’t say where.

Technically speaking, this knife I have is a butter knife. It is good for spreading margarine and pimiento cheese.

I think, the third person continued, standing in what passed for a kitchen, we have some trouble here. Please keep away from the technician who will be collecting the pimiento cheese evidence. He didn’t really say that. He didn’t say pimiento cheese. The technician had recently been promoted to entry-level evidence collector. There would be a salary of between $14.17 and $17.89 per hour, depending on random variables and knowledge of other languages including Spanish, Korean, or Cantonese. You couldn’t just say that you could speak or write in one of those languages. You had to take a test.

There are no laws here, not really, only small requests about toilet seats and arias. There are, however, incontrovertible facts, and he, Dean, my brother, had bled my couch deep red and then had managed to get down the stairs and into a taxi anyway, guts hanging outside his belly like an unbuckled belt or umbilical cord.

This is what I meant about having a play with a cheerless topic. You can only hit a wall and break your face. You can’t take a U-turn at the very end of it. If you could, then Dean was just pissed off after his latest divorce and angry over some lost publishing rights. We’d have shared some potato chips and bored the shit out of each other by talking about the crass commercialization of the Broadway musical. Dean would have cussed out the investors and used strong language to do so. Eventually we’d have wandered down to the bar on the corner to watch the secretaries drive with their high beams on, blinding anyone who dared to look them in the eye. If Dean had stayed around another couple of weeks, we could have gone away for the fourth of July and eaten ice cream on the boardwalk.

They haven’t grown up here. They have grown up without snow, without Christmas trees in Rockefeller Center and the Rockettes and the fierce competition of holiday-themed window displays, but what they have not missed is the very visible fiduciary differences that have them sitting and eating steamed tamales on this stoop or that stoop while taking a break from painting the dining room where one day the King’s smoked sable will be served.

Not that it matters. Right now, today, this is their stoop. It has been their stoop since the low combustion of summer and with any luck it will be their stoop right through the high clouds of Easter. These things take time, or more to the point time can be taken with them. Luis has it all figured out. Gutting and remodeling, plastering and brickwork, has to be the best. Competitive, like the neighbors. Better than the neighbors. Luis takes pride in his work, in his temporary squatting rights, and this is why he sits on the stoop drinking beer long after the day is complete. He has put his sweat here, but not his hope. He knows he is a builder of someone else’s dreams. He takes his time with the cervezas, knowing that by spring he will be nothing but an illegal shadow. Now, though, the house belongs to him.

Last year, he tried his luck in Los Angeles. Everyone goes to Los Angeles first, there is plenty of remodeling and plastering and day jobs taken off the sidewalk. Here, in Manhattan, the weather is worse and no one has a swimming pool. For the past two months they have been sanding and sculpting, this sculpting the repair of some fat bouncy cherubs just that vulgar to stop a pederast in mid-ogle. They are taking their siesta and tamale on the fine autumnal stoop of Mr. Mindich, brownstone owner. Five bedrooms, blah blah, pre-war. There is still enough sun for them to have laborers’ tans, but the sun casts differently in the afternoon, leaving shadows long as fingers.

No one has met Mr. Mindich, although Mr. Mindich’s wife stopped by briefly to complain about a defective granite countertop that was to be installed in the kitchen. “Completely unacceptable,” she said, before asking anyone’s name or making it known that she was the lady of the spread and not just another floating personality from a team of architects and interior decorators and lighting designers. “Who is in charge here?” she frowned, lipgloss smile stretched tight as a rubber band, among all the wrong people and all the wrong clothes.

“Puta,” one of them whispers. There is no other explanation. It doesn’t mean anything really, the same way “cabron” means nothing. Two of them check out her ass, flat in Stella McCartney trousers. Blonde hair, puta.

“I want to know,” she continues, “who brought this granite in. There’s a chip.”

She doesn’t look as if she works for the INS, not with that lizardy purse. They learned that much back in California. That type of purse was usually set on a table in a foyer in Bel-Air like it was a religious icon. INS agents do not live next door to Aaron Spelling. Here, it dangles off the wrist of a right hand, which they understand is simply another way of exhibiting American good taste.

The blonde is very unhappy with their inattention. Three have gone back to squiggling electrical wires underneath the flooring, and another is chewing on a toothpick, revealing a gold tooth.

Luis steps forward. His English is better. He’s the one who started the habit of sitting and drinking beer on the stoop after the day’s work was done, breathing in the life of the building. When summer ended, some went inside to the living room and sat on the floor. It was their brownstone. They’d brutalized its walls and caressed it contours daily for eight weeks and weren’t going to give up command to a woman as thin as a wafer with hair the color of hay.

“Si, is there problem?”

She hadn’t expected to engage in conversation with the workers. Richard should have been here, she was paying him enough to oversee the damn thing. Richard had come highly recommended and had once consulted on, among other things, the renovation of the old Rita Hayworth apartment in the San Remo, below one of its matching, towering architectural nods to the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.

“This,” she pointed out. “There’s a chip, a flaw, in the granite. Right here. It won’t do. Take it back.”

Luis is a practical man. He lives in the Bronx, makes sure his Sunday clothes are clean, throws down a few bucks at Aqueduct, and is the ringleader of the stoop. For two months they have ripped and clawed out what looked pretty fine to begin with to turn it into something better, or really just something more expensive. This is a given. This is understood. A foil-wrapped tamale sits on the bare countertop. She asks that they please not eat inside the house again, because the smell, you know, the smell might get into the walls and remind people that other feet walked the floors and other hands smeared the walls. It’s best to look as if effort weren’t put in, even though everyone from W.59th on up knows that it was enough strain to cause a financial aneurysm.

“Sure, sure, “ he says, laying that accent on extra thick. The granite isn’t his to take back anyway. Taking it back is complicated and there is a chain of command for accomplishing it that starts with the interior designer and ends up in Richard’s lap. It isn’t as if he is going to have to put it in the back of his truck and haul it away, although it might make a nice coffee table with its invisible defect intact. It’s to be double granite. This is the piece that goes underneath. No one would see the chip, but she would know the flaw was there and that isn’t good enough. It would ruin the house. The Americans complicate things, or maybe it’s just the rich ones that do it, finding something wrong with nothing just so they can have something fat to say.

This is what has led to the late afternoons on the stoop and the refusal to give up sovereignty over the house until they have to. It is perfect as a shell. They have discussed this woman’s husband, Charles, the cabron, and imagined him as tall and blonde and pale as a bleached bone. And very, very rich. He won’t step foot in this reconstructed house until the work is done and Richard has given his okay. They will never see Charles in person.

“Hey, la rubia peligrosa!” Luis calls out when I come in hauling yet another bolt of mint-green silk. For today I am Richard’s bolt runner, or that’s what I call it, because no one knows what it means and it could denote something dangerous and fun. Bolt of a gun, bolt of a latch, bolt of fabric. I might be a mercenary, a locksmith, or a person who gets paid eight dollars an hour to drag fabric around to what Richard calls his “appointments.” I hate Richard. I think he’s a dick about that bathroom thing. I think I’m a psychic; I know when the material is not going to look right in its larger application and I know that I am going to fiddlefuck for six hours while this is debated. Not that I have any say or anything. If you ask me, I’d go for sage. Mint is so Sutton Place.

“Is Richard here?” I ask. I have to pee. Richard is nightmare on a bladder and the rule is you can’t use the facilities at the appointments.

“Not yet,” Luis says. Not jet.

The blonde, still fretting over the granite, animates at the sight of the fabric. “Is that my mint moiré?” she asks, and I recognize that hair and the special cadence used on the triple alliteration. I last saw and heard this in 1977, disappearing down a long hallway, wearing a tawny mink and my blue eyeliner. It is, I am horrified to see, Elizabeth Dore, she of the white Cadillac and freshman year nose and tit job. She is still wearing my eyeliner.

My own blonde job—box, drugstore, $6.99—wants to break off at the root, so fried is it in the face of the Diva of Dellplain Hall. That frostbite winter of 1977 I rode a lunch tray down a snow bank outside Liz’s window and the part of my thigh exposed by a rip in my jeans turned purple, then black. For a while, I was Liz’s Gentile pet, someone to soothe the horrors of a bad manicure, to collect her designer jeans from the dry cleaner, to admire her need for animal pelts against the January winds. But most of all I was there to tell Liz that she was beautiful. That was the easiest part of all. She was always nice enough to tell me I had a new zit right in the middle of my forehead. I loved her.

“What are you going to do if you drop out of school?” she had asked me, when I made clear that studying creative writing was killing my desire to create. “Marry a dentist?” She made “dentist” sound like an automotive mechanic. She had shuddered.

I told her I thought I would marry a Polish firefighter, but only because my mother told me that was what I looked like, the Polish firefighter’s wife. This was the only burst of creativity my mother ever had, and the recollection made me feel warm and safe and like I might want to suddenly hug her and announce, “Elizabeth, I’m Suzanne from Dellplain Hall!” but I knew I didn’t speak her language and in the intervening years had become a mute.

She instructed me to place the bolt on a worktable and asked me to have Richard call her about the chip and the fabric, in that order, because neither was going to work, and then she was gone. I’d be back enough times to see the new granite installed double so that the edge could have a loping, curlicue design carved in, and to breathe enough of her air to understand the stoop and how it is so goddamned hard to give it up to its rightful owner without a beautiful, hop-filled battle.

“May I eat that tamale?” I asked Luis.

The jeans cost $65.00, a considerable sum for 1978, and they were only available at Henri Bendel and everyone knew Henri Bendel’s dirty little secret: Nothing larger than an eight. They couldn’t weigh you at the door, however, which was why I was allowed to accompany Day, who was size two, off W. 57th Street and into the series of small boutiques that the larger store comprised. You weren’t chic if you wore larger than an eight, and even an eight was pushing things in some circles. There were monkey-fur jackets and mysterious veiled cloches, the last perhaps more democratic in assuming you also did not possess a fat head. Bianca Jagger shopped at Bendel’s. Girls from Parsippany with New Jersey thighs did not.

Day was infuriated that her mother wouldn’t give her the money for the jeans. Her mother gave her money for nursing school, for taxis, for methadone clinics, for out-of-season crab legs and large tufted ottomans, but not for shiny lilac pants and overdoses. We took her mother to see the jeans as though they were some kind of touring art exhibit that required an advance ticket. Her mother was a Bergdorf’s gal and had been since before the Korean war; she, like my own mother, dreamed of the day her daughter would open her own Bergdorf’s charge in anticipation of purchasing an elegant trousseau. This would follow a nice semi-career in international banking and would precede what mothers annoyingly referred to as a “successful” marriage. Instead, these mothers were given daughters with boyfriends who resembled gnats and daughters who didn’t know that 21 was anything other than a legal drinking age. Not that the musicians who made up the bug collection would have been given entrée to the mothers’ domains; they did, after all, reject suits, personal hygiene, and regular meals. Everyone remembered the drummer who considered wooden toothpicks part of the food pyramid.

The mothers tried to discourage these anemic boyfriends, proclaiming they were “not our sort, dear” and asking sarcastically if the young men had matriculated at Yale or Princeton, all the while knowing the true horror; the daughter was not only shooting dope with the wastrel, but was paying for his portion as well. The hologram jeans were merely confirmation of that pathetic truth. There would be no chiffon party frocks for this daughter, no Cub Room, no press party at Elaine’s. No Ferragamo pumps or Vuitton purses or titular status at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. No future, just like Johnny Rotten predicted.

“Absolutely not,” Mrs. Lewis decreed, when confronted with this obvious sign of imminent catastrophe. “Horrible things. Why do you girls insist on wearing everything so tight?” Moreover, it was understood that Henri Bendel was a bit–to put it nicely–arriviste, all things considered. Despite dating back to the turn of the century, the store did seem to consider spandex proper material for streetwear, and no amount of protestation from Day would change Mrs. Lewis’s mind. “Now, if you told me you needed a blond mink to wear to Pamela Chaldecott’s charity event, that would be a different story.”

“Shit,” Day protested, “It’s the Dead Boys tonight. For fuck’s sake, Mother!”

In a fit of kindness, we had decided to spare Mrs. Lewis the rest of our afternoon waypoints. Instead of biology class, we spent several hours calling the disconnected phones of itinerant songwriters and economically distressed poets. After attempting to score a joint from an unemployed neighbor, we’d head off to the Fiorucci boutique, where the clothes were louder than the New York Dolls. If I wanted to get a thigh into a pair of gold lame jeans, I’d have to give up the later afternoons we spent in a ménage a trois with our shared boyfriend Jack Daniels.

For whatever reason, Day and I never fought over Jack. We fought over junkie artists and English drummers, but not over Jack. We didn’t even mind that Jack’s own idea of fashion was that jocular standby, the brown paper bag. We’d just go and publicly do our thing in the middle of Washington Square Park. The mothers thought, incorrectly, that we were part of the large throng of students going about the business of education and future, and not part of a seedy fringe display that the students smartly ignored.

“I’ll go back on methadone. Tomorrow. Please! I have to have those jeans.” She wanted the pants more than she wanted a fix, at least at that moment.

Mrs. Lewis considered the situation and offered alternatives. She thought we might call Andre at Bonwit’s and do something about that awful orange hair. There were darling winter coats at Saks, some with coordinating scarves. Beige coats were time-honored maternal anodynes, as sure to soothe a mother’s concern as sensible loafers and degrees from Columbia. Anything but leather or these terrible purple pants.

“What about a nice Halston sarong?” she offered. “He did some lovely tropical prints this year.” She held up a length of sheer blue material printed with tropical lilies and knotted it around Day’s waist. “Girls, isn’t this terribly chic?”

The poor mother didn’t realize that her daughter was going to pass out and die on the curb outside a nightclub after tying on something quite different. She didn’t know that people would shrug and walk away when confronted with this commonplace occurrence, or that her daughter had in the past considered overdoses–her own included–to be special badges of honor and the golden key to a chic, perverted club. All of Day’s friends had gotten used to these preterite emergencies being casually interjected into conversations and hoped that she’d stop equating heroin with heroism.

Mrs. Lewis struggled to keep up with these sudden changes in fashion. Town and Country certainly couldn’t be counted on to report these disturbing styles, and while Vogue made certain arch references, at the moment it too seemed to think the trend was best avoided. The New Yorker, on the other hand, recommended that its readership patronize the establishments where the fad had its genesis. Furthermore, there seemed to be an accompanying soundtrack, which the New Yorker also recommended. Highly.

“Absolutely not,” she said, not realizing that repudiating the hologram jeans also meant repudiating her daughter with an ad hominem indictment that would cause Day to seek out not only those skeletal downtown musicians who couldn’t afford underwear or penicillin but also that outer element who supplied the musicians with the roughest, cheapest palliatives.

Mrs. Lewis had missed that the jeans represented an important step away from the black spandex that we had formerly considered le dernier cri of punk fashion. We had intended to take the purple denim out to Studio 54, not that Studio 54 was much of an improvement, drug-wise. Still, it was a place that Mrs. Lewis had at least heard about, and Vogue felt safe covering it as both a social and a fashion phenomenon. And since there was such a clamor outside the door Mrs. Lewis could feel the safety of numbers, unlike the sparse and criminal headcount Mrs. Lewis supposed would people the dingy downtown punk clubs. She didn’t apprehend that black spandex was outer borough now, and hardly likely to get you admitted to much more than a Brooklyn disco. The hologram jeans, on the other hand, were new and eye-catching, especially when lit from a certain angle. Those jeans spelled upward social mobility, but this was just too difficult to explain. They were a metaphor, the unvoiced difference between uptown and downtown. We might even have struggled to explain it ourselves, had anyone cared to ask. That’s what music was for, and Mrs. Lewis had the driver put on a classical station.

Later on, when Day went blue, Mrs. Lewis wondered about those jeans and asked herself if they really would have made that much of a difference. Yeah, I thought. They would have. Maybe. Maybe there would have been better quality control, better quality dope. Uptown, they used baby laxative; it was so much chicer than rat poison. You couldn’t tell, though. It wasn’t that often that fabric was the difference between life and death.

Some complained that their bag did not contain a sample of the latest absinthe scent, the one with a sprig of lavender spiked clear through the heart. Who cared if it smelled masculine or like gin dregs at last call? The point was to say that you had smelled it—been there, sniffed that—before anyone else, and not to claim an affinity for smelling like the bottom of the Bowery.

“Aren’t you going to have a lookie in your bag?” the organizer asked. She was petite, I was Amazon-ish, she was a brunette and I had black roots. She made me wonder why petite women—brunettes especially–are never at a loss for gumption and drive and do quite well for themselves in public relations and marketing. Exactly the opposite of what I do, categorically speaking. She took the bag from my hands, breaking the paper handle, and spilled the bag’s contents out onto the counter at Barney’s, chiding me for not realizing that I had somehow miraculously come across a sample of La Mer skin foundation, lotion style, color deathwatch. “The others didn’t get that, I don’t think. Hmmm. Paula, do you have a sample of the La Mer lotion foundation? Renee? May I have a show of hands for those who have a sample of La Mer lotion foundation in their gift bags?”

There is a simple premise behind this cosmetic rodeo: We are assembled one and all to partake of special olfactory events (personal appearances, bottle signings, atomizer huffings, and secretive, closed-door shopping hours that must aggravate the hell out of the shopkeepers, who endure it with forced good cheer and tight grimaces) offered through various Web forums dedicated to the discussion of things scented and potentially repellent. There are candles, eau de toilette, sachets, incense, and silky panty powders. Not a Glade Plug-In air freshener in sight. We are vain, middle-aged, overweight, flat-footed, and largely secretarial by occupation. We are invisible, but we stink good.

The only life we have is the one we can smell. The redhead with the panty-powder purchase lumbers over and asks if I’m married. “No,” I say. “Good,” she chirps. “We have some common ground.” She spends five minutes outlining the many benefits of the panty powder, not the least of which is to cover up funk in case of a lack of shower facilities after a blistering date. She shadows me on the way to the West Village, where we are going to crowd into the small Aedes shop on Christopher Street. Many of the women call this shop “Eeds” and are politely corrected. The men who run the shop are German and very, very kind, although with a thin brutality that would surface like a fin if the waters were too grandly disturbed. These men are elegant and sleek; the perfume fanatics are dressed in polyester and sweat. Several break out copies of Perfumes of the World, the most recently released edition, and waft dramatically about the conjunction of wine and scent that has led to the shared official descriptions of rubber, tar, wet wool, wet dog, and cat urine. The perfume book even has a little colored wheel like the wine wheel developed by the vinology program at the University of California at Davis. Neat. The shopkeepers are accommodating about the subsequent interrogations and even have wine on hand in little plastic flutes. You can learn about grace here, even when your arse threatens to overturn a delicate display.

My red shadow asks if I have purchased a bottle of the scent that perfumes the rooms at the Hotel Costes in Paris, and whether I know if there are matching soaps available. “I’m having a soapy incense month,” she confides. Personally, I am in a strange vanilla month in which I insist on smelling like a patisserie, and a cheap one at that, a common bakery, or perhaps even a plastic brioche. Someone had pointed that out earlier. It’s not the first time I’ve had something pointed out to me: You smell like burnt leaves and Grade-C maple syrup. Do you want to smell like that?

“If you buy that Costes, I want a decant of it,” the shadow whispers. I quickly toss up some rough figures in my head: If I purchase a 1.7 ounce bottle of this perfume I am reconnoitering out of the desire to appear involved and nasally stimulated, I will spend somewhere in the vicinity of $70.00 and probably not get any free samples, because I am loath to ask for them. I’ve worked a perfume counter in my day and was fired for giving away too many samples without immediate mega-purchase. Both the customers and the management hated me. I stank. I cannot sell three thousand dollars’ worth of perfume on a weekend. I will have to share at least 10 milliliters of the bottle with my newly acquired companion, who has smartly brought along some empty atomizer bottles for this exact purpose. And then her friend from the makeup forum will want some, and twenty minutes later I’ll end up with 20 milliliters for myself—less than half the bottle—and a sample vial of Paris Hilton, which is not hot at all.

We have lunch at a Swedish restaurant where everyone takes out all of their purchases and participates in a round-robin distribution and an informative presentation by the maker of what I will forever after refer to as Dung Ho perfume (chocolate, jasmine, gym sock and dreadful animalic) and I am forced to give up my sample of the La Mer lotion foundation to the organizer, and when we disperse I realize I have purchased nothing, want nothing, and can’t afford anything to begin with. It has been a very productive day, and I reek magnificently of day-old bread and the sweet toxin of wanting what you aren’t stamped out to buy.