He arrived early, by almost half an hour, because he could and because part of the treat of the evening was to sit alone by the window at the top end of the bar, in the brightness of a late summer afternoon, and watch the people pass outside, and have a couple of drinks.

And he proceeded to have his couple of drinks: Wild Turkey on the rocks, in fact; and he bummed a cigarette from a shy, nervous, acne-scarred, gay man near him and the cigarette was luxuriously good with the whiskey; and though he’d aged (he was 43 and, what else, rising) and had gotten fat, he was still enough of a what — a mensch, perhaps? — that it was clear the brief conversation from the gay man’s side had not been unwelcome; and so he felt beneficent.

The bar was pleasant but crowded, one of those old places in the West Village where the last remaining working class men of the waterfront still felt comfortable enough to drink at the bar while the young and the prosperous and the profoundly underemployed came and went loudly all around them. It was called, with appropriate invisibility, the Corner Bistro.

These days Ralph and Alex saw each other only two or three times a year, usually at a literary gathering of one kind or another, when Ralph ducked away from his real life of demanding job and what he pleased himself to think of as wonderful children (because they were wonderful children, after all) and the endless stream of homework and housework and writing late in the night. On these rare occasions he ventured out to see the changing but unchanging faces of the New York publishing community, as he had done tonight — only tonight was different. It was one of those weeks in summer when his family was out of town and he was at loose ends. He was near the end of a novel he had been working on (he hated to admit the number) for nine years, and normally should have stayed home doing it, but tonight was a travel night, to join the family for a long weekend, and he was merely lingering for a couple of extra hours for one of these parties, thrown by the magazine.

- – -

Alex traveled in this world much more than he; Alex ran a small magazine of his own and had published two books, one very recently, and had remained a bachelor, a figure of growing reputation and notorious good looks. Ralph and Alex had known each other for a decade or more and they retained that comfort between them of instant familiarity. Ralph was Irish Catholic and had been raised in the suburbs; Alex was Jewish and ten years younger and had grown up on the Upper West Side; but despite the differences in age and upbringing they seemed to have been issued at birth similar formulas for seeing the world, a highly sociable mixture of melancholy, sarcasm, and affection.

And of course Alex, who lived a few doors away, was late; and arrived with the self-conscious air of rumpled disregard for society and appearances that, despite its self-consciousness, actually had taken hold as an integral part of his beauty.

“Is it really 7:25?” Alex said. He was looking with exaggerated shock at the clock over the bar. He was supposed to have been there at seven.

“I have twenty after,” said one of the old men behind Ralph.

“And I have seven-sixteen,” Ralph said, looking at the little four- dollar digital thing that he carried around. “Time moves backward at the Corner Bistro?. I’ve been waiting here since 1934, actually, but I’m younger now than when I started. Go figure.”

“How’ve you been?” Alex said, putting himself down on a stool.

“I’ve been fine.”

“You look good.”

“That’s a lie,” Ralph said. “What’s keeping you so busy these days? Every time I e-mail you or leave you a message I keep thinking I’m reaching into the maelstrom.”

“I keep as many fires burning as possible,” Alex said. “It fends off having to think.”

“Sounds expensive,” Ralph said.

“Oh it is. Absolutely,” Alex said. “In fact I was thinking, I should write a piece on how a hundred thousand a year not only isn’t enough for a family in New York, it’s not even enough for a bachelor. I’ll be a pariah.”

He was referring to a piece that Ralph had written a few years before, that landed him on television and made him the object of many denunciations. This led them to talk about money for a while, in the usual abstract ways, and about the financing for Alex’s magazine; money was a subject you could rely on in New York, a real fencepost for leaning during long conversations, though from such discussions one never learned a thing.

“You mean you’ve never met her?” Alex said.

“Not in person,” Ralph said. “I’ve talked with her on the phone. I’ve e-mailed her. We do a lot of e-mail.” Jessie did all the research and copy editing of Ralph’s monthly book pieces, and they had now had a long-running correspondence on a variety of topics, an exchange that of late had expanded (he knew but was not yet admitting that he knew) into realms of the dangerously personal. She had a modern-educated voice, which was to say he heard both culture and privilege in it — two attributes that when he’d been young had been merged seamlessly together in the voices of those who had been given them, but that now one almost always heard as distinct and competing influences. In the contest, privilege usually won, but it didn’t sound to him necessarily as if it would in hers, which was part of what he’d grown to like and respect about her. She had self-confidence, he discovered over time, and she had good taste, and she showed a kind of enthusiasm for ideas that didn’t go with the scenery of the New York publishing world. She had not yet picked up its expensive, super-scheduled world-weariness, its vulgarity, or, so far as he could tell, its distinctly off-center, flickering hungers; her ambitions seemed to be of a worthy kind. She presented a mind that yearned for knowledge; improbably, it might even have yearned for wisdom — counter to the times and certainly to the milieu.

And so in his way, vaguely but not altogether paternal, didactic, tentative but, he also knew, insinuating (like a Henry James character, an older American distant relation, the narrator) he had taken her up, and read her work, and given her things to read as well. She was grateful to him for his attention; it turned out that she was not a woman short of men’s attention but she had been short of the right kind, or of this kind in any case, and the quality of his was what he had to offer, that and nothing else. It cost him nothing, it came easily to him, it blended with his passions and, unquestionably, it fed his vanity and his soft messianic tendencies; yet, for all that his paying of attention did for him, he also enjoyed believing it did something for others, that the men and women who had accepted it from him in his life had known a certain value. His wife had taken it and made good use of it for almost a quarter of a century, since they had been, he knew now, children. She was accustomed to it; and he wondered with the usual boring and mild resentment that builds in marriage whether she even recognized it as exceptional anymore, or noticed it at all.

The young lady had reached the door. “She’s got a lot on her plate tonight,” Ralph leaned forward and said. “She’s fitting us in.”

“Kind of her,” said Alex. Ralph looked at him with an arched eyebrow. “I mean it,” Alex said.

She came inside then, and stood before them proud and nervous. He was shocked to discover that he could barely look at her: he had with ease been dealing with this woman for more than a year, writing her quite a bit in recent weeks on all sorts of topics, enjoying himself; he thought of himself as fearless and had earned the right to, it was one of his few strengths, real butt-hard nerve in the face of failure, humiliation, poverty, violence or worse. But — he could barely look at this woman. And bare, alas, was one of the operative words. She was showing a lot of skin and it was very beautiful skin, arms and shoulders and collar and chest and muscled neck, and he hadn’t been sleeping and he was very, very tired; too tired to brace himself into the relaxed pose of the accomplished and sexually mature older man; too tired coolly to withstand it. It was not arousal he had to contend with — he had contended with that every day since he’d been thirteen and it was as familiar to him now as his own belly and language and aching feet — no, it was the instant sense of fatigue he felt on looking at her, and the distant echoes of his predictable early failures in courtship and in sex. All of her — no, of course not all of her, but enough of her — the golden hair and skin, the cell phone and lipstick and cigarette, the black tube top and tan petal pushers, the lovely shoes and the slight tremble around her, like the shimmer of light viewed through rising heat — said trouble; trouble that had been cultivated with a knowing eye; trouble as a kind of personal philosophy, half humorous and half lethal * and she might, just might, grow out of it by the time she turned seventy. Was he really so far beyond having the strength for such things? He had married a woman like that; she rocked and she rolled; she had no settings below “intense” and she had, he liked to think, kept him alive and awake and at arms length from the world of gloom and death that would otherwise have been his habitat. Suddenly he wasn’t up to it anymore: that’s what this young woman made him feel. He tried to watch her eyes, which were a backlit, peacock blue, but found that looking into them was like staring through the windows of a burning house. “The fire burns as the novel taught it how,” was a line in a poem he’d passed along to her and another editor at the magazine at one point (they all shared a liking for Stevens, they discovered one day), and now here it was again, art come back to burn life onto itself, and onto him. It singed him.

She knew them both by sight, presumably from their pictures, which had been at one time or another in the magazine. “I decided to be late,” she said — she was quite late — “so you two could bond.”

“We don’t need to bond,” Ralph said. “We bonded fucking years ago. They had to use a solvent to get us apart. Jessie, this is Alex Peterman, Alex, this is Jessica Traut.” She took Alex’s long hand and held it before her momentarily and made a small move with her body that hinted at a curtsy, he had to smile to see it.

“Alex barely just got here himself,” Ralph said. “I was virtually stood up.”

“The great thing about this whole arrangement was that you knew at least one of us would show up,” Alex said.

They were both facing him then. Her mouth gave her face a look of permanent sardonic amusement, so that her smile, when it came, was a surprise, the delicate back of a tough-looking leaf. “Oh, no,” she said. “He knew both of us would show up.”

“Sure, sure,” Ralph said. “What are you having?”

She wanted some damn complicated thing — Alex seemed to know what it was, one of the benefits of being a man about town — that the bartender not only didn’t have, but clearly had never heard of; and then she asked for Guinness but they had only cans, which he thoroughly agreed with rejecting; so she settled for a vodka and soda. Ketel One it had to be. At least it wasn’t Absolut.

“You have very precise drink ideas,” Ralph said to her, handing the drink from the bar, over someone’s shoulder, toward the window where she and Alex were standing. “That’s good.”

“Why is that good?” she said. “It’s mostly a pain.”

“It means you’re a serious drinker,” he said. “One likes to see that in a young lady today.” They clinked glasses. He accidentally swished a little of his out and it spilled near her foot. He looked down to see if he’d hit her.

“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt my foot,” she said.

“You know,” Ralph said, looking up again, “I’ve been commuting by public conveyance all summer– ” he worked and taught at a university outside the city “–and because of the shoe fashions I’m seeing at minimum a thousand toes a day. It’s the Summer of A Thousand Toes.”

Alex swallowed his drink; he had a long neck and the Adam’s apple slid up and down like the counterweight on a doctor’s scale. He was looking off down the bar. “It has,” he said with placid thoughtfulness, like a farmer talking weather. “It’s been a very footy summer.” This made Ralph laugh and he spilled a little of his drink again; again it was near Jessie’s foot.

“You might think about getting some Totes,” Alex said to her.

“Shut the fuck up,” Ralph said.

She began telling Alex about people they knew in common, mostly, Ralph gathered, sensitive, unreliable body-pierced guys who on and off worked for Alex at the growing kingdom of his small magazine. (Ralph had an image, suddenly, of a gaunt, unwashed young man, walking into a body piercing shop — where? on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey? — and ordering up rusty spikes for his wrists and feet, and a lance for his side.) The young people and Alex were going to be launching a website very soon; Alex was outlining the basic premises.

Ralph half listened, drank his drink, stole one of her cigarettes, watched. And watching her, Ralph knew one thing… No, he knew two things, or three. Actually, it was a thousand. First (one always had to settle this question in one’s mind with a good-looking woman), he was not and never would have been the kind of man such a woman would be interested in; she was not interested in older men in any case; and even if he had been exactly her age, he would have been an older man, as it had always been in his nature to be forty. Her agenda of pleasure was clearly athletic and geographically wide and she was interested (he guessed) in rather sporty men who could keep up with her. If she had been one of those young women who openly pursued older men, women he invariably thought of as calculating, or at least misguidedly ambitious, he was not the right kind: he was very accomplished at this point in his life, a fact known to certain people in his field, like Alex; but had neither the money nor the standing to compensate for his age, for his marital status, or for his appearance.

More than that, he also knew something else: he himself was not interested. Or, he thought, to be more accurate, he was nothing more than interested. He and his wife — his wife of whom he still often thought with a small internal tremor of longing and desire — he and his wife were at this moment halfway across the river they’d been given to breach; they were up to their necks in hard current, in other words, with three children on their backs, and he understood, with an added, silvery light suddenly cast on the scene, that it was not a moment when he wanted to make any new fucking discoveries. Not when it meant — and invariably it would mean this — that the people he actually loved would be whisked off shrieking downstream.

Yet, that feeling he’d had when he saw her, it was like a little piece, of what? Masculinity vanity? Something just slightly more precious than that? Whatever it was, it fell to the floor of the bar at that moment like a loose lens from an old man’s cloudy eyeglasses and was crunched underfoot before anyone could retrieve it. Here it was in all its glory, the tragi-comic fucking midlife bullshit he’d always heard about… Well, it sucked was all he could say. It sucked inherently, like surgery sucked, and it sucked further than that: it sucked in its attendant meanings, it sucked that he, of all people, enlightened with hard-won self-knowledge, bloated with it in fact, a man who along with a few close friends stood — it was his great pleasure to think, especially after two drinks, or now he was just onto three — as a moral beacon in a corrupt world; it sucked to know at that instant that, even if it were it only for an evening, he would have to endure this, would have to be made foolish and ridiculous by it in his own eyes. He had a very high opinion of himself and this was an insult.

But they talked; they had to talk, after all, they weren’t all about to stand and stare at each other in glum silence. So Ralph told them of his walk down to the Village from Penn Station along Eighth Avenue, and of the assessing eyes of the gay men all along the way, and how amused he felt by it and how oddly confirmed, by frank sexual assessments that ranged from the mildly negative to the surprisingly positive with many stops in between; it made him feel, rare for him on the streets, as if he was being viewed as a living, breathing, sexually-active being. They talked then in comparison, about how men looked at women, about how women looked at women (the cruelest of all assessments, the two men believed, but she didn’t think so), and then two children slipped past them at the bar, followed by their father, to sit in the corner, which was empty; it was that kind of place, open to all comers; he helped the little girl up onto a stool. “Ralph is very experienced with children,” Alex said and she said quietly, “I know.” In this intensely crowded place, an absolutely grown-up place, with how many gallons of whiskey stained into the floor over the years, the two little children, a boy perhaps five and a girl no more than seven, showed that amazing courage that children display when they have no choice. Ralph was moved by it, and, as he made way for them and helped them up, he gestured to them by face and body and voice, in ways he knew they could take in, that this immense smoky crowd was actually safe and that their special status as children would be recognized and respected.

“So,” Jessie said. “What about you? Did you like any of the men? Encourage any of them?”

“Not a one,” Ralph said. Alex and she offered some cat calls on this. “Denial, denial, ” she said.

“I don’t like the whole Chelsea thing,” Ralph said, “They all look like Michael Medved, except with too much drug use in their pasts.”

“So what’s your type, then?” she said.

Ralph thought about it. “Brad Pitt,” he said. “Now there’s a guy you could tolerate seeing lying around the house scratching his balls.”

“Amen,” she said.

“Maybe he brings Jennifer Aniston to the relationship,” Alex said. “That could get interesting.”

“She could be the houseboy,” Ralph said. “She’d do the shopping and hang around scantily clad dealing with, like, all the recycling, you know, paper, plastics, metals.”

Long married and parental, Ralph was the rabbi’s wife in this trio; he had brought them together in an amusing little piece of matchmaking, to flirt; and they did flirt; but then, ominously, they kind of stopped, he noticed, or did so in ever more tentative little salvos. Being the matchmaker, he suddenly was able to see Alex as Jessie must see him; not merely good-looking but, to put it in a woman’s kind of word, scrumptious: tall , warm, smart, funny, self-deprecating, and highly unattainable. He’d been with some very serious women in his time, she must sense, or even know, and he was with one currently. Still, she had some tools, Ralph thought; she was good, it certainly wasn’t out of the question. Their slight, growing nervousness felt a little potent. And it occurred to him, with a jolt of surprise, that if these two actually hooked up his heart would give off a quick flame of jealousy — which was not the surprise; he was accustomed to that, he felt like that whenever anyone he knew got laid; the surprise was that he was uncertain suddenly which one he would be jealous of, or for, or about; he couldn’t even nail down the damn preposition.

Well, this was a brand new piece of self-knowledge he had suddenly to deal with, like the first time a woman slaps you. (Knowledge of himself was the problem: he would be sufficiently poisoned by it the next day that at one point his wife would look at his face and say, “What happened to you last night? Were you rejected?” And he would say, “I’m sure I was, but I didn’t think to check.”)

- – -

After Brad Pitt played himself out, Jessie went off to the ladies room, announcing that on her return they would have to go to this party because various people were actually waiting for her there. She turned and departed practically at a sprint; she did things quickly. Alex watched her until she disappeared. Then he looked at Ralph.

“So — you’ve never seen her before?”

“No. I had a feeling she’d be a knockout.”

Alex made a face, pulled his head back.

“What?” Ralph said. “You don’t think she’s–”

“Oh, don’t worry, she’s a knockout, she’s a lot more than a knockout,” Alex said. They were staring out the window again. “All I can say is, you show admirable restraint.”

Ralph wasn’t certain he’d shown enough restraint at all; Alex could see only the restraint that was left. Restraint was the air he breathed. Restraint made life possible. He thought again of his family and the river.

“That’s like saying the people who don’t use nuclear weapons every day show admirable restraint,” he finally said.

“They do, they do,” Alex said. “I admire them too.” They finished their drinks, and stood, like two rumpled gentlemen, as she returned to them.

- – -

She and Ralph took a cab to the party; Alex was going as he did everywhere, on his bicycle. In the back seat, each at a far end, Ralph said to her, “So, are you recovering from your day?” She had juggled about three hundred things that day, she’d told them, finishing up at work in the largest sense of finishing up, since the magazine was closing, kaput — that’s what this party was for, what gave the night it’s feeling of apocalypse — so this had been her last day, plus she’d been doing all the arranging for a long weekend to Nantucket with four young men, a trip on which she planned to depart at one in the morning, with the four men, what, in tow? Or was she in tow? It was part of her appeal, he guessed, that he would never know which, although if it was she that was in tow, he had to give at least one of these guys credit because this one would take some real towing.

“Oh, I still have to go see this drug dealer tonight,” she said quietly.

He looked at her. “You’re the one who has to score the weed for the trip, tonight?” he said.

“It’s not weed,” she said, “it’s …” but she was whispering now and he couldn’t hear her.

“It’s what?”

“Ecstasy,” she whispered it again. She had the most remarkable look on her face, fear squelched by defiance, as if she thought someone — specifically Ralph, as he was the only one there — was going to hit her, and she was going to be ready to take it. It caused him to shift himself even farther away. Another gesture of safety.

“Ohhhh, ex-stacy,” he said. “In Nantucket. Hmmm. Rave in the waves, you can call it.” A song came back to him, some mighty guitar anthem, what? Nantucket Sleighride… it was a heroin song, or a coke song, a celebration of some drug, he couldn’t remember.

She was backed into the corner of the cab with that semi-frightened look still on; it was mixed, though, with the other look she’d had all night of amusement; she was pleased by disobedience, he thought; he wondered who she was disobeying. Earlier that day he had glanced down at a picture that had turned up recently and that he’d left on his desk at work; it was of himself at five years old, and at the moment of seeing it — he had been reaching for the phone — he remembered the line of Flannery O’Connor’s, from “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” when the grandmother looks into the Misfit’s face and says, “Why you’re one of my babies… You’re one of my own children,” at which point, the Misfit, furious, shoots her. He saw himself at five that way because he did look in fact like his own children and because he’d been wounded then, deeply, and though he couldn’t remember what he had thought then or how he had felt, in this picture that wound showed clearly in his face (he could see it there in the picture as directly and immediately as he could see his own children’s pain), and right now, with Jessie looking at him that way — twenty-three going on twelve — the same feeling came over him and the same words, “one of my own children,” unspoken but palpable, rose in his throat. His children often did what she’d just done, dashed into crime with defiance and fear and wonder, and, because they felt safe with him, with a deeper pleasure, pleasure with themselves and their daring. He wanted to tell her that the stakes were rising, she was a child no longer; or he just wanted to whisper, oh, be careful Jess, but he said nothing. It occurred to him later (the thought gave away his age) that he should probably have offered to go with her, an amusing notion: You don’t let a lady visit her drug dealer alone.

The party was at a forgettable restaurant in Tribeca, nicely expensive looking and fashionably Asian. It was all pleasant, unnecessary, and free. There was an editor there he’d worked with more than the others, a warm and funny man, it was nice to see him (“Stop hitting on my staff,” he called out from the bar when Ralph walked in with Jessie; “Your ex-staff,” Jessie said, and bolted for the corner) and Alex was around, which comforted him. Alex had not intended to go the party, Ralph knew, and so must have done so to follow either him or Jessie; but now they all avoided each other. Ralph holed up with the editor for a while, who, it turned out, said he had enough money stashed away to live “for three years”, a numbing and, in some distant little hole of his resentment closet, infuriating concept to Ralph, who barely had enough money to get uptown. He met an older writer, much respected in the magazine trade, who had taken a highly commercial job and made some very internet IPO kind of money over the last three years, and looked like the boy who’d been forced to sit before the bowl of porridge from morning to afternoon — as if he were finally getting ready to have this arrangement of his life begin to appeal to him.

Other women he saw and spoke with that night struck him either as stupid, cynical or depraved — well there was one who was intelligently gracious and possibly nice but she wore a kind of high-fashion raincoat thing all evening, well cinched at the waist, over bare legs and high heels, and as it was a summer night and they were indoors, it had a feeling about it of Audrey-Hepburn-goes-flasher, and she was altogether too voluble and active for this late in the evening, at this late date in his life. By the time the party was well along he had joined the stupid. He would have preferred to be on the other side but he never could get himself there. He drank too much for one thing, always a sign of sentimentality run amok… He was not capable of cynicism, though some people thought he very much was; nor was he depraved, though he heartily — too heartily — approved of it: he had spent some fruitless hours of his life in a supplicant’s relationship to depravity, kneeling before it, tossing offerings down into the swirl of lava and smoke and flames; he was davening at the rim of that hole again tonight. Afterward he always ended up back home, doing something ordinary, making a pot of rice.

And so he would again. Jessie, on the other hand, would be traveling to South America shortly, now that the magazine was finished, where her sister, an anthropologist, was on a dig. She would be stopping at Machu Piccu in Peru, she was telling someone this, in the darkness Ralph didn’t even take in who it was as he walked up to them, a small and somehow weary-looking woman being his only sense. Jessie was saying that Machu Piccu, with its soul-shattering views, had been a holy place, and he said, suddenly interrupting, “Well, maybe you’ll have an experience like Eliot did. One of the Four Quartets is about him being at a place where prayer has been valid.” It was a drunken thing to say.

“Exactly,” she said. She was a little drunk too now, he realized. “The women who lived there were holy women, they spent their whole lives apart, meditating and making sacrifices on behalf of the people.”

“May it not happen to you,” he said.

“May something happen to me,” she said quietly.

“Something will,” he said. “It always does.”

“Your friends are all going downstairs to smoke,” she said.

“Ah,” he said, and followed them out. Alex was outside with Francis, the editor, and another young editor named Lawrence, and off to the side some of the women. The men were warm to him and handed him the joint as he walked up. Alex was not unused to seeing him this way, passionate and lost. They stood on the sidewalk smoking the joint and joking; eventually more of them came down, Jessie among them. He checked his watch. Time was coming for him to go, to catch ‘the last bus out’ as he had taken to calling it; he wanted to be early, he wanted there to be no chance of missing it, none; no chance of opening a chasm of time and doubt in his life, a lost night, which this would become if he didn’t get on that bus; so he went up for his bag and descended again and said goodbye to the men and was confused for a moment about which way was east and which west until they pointed him off in the right direction, and away he went, a rotund middle class Chaplin figure with his bag, toddling off drunk. He remembered her then, as he was walking away. He was going home. He was, with a great sense of relief, only thinking of that, of going home, and so had forgotten for a moment all the lovely turmoil of youth. He looked back, and there she was — under the silver streetlight, against the brick wall, her eyes still burning; she was literally surrounded, almost penned in by people and chatter and smoke; she stood at the center of them and either they were her audience or they were a group of hungry primates, wanting to pick her bones clean, but whichever it was, he thought with a bit of affection, she can handle it.

He got himself a cab on the avenue and felt the exhaustion begin to overwhelm him. He hadn’t been able to sleep — for days, for weeks it seemed, always a problem when his wife was away but now worse. Something was working on him these days, some slow enormous transformation. His accommodations of his age, his circumstances, his successes and failures, all of it was occupying his mid section; he was like a snake in the first hours after swallowing a gopher. And this was when snakes slept, no? — but he could not, not until now, in the swaying taxi, when he began to fall under, aided by too much whiskey and a bit of weed. He was on his way out of town — get out of town! — to a little house in the Pennsylvania countryside, or what had been countryside until recently, when the boom time finally reached it. Something wrong with this gopher, he thought, it was a terrible fucking gopher — This gopher sucks! and he must have said it too, because the driver leaned back and said, “What sir? What did you say?” Ralph just waved his hand, “Nothing…” and put his head back onto the vinyl seat.

He would wake up in the morning with the arms of an eight-year-old boy around his neck and the lips of the boy on his cheek, the youngest of his children, one of the beautiful in the world. “I missed you, Daddy,” his son would say in a cheerful, utterly-not-hungover tone of voice. “Do you want to say hi to doggy?” Doggy was a favorite stuffed animal. This boy would need his own phone, hell, he’d need his own apartment, by the time he was fourteen? And he would wake this morning too with his wife’s legs entwined with his – legs rounder than they had been in youth but with a strong, fine shape and smooth skin that still drew his hands, his mouth, his body to hers, that body which despite pain and disappointment and betrayal and fatigue still answered him. And through the quiet day with them, his family – or through most it, anyway, when no one was fighting or hungry or wounded in play – the time would be full of jokes and stories and little errands and walks, some good cd’s from the library, and a couple of mighty embraces, including one in which his wife would turn to him with a sexy kiss, and as he leaned into it, would drop an ice cube down his shirt, making the children laugh. Through all this he would know the force that Hopkins said charged the world – god’s grandeur – and know too a small piece of what that grandeur stood upon, the inevitable, hard ground of mercy and love.

But that would be tomorrow; for now he slept.

Madame: In Re: the difference between ‘booty call’ and ‘fuck buddy,’ despite the alliterative pairing and their shared concern with fucking, the two phrases are ontologically different, the main distinction being that one is an incident or event while the other is a category of modern relationship.

“Booty call” is a mid- 80s expression, from a hip-hop-beeper-and-baggies-hat-and-colors world, what we white media guys would call an ‘urban black community expression’, meaning you hang all night getting fucked up with the your male friends enjoying yourself, laughing, no stress (no women in other words), comparing sneakers, timbs, huge jackets, and when bedtime rolls around you call your girlfriend, or your occasional squeeze, or some chick who has the hots for you, or whatever, and head over there or, better yet, have her come to you, for flesh and moisture and warmth. (The ‘booty’ is a female ass, but I assume you know that; I merely state it for the record.) It’s utterly a male-oriented concept, in that the name and the desirability both involve not having to spend ANY social/emotional/intellectual/spiritual time with the lady whatsoever and not even having to fake a willingness to do so. Paradise, no? Nowadays you can use ‘booty call’ in a context where there’s a real relationship going on, you and the S.O. are out doing separate things, and decide when you’re talking at one a.m. that one of you is going over to the other’s place because why not… this could with ironic amusement be categorized as a ‘booty call,’ but it isn’t and you both know it isn’t.

“Fuck buddy” is more a Clinton-era, white people, Wesleyan dorm sort of phrase. Picture semi-androgynous young professional-class whites, who were very early into mp3s and text messaging, and whose parents’ marriages and subsequent relationships were so grotesquely bad that they, the kids, have no interest whatsoever in having, or ability to have, a romantic relationship. Sex being what it is, i.e., necessary (as is love but they’ll never use THAT word even though they seek it in a leg-shackled sort of way), such folks have ‘friends’ that they sleep with. Now the phrase stands for any sorta kinda mostly uncommitted, laconically sexual, on-again-off-again relationship for which and in which, over the long run, if there’s any real emotional engagement/attachment whatsoever, take my word for it, the woman pays the steeper price. “T’was ever thus,” as Mr. Bugs Bunny once said.

I took two of my kids to see the new Adam Sandler picture, “Little Nicky,” and there it was again, behind Sandler as he sniffed some flowers: Tom’s Restaurant at 112th and Broadway.

When I was at Columbia College, in the gray and bankrupt and crumbling 1970s, my friends and I had a joke that someday, older and successful, we’d gather for lunch, and Tom’s would be so famous we’d be able to jump in a cab and say,“Driver, take me to Tom’s.” It would be the Sardi’s of the Bromo-Seltzer set.

This turned out, bizarrely, to be nearly true. Tom’s is a Columbia haunt and home to senior citizens on fixed incomes looking for an inexpensive full-sized Sunday meal available all week long. Its arrival as a second-tier New York icon, getting up there with the Margaret Bourke-White Art Deco bird jutting from theChrysler Building or the arches at Washington Square, came first with the house-mix version of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Restaurant; and was cemented by a decade as the exterior of the diner where Jerry Seinfeld confabbed with Elaine, Kramer, George, and, when worst came to worst, Newman.

Now visitors come from out of town and around the world just to see the place. One pauses on the sidewalk as they take their snapshots. The management sells postcards at the register.

Its fame always strikes me as a piece of bittersweet personal comedy. Tom’s, though called a restaurant, is actually a diner, one of a decreasing number of ‘50s vintage cheap food establishments in Manhattan.

I spent hundreds of hours there, through every stage of our romance, with the woman I dated through my college years, now my wife and the luckily-absent-from-Little-Nicky mother of our three sons.

Not long after we’d met, a few weeks perhaps, I ran into her on a sunny afternoon in front of Tom’s and watched her eyes blazing green in the bright light during some minutes of long-forgotten talk before calling up the nerve to invite her in for a coffee. Later we would go on Saturday evenings, spending our last money on the early editions of the Sunday papers and coffee and a shared sugar-soaked glazed donut, which was best eaten with forks. Invariably, as I remember it, we’d argue about literature. “You don’t like any women writers,” she said. I offered Flannery O’Connor and Joan Didion. “They’re not really women,” she said. “Henry James is more of a woman writer than they are.” I also liked George Eliot and the two most prominent Bronte sisters and Austen, but nineteenth century British writers didn’t qualify: it wasn’t until she introduced me to Grace Paley, who could do more in two pages than most writers can do in two hundred, that I liked a woman writer who did make it.

After fights, after rapprochments, after movies (dozens and dozens and dozens of movies, at the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Embassy, and later the Metro, which had an Ozu and Mizoguchi festival we went to every Wednesday afternoon) we’d retreat to the window seat in the corner, do the crossword, watch for friends, and work out the boundaries of a shared world view. When we were flush, we had cheeseburger specials, with the great fries and the always near-flat cokes from the fountain. One of us might even go for the roast turkey supper, which on weekends came with stuffing, soup to start, salad, two vegetables, coffee and dessert, an extravagance at $3.75.

One day in the summer of 1977, before the blackout and during the Son of Sam spree, I went in, had an iced coffee at the counter, and read my Daily News, which had three great columnists covering New York: Michael Daly, Pete Hamill, and, the writer we thought the best newspaperman of our era, Jimmy Breslin.

Then I walked out into the brutal heat and saw on the median that runs down the spine of Broadway two old men. They were faced off and arguing very loudly. One took out a cheap-looking gun and shot the other in the leg, pop, just like that. In those days, cops thought it a good idea to ride undercover together in cabs, so much so that in a neighborhood such as ours, you’d see more off-duty cabs with two white guys in the front than real ones which could actually take you somewhere. About six of the undercovers showed up in the next forty-five seconds, or so it seemed, cops leaping out the doors with pistols drawn, until the middle of Broadway was like a gun show. I meandered on home. The two old men were still yelling.

We had times apart, of course, Beth and I, and if I were to meet any other woman at a local hole, it would be at the College Inn up the block. Tom’s was for her and me. They all knew us there, not by name but by the matching narratives of maturing faces and growing intimacy: Betty the sixty-ish waitress with her flaming red hair: “How are ya ba-bay…”; and the other waitress, of similar years, so shy we never learned her name, knowing her only by her tiny little girl voice and her fabulous jet black wig. The guys behind the counter, Tommy and the rest of them, were dark and muscular young men forever wiping things down with white cloths and hot water from the coffee urns.

“Yes, my friend, whatever you like my friend.” When we were broke, “No problem, pay me next time, sure sure.”

This is still our neighborhood, vastly more expensive but in some way incurably grubby. We like it that way. Beth took one of our boys in for an ice cream recently, and Tommy, with hair and mustache gone gray like the aging Giancarlo Giannini, asked her,“You still married to that guy?” Yes, she said, in a tone that, I’m certain, very much depended on the day.

“How many kids, two?”

Three, she said.

“Good, good, I stay married to my wife all these years, too,” he said. “Too expensive to get divorced and what for? Another one is better?” He makes that face, and waves his hand: bah! to the modern world.

There are a couple of authors whom we suspect COULD add to the available pool of wisdom on what is happening right now, but they won’t be invited to do so, at least on ABC. Gore Vidal is one, because he is able to speak honestly about the specific sins of American politics; and Don DeLillo is the other, because he alone among living American writers has made a career of understanding the fragmented narrative of modern violence. His 1979 novel, Players, was about a bombing of the stock exchange; his next book, The Names, centered on violence and terror in the Middle East; White Noise covered “an airborne toxic event” and Libra did the Kennedy assassination; Mao II was about the relationship of terrorism to art. Finally, Underworld took in all of these, in the way of the masterpiece, and moved across the landscape of violence and waste that characterized the twentieth century. They are stark, haunting, prescient works.

As for what he might say about the past week, you can look in the archives and get the idea. He once was quoted as saying, for example: “People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. People who are powerless make an open theater of violence. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.”

Told last week that, in the aftermath of the towers, his name was on many people’s lips, DeLillo said simply, “Well, I wish it weren’t.”

Last night, a friend called me. He is a newspaper reporter and was stationed somewhere down in the new military zone that has been created south of Canal Street: ‘ground zero,” or “command and control”, I can’t remember which.

“I only have one thing to tell you,” he said, after we’d talked for a while about the events of the day, Giuliani, Bush, Osama, etc. “I just called to say, have you taken a look at the cover of ‘Underworld’ recently?”

The image came back like lightning: I went out to the hall and pulled the book from the shelves, and there it was, the two towers, dark and enshrouded (by fog, much as they had been by smoke early last Tuesday morning); before them, the stark silhouette of the belfry of a nearby Church (perhaps St. Paul’s Episcopal, down Broadway; perhaps the now-partially-destroyed St. Bernard’s, I don’t know the churches down there well enough to say); and off to the side, a large bird, a gull or a large pigeon, making its way toward Tower One. It’s eerie and religious. At first DeLillo, after finding the image, thought it too religious, according to his editor, Nan Graham at Scribner. A photo researcher was hired to find an image for the cover of the book; she came back with the same image DeLillo had found on his own. In the context of the past week, the image is deeply disturbing, one more bit of testimony to his remarkable tuning.

And then this morning, on the way to work, in the mini-plaza beside the new escalators in the Times Square subway station (which are occupied in normal times by musicians and painted humans performing as statues and the bizarre guy who tangos with the lifesize rubber woman-doll), I came upon a memorial site. The square, tall, tiled columns (roughly similar in shape and relative dimensions to the Trade towers) now host the many flyers of the missing and people were gathered in threes and fours around them, reading them, or perhaps a better word would be ‘internalizing’ them. We are, we readers, obstructing the shortcut from the 1 line to the R line (neither of which line now runs the 1 or the R trains at Times Square, but that’s another story). We read them for all the desperation and grief that they reveal; we do it as a salve or a food, I can’t tell which, for our own sense of desperation and grief.

Flowers and candles surrounded the bases of the columns – it would have been difficult to imagine in our past life how a flame of any kind would be a welcome sight in the Times Square subway station, but there they are, and we find them welcome. They add a religious air to the place, inescapably.

Much of New York in its reaction to this enormity of death has shown itself to be far more religious than we had ever imagined it to be, far more religious in this first week than patriotic. Later, on the BMT platform, a man is handing out small volumes, well-printed and perfect-bound, the complete Gospel According to St. John, the one that opens, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is the most poetical and abstract of the four Gospels; and it is surprising how many of us on the platform are taking the books from him rather than waving him off. They are shiny and of a pleasing size to the hand.

But — down the platform a bit a woman is reading a physically larger book, an old hardcover. I cruise by. I have a professional interest — or so I always tell myself, in the face of my obvious and occasionally intrusive voyeurism– in what people are reading on the subway.

It is “The Names,” by Don DeLillo.

The dry cleaner is Le Kang, an Asian name, and the woman who broke the news is the Korean lady who runs the place. She is assisted by an older Asian woman and one or two or sometimes three Latinos, and the bunch of them crawl and glide over and around each other in the small tube of plastic baggy space behind the counter like walruses galumphing with fatty grace over each other to slide from rock to sea.

I walked to the subway in a daze: air traffic control, I thought. Someone fucked up or went crazy and brought those planes in like that – I was preparing myself for the version of the story that we all seem to prefer, that there is a Madman, and the Madman does something Mad, because he’s touched, irrational, worst of all, religious, and always alone, oh yes, that’s the important one, he’s all alone, it’s not a movement, it’s not a trend, it’s not an idea: it’s a Madman.

But there are politics in the world — not the politics of bad talk show appearances and expensive orchestrations of the inane, but actual politics, in which what we do, what the state does, what we as a nation do, matters. Matters even to the degree that others might feel themselves compelled to do something back.

Madison Square Park at 25th is one of those spots in New York that I have long loved (Sixth Avenue around tenth or eleventh was another), where you would turn, arrive, look up, and there they were, previously invisible, suddenly lined up with the avenue and looming, enormous silver matchsticks down at harbor’s edge. They changed in the light, from blue to pink to iron gray.

But now there was only one. I couldn’t really take that fact in. I knew a plane had hit the towers, I knew it was bad, I knew the subways, which had taken me downtown in fits and starts, had finally given out at 34th Street, leaving me a short walk down to Lex and 22nd, where I work. What I didn’t know was that there’d be a tower just missing . The one that was left was engulfed in smoke. All along the park we stunned humans stood, alone or in twos and threes, staring and trying to use our cell phones. After a few moments the smoke kind of lifted in a wind. I will never forget how beautiful a day it was, how blue and cool and filled with a promise of restoration. The smoke lifted and there it was, one tower with a hole of astonishing blackness, jagged and infernal, and my stomach fell away and I thought I would throw up, the bad stomach of a roller coaster ride taken too late in life. Tears came, and for once I let them: slow tears for all that death. Prayers came, small ones, hardly verbal, and I let them too. Then I put my head down and walked. I got to my building, and five minutes later the second tower had gone down.

I kept thinking not of the people who worked in the building, who were unwitting victims, but of the one’s who had chosen to run inside it while it melted and collapsed: the firemen and EMS people and cops. And sure enough, on the television Tuesday night, this would be the issue that most moved me. The mayor, pressed to estimate the dead, would say with extraordinary eloquence, “When we finally know the number, it will be impossible to bear.”

And then the fire commissioner, a man named von Effen who looked, in the plainest way possible, broken, announced that more than 300 of his men were missing.

“How do you feel about that?” a reporter called out.

“How do I feel about it?” he said, quietly. “How do I feel about it?

There are men who have died who gave thirty and forty years to the fire department. How do you think I feel about it?”

He described some of them – a man named Sheehan, and a chaplain named Father Judge. He never raised his voice, he did nothing to dramatize, nothing to embellish. He said, “And there are others, many others, I don’t want to name them. Someday this department will recover but I don’t know how.” Then he turned and walked back to where he’d been standing behind the mayor. My best friend, a reporter, called with his ghoulish humor to say what he’d been thinking all day and knew he could say only to me because no one else would understanding jokes at such a moment. The voice goes Brooklyn-Jewish: “So everybody has to be an architecture critic?” Then he told me that among cops, fire, and emergency, between four and five hundred were thought dead. For a good many years and several papers, he had covered cops, fire, and emergency; he’d covered corrections; now he covered City Hall. He was at the triage center on Greenwich Street, where, notably, there were no survivors to work on. He sounded different, changed. The other unforgettable and moving thing I learned on television Tuesday night was that, of the many people who jumped, prefering flight to immolation, two were lovers – perhaps they’d only been lovers for a few minutes, in circumstances of emotional and spiritual compression that most of us will never understand, but they were lovers nonetheless – and they elected to depart a high floor together, sailing through blue sky and dust holding each other’s hands. I had been reading Dante on the subway, it was my new little fend-off-midlife project, reading Dante on the subway, and before getting out to see the towers I’d read this passage:

“And how it is, when one glories in wealth and acquiring, And then the times make for enormous loss So that he weeps with every thought and fills with despair, So it was with me, when it met me face to face, that beast without peace, and little by little Drove me back to the silence of the sun. “

The Italian for my awkward “beast without peace” is “la bestia senza pace”, which would really read more easily in English as “restless beast,” but all day I kept hearing the words in my head, “la bestia senza pace,” thinking in these terms not about the killers but the killed; thinking, as another friend reminded me, of Malcolm X’s chilling remark, when Kennedy was shot, that “the chickens have come home to roost;” thinking about the United States in the world and how our ease and comfort and ignorance come at a price which, like all colonialists, we prefer others to pay. I kept thinking of being “without peace.” We watched through the evening, my three sons and wife and I, and then I put the boys to bed. Paul, the nine year old, said he would have nightmares. “You very well might,” I said. “I’ll dream that the building next to ours gets hit by a plane, and it falls into our building, and I will be killed but you won’t.” “I don’t like that arrangement,” I said. “You’re much better-looking than I am, so you should live.” “You’d be happy to inherit my Mickey Mantle card though.” “That’s true,” I said. In the morning, he told me that it turned out he’d had some other important dreams and didn’t “have time for the nightmare.”