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then cursing you, you can’t walk in the soot till your collar turns black, and your body stinks with
the smell of flaking brick and decaying brains, you can’t do it without calling up some kind of
awful--”
He stopped.
His face bore the expression of a man who has just received brutal word of the death of a
loved one. He suddenly lay down, rolled over, and turned off.
She lay beside him, trembling, trying desperately to remember where she had seen his face
before.
He didn’t call her again, after the night of the party. And when they met in the hall, he
pointedly turned away, as though he had given her some obscure chance and she had refused to take
it. Beth thought she understood: though Ray Gleeson had not been her first affair, he had been the
first to reject her so completely. The first to put her not only out of his bed and his life, but even out
of his world. It was as though she were invisible, not even beneath contempt, simply not there.
She busied herself with other things.
She took on three new charting jobs for Guzman and a new group that had formed on Staten
Island, of all places. She worked furiously and they gave her new assignments; they even paid her.
She tried to decorate the apartment with a less precise touch. Huge poster blowups of Merce
Cunningham and Martha Graham replaced the Brueghel prints that had reminded her of the view
looking down the hill toward Williams. The tiny balcony outside her window, the balcony she had
steadfastly refused to stand upon since the night of the slaughter, the night of the fog with eyes, that
balcony she swept and set about with little flower boxes in which she planted geraniums, petunias,
dwarf zinnias, and other hardy perennials. Then, closing the window, she went to give herself, to
involve herself in this city to which she had brought her ordered life.
And the city responded to her overtures:
Seeing off an old friend from Bennington, at Kennedy International, she stopped at the
terminal coffee shop to have a sandwich. The counter--like a moat--surrounded a center service
island that had huge advertising cubes rising above it on burnished poles. The cubes proclaimed the
delights of Fun City. New York Is a Summer Festival. they said, and Joseph Papp Presents
Shakespeare in Central Park and Visit the Bronx Zoo and You’ll Adore Our Contentious but Lovable
Cabbies. The food emerged from a window far down the service area and moved slowly on a
conveyor belt through the hordes of screaming waitresses who slathered the counter with redolent
washcloths. The lunchroom had all the charm and dignity of a steel-rolling mill, and approximately
the same noise level. Beth ordered a cheeseburger that cost a dollar and a quarter, and a glass of
milk.
When it came, it was cold, the cheese unmelted, and the patty of meat resembling nothing so
much as a dirty scouring pad. The bun was cold and untoasted. There was no lettuce under the patty.
Beth managed to catch the waitress’s eye. The girl approached with an annoyed look.
“Please toast the bun and may I have a piece of lettuce?” Beth said.
“We dun’ do that,” the waitress said, turned half away as though she would walk in a
moment.
“You don’t do what?”
“We dun’ toass the bun here.”
“Yes, but I want the bun toasted,” Beth said firmly. “An’ you got to pay for extra lettuce.”
“If I was asking for extra lettuce,” Beth said, getting annoyed, “I would pay for it, but since
there’s no lettuce here, I don’t think I should be charged extra for the first piece.”
“We dun’ do that.”
The waitress started to walk away. “Hold it,” Beth said, raising her voice just enough so the
assembly-line eaters on either side stared at her. “You mean to tell me I have to pay a dollar and a
