Bloodless

Just after eight on a seasonably warm Sunday evening in late September, Dan Muehler left his stopgap digs on East Ninth Street. The gathering outside The Migrant, directly across the street, was still hardly more than a sober smokers’ collective. 

Dan worked at The Migrant and would be back at the retro-chic bar the following morning to prep for the daily opening. He stopped for ten minutes to gauge the effect on those waiting outside for the lunar eclipse of the so-called Super Blood Moon. Irritating cloud cover had momentarily dulled “moonthusiasm,” sending most of the watchers inside. When the star of the show reappeared, iPhones lit up as if they’d been signaled, hurrying Instagrammers and FaceTimers back into the street. 

Dan re-shouldered his guitar, clicked the off button on his e-cigarette and headed west for the weekly jam session across town. The rabbity unease that sent believers scurrying to rapturous predictions from religious leaders of all stripes was not evident in Dan’s crowd. Music, alcohol and pot pitched them—at most—into gauzy, freewheeling what-if scenarios. Dark humor poured from them like the rich, chocolate-colored pints of Guinness that went down so easily. 

He sauntered across Bleecker—the street where music used to spill from every crevice—now awash in the kinds of shops that made New York City the Big New Anywhere. Who didn’t enjoy battling tourists jostling for position outside the artisanal gelato shop, or need fresh baked cookies delivered at two in the morning? 

The former home of Phil Ochs was still a soulless cavity between tenements the color of blood. Choga, now shuttered at the top of a steep flight of stairs, had been a gathering place where musos, oiled by multiple rounds of sake and Japanese beer, spilled their stories in song. The Gaslight on MacDougal Street had finally given up the ghost of Bob Dylan. The stage was gone. Shiny red banquettes lined the narrow, bloodless interior. Anemic international sorts crowded the bar, looking both wounded and entitled. The menu boasted signature snacks. Cocktails had names that sounded like book titles written by terribly hip grown-up children: “False Witness in the Old Fashioned Flask” and “Vampire Attack.”

The Bitter End would hang on until the bitter end. Owners of most venues still standing had mastered the art of making the artist pay to play. “Just a reminder,” they’d scold. “This is a business, so bring your hungry and thirsty friends and have a few rounds, or the music goes away.”

Omar—a black-suited refrigerator of a man—emerged from the doorway of The Red Lion. He nodded to Dan. “What’s up, bro?” His head swiveled left to right and back again like a cannon, scanning for potential troublemakers on a drunken lark in Greenwich Village. “Good crowd tonight.”

“Hey, man,” Dan replied, ducking past him. 

The Bitter End and Terra Blues had nostalgia cachet on Bleecker. At the Lion drinks were cheap. The menu was non-threatening. The bar had a steady roster of musicians who played to regulars, students, tourists, and the homesick, who felt mercifully at home with a properly poured pint soaked up by battered fish and chips. 

On Sunday nights, Dan played in the jam at the Lion. There was no metal, thrash or stand-up on those nights. Folkies slid in alongside a familiar gang of seasoned blues musicians. Among them was a spirited blonde. She was a looker, right out of a Raymond Carver story—forty-something and ballsy everything. She sang with a voice that stopped seasoned hearts in their rutted tracks. For those in the audience who knew how to holler back, Dan always covered a Hank Williams classic, “Mind Your Own Business.” He followed that with more crowd pleasers, growling through “Shine on Harvest Moon” and “Walking Stick.” 

Old Jack was a regular who wore a battle-scarred, mouse-colored Stetson and shamelessly channeled Bob Dylan onstage. He needled Dan with the same damn accusation, every damn time. “You ain’t old enough to know who Redbone is.” 

Dan was old enough. He knew who Leon Redbone was.  No one at The Red Lion gave a shit about the moon. 

The text came in at 2:00 a.m., while Dan was play-flirting with the blonde. “Need u now. get a cab!!!!!!”

“Everything okay?” she hummed, warm and promising like freshly poured whiskey.

“Yeah,” Dan said. “My boss, Ari, old-school jerk. Trust no one. Hate everyone. Stab them with exclamation points.” 

She laughed huskily. Score for him.

Still sober—because that was his life now and had been for a decade—Dan re-scanned the text. He decided to walk back and make a pit stop at the rent-controlled apartment. He’d been saved—again—when his girlfriend had kicked him out and Mike, his magician friend, had taken him in. 

He trudged up three prehistoric flights of stairs. He dropped off his beloved Epiphone Blackstone. Magic Mike was in rehab. He needed someone to stay at his place—rent-free—and take care of the cat. “Be careful, if you do see her,” Magic Mike warned. “She’ll act all chill and purring and then wham, she’ll draw blood.” 

“Kind of like a knife fight at a Buddhist picnic?” Dan suggested. 

“Yeah, that,” said Magic Mike.

Magic Mike’s greeting was still on the machine. It blinked furiously in the darkened room, like a demented spy with Tourette’s.

“Ari here. I need you, now! Chop, chop! Unless you’re the one in fucking rehab.” Twelve seconds of Ari’s hacking cough tore through Dan as if he’d been violated. “When can you get here?” Ari wheezed. 

At eight-fifty an hour, Dan mused. Never.

His job at The Migrant usually started at seven in the morning. Dan erased Ari’s message. At just after three in the morning, he dropped some dry cat food into a bowl in a kitchen that would have been frightening if it was any bigger, but was merely disheartening. On his first night in the apartment he’d discovered the gory aftermath of beet borscht stored in a glass jar that had exploded in the freezer. 

Dan sloped downstairs into the still-dark morning and ran across the street to the bar. 

The first thing he noticed was the chalkboard, still on the street. It should have been brought in at closing. Last night it was lettered in colored chalk, listing the drink specials: Bloodberry Mojitos, Blood Orange Margarita, Blood and Sand, Bloody Bull, Blood Red Sangria, Bloodberry Fizz, Bloodsucker and Bloody Sunday. Now it looked as if the drunken ghost of Jackson Pollock had stumbled by and created another masterpiece. The stench of urine clung to it like snail slime on a leaf. Cigarette butts—little grave markers—stubbed the outdoor planters flanking the entrance.

Dan dragged the offending chalkboard aside. He pushed the front door open to the barely lit interior of the storefront bar. It smelled as if a thousand clowns had died slow, unfunny deaths.

Emerging from behind the bar, a pit bull in pants, Ari threw a ring of keys at Dan. “Get this shit cleaned up,” he growled. “Bartender quit last night. Last fucking time I hire a fucking hipster with his fucking hair in a fucking man bun!” 

“Pay me,” Dan said evenly.

“What? What the fuck!”

“Pay me now, Ari, for today, too,” Dan said. “I’m in no mood.”

Dan tailed in Ari’s wake and locked the door. He pocketed the damp wad of bills thrust at him. He threw a switch and surveyed the scene. The place was a shambles. It was going to be a long fucking day. He closed his eyes and summoned the Zen his girlfriend—ex-girl friend—went on about. Apart from conscious awakening, Shawna was fixated on death. She was the only person he knew who had memberships to morbidity. In Philly, where she was from, there was the Mütter Museum. She belonged to the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Gowanus, where she lived and he had once lived. She was the kind of person who had unabashedly delayed opening curtain, calling for security when she spied a coat and bag left on a theater seat still empty five minutes before show time. “This is New York City in 2013,” she’d announced. “If I’m right, you’ll thank me for my concern.”

They’d met at the city’s only school for Appalachian flatfoot clogging. For a native New Yorker like Dan, stomping to Southern Appalachian fiddle and banjo was not exactly a play-it-again-Sam moment.  He was there by invitation from a friend. “Come,” Edna said. “I want you to meet someone.”

He fell in love. Or dependency. Shawna was tightly drawn. She biked everywhere in the city, helmeted as if for battle. She stared him down with her joyless observations. Shawna had a job. He did not. She scared him a little. Love at first fright.

It lasted for almost three years. 

Shawna would say to him, “You can sit at home and be annoyed or you can go out and be annoyed.” He preferred to sit at home and re-watch New York characters tough it out in the neo-noir of Cassavetes’ films.

Shawna was twenty-four when they met. Aging with a still fertile female. Not a thing to look forward to. So he ended it. Well, she did, but he’d agreed.

He wondered what Shawna would make of the drama. It would be eighteen years before a Super Moon happened again, putting Dan at an inconceivable eighty-one years old. Pundits, soothsayers, and end-times websites thrived like leeches on the blood of news junkies and the shamelessly panic-stricken. Forget about greeting 2016 any time soon; the end of the world was at hand. 

On the other, more rational hand, the world was not going to end. NASA knew of no asteroid or comet on a collision course with Earth. Dan’s hopes were pinned on the asteroid.

Like much of the year’s headline screamers, Super Moon hadn’t lived up to the hype. Bruce Jenner scored a Vanity Fair cover as scantily clad Caitlyn, but she was still a Republican. “Deflategate” was actually an nfl scandal over softer balls, and another royal baby was just another welfare cheat. For all the hoopla surrounding it, the Super Moon had been kind of bloodless. 

Shawna dismissed the “fake moon shot” and “9/11 was an inside job” and relegated Dan’s favorites to the conspiracy trash heap. At their first meeting, he mentioned the Cuban Missile Crisis, prompting silent age-guessing on her part. She urged him to write his own songs, but he resisted. There was a blues song already written for every emotion. Even for the guy on Facebook who cried when he had to euthanize his fish. Muddy Waters had that covered. “Catfish Blues, back down the road I’m goin’.” Suicide bomber songs were a bit more challenging. 

He forced his eyes open. Still here, he thought, taking in The Migrant’s interior. It was a cozy space in a historically incommodious tenement building. Brick walls, properly scarred. Old-fashioned cash register, for display only. Milky-white globe lights and backlit etched glass panels. Depression-era framed photographs. Latter-day prices. 

Carmine-colored clots spilled over the floor, the bar, and the few tables in the back. He started with the broken glass. What horror lay behind the bathroom door filled him with dread. The hidden nook at the back of the room would stay hidden for now. He imagined bottomless Bloody Marys sliding down the throats of dark-haired, marble-complexioned, spectral young women. 

Dan powered through the carnage. Black trash bags slumped at the door like unidentified bodies. The mats were washed. Supplies listed. Wine stocked. Condiments and snacks were prepared and refrigerated. 

“I actually cut cheese,” he thought and laughed out loud, cracking the deadly quiet interior.

Outside, raw-skinned, bone-tired and practically narcoleptic, Dan forced his lanky, sixty-three-year-old frame from the curb, shallow-breathing the stench of fetid gutter debris. Clutching a broom, he traipsed back to the open cellar doors of the bar. He ran a hand through still thick, though graying, hair that capped his scalp like a colony of edgy bats. 

Does it get any worse than this? 

Dan was the only kind of mess you could be after not having steady employment for a decade, at least. He’d worked five hours a day for three days a week at this job. Twenty-one days of paid work. He laughed, but he was still a mess. 

Every nerve ending in Dan’s body telegraphed displeasure. His flesh clung to him, fearful of sliding off bone and diminished muscle into the oily gutter. If he were bloodless, he would not be surprised.

He dropped a bright yellow floor stand at the top of the cellar stairs. He hated the cellar. When he was still drinking, he’d needed a shot of amber-in-a-glass for moments like these, and he needed one now. Caution. Watch Your Step. Alcohol was the minefield he no longer traversed. He saluted the sign and dragged the hose as far as it would stretch from the cellar. 

A trash tornado on legs emerged from the pre-dawn gloom. The old woman glared at Dan as if seeing him for the first time. He continued hosing the pavement. She reared back.

“Don’t fucking spray on me, you four-eyed shrimp!” she screamed.

Dan adjusted his eyeglasses and contemplated the hose. Tool? Weapon? It was a conundrum.

He turned off the water. The woman had not moved. 

“I don’t mean to be a shallow jerk,” Dan said. “It’s my job to clean—.”

“Find something else to do, jerk.” 

Does it get any worse than this? Why yes. Yes, it does. 

He watched her scuttle down the block like a sack of angry crabs. He wondered how she knew he was earlier than usual. He wondered what she did to survive, where she lived and if she was alone. Every morning. Same thing. She screamed at him. He apologized. 

It was a pissing contest that had started on his first day at the job. She’d cracked a new retort every day since then. 

At first it amused him. When he’d ask how she was doing, she’d say, “Mind your own business, you nosy bastard.”

When she noted he had a shitty job, he replied, “No big deal.” 

“I got bunions bigger then your dick,” she cackled.

Dan let the hose drop to the pavement. He felt for the mini-vape in his pocket. He wondered how he had gotten to this place.

One of the kitchen workers arrived. Ari must have called him in earlier. Francisco stopped, flicked a cigarette butt into the gutter and nodded. Dan nodded in return. The only reason I have a crap job at a place called The Migrant, Dan thought, was because Ari didn’t trust the Mexicans. He wondered if the Mexicans got the joke.

Dan pocketed the vape. “Hey man. Door’s open. How’s it goin’? Could I…uh…bum a cigarette?” 

Francisco half-smiled and shook one from the pack. 

Alone again, Dan dragged deeply on the cigarette. Dan knew exactly when he’d finally quit the addiction to the rat race. There had been a few half-hearted prison breaks before then. The first time was when he left school. He set out for San Francisco with his guitar and a girl who’d claimed she’d slept with Salinger. His disgusted father bribed him to return. “Go to art school, at least,” he said.

He’d been an artist once, a painter—large canvases full of a quiet angst. He guessed the really heavy drinking had started around then—and the drugs. When he quit drinking, he quit painting. Dan knew he was not the next Jackson Pollock. For one thing, coke was no longer an inspiration and he didn’t want to die. And then he’d gotten un-sober. It was a bloodless white wine for him, a lot of it. And pot. Which wasn’t really a drug. Gateway meant nothing if you had nowhere to go. 

He’d taken courses in graphic illustration and design so that he could earn a living. He was comfortable doing graphic art. He made his own hours. Deadlines got harder to meet.

Then, after some years of persuading himself that he would eventually get back to the canvas and paint as a sober man, he realized he’d never be able to produce anything more than small, dull abstract paintings with ridiculously pompous titles for vanity galleries in Chelsea. He took up the guitar again. 

The final bloodless escape happened on a night in June, ten years earlier, when America was still shedding its craven innocence. Some underpaid, neophyte magazine editor had insisted he redo an illustration multiple times. She’d hung up on Dan twice. Finally he just went to the midtown office, threw the illustration down, and walked out. 

He’d been sorely tempted to make his way downtown, find a connection and just end it all with a nice warm overdose. Instead, he found the nearest Irish bar in Hell’s Kitchen.

Dan had spotted her right away. She was older than the crowd she was with. Experience fell off her like a molting caterpillar. She was dark-haired, dressed well and all in black, with the air of the recently released. She was at that age when women are at their most vulnerable and most heroic at the same time. She was not wearing a wedding ring.

He’d stood at the bar and telegraphed his desire. She motioned him over. It was her going-away party. “Leaving what?” he’d asked. “Manhappened,” she laughed. “No, I’m a native. I’ll stay until the bitter end. Out with the old. In with the will-work-for less,” she said. “I’ll be a real writer now.” “

She nodded to her co-workers and whispered to Dan, “I’ve lost my joi to their vivre.”

He laughed, and she said, “Why aren’t we all born laughing?”

They traded stories of a city that was once a heady farrago of excitement and danger. She remembered when poison pen letters were written with a proper fountain pen on good stationary. 

“What’s your story?” she asked.

“The names have been changed to protect the humiliated,” he said. “Thank god we finally have 7-Elevens.” 

“And bourbon!” she cheered, lifting her glass. “Lots of bourbon.”

He still felt the guilt of letting her leave on her own. He remembered her name was Trudy and that she would be heading west soon to hike to a reservation at he bottom of the Grand Canyon. “I’ve got new wings,” she said. “I’m gonna commune with the Great Spirits. I’ll be fine.” He raised his glass to her. It was his last drink.

A high-pitched duo shrilly announced their presence, bringing Dan back to his place outside The Migrant. The young women careered about on spike heels, tugging the hems of their leather mini-skirts, waving water bottles like distress signals. 

Heading home from an all night rave, Dan guessed. He overheard one of them say, “This area of town’s like, a lot more youthful, like a younger crowd, because, like, nyu is here.”

Dan stepped out of their way. 

They giggled like conspirators. “Don’t give him any money. He’ll go away.” 

The old lady sprang out of nowhere. “He’s not bothering you. He’s just occupying his fucking space!” 

“Occupy whatever,” one of them drawled. “What’s your problem?” the other one said.

“I got this mother hen thing for the dope.” She pointed to the water bottles. “What’s that?” 

“Asparagus water,” they cheered.

“How much?” she demanded.

“Too much for you,” they sang.

“I’ll eat some asparagus and piss into a bottle for free.”

They wobbled, gagging, to the other side of the street.

“Just die of dehydration and do the gene pool a favor!” she yelled after them.

“I’ve lost my joi to their vivre,” Dan said.

A smile cracked the old lady’s face for the first time. “Good one, shithead.” 

Dan waved at her retreat. He coiled the hose loosely around his shoulder and headed for the cellar. There was still the bathroom and the nook at the back of the room.  When he’d complained about the job to his buddies, one of them suggested he do a GoFundMe. “Why would anyone give someone like me any money? I’m already in Stage 4 of incurable life.” Buy some time, his friends said. “I don’t have an album,” Dan said. Make one up, they said.

Francisco stepped around Dan, extending a pack of cigarettes. 

“Thanks, man.” Dan drew a cigarette from the pack. The rest of the kitchen staff would arrive soon. Someone else could tackle the mess before Ari returned and found him gone. He dug the keys from his pocket and handed them to Francisco. “I’m done. Finished. Terminado.”

He’d get some sleep and then wander over to Washington Square Park. He’d meet his pals for a jam by the fountain, and pick up a few more bucks from the tourists. He patted the still damp wad of bills in his pocket. He might call Shawna. He’d ask her to dinner, maybe see a documentary, her favorite genre. There was a new one on the Ukraine at Film Forum. Dan had a hard time letting go. She might one day need a transplant or a bit of his bone marrow—or he, hers. Already the air smelled fresher. Today was going to be his lucky day.

A View from Her Bridge

“The doctor left at five o’clock.”

Gaye Cleveland straightened her shoulders, lowering the script for Chip Rodney’s new play. She regarded herself in a mirror that looked like a glassy vintage map stained with continents. It hung against a roughly plastered wall, above a bathroom sink no bigger than a bedpan. Gaye wore a crisp white tailored shirt buttoned to the neck. She avoided the sight of her voluptuous breasts, instead concentrating on her face.

Squinting through dark brown eyes, the eyes of an Aleut mother she could not remember, Gaye studied her too-broad nose. Her full lips hid cockeyed teeth. When she laughed, she had a tendency to raise smallish fingers to her mouth in girlish affectation. Skin the color of fresh milk was the only thing she’d gotten from her father’s Irish side. She’d come to Manhattan from her home state of Colorado to be an actor. Picturing her face on the big screen dispelled any Hollywood illusions. Gaye was meant for the stage. She turned to the script again, to a single line highlighted in caution-tape yellow.

“The doctor left at—. Darn, still not right.”

Gaye noticed a dark speck on her miniskirt, also white. “Darn. Darn!”

She pressed her generous hip, willing the mark to disappear. Her shoulders slumped from the effort of rehearsing the line—her only line in the play—until she was startled by a furious staccato horn, blasting in the street. 

After nearly six months, she was still rattled by city noises, so different from the dense, silent background of the open spaces she’d been used to. Car horns resounded like an ill-tempered orchestra, four floors below. A mechanical sea churned down Ninth Avenue, pulsing trucks into a congested eddy headed for New Jersey and beyond. Buses charged and then gasped under lead-footed drivers inching in traffic to the bus terminal at Port Authority, a few blocks away. Not long after she’d arrived, stretch limousines proliferated, disgorging prom-bound students from open sunroofs, gleefully unpinned.

Never having been a pedestrian, Gaye had to learn quickly to dodge traffic and sprint through yellow lights. She missed her old junker, left behind in the care of her one close friend. Dick Hogben had warned her that if she attempted the drive, the ’82 Chevy Nova would tremble to a defeated halt long before Kansas City. New York City was no place for a mechanical country mouse. 

Gaye worried the stain, striking it with a damp cloth as if it were an ill-timed reminder. Satisfied, she took a deep breath, willing melancholy from her. She exhaled slowly. 

Invoking her hero, the playwright Arthur Miller, she whispered, “Who can ever know what will be discovered?” 

She peered into the mirror again, tugging a cherry-colored strand of freshly dyed hair from the towel clapped to her head. “Not quite Rihanna, but close,” she said. 

Wonderment at the energy in the streets had not diminished. Often she drifted to the open window. There were more kinds of bars, cafés and restaurants in one block in Manhattan than in the whole of her town back home. Way more. Take-out food was not just some sad chicken franchise. You could enjoy cuisine of any country in a few blocks here: Thai, Brazilian, Southern, French, Italian, Turkish—vegan. She liked that the apartment houses looked oldy worldy; many in her neighborhood did not rise above five stories. Directly across from her building on Ninth Avenue was the Film Center. 

“I am in New York City. This is why I came here,” she said, leaning her elbows on the windowsill.

Her grandmother’s ranch in Colorado—a tenacious ruin—was only a memory now. Not as dim a memory as Eek, Alaska—Gaye’s birthplace. That’s the joke she figured would open doors for an Alaskan transplant, by way of Colorado. “Where ya from, gawjus?” a stranger would ask. She’d respond with an infectious giggle, “Eek!” She would tell him she came to New York to be an actor. This would lead to an interesting conversation about growing up on a ranch. But no one asked.

Gaye had no memory of Eek. Her mother had died before Gaye turned three, and memory was a dubious resource. Her grandparents took in Gaye and her father at their Colorado ranch. Her father, known only as DJ, didn’t say much, often leaving his questioner to interpret his miserly response—a crooked smirk shaded by an eyebrow curled like a caterpillar poked by a stick. He loathed anyone who wore a suit and tie. “Not my kind,” he’d grumble. “Those people ain’t ever up to nothin’ good.” DJ was the kind of guy who refused to wear a seatbelt. He simply hacked the buckle from the strap and stuck it in the slot, defeating yet another attempt to thwart his freedom.

When pressed about why he’d left Alaska, he’d say, “Can’t stand the smell of fish.” A brusque finger tapping on the shot glass before him signaled an end to the interrogation. Soon enough, he couldn’t stand the smell of horseflesh, prompting his flight back to Alaska. 

His mother had reminded her granddaughter repeatedly. “Alaska doesn’t grow on you, it just makes you unfit to live anywhere else.” 

When Gaye turned sixteen, she’d received an envelope from Fairbanks. No letter, just a worn hundred-dollar bill wrapped in a smudged bit of paper. She’d tried to guess what her father was doing by the smell of his fingerprints. Postcards were infrequent clues to his peripatetic life. The last one was postmarked from Ketchikan. His careless handwriting cramped the punch line of a joke about a bridge to nowhere. 

By the time she graduated from Wallsenberg High, Gaye knew A View From the Bridge by heart. She’d lobbied hard in her junior year to make Arthur Miller’s play their senior project. Gaye had won the part of Beatrice. Dick Hogben would play Marco. Before that could happen, the Drama Club was suspended. Marco would not die in Beatrice’s arms that time. She and Dick clung to each other like disappointed outcasts from an enchanted garden. They’d made a pact. They would get jobs after graduating, share an apartment, and in two years have enough money saved to move to New York. Like some alternative Will and Grace, they’d pictured a life after laugh tracks. They had not reckoned on the show-stopping events of September 11th. Dick’s fervor waned, reappearing as indecision, and then anger. He remained with his scolding, religious parents. A penchant for fabulousness tempered until he was nearly unrecognizable to Gaye. 

For a while, Gaye had been safely undecided. Her friend needed time. “Real soon,” became her mantra. She remained at her grandparents’ ranch.

“Real soon” eased the sting of her grandfather’s sharp tongue, his unwelcome touch. He mocked Gaye’s dream of acting, and teased her mercilessly about her “airs.” The Brooklyn Bridge—her obsession—was just a bridge. His callous reproach was meant to deflate Gaye’s desire. 

“I know that town, that neighborhood. I don’t like it,” he said. When Gaye challenged him—he had never actually been there—he rode right over her. He’d heard enough stories. She would be eaten alive in the jungle, he sneered. “You can’t be so friendly, kiddo, and you can’t be walkin’ so wavy.”

His barbs fell like a box on the ear, never unexpected, yet always a shock. 

Finally, her grandmother intervened. “You’re a big girl now,” she cautioned, “You gotta watch it, hon. Keep to yourself more.” Gaye moved out. She took a small apartment above the Hungry Bear Café, where she worked in town. Visits to the ranch lessened.

Gaye’s grandfather died and relief was unspoken. She moved back to the ranch at her grandmother’s urging. Gaye reasoned there would be no harm in saving money. The ghosts of his taunts were harmless now. At the wake, she’d been told by nearly everyone that it was too late. Never should have been scared off moving to New York City in ’01. She was accused of having cold feet. 

“It’s respect,” was all she would say.

At her grandmother’s funeral, it was a sharp comment that had gotten her moving. Gaye overheard one of the regulars from the café where she waitressed. 

“That ass can still twist a guy’s head right offa his neck.” 

She was not a mouthy broad, like Miller’s Beatrice. But she was not about to roll over and play dead. Not this time. Nearly ten years had passed. It was now or never, she reckoned. The ranch would most likely be foreclosed. Only a few riders kept their mounts there anyway. A few months later she was gone.

She’d found the sublet on Craigslist in May, a month before she arrived in Manhattan. George Balint, a Hungarian sculptor, had insisted on being called by his surname and cash up front. Not wanting to be taken for a rube, Gaye demanded a key from Balint in exchange. 

In early June, she’d arrived breathless at the top of the fourth-floor landing, hauling her life in luggage, key in hand. Excitement trumped trepidation. She congratulated herself on an easy commute from LaGuardia Airport to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, just a few blocks away from her new home in one of those brownstone buildings with the charming fire escapes.  

Balint was there to greet her, a small man with a slight paunch and arms like thickly twisted rope. His teeth were in worse shape than hers. He looked to be in his sixties.

“Too much of this,” he said, tapping his nose with stubby fingers. 

In the sparsely furnished apartment, bookshelves crowded into two rooms in dilapidated harmony, a welcome sight. Although it looked as if he had not actually moved out, Gaye’s unease had been put to rest when Balint explained that he had moved into his studio down the hall. She was to tell anyone who asked that she was a relative.

Gaye jumped at a sound behind her and spun around. She never got used to Balint’s unannounced visits or his letting himself in with a spare key. Gaye fumbled the towel from her head. 

“You like?” 

Balint squinted his eyes, as if in pain, appraising her newly dyed locks. “Very nice, Cookie. It suits you.” 

He was agitated. Gaye waited silently while he paced through the rooms. 

“She is painting me out of the picture!”

“She” was Alice Darling, a youthful sixty-something artist with a discriminating generosity. Balint pronounced her name “Aleeze.” Alice was a no-nonsense native New Yorker who lived with her cats on the top floor. Spotting a survivor, Alice quickly befriended Gaye, promptly insistinsisting she come for a home-cooked dinner.

Alice had described the day she knew she must quit her job to be a full-time painter again. Gaye marveled that someone she hardly knew shared her story without hesitation—warts and all, as her grandmother used to say. 

From the kitchen, Alice hollered to Gaye, “Feel free to look around.” 

Gaye took in the ragged fairy-tale look of Alice’s rooms. Two cats pawed the artist’s detritus, as if searching for treasure. Canvases were stacked against one wall. A low table in front of a pillowed sofa was piled with books and magazines. More books were crammed helter-skelter in as many bookshelves as Balint had in his place. On the sofa, a laptop was open to what looked like a political site. Perched, like clues, among the paint tubes and brushes, were miniatures of the large expressive sculptures Gaye had seen in Balint’s studio. The painting on the easel also depicted similar figures. Two expressionistic forms in a sun-baked, striated landscape, separated by a forbidding crevasse.

The smell coming from the kitchen was heady—spicy and sweet. 

Gaye poked her head in and asked, “Can I help?” Alice had pinned up her shoulder-length brown braids. Gaye noticed the oven was exactly like the one in her sublet. And like hers, the temperature indicators were worn off. “How do you know what temperature the oven is at?” Gaye asked.

“Practice,” Alice said. “Hand me those plates.”

Alice cleared space on the low table. They sat down to a vegetable curry—a first for Gaye. “It’s called a korma,” Alice offered. Gaye had never heard the expression “golden handcuffs” until Alice used it to describe how miserable she’d been in a job with a steady income. She laughed when Alice replayed her story of some design award and telling her boss off in a fancy restaurant. Alice knew then that she had to make a serious change. It took her another five years to leave and she was—to be honest—pushed. She managed to extract a settlement, which paid off her credit cards, leaving her a bit to find her way. She had no health insurance, but her rent was low. She walked dogs for cash-in-hand from the residents in the high rises. In another year she would collect social security. She exhibited in a gallery on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. She had sold some paintings. She lived meanly, but freely. 

Alice collected their cleaned plates. On her way back from the kitchen, she plucked a framed photograph from the bookshelf. Gaye clocked Alice immediately. Younger and dressed more formally then than the batik wrap skirt she was wearing. Her hair was cut short and blonde. In the group shot of her coworkers, Alice could be seen making a comical escape. 

“The beginning of the end, for me,” Alice said. “Bourbon was involved, a lot of bourbon.” 

Gaye basked in Alice’s bravery, that she could chuck a career in magazine design for what she loved most. 

“I need time to waste to make art,” Alice added. “I’d lost that kind of time and I wanted it back. Now tell me about you.” 

Inhaling benign neglect mingled with the oily newness in Alice’s rooms, Gaye had felt a sharp increase in growth. As she told her story, Alice had listened intently. She’d laughed easily at Gaye’s Eek reference.

Balint poked Gaye in the shoulder. “You listening to me, Cookie? Where are you? Aleeze is disappearing me!” 

“Do you mean the painting, the new one?” Gaye asked. 

Balint scowled. He bent stiffly at the waist, arms folded in a now familiar pose. “She is disappearing me,” he said, defeated. 

“Maybe she’s thinking of painting a bridge between them?” Gaye offered.

Balint shook his head. “We’re not getting any younger, Cookie.” He looked her over. “You waitressing?”

Shyly, Gaye told him that she’d scored a role in Chip Rodney’s play, Nuts on the Hudson. 

“How?”

“The director, Alfonso Riordan. He spotted me in a bar near his theater.”

“Who?” Balint barked. “You gotta be careful. What theater?”

“Alfonso. Alfonso Riordan. It’s a basement theater. Near Times Square. Avant-garde.”

“Never heard of him,” Balint retorted. “Wanna get a bite?”

“A bite” meant the Olympic Diner. Gaye was nervous, too nervous to eat. She’d have to tell him that the crew at the diner already knew of her triumph. 

Gaye had sensed right away that the wing Balint had offered to take her under might be too constricting. On her first night in the city, Gaye had been determined to head directly downtown on her own. Balint had pooh-poohed that idea. The Brooklyn Bridge was covered in tarps, under renovation, lead paint removal or something. It could go on for years. “You’ll get creamed by some crazy cyclist,” he warned. “I’ll take you around the neighborhood.” But Gaye resolved to find her own way. 

Thrill quickly suffocated under a surge of theatergoers crashing toward opening curtain. Gaye briefly lost her bearings. Shedding her newcomer status, she stuffed the subway map into her bag, clutching it tightly. She found herself on a quieter, darker strip where desultory men demanded spare change. “Looking for something to eat,” one grizzled husk of a man begged. She shrank from his dark, leathery hand. 

Uptown and downtown suddenly meant nothing to her, despite the effort she’d put into studying the map. She plunged back into the throng until she found a subway entrance. Trains roared in both directions over four ominous tracks, drilling her bones. She spotted one that indicated the World Trade Center. It didn’t make sense. What was there now? But she figured it would get her close enough to the bridge. She jumped back in fright when the doors of the subway car closed, clipping her misstep. Shadows flickered from the grate to the street above the platform. She felt entombed. Disoriented, she stumbled in one direction, stopped by a sign that screamed no exit. Ominous black bins at the end of the platform pulsed with rodents. In a deli window above ground, her reflection—glistening and pale, black hair pressed to her head like a moldy sponge—was a cruel reminder of her naiveté.

The light under Balint’s studio door, the sound of a chisel tearing into wood, had been a relief. He was working. She’d slipped unnoticed into the apartment, sliding the chain in the lock behind her. At the flip of a switch, mice skittered under throbbing fluorescence in a panic of discovery. Defeated, she gave them back the dark she was still not used to, a dark that had a light of its own. She’d crawled into a strange bed, crying herself into an exhausted sleep.

Before Balint made an appearance the next morning, Gaye had set out again with fresh determination. It was daylight. She was hungry. She walked through a warm mist in quieter streets, the spent aftermath of an all-night party. Tourists rumbled their luggage to waiting taxis or stood silently clustered in end-of-holiday determination to stay the course.

Gaye had wandered aimlessly along the same streets that had crushed her resolve the night before. There was that funny little wooden structure that looked like an out-of-place chalet. She would ask Balint about it. She was surprised at the presence of so many churches. Before the open doors of The Actors Chapel, she briefly considered joining the mass about to start. But the theater was her real church. Her heart swelled at the passing names she had come to know so well in her imagination: The Majestic, Ethel Barrymore, the Booth and the Belasco, Lunt-Fontanne and Helen Hayes. There was The Book Of Mormon at the Eugene O’Neill. And there was the Harry Potter guy in How To Succeed in Business. Gaye took in the marquee of the Winter Garden, smiling to herself, “Mamma Mia, I really am in New York.”

She headed back to the nearly deserted pedestrian mall, set at the bottom of an electrified canyon. Little red metal tables and picnic chairs stood empty and slick with moisture. Gaye, thrilled to her core, paused before the statue of George M. Cohan. She recalled Dick’s reluctant farewell, “Give my regards to Broadway, Gaye.” She’d wanted to shout, “Look for my name in lights!” But back home her plans had been met with derision. They wanted her to stumble. They wanted her to lose. Better than everyone else, but not good enough for New York. She looked up at the statue, voicing the playwright again, “Who can ever know what will be discovered?”

She shook the previous night from her. Her stomach rumbled like an unexpected train. The Stardust Diner caught her eye, but she shied from the cost of breakfast. Passing the Hotel Edison, she regrouped, found her courage, and entered the yellow and beige interior of the coffee shop. Fleurs-de-lis stuck to the walls like cake decorations. The place was heaving with foreigners. She could hardly tell one language from another. 

Gaye timidly asked a gray-haired man in a Ranger’s Jersey, “Waiting long?” 

“Too long!” he barked. “Fuckin’ tourists everywhere,” he grumbled, barging past her. 

Gaye headed for the counter. A man in a red, white and green football jersey screamed at her, furiously indicating the handful of empty seats, “Occupato!”

Gaye, defeated, had returned to Balint’s paternal scold. “Come with me, Cookie,” he said, and led her to the Olympic Diner, where waiters called you “my fren.” Within weeks she was a regular, often returning on her own. Eggs Florentine. Belgian waffles. For dinner, burger with fries, grilled cheese and fries, moussaka and fries. Sometimes, just the fries. 

The woman at the register in the Olympic Diner was the curvesome, full-bosomed mistress of her domain. She looked entirely at ease in the aqua-and-white-tiled world. The walls of the diner were hung with large black-and-white photos of Manhattan at night, the Brooklyn Bridge among them. Gaye took note of the woman’s placid boredom. She was dressed in a long-sleeved blouse with lacy turtleneck and cuffs under a double-breasted red jacket. A generous belt cinched her waist with a rhinestone buckle. Her bottle-blonde hair was piled like whipped cream on a pudding. With an incurious detachment, she watched everyone who came and went.

Gaye loved the camaraderie of the giggling Mexican men—the kitchen workers and delivery guys. The counterman with the salt-and-pepper moustache, gold chains tangled in a tuft of hair peeking from his open-necked white shirt. He always gave her extra jelly. When she’d announced that she’d gotten the part, he’d shouted, “Brava!” and kissed her on the cheek. Balint would complain bitterly when he found out that he had not been the first to hear her news. 

“Yoo-hoo! Earth to Cookie,” Balint rumbled. “Last chance. Even actors gotta eat.”

She begged off again. Balint shouted as he hurried from the apartment, “See you later then, Cookie. Don’t forget, time’s running out. Break a leg!”

Break a leg! She was legit. And all because she’d been brave enough to sit alone in a bar sipping Dubonnet on the rocks when the director had approached her. He offered something stronger that she declined. They talked. She deftly shifted her cushioned buttocks on the bar stool when his slight, wavering hand found its way around her waist. He hopped off the barstool at nervous intervals, disappearing outside. A telling odor of stale cigarette smoke clung to him when he returned. 

“Bloomberg is like some interfering grandma,” he grumbled. “First they came for the bars and I was silent.” 

She hadn’t any idea what this meant, but nodded her head knowingly. Gaye supposed the white suit and red silk scarf tied rakishly around his neck were what theater types wore here. His language was crude, but no worse than what she was used to. And he was smart. She had potential, he said. Alfonso Riordan—a bona fide director—had offered her a role in Chip Rodney’s play, Nuts on the Hudson.

“Hey, girl. Awesome color!” 

Gaye spun around to face another neighbor. She’d forgotten the darn chain again. Didn’t anyone knock? 

Laurel Bud smelled like the fresh return of spring, even in October. She was stunning in a body-hugging leopard-print dress. Her hair was now a rich mahogany color. Gaye’s confidence sank.

Gaye had met Laurel in the building’s cramped and musty-smelling vestibule. It was a breathless encounter by any definition. Laurel was an exotic combination of races. Her father—divorced from her mother—was a French jazz guitarist. Her African-American mother sang like Billie Holiday. Laurel was a native of San Francisco. Before moving to New York, she’d had a modicum of success in Los Angeles. Her smile was on high beam. Everything was awesome. Her skin was a luminous, backlit mochachino. Her hair had been frosted-blonde then. Immediately she’d demanded, “Facebook me, Mama!” 

Gaye had been on the social network for a while—everyone was—but at last count, her friend Dick’s 1,282 “friends” unnerved her. He had no real friends apart from her. It was just another place to make Gaye feel lonely. 

“Will do,” Gaye promised.

Laurel exercised her vocal cords directly below Gaye’s apartment, sending a heartbeat other than Gaye’s up through the floorboards. 

Unlike Gaye’s sublet, which had almost nothing of her imprint, Laurel’s apartment begged for applause. You had to cheer, “Divine!” and “Oh, I adore that!” in order not to disappoint her. Confection-pink walls trimmed in wedding-dress white, a cushiony rose-colored satin sofa. A massive gilt armoire crowded between ornate, silver-framed mirrors. Laurel’s collection of fans spread across the room like elegant frozen birds. Armloads of cut flowers in varying stages of collapse spilled from ornamental vases. Madama Butterfly meets Brideshead Revisited. Headstone-sized home decorating books in obvious placement among artfully scattered magazines, like Vibe and Vogue. An oversized color-saturated photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge hung above the sofa. When Gaye revealed that it was a bridge—the Brooklyn Bridge—that had brought her to New York, Laurel flew off on a tangent of recollections. An hour later, Gaye knew a lot about Laurel, while Laurel still knew nothing of Gaye. Back home, Laurel would be considered rude. Here, she was a singer looking for her big break.

When she felt vulnerable, requiring Gaye’s ear, Laurel would proffer a bottle of wine. What followed was a recitation of the list of slights from the men she’d dated. “…all the wrong ones,” she’d moan.

Friends betrayed her. Auditions brought no callbacks. Laurel was older than Gaye by a dozen years. She regaled Gaye with excerpts from the script she was writing, which Gaye imagined was a spanking new one-woman cabaret act, until it dawned on her that Laurel had been sitting on it for some time. It steadied Gaye’s wavering morale that a forty-something-year-old was not necessarily past her prime here. It was also oddly reassuring to catch Laurel on a midday coffee run, trench coat belted tightly over the kind of pajamas a child would wear. Then, the gaps in Laurel’s beauty poked from indifferent eyes free of makeup, from the stark dismissal of hair extensions, and the scowl she reserved for only her closest friends.

But when she was on, which was nearly always, Laurel pirouetted on leopard-glitter spiked heels. She wore her clichés with style. Her voice was majestic—the only way Gaye knew how to describe it to Dick. Laurel was someone to learn from, and she had a lot to say. Balint complained that she had too much to say, “…especially when she….” He’d tap his nose. “Then she sucks the air right out of a room.” For the moment, though, Laurel was singing karaoke at midnight while pouring drinks in a sports bar on the East Side.

Laurel pushed past Gaye. She headed for the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing her reflection. 

“Do I look hung over?” 

Gaye ignored the question. “Do you really think it’s okay?” 

Laurel laughed. “Of course, silly pants.” She lifted her elegant fingers to Gaye’s hair, frowning and plumping. “Amazeballs.” She eyed Gaye as if she were a disabled child. “Tonight’s the night, then, your first rehearsal. Are you up for this?” She held up a card. “This was at your door.” Laurel roamed the apartment, still holding Gaye’s card. “Can I take this?” She waved Gaye’s battered copy of A View From the Bridge. Gaye balked, but Laurel slipped it into a Kate Spade knockoff. “It’s a lo-o-o-ng ride back from Long Island, Carey.” Gaye looked up, confused. “The Elvis Show. I told you about that, silly pants.” 

“I have to get ready,” Gaye said. 

“Me, too,” Laurel sang. “Must fly. I’ll take you out for a drink later on.” Laurel stopped at the door. “Be careful,” she warned. “Something’s going on in Times Square.” 

“You be careful too,” Gaye returned. 

“Thank you, Mama Carey.” Laurel scowled, and then flashed her Audrey Hepburn smile.

Carey Gaye. The name change was Laurel’s idea. “Hon, you need to have a stage name. Imagine that name up on a theater marquee. No offense, sweetie, but Gaye Cleveland sounds like Gay Pride Week in Ohio.” She had no end of advice on what to wear, how to come across at an audition. Gaye always listened—she had to—but shrank from Laurel’s suggestion that she could be a telephone fantasy girl if things didn’t work out. “You deffo have the voice for it, Mama,” Laurel had insisted. “And it’s not like any of those guys can see you.”

A drink with Gaye later on would depend on what better opportunity might come along for Laurel.

Gaye checked the clock above the stove—a relic that she had not yet put to use—and then warily eyed the perimeter. Mice were a benign fact of life on the ranch. Here, they bolted like criminals. 

Hairbrush in hand, she returned to the bathroom mirror. She was from Wallsenberg, Colorado, from one of the poorest counties. She had survived a summer in New York. She’d need a job real soon. Now she was meeting the director at his apartment. A dry run, he’d told her. Gaye thought about Laurel’s warning. He had assured her the rest of the cast would be there. 

It was a weird play, certainly not like anything she’d ever read. Her character, the nurse, was called Beatrice. Gaye was sure that was a sign. Nurse Beatrice was the one sane note in a play about eccentric New Yorkers who’d escaped a military takeover of the city to inhabit an abandoned insane asylum overlooking the Hudson River.

Mr. Miller’s Beatrice would have advised Gaye, “…she gotta be her own self more.” 

Gaye summoned her inner Beatrice. She raised her wrist to look at an imaginary watch and spoke to her reflection. In a thoroughly no-nonsense voice, she delivered the line evenly, with comic toughness. “The doctor left at five o’clock.” 

Satisfied, Gaye stretched her arms. She rolled her shoulders, remembering the card Laurel had dropped off. She found it where her copy of Miller’s play had lain. It was from Alice. It was handmade. Covered in drawings of theater masks that were all…smiling. “Knock ’em dead,” it said. “Love, Alice.”

She looked up when she heard someone running past her door. Car horns sounded above shouting in the street below. It was an unseasonably warm October night. Gaye leaned out above the fire escape. A boisterous throng spilled from the sidewalk into the street, moving uptown against traffic. Some people in the crowd were dressed like zombies, white-faced and fake-bloody, staggering comically among the fast growing assembly. Many were carrying signs: We are the 99%. End Corporate Personhood! God Hates Banks! A young man streaked through them carrying a blue-and-white flag. Gaye couldn’t read the message on the flag, but she recognized the peace sign. A clutch of student types yelled in unison, “No truth! No justice! Whose streets? Our streets!” They wore t-shirts that said Occupy Wall Street. There were many older people in the mix. Adults shouldered little kids. Cops clutched their weapons and ran in a column, struggling to head off the protesters. Nightsticks flipped at their sides, like untethered limbs, to the beat of the crowd. 

“All day. All week. Occupy Wall Street!” the crowd chanted. “We got sold out. Banks got bailed out!”

Alice Darling waved to her from the street. She clutched a hand-drawn placard: Bombing for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity. She was wearing an Indian print dress. She was still barefoot in sturdy sandals. “I’ll see you later,” she hollered. “I’ve got a revolution to go to.”

Gaye returned Alice’s wave, lowering the window. She’d always suspected she’d have an unusual destiny. Who can ever know what will be discovered? Gaye smiled to herself. Pushing the window closed, she whispered, “Who can ever know who will be discovered?”