The Change

It had been a long and sometimes turbulent flight from JFK in New York to London’s Heathrow airport. Unable to sleep, Susan Holt spun a fretful scenario over and over in her head. All it would take would be an unceremonious nudge to push her jobless into the New Millennium. At the Zen-like warning bong, Susan squinted at a panel above her. A flashing Fasten Seat Belts joined No Smoking, which had remained on during the flight. The pilot’s announcement discombobulated her. It was neither a New Yorker’s abridged bark nor a Londoner’s genteel enunciation. His flattened nasal twang floated across the re-animated economy cabin, informing sleepy passengers of altitude, time, and weather on the ground. Susan peered from her aisle seat to the middle-aged woman at the window. Neither of them had dared to co-opt the empty seat between them for a nap. It took a blurry concentration to see the window shade had been pulled up. The gray rectangle was the color of morning now.

Susan shoved a crumpled polyester fleece blanket from her lap. With that, her book flipped into the aisle. She knew Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day was the wrong choice for the flight, but she’d kept it open on her lap. Flashy tabloids of rumormongering and celebrity Schadenfreude were better suited to being trapped in claustrophobic spaces. She bent stiffly to retrieve the well-thumbed paperback. Yes, one might suppose she’d passed the time of life when ambitions were personal—that it was time now to observe and reflect. Doubts about her job would be put on hold while she was in London for the next ten days.

Take the overnight, Dónal had insisted. Susan hated the overnight flight. It forced her into a full day ahead with no chance of sleep for another twelve, maybe fifteen hours. He expected her to get right to work. Her annoyance with him would be short-lived once she’d had a hot shower and a typical English breakfast in one of those workingman cafes Dónal was always rediscovering, like his poverty. Her love for him would return with the first tickling draught of vintage champagne he’d insist on, and once the badinage between them had taken off. She’d tell him about the awful in-flight teen film she’d forced herself to watch. He’d take off immediately on a hilarious homo version of American Pie. He was nothing if not a remarkable storyteller. She was his captivated audience.

Dónal Brennan was forty-six and desperate. In fact, he was always at some level of despair: desperately poor, desperately behind in meeting a deadline, desperately in need of a sponsor, desperately in love or desperately shattered when a lover had had enough of the desperation. His poverty was of his own making, as was his inability to complete grant applications on time, if at all. Desperation was trumped only by sporadic bursts of supremely self-confident behavior. Then, in no time, he produced hundreds of pages of a novel-in-progress. There was no middle ground. His name said it all. His surname meant little drop. His given name, also a form of Irish Gaelic, meant world ruler, or world mighty. In correspondence he insisted on the accent. It stood out like a tiny sword over the “o” in Dónal. No one ever called him Don.

Drinks on the plane had long since outlived their anesthetic purpose, turning on her and leaving Susan with a painful throbbing behind the eyes.

“Purpose of your visit?”

Muse, was what she wanted to reply to the customs officer. But on this gloomy late November morning he was not smiling. She was, in fact, carrying over 1,000 pages of Dónal’s novel—in duplicate—in her hand luggage, which no one bothered to search. Dónal didn’t trust the Internet, forcing their collaboration to move at a snail’s pace.

Susan Holt was editor-in-chief at a French-owned publishing company in Manhattan. She had held that position for five years, churning out magazines that catered to women who cooked, decorated, lost weight, parented, and still found time to knit. In a time when so many gay men were dying, Susan’s boss had died unpredictably from ovarian cancer. Olivia Sinclair’s prognosis, her rapid decline, sent Susan’s department into a tailspin. The object was to keep the pump of advertising flowing freely while they milled holiday specials and bridal issues. Susan had once offered a wry observation that their department—so different from their fashionably upscale counterparts on the floors above them—was like the Special Olympics of magazines. She’d been shot down by a withering look from Olivia. After Olivia’s death, Susan—eminently qualified—slipped unchallenged into the number one spot. She was an unmarried workaholic. She was thoughtful regarding her assistant. She was not disliked.

Dónal had often referred to her as his muse. She’d eventually seen through the flattery he draped her with, his insistence that he could not do it without her. It didn’t take a muse to covertly photocopy his Herculean novel. A muse would have had better things to do than to spend countless late nights in the office. For all the editing she had done on Dónal’s novel—this one and others prior—she wasn’t even sure she could call herself his editor, much less his muse. Nursemaid would be closer to the truth.

Dónal was nowhere to be seen in the forlorn cluster of rain-sodden drivers holding up signs. Susan buckled under the wave of annoyance that preceded a hot flush, grabbing the nearest empty seat. Dónal’s capricious nature, his Irish inattention to another’s time, was infuriating at the best of times. Now her hormones were firing on all cylinders. She rummaged in her bag for the cell phone she’d bought on her last visit, praying it had not expired. Her personal cell phone was useless abroad. Dónal refused to have one.

“Why aren’t you here?” she demanded. “You promised me you would be here.”

“I can’t tell you,” he whispered dramatically. “It’s easy now anyway to get here on the tube from the airport. Don’t take a taxi. The traffic will be mad in the city. It’ll be too expensive.”

To spend it on you is more like it, she thought, restraining herself. She was too angry, too early.

“Sure, you’ve done it before,” he chided, filling the silence at Susan’s end of the line. “Don’t be a silly cow.”

She hung up on him.

It was like diving through soup in the tube, cold soup. The Piccadilly line was overheated, nearly empty, but at each stop before Acton station a blast of wet, cold air sloshed through the open doors of the carriage. Susan shivered in her coat, wishing she had brought a scarf. She was awake now, wide-awake. Though why she was made no sense. The night before her flight she had not slept well. That night, and for that matter many nights, had been passed in sleepless battle with her body’s raging hormones. At King’s Cross, she swam with the rush hour surge, changing for the Northern Line to the Old Street tube station.

She’d spent the previous evening with a close friend, Ralph Lyon, another gay man. Most of her friends—her male friends—were gay. She did not have many female friends. Womanly contact was relegated to her office, in which were dogged legions of females pitched in a passive-aggressive battle in a male-dominated corporate world. She was their beleaguered captain, but not often invited below deck to raise a pint of anything. The last voice she needed to hear, anyway, at the end of a grueling day was one that sounded like hers.

Ralph was bewildered by Susan’s ongoing friendship with his Irish friend—his former friend, he reminded her. A tenuous rift had widened over Ralph and Dónal’s temperamental friendship that had lasted some five or six prickly years. It finally became an impassable crevasse between them on the same day that Susan began her own odyssey with the mercurial Irishman. Ralph had mentioned him in a way that predicted the apparent tension when she’d finally met Dónal at the funeral of a mutual friend. “He is genius,” Ralph told her, “and smiles with teeth like a leg-hold trap.”

She was seduced immediately by that irreverent grin. Ralph watched from a distance as Susan was charmed. His own relationship to the dead man was dear. Susan understood his vexation with her. So many had died that the funerals were beginning to blur. Not this one. The presence of a coffin crafted as one might for a pharaoh—specifically to the dead man’s wishes—elicited a wicked observation from Dónal, causing her to gasp and then giggle. Ralph’s anger with Dónal was still raw and had never healed. He’d forgiven Susan.

Dónal’s novel—the one she was carrying—was titled On the Wings Of Plagued Angels. She had spent the better part of the past six months editing it, or trying to. Dónal balked at so much of what she recommended that she would have thrown in the towel if she had not seen, down the line, that he had incorporated much of her input. He revised, confident it had been that way all along.

By the time Susan reached the flat, the downpour had slowed to a bitter drizzle. Dónal answered the door in an aged plaid woolen scarf wrapped desperately around his neck. He was disheveled and shoeless. His big toe poked through a mismatched sock. He was wearing an un-ironed shirt, worn at the collar and cuffs. His jeans were weirdly out of style and unlike him. 

They skimmed an awkward kiss. “Why are you dressed—?”

“I’m beggared,” he whined. “Skint.” Then, as if talking to a foreigner, he snorted, “Dead broke.” He nodded toward the tiny bathroom. “The toilet won’t flush.” He prodded a plastic bucket filled with water at the ready by the bath. She shook her head, not comprehending. “You have to flush with the bucket when you take a piss, or, whatever,” he said.

And it was cold because the heat had failed.

Susan brushed past him. She closed the oven door in the kitchen of the tiny flat and turned off the oven. It was a council flat Dónal had once shared with his Argentine lover. “Where’s André?”

“He’s left me!” Dónal wailed. “I’m—.”

She cut him off. “You’ll kill yourself trying to heat the place. At least do it after I leave.” She called the caretaker about the heat, explaining that she was a relative from America visiting her sick cousin. Assurances were made that the heat would be back on by the evening. The toilet, however, wouldn’t be looked at until Monday. It was Friday.

It crossed Susan’s mind that she could book into a hotel. Bring him along. But that would be regarded as desertion or worse, an insult to his perceived poverty. He lived on the top floor. There was no lift. He said he was starving, far too weak to accompany her to the shops. There was nothing for Susan to do but head back out into the dismal morning. She wouldn’t be enjoying a fry-up any time soon. He wanted granola and yogurt and fresh fruit because he was, “…as you can see, not in a good way.”

Heading down Pittfield Street, Susan considered that she had made a mistake coming over. “He’ll be the death of me,” she muttered. She flexed her stiffened hands and touched her burning forehead with icy cold fingers. She hoped he had gloves to borrow. 

Stepping into the road she was nearly clipped by a black cab barreling through the intersection from an unfamiliar direction. Breathless, Susan leaned against a railing at the crosswalk until she could no longer feel her heart banging to escape her chest. She shopped for groceries for breakfast and dinner. Then the alcohol: red wine and a bottle of gin, some tonic. She went back to the market for limes. It was as much as she could carry up the hill past Hoxton Square to the council estate, yet she felt mean for not having bought champagne. She could go back out later, after she’d had some food, maybe some rest.

“Ralph says hello.”

“No he doesn’t,” Dónal retorted, directing her to the cabinets, which were, surprisingly, crammed with bags of pasta alongside cans of tomato juice. Containers of pesto were wedged into the undersized refrigerator. She forced the package of lamb chops he’d requested between them. The freezer held an unopened bottle of Stoli.

“You’ve been poisoned by him,” he said petulantly.

“Poisoned? How?” Though she knew exactly what he meant. “You know how he feels,” she replied, abandoning on the counter the rest of the groceries—whole meal bread, Weetabix, Walker’s crisps for her. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”

The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the flat, restoring her. Yogurt and granola was probably the better way to go, though she’d make sure to get a plate of bangers down her neck while she was here. Miraculously the heat did come up. She wanted to call the caretaker to thank her for getting the job done but Dónal stopped her. “She’s a cunt,” he said.

After the dishes were washed and put away, Susan managed a sponge bath, draining the tub of murky standing water before filling it calf deep with hot water. Dónal shouted through the bathroom door, “Remember to fill it again when you’re done in there. Just don’t use any more of the hot water.”

He was anxious to get to work. Susan changed hurriedly into fresh clothes. Wet hair clung to her neck and she was glad of the heat steaming up the few windows in the flat. He’d discarded the moth-eaten scarf for a pristine Burberry, one of many she knew he owned. He’d slipped into a pair of glove-soft loafers, red suede branded with that telltale horse bit. Italian. 

“My God, your face is red! What on earth?” Dónal had purged her carry-on bag of its contents; his manuscript sat among her personal things on the table between them.

“Oh, you know. It’s…(she pinched the air with invisible quotes)…my time of life.”

Dónal covered his mouth as if she’d just said: I have tuberculosis. “Ugh. The change.”

“What, ugh?” she asked, indignant. “You know, I’m actually having a hard time. Especially at work….”

He flipped through the pages of his manuscript, avoiding her question. “Mother made life absolute hell for all of us when she went through it. The Vale of Estrogen, I call it.” He chuckled softly. 

The afternoon passed unnoticed into early evening with little change in the blustery lowering sky. “What about dinner?” Susan said, lowering her glasses.

Dónal returned from the kitchen holding a bottle of red wine aloft. “Oh, I think a wee bit of imbibing is in order, don’t you?”

The label looked expensive. “That’s not what I bought.”

“No-o-o,” he purred. “Jason gave it to me.” Jason was one of those hyphenated trust fund boys who followed Dónal like the stock market. He showered Dónal with his cast-offs: the Burberrys, the cashmeres, designer shoes and tailor-made shirts. Susan had met him a few times. She always came away thinking, he’s not really straight.

Dónal’s coterie was an ever-shifting bunch of both sybarites and guttersnipes. There was always the brilliant straight male—or two—among them, those who loudly professed their ease among gay men. Then there were the women. Some, from his university days, had remained out
of loyalty or boredom. One was the daughter of a famous pianist. Others were beautiful, eccentric—a few with their own wounds. All had the capacity to wound him. The lovers, when they stayed for any length of time, were sideshows to the party. Dónal had lived with André, who had never liked any of
the hangers-on, least of all Jason. André worked with an international human rights organization, eventually tiring of rescuing Dónal. Sy, who had come before André, was rough trade.

Susan looked around the disheveled flat. No wonder André had left. She liked him and vowed to reconnect once she got back to New York. It really was all Dónal, all the time. She tried to bring the conversation around to her—what she was facing in her life—when they broke from the job at hand. The only time he paid attention was when she said, “I may not be able to afford these trips after a while.”

Then he launched into recounting the last terrible days of his life in Manhattan, how some had deserted him when they’d found out he was hiv positive. “Diana especially, and I don’t mean the princess.” A nearly overflowing glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape was suspended before her. “We’ve worked hard today,” he said. “We deserve this.”

During the night, Dónal slid in beside her. He’d graciously offered her the double bed, insisting that he was fine in the front room on the futon, “…if you’ll just help me unfold it and make it up.” She, unable to sleep, felt his unwelcome warmth, his weight beside her, inching ever closer, claiming the space. When she got up to pee she tripped over the bucket.

In the morning, hung over, her body stiff from avoidance, Susan checked her watch and saw it was past eleven. A mechanical purring came from the kitchen. She knew that sound. Dónal was making Bloody Marys. The lingering aroma of last night’s feast—copious amounts of robust red wine, baby lamb chops, and roasted red potatoes—sweetened the whole-foods artlessness of another breakfast of yogurt and granola. A hint of garlic still hung in the air until the stronger aroma of fresh coffee overtook it.

Susan declined a second Bloody Mary. The vodka wasn’t helping. She’d been trying to find her way through the plot of his novel, deciding there was none. She asked, “Is that it? That there is no plot?” He refused to allow her to “shape” things in the manuscript. He believed his style was the plot, pure genius as he so unabashedly claimed. She’d surmised that On the Wings Of Plagued Angels—subtitled Life In the Age of AIDS—wasn’t about life. It was about childhood abuse and death—more specifically, the death of his mother.

“But there is life,” he insisted. Dónal had abandoned the wearisome jeans. Leaning theatrically in the kitchen doorway, he was dressed in camel-colored wool trousers. He had layered cashmere with a flamingo-pink pullover over an eggshell-white turtleneck jumper.

“You look nearly presentable now. Better?” Susan asked, almost sarcastically. “Maybe we can still go dancing while I’m here.” He ignored her.

There would be no dancing, she pondered. No theater either, although on previous visits they had made the most of both. There was always dinner, the theater, usually something classical, along the lines of Medea, where a famous actor once sat directly in front of them two rows ahead. Dónal, of course, knew the man’s godchild, “…a dreadful little queer who sucks up.” They’d gone to drama school together; while Dónal had had to work his way through school as an usher, the other was already blowing his way into film roles. “Minor roles,” Dónal emphasized.

Susan enjoyed dancing with him, though she doubted she had it in her these days. Off they would go to Camden Town for drinks and dancing at drag bars like The Black Cap. The last time she’d been there, Cher’s song, Believe, had resurfaced as a huge disco hit. Susan and Dónal had danced like the possessed. Sy, the lover of the moment, wasn’t a dancer, but he watched.

“Have you heard anything from Sy? I wonder how he’s doing?”

“Oh, poor man,” Dónal sighed. “I hurt him a lot. I left him right after I started the Minor Wounds book. I am a little sorry about that. It was unavoidable. He was a bit of a lost soul.”

“Was?”

Dónal swayed past her questioning stare.

“The thing, Susan, is to carry on being good in the present.”

The afternoon dragged on. Tomato juice ran out. They drank vodka straight. Susan groaned periodically. When he asked her why she said, “That’s the sound of my brain trying to sort though all this.”

“All this” was the manuscript splayed out before them on the table, on the floor, on chair seats. He balked at cutting anything. Every word was precious. “Even” was the last one they’d argued about. His response—so musical in its delivery—to her suggestion to eliminate it seduced her and, without totally understanding why, she agreed to its oft-employed inclusion.

“I have come to love certain expressions, and words like ‘even’. They leave open the possibility that we can never have the last word.” He sipped from his glass, pausing dramatically. “It is my mission to recognize that the last word does not exist. This word allows for fallibility. I have created this arena.” He gestured grandly to the pages scattered across the tabletop. “It’s Joycean, you see. Life. Death. Begin again.”

The sky had darkened when Susan rose to switch on another lamp. There had been many esoteric references: Hegel, Spinoza, Joyce. They had picked through the manuscript; in some places it was like picking at a scab and then suddenly: Beauty. Light. Hope.

Dónal took the telephone into the kitchen and made a call. It sounded as if he was making a dinner reservation. He returned, an expression of smug satisfaction etched into his face. It was a beautiful face, carved into ageless stone. In summer, when his face blossomed with freckles, it had the quality of cork, especially as he grew older.

“What are you up to?” Susan asked.

“This is the season,” he declared mysteriously.

She prodded, almost annoyed, “Season for what?”

“White truffles, my dear!” To her vacant look he added, “White truffles, infinitely superior to the black ones, are cultivated from October to the end of the year.” He studied her face. “That’s now.” He headed for the bedroom. “Tart up my dear, we are dining at Carluccio’s.”

Susan bathed and then dressed in a little black wrinkle-free number. She pulled her hair into a soft knot at the nape of her neck. She added just a bit of lipstick, as nature had taken care of the blush in her cheeks. Dónal was drawing his arms through the sleeves of a camel hair frock coat. Black cashmere turtle neck jumper, charcoal wool trousers. Another Burberry scarf at the ready. Just before they left for the restaurant, Susan flung her coat open as she experienced the greatest spike in her body temperature yet.

Dónal ignored her. “Hurry, the cab is downstairs. We’ll be late.”

She let him order the wines; he did not stint on expense. Champagne arrived before their starters. Vintage. Susan let the effervescence drain the tension from her. She was prepared to laugh, to have a good time. As she pushed her fork around her risotto, watching him tuck daintily into his porcini, Dónal confessed he was afraid. 

“Of what?” she asked, not unkindly.

What if the next century brought him nothing but failure? What if he fell on his face? He drained his glass, threw his head back before demanding of her, “What if I am past my prime?”

Their main course arrived. Quail for him, sea bass for her. Both dishes enriched by what they had come to pay homage to: the white truffle. “Jolly good wack,” he said in a comical attempt at Scouse. He called for a second bottle of Pinot Noir. Susan loved his odd habit of stealing and combining expressions. Dónal’s temporary despair, as he put it, had mellowed with champagne. He became light-hearted during the first bottle of wine, funny again, making her laugh. Into the second bottle his mood shifted. He was pensive, almost dreamy.

“Ah, well then. To me.” His Irish was up and with it his glass of wine. “Now it’s failure I’m used to. It’s not a bad life. After all, I have made my way on a wing and a prayer generating literature, enemies and friends.” 

He returned Susan’s smile with a smugly innocent expression of “whatever.”

“I have learned to be soft, to understand differences.” He leveled his gaze at her. “I can even tolerate intolerance. I am able to lubricate rather than irritate. Rather than reacting, making a situation more polarized, I calmly propose a solution for intolerance.”

Without waiting for a response, he excused himself, rising from his chair. “I need the loo.” Susan watched as he swayed across the intimate dining room, navigating around a display of fresh funghi.

She concentrated on her wine glass until the waiter arrived to clear away the plates. She accepted the dessert menus. How had she come to have so many gay male friends? Recounting them in her head she saw Ralph, of course. He was a theatrical costume designer. He and his actor partner were her closest friends. There was the ex-priest, and a corpulent poet and his partner, the psychiatrist. Susan often accompanied another friend, a public relations guy for the Bronx Zoo, to opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, knowing full well the unspoken, that she was his beard. There was the journalist, now dead. There had been a landscape artist in L.A., also dead. 

She had been reading Virginia Woolf on the flight over. Why didn’t she have a Leonard? She did not because she could not have endured a Leonard. She recalled with fondness the closeted Argentine painter without a green card who had once proposed marriage for the obvious reason. She sometimes wished she had taken him up on it. With a start, she remembered something Ralph had said to her the night before she’d left. “Honey, I never thought I’d hear these words come from my mouth: You need a man. A straight man.”

Dónal stood before her. His face was beaming like a window in a red light district. “What’s happening to me?” he cried. “I’m burning up!” He leaned over, pulling her hand to his cheek. He was feverish. “You witch!” he shouted. Others in the restaurant turned to look.

“It’s transference,” she joked. “You know, when women spend a lot of time together they get their periods at the same time. You’re just a big girl.”

She didn’t care who heard them. He slumped into his chair, laughing. Susan called for the waiter. They ordered double espresso and cognac. 

Dónal reached for the bill. When the waiter left, he passed it to Susan declaring, “It’s very extravagant, shockingly so. Alec Guinness dined here often.”

They stepped onto Neal Street into a bone-chilling downpour. He took her elbow, propelling her over to Covent Garden where they would find a black cab. He was noticeably drunk, gripping her arm tightly for support.

Back at the flat, his mood darkened. He instigated an argument, insisting that she and Ralph must talk about him, and not in a nice way. 

“I know why he won’t speak to me. It’s the condom conundrum.” He told her he was having sex with five men, as it happened. Five. He refused to wear a condom. “I ride bareback. Shoot me.”

Susan managed to ask, “Are they poz, too?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he cried. “I have no need for protection. That is something you condemn me for, you and Ralph. I go for it, neither innocent nor guilty. My mind is innocent though, the mind of a child, a fool. I am sure you are both appalled.” He stopped for a moment to gauge his effect on her. “That is also fine,” he said.

He stumbled off to the bedroom, leaving his camel hair coat in a heap at her feet. Susan started for the remaining vodka in the freezer. It wouldn’t do. Instead she brewed a pot of strong coffee. She and Ralph did talk about Dónal, this promiscuity he embraced with a vengeance. “He’s a carnival act,” Ralph said. “Only he’s a dangerous clown and he can kill.” They had often debated whether Dónal had purposely set out to get himself infected with the virus. “He’ll live to be a hundred, I think,” was always Susan’s response.

In the morning, Susan greeted Dónal with a fresh cup of coffee. She had made a decision.

“I’m going back to New York today.” Before he could utter a word, she told him she would re-book at the airport.

“It will cost you,” he warned, still dazed.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

He saw she had packed. Both copies of his manuscript were neatly stacked on the table. His face went crimson. “I’m burning up! I haven’t slept all night.” He looked her up and down. “Those are my—.” She shot him a determined look. He almost touched her shoulder, but resisted. “Please change your mind.” She shook her head. He shouted, “You’re still drunk!”

“Maybe,” she offered. “But I think it’s best that you sort this one out on your own. The change will do you good.”

Susan pulled the front door closed behind her. She stood at the top of the stairwell adjusting one of his Burberrys around her neck. She slipped her hands into lambskin gloves lined in cashmere. He wouldn’t miss them. She could see her breath. It was cold, but it was sunny.

Breath Visible

At an ungodly hour on Christmas eve morning in an Upper East Side building, Dora Bauer waved off the doorman on her way out, startling him from his drowse. 

It was well past two in the morning when she’d left her studio earlier. She had indulged, possibly too freely, in a bottle of Maker’s Mark as she applied the finishing touches to a canvas. Mindful of a boozy brume she biked with care up a ploughed route on Park Avenue. Back at the apartment there was only time for a shower and a quick change. She’d had to scramble to pack her bag with the essentials: her journal, a thick volume of Proust and a few slimmer paperbacks of poetry. She had pens, yellow legal pads, an extra sweater, woolen socks, an unopened bottle of bourbon and a pack of Dunhill Reds. Folded into underwear less sexy and more functional were a couple of freshly rolled joints.

She headed to Fifth Avenue in the winter darkness and hailed a cab. Dora’s spontaneous friendliness belied a cynical nature. New York cab drivers saw through that. Strange men often did. 

The driver sped down the deserted avenue along a route of moneyed cliff dwellers and bare trees abstractly silhouetted along Central Park. They passed holiday displays in darkened department store windows. He talked about President Ford’s message to their bankrupt city. “We got the bailout awright,” he said, “but that guy’s goose is cooked fer shuah.” As native New Yorkers he and his passenger shared a certain laissez-faire attitude and they laughingly agreed that being told to drop dead sort of came with the territory.

Until they swept past the towering illuminated evergreen in Rockefeller Center, their chatter remained impersonal. He informed Dora that she was lucky; usually the lights were off by midnight. Except for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Then they were kept on for a straight forty-eight hours. She told him of her Atlantic City getaway and the reasons for it. He steered through Times Square and dropped her off on Eighth Avenue amidst swirling trash and the few vagrants huddled inside the entrance to Port Authority. The famously sordid strip along Forty-Second Street looked more than usually ominous in the freezing pre-dawn chasm.

“Take care yaself, okay?” he admonished. “There’s a lotta lunatics out there.”

Lowering a bulky floral-patterned carpetbag from her shoulder, Dora balanced it on the tips of her Timberland boots, avoiding contact with the grimy cement floor scabbed with spent chewing gum and sadly recognizable fluids. She jammed bare, raw-knuckled hands into the deep pockets of her pea coat, and buried her nose into a knitted multicolored scarf—a thrift shop find. The Port Authority bus terminal, at that hour—at any hour—was like a tomb. She made her way to the Greyhound gate and waited for the hound from hell.

She’d lied to her old aunt, saying she had been invited to stay with friends in the country, knowing full well she could never be rusticated. She had told neither her friends nor disparate lovers of her plans. They would have tried to talk her out of such a gloomy escapade, coax her to their overwrought dinners, or guilt her into joining a lonesome drunken despair in Greenwich Village, on a barstool in Julius’ alongside a bereft handful of gay patrons, where she would be even more conspicuous than usual. Worse, some might not have made any overture at all. She would be poor Dora, newly divorced and alone at the holiday. They would cry, “Oh, such a desolate place! Atlantic City in the winter?” And they would be right. She’d bought her ticket two weeks ago so as not to change her mind. Dora wanted desolation.

Dora chose the seat nearest the driver. To move back any closer to the one grizzled passenger hacking into a yellowed handkerchief would have been foolish. The bus looped along the exit ramp toward a sliver of light beneath the darkness. It reeked of stale reminders of previous passengers and synthetic air freshener. Two days of seaside ahead of her. She had two and a half hours to catch some sleep.

A mechanical squeal and then the wheezing exhale of brakes shot through Dora like a threat. She woke and rose sharply, hitting her head on the overhead storage. Bleary-eyed, she exited the bus and stumbled into the terminal at Atlantic City. Poking her head into a foul-smelling restroom, she thought better of tramping over a waterlogged floor and, hiking the cumbersome carpetbag over her shoulder, hurried out to the main drag.

She scoured Atlantic Avenue. It was too damned early. The big round face of the clock inside the jeweler’s shone through a bracing drizzle. It was not yet nine in the morning. Shops that weren’t boarded up offered nothing in the way of breakfast, and besides, nothing was open. There was an old-fashioned hardware store. There was a dress shop with a window display of bewigged mannequins teetering shoeless on stands, like levitated drunks. Next door was an income tax preparer and then the last resort of the desperate, the pawnbroker. She squeezed between boat-sized cars with tail fins like sharks and crossed an oily tarmac streaked with slush. A blue and gray bubble—a dwarfish bus—rolled up to her but she waved the jitney driver on. Her head throbbed. Her face was frozen. She was desperate for coffee. She started for the boardwalk and her spirits revived. Anything could be had there, from what she remembered. She had her heart set on a room at the grand Marlborough-Blenheim hotel.

Dora crossed Pacific Avenue, the main thoroughfare, parallel to the Atlantic Ocean and at that hour nearly devoid of traffic. Her attention was drawn to decrepit buildings, vacant lots hemorrhaging sodden debris and shops that may or may not be open on an otherwise abandoned strip. Memories of a lively summer crowd carrying kitschy treasure from souvenir shops belied reality. It looked like the kind of place rope-necked thugs could shake down a cowed shop owner. Dora, rattled, hurried along.

Once on the boardwalk she was buoyed at the sight of a familiar image on a bright yellow billboard, an unexpected window in a dull winter sky. The incongruity of a half-naked, curly blonde moppet with a Coppertone tan alongside her mischievous puppy was not lost on Dora, shivering in the raw dampness. “Get more from the sun.” She recognized the domed, architecturally ornate Moorish structure ahead—something out of an Arabian dream—rising above the boardwalk, bigger even than she remembered. Another gargantuan hotel loomed nearby like an asylum. But in the freezing mist, the chimneys of the Marlborough-Blenheim conjured mystery, maybe even danger, and not the welcoming sunbaked hotel she remembered. 

Early on in her marriage—nearly seven years ago—Dora had been determined to live up to her husband’s single-minded whirlwind courtship and had accompanied him on an overnight to Atlantic City. She’d sat raptly attentive in an audience of scientists as he delivered a paper—incomprehensible to her—which she only knew had something to do with toad bladders.

She’d been dazzled by his determination, his education and radical political views, his family’s Park Avenue residence. She hadn’t so much accepted the marriage proposal as offered little resistance. His parents, as far as she knew, were not aware of her existence until after they married. Visits to the sprawling art-filled apartment, pre-marriage, were made sporadically, when the doctor and his wife were absent. The young couple’s late-night presence among the Eames chairs and the antique marble and gold leaf, a small but not insignificant collection of Italian master drawings, decorative kilim rugs and the abundant examples of his mother’s cloisonné handiwork was noticed only by the live-in housekeeper, who noiselessly interrupted amorous fondling to ask if he—not Dora—needed anything before retiring for the night.

Dora should have suspected his insistence on eloping was less a nod to anti-establishment and more of what was to come. She couldn’t make the rent and he sent bad checks. Stamping her feet on the boardwalk, Dora pulled the knitted scarf over her nose and muttered under her breath, “Bastard.”

She caught sight of a gray-faced man behind the glass door of an outmoded luncheonette. He flipped a sign on the door to Open. A cluster of determined women wrapped in homely cloth coats pushed past the man. He wore a depressed, not-so-white apron, tiny black bow tie and a white fountain cap with red piping—a weary nod to authenticity.

Dora followed the women to the counter and lowered her carpetbag between her feet. She ordered a cup of coffee—steaming hot coffee that the obliging man kept pouring. Oddly, her hunger had abated. She tapped a cigarette from its red and gold box. Neither she nor the women removed their coats in the unheated shop. They kept scarves securely tied around wooly hats. Dora flipped the collar of her dark blue pea coat. She didn’t have a hat. Seated next to her was a woman in a coat with a rabbit fur collar. A cheaply jeweled snowman was pinned to it, its tiny red nose alight.

Later, Dora stood outside the Marlborough-Blenheim hotel and weighed her options. There were really only two. She could head back to the station and board the next bus home or she could take the desk clerk’s suggestion and seek out his cousin’s motel. Hesitancy in the man’s voice was something to consider. He’d told her there were no rooms available in the hotel because it was out of season. When Dora pressed, he said there were no rooms in any of the hotels on the boardwalk. She saw evidence, albeit slim, of guests slumped in tatty upholstered wing chairs or slowly wheeling their walkers over the oriental carpet. An aging bellboy in a dark blue uniform shiny with regret, his too-short pants exposing white tube socks and black lace-up orthopedic shoes, stared dumbly at the quiet bank of elevators. Gift shops in the lengthy hotel corridor displayed crystal sailing ships and cast iron statuettes of baseball players. Sensing her confusion, the clerk admitted that a few residents remained, but the hotel was no longer taking guests. He’d shrugged and said it would all be torn down anyway.

Dora, undeterred, had taken a second glance around the circular lobby, as if to challenge his news. Little white letters were missing from summer convention schedules still tacked to a ribbed black board: As ury P k, Ca den. There were almost no gaps where room keys hung like skeletal fingers. Darkened pigeonholes behind the desk held no mail. The fireplaces were unlit. Walls and curtains had faded to the same aquatic shade: more poorly maintained pool than surging ocean. Another peek at the floor suggested her carpetbag was in better shape than the rug. 

The clerk’s parting words rang in her ears: “It’s gonna be the only room you’ll get around here if you insist on staying.” He’d directed her further down the boardwalk, much further. Dora stared ahead at the choppy slate-colored ocean, looking for a natural resolution to her dilemma. Naïve bravery directed her, the heaving Atlantic Ocean on her right and crumbling dreams on her left, until she found the place. Paint peeled like sunburn from its pink exterior. She knew it was cheap. She also had a vague suspicion that guests booked rooms by the hour.

Dora Bauer stood before the man at the desk, who appeared to be taken aback by her presence until she explained who had sent her there. Her long, honey-blond hair hung in damp plaits over her shoulders. Her cheeks shone brightly from winter’s vigorous and salty caress. He watched as she unwound a ridiculously long scarf from her neck, unbuttoned the pea coat and revealed a red plaid flannel shirt. His gaze went first to her snug blue jeans, and then dropped to the bulging carpetbag alongside her sturdy Timberland boots mustached with salt. She was twenty-eight. She assured him she wanted a room for two nights and handed him the cash. When she spotted a manual typewriter atop a pile of damp-cured telephone books and asked if she could borrow it while she was there, he was too stunned to say no. She shouldered the bag and he hoisted the typewriter into her waiting arms.

The room was dark. On impulse, Dora reached for the drapes. At the rear of the motel trashcans crowded, choked with empty liquor bottles. She dropped her hand and quickly returned to the light switch by the door. A moribund space heater in the bathroom doorway was the first thing she noticed in the stark yellow light. A cautious peek revealed a shower she was certain never to set foot in. The sink was stained from forgettable stories and the toilet covered with a wrinkled paper strap, dubious reassurance. A utilitarian blonde-wood table and chair reminded her of her own little desk when she was a girl. There was no sign of a television. No mirror in the room. Hanging above the bed was a dime store seascape, almost a boast.

Music came from somewhere—from a radio or perhaps a cassette recorder in another room. “You got your demons. You got desires. Well, I got a few of my own.” Recognizing the Eagles song, Dora smiled and began emptying the contents of her bag onto the flimsy chenille bedspread. She unscrewed the cap on the bourbon bottle and thought better of it. Suddenly she was ravenous.

Back at the luncheonette, Dora ordered from the younger man behind the counter. He was a boy, really, his hairless face scarred by acne. It was too late for the breakfast special, he told her and she, big spender, waved off his concern. Where was she from, he asked and she told him, New York. “Goin’ back home tonight then?” he asked. Dora shook her head. He frowned. “Not goin’ home for Christmas?”

On the wall behind him was a decorative serving tray illustrated with an apple-cheeked Santa raising a bottle of Coca Cola to his full, pursed lips, buttoned into a foamy froth of beard. As if she needed to be reminded of the holiday. Her prospects were dashed when he revealed that the luncheonette would be closed on Christmas Day. He promised that she could still get dinner that night if she was back there by five o’clock, maybe earlier, depending on the customers. Dora lowered her head over the plate and, avoiding what she imagined was barefaced appraisal, she wolfed down bacon and eggs. She tipped the young man and said she’d see him later.

By the third sighting of the massive Convention Center, her sign to turn around and head back toward the motel, Dora knew that strip of the boardwalk: Fralinger’s salt water taffy, Planter’s Peanuts, a deserted pier. It was, after all, the longest boardwalk in the country—maybe even the world—and Dora figured though she had not gone the actual full length of it, she had already walked at least that far in her determined circumnavigation. By the fifth go-around she was nodding slightly to some of the same people doing the same thing: walking, walking and more walking.

The old women walked slowly in pairs, some as trios, their arms interlocked. Perhaps they feared falling. A newcomer was advised what things she’d need in the summer. Some of the men, also seniors, strolled in pairs. Others walked alone, but a modest show of recognition was made in passing. One couple of indeterminate gender eyed Dora with curiosity. She tried to imagine the place heaving with vacationers, children with broiled shoulders, the smell of suntan lotion hanging heavily on salty breezes sweetened with cotton candy. 

But the air was frigid and smelled only of churning sea. The auctions were silenced: no sign of a toaster, clock radio, blender or iron. Street lamps arched over the boardwalk like skeletal giants with humps. The gray-green of the sky fell into the sea. Waves broke loudly, a never-ending accompaniment to her footfalls. The fire-engine-red façade of Banko Games shocked the colorless canvas of winter.

Dora paused on the boardwalk at a row of wooden benches backed by the sea. She decided to sit for a moment. Like a seagull eyeing a scrap of food, she let her mind alight on why she’d come here. She was done thinking about her marriage—that sinister lie. She was an artist again, a painter, and it was time to find a way to sustain that reality. Perhaps a recent proposal was a way out for her.

Dr. Jack O’Hanlon. It was not hard to reconcile the Catholic schoolboy—a taut equivocal teenager managed by priests—with the meticulously and expensively dressed man. Jack had been Dora’s first serious boyfriend. When she’d dumped him after high school he’d been distraught. She moved on. He chose the psychiatric profession. In a drugstore near the hospital complex where her husband had a lab she overheard the pharmacist address a familiar-looking red-haired man in front of her as Dr. O’Hanlon. After a discomfited fumble with pat phrases about looking well and not having changed a bit, they exchanged phone numbers. He called. She was already separated. Could he see her? And pretty soon he was in her studio, listening to her as she prattled on about her misconceived marriage, her passionate commitment to her art, her lack of money. He had money. He made her an offer. 

Dora stretched her legs and rose with a start. She had no watch. The sudden dark hurried her back to the luncheonette.

Inside it was warmer than it had been that morning. Elderly patrons, slouched over the counter spooning soup, took up all but one of the stools. It was like a meeting of gnarled victims of osteoporosis, replete with the smokers’ cloud. She slid onto the vacant seat. The same young man hurried to her, barely able to suppress his elation. He was maybe fifteen or sixteen, a tall drink of water, as her uncle would say. His white coat was unbuttoned, revealing a blue and green paisley shirt, top three buttons undone. A ponderous medallion shone from his hairless chest. She stared at the balance scales engraved on the medallion.

“Libra?” she asked.

“Yes!” He said he was really good with people, able to see both sides of a situation. “What about you?” he asked.

She told him she was a Leo, and without quite knowing why, she added, smiling, “It gets me into trouble.”

He frowned a little at that. “What’ll you have?”

Dora asked for a grilled cheese and a coke.

“Just plain?” he asked. “How about some bacon or a tomato?”

“Nope. Just plain grilled cheese.”

When he returned with an embellished sandwich he placed it before her and said, “It’s Christmas Eve. You should at least have a tomato.” He winked. “On me.”

She left with a bagful of snacks: potato chips, pretzels, a toy sand pail filled with salt water taffy, and a small carton of milk. Dora was touched that he’d remembered their earlier conversation, such as it was. She felt looked after. Heartened, she decided to call her aunt. She had a pocketful of coins he’d changed for her. The pay phone was just outside the motel. 

“Uncle Frank. It’s me, Dora.”

After the first tentative hello from him there was silence. He was forgetful and prone to staring blankly. It drove her aunt crazy.

“Uncle…?”

“Hey, Dorrie,” he croaked. “How’s my girl? Your aunt is at mass, I think. Where are you, hon?”

She said she was in Atlantic City and before he could ask she told him she just wanted to be on her own. She was okay. Fine, really. 

“Hey, Uncle Frank. Listen to this.” She held the receiver in the air, facing the sea. “Can you hear it? It’s the Atlantic ocean!”

He said he could. Where was she again?

Back in her room, Dora hunched over the typewriter. She peeled a sheet of yellow legal paper from the machine and added it to the jumble beside her. She’d dragged the little table to the bottom of the bed. Proust had been abandoned because she could not ignore the rather less refined drama outside her door. Rimbaud and Baudelaire met the same fate. The unread paperbacks lay among the contents of her bag, strewn across the bed. She took another swig of bourbon, left the bottle uncapped and lit up a Dunhill. Warmed by the alcohol, she was finally able to discard the woolen scarf.

The noise outside her room was getting louder. Doors slammed. Shouting that sounded like argument or joviality—she couldn’t tell half the time—was ceaseless. Sometimes it seemed as if voices changed sooner than hourly. Barry White’s steamy bass oozed through the thin walls. Earlier there had been vigorous banging on her door. A man’s voice hollered to let him in. She ignored it and carefully wedged the only chair under the doorknob. “Sheila!” he yelled. “You ain’t changed your mind?” Dora hollered forcefully, “Wrong room!” He was instantly pacified and mumbled an apology. A few seconds later she heard him further down the corridor, banging on another door, looking for Sheila.

Dora was getting nowhere with the letter to her potential benefactor. Myriad versions rolled through the typewriter. She argued with herself over the letter’s tone; should she be warmly appreciative or coolly nonchalant? He could be playing with her, all that history. And how to make perfectly clear this would be strictly a business arrangement. Jack had taken her to dinner a few times to a few different places, all intimately expensive venues. He’d enjoyed her surprise when waiters deferred to him, and he’d quietly boasted that he owned those restaurants in addition to a thriving practice. But evening’s end brought a rebuff from her when he suggested more. She told him she wasn’t ready yet. The divorce. It was too soon.

But, in fact, Dora had been game for lovers the moment she’d decided that her marriage was over.

In the freezing bathroom she inhaled on a joint. Not that she imagined anyone on the other side of the door would notice. The pungent aroma had been hanging around all night. She was only adding to it. Stoned, she settled on the bed against an anemic pillow, reluctant to discover what lurked between the sheets. She remained dressed, bundled in a thick, ribbed fisherman sweater, removing only her boots. She’d added a second pair of socks and draped her coat across her lap. Oh, she’d had and still had lovers; made up for lost time all right. She debated reopening the bourbon bottle. Popping a pretzel into her mouth, she rolled the salty nugget with her tongue.

Maybe that was the problem. Despite his offer to bankroll her artistic pursuit, Jack did not seem to get the new work. He’d even admitted to it, finding it odd that she, a self-professed painter, was using only graphite on primed linen canvas. He thought the draftsmanship—was that the word?—superb, but why no color? He was only a little less bemused when she’d explained the point of the series. It was called Tagasode. Some sixteenth-century Japanese panels exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum had inspired her. Paintings of lavish kimonos, heedlessly left behind, evoked a stronger image of the person than the owner’s actual presence. Tagasode translated as “Whose sleeves?”

He’d asked her to describe each canvas—what, or more specifically whom, the articles of clothing represented—but she’d put him off. “Well,” Jack quipped, “it’s certainly a departure from your dead flowers.”

When he first viewed her work, he bluntly asked what she was afraid of. At the time, off-putting as his question was, she attributed the remark to his role as a psychiatrist. He probably couldn’t help himself. But the question haunted her. Was she afraid? And if she was, what was she afraid of? She was on her own in Atlantic City, wasn’t she? Her list of lovers was long and varied, some might even say indiscriminate. Perhaps the monochromatic drawings of dead flowers—blown-up images on canvases as large as six feet square—were a bit on the gothic side. Thorny roses and velvet-soft gardenias, with titles like Misgivings and Things Past.

An artist works through pain. Left behind freely or mistakenly, the articles of clothing that had been immortalized were proof that she had triumphed over romanticized love. She was in control, free of the messy color of relationships. Each canvas was simply titled with an initial.

D graced her with his Burberry raincoat, explaining to his long-term girlfriend that he had left it in a bar somewhere. Fragile and aristocratic and so enthralled was he with Dora’s streetwise nature, her humble origins, that he allowed her to portray their secret affair.

K was his unsuspecting roommate who, while never imagining Dora was monogamous, would have been crushed to learn of her affair with D. He loaned her a tattered sweater, which he felt represented his life as a penurious philosopher.

The leather bomber jacket came from T. Irish journalist, bisexual. He was mad about Dora. She rivaled his passion, his energy and his devotion to craft. She held her own in any topical argument and matched him drink for drink.

C was another painter, a handsome black man who was wildly talented and given to stylish dress. He was married to a woman Dora adored. He was going to leave her. He left Dora with a white linen handkerchief.

She met A in St. Mark’s Bookshop, in the poetry section. After some hours of marvelously convoluted conversation at the bar in the Lion’s Head, they spent one drunken night together. The Argentine student left his paisley scarf behind.

J—a woman—was probably not speaking to her. Dora would heal that breach at some point, but meanwhile J had left her cashmere scarf behind and that would do.

P was her ex-husband’s best friend. Dora’s cross-country getaway happened in the unraveling year before their separation. At her husband’s suggestion she stayed with P in Laguna Beach. Her husband thought the trip would be good for her. She knew her absence would be good for him. Out of revenge, she’d slept with P. His tagasode was the only departure: a roach clip she’d filched from an ashtray.

Another C was a comedy writer. He was the only cynic among her lovers and he’d fallen in love with the unattainable Dora. She had just finished rendering his prized Chicago Cubs t-shirt.

Dora jerked awake. Her limbs were stiff, her mouth a dank cave of dry patches. Dazed, she looked around and gauged her surroundings. A chink of light split the exhausted drapes. She had no idea what time it was. The last thing she remembered was that the hallway ruckus had quieted down and she’d closed her eyes to Elton John singing “Someone saved my life tonight….”

A low, blustery sky beyond the pier in the distance—a scene not airy enough to be Turner—reminded her more of the Dutch masters’ dense, sardonic clouds. She stood at the edge of the ocean where the tide lapped the tips of her boots. The sleepy stranger at the desk had only nodded when she said she’d be back in a bit. Just going for a walk, she told him, waving her key.

The gritty beach was the same color as the squealing dirty gulls, reprimanding her for coming empty-handed. The sun was already quite low in the sky. Dora dragged her boot in the hard sand, forming Jack’s initials, the natural resolution she looked for when all else failed.

The wallop of the incoming tide caused her to jump back. The initials were washed away. It was fucking freezing and Dora laughed out loud. Her breath hung before her like an illusory curtain to be parted and stepped through.

At the motel she stopped to call her aunt again.

“Where are you?” her aunt demanded.

“I’m in Atlantic City. Didn’t Uncle Frank tell you?”

“Oh, my Lord,” her aunt moaned. “Frankie did tell me. I thought he was crazy and I yelled at him.”

Dora laughed and soon they were both laughing.

“When are you coming home, hon?”

“Soon, Aunt Fran,” she replied. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Wait!” her aunt cried. “I want to hear the ocean too.” 

The milk carton was gone from the windowsill where she’d left it to keep cold. Dora still had an unopened bag of chips. That would do until she got home. She left the unfinished bottle of bourbon on the table. The pail of taffy would delight her aunt. She dropped the typewriter on the counter before the bewildered clerk. Adjusting a lighter bag on her shoulder, Dora Bauer waved good-bye. She’d wait at the bus station for the next bus home. She had plenty to read.