EVE

For my father

eve of nothing

eve of mass

eve of something’s
eve of past
eve of notions
big and small
eve of childhood
eve grown old
eve of many voices sung
eve of one
resists alone
eve of loving
eve of fire
eve before
next moment’s ire
takes me back
to songs unsung
stands me beside
that drunken choir
eve of fathers
out of tune
among the rest
who gauge the ruin
eve of loving
all the sins
eve of accuser
eve of forgiven
sing it anew
that standard hymn
eve of judgment
eve of sin
come ye faithful
to the circus
laugh at his misplaced

notes among us
eve of always
missing him
eve of me
his first born hymn

"For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice." T.S. Eliot

HALF-EMPTY, HALF-FULL

Montauk off-season is always an eagerly anticipated destination for The Mister and me. By the time we get to the turn off into the village on the Old Montauk Highway and glimpse the proof of ocean off to our right, the everyday news that is seemingly inescapable back in Manhattan has already been consolidated into a sign in a shop window we have passed driving through East Hampton advertising a BAGEL BAILOUT!

Having been sidelined financially to the city for the past two New Years, this year—more than ever—we needed to escape to Land’s End; to draw in as much ocean air at Montauk Point that our stifled lungs could hold. Running away at year’s end (both physically and emotionally) is something I do and have done since experiencing the first blinding insight into the obvious holiday dilemmas. I just did not have to be where the specter of painful family memories, or a disastrous first marriage and the materialistic crush was.

And just in case I had forgotten, The Mister and I got a taste of that crush this year when we ventured into midtown on the eve of our departure for a talk on the 1964-65 World’s Fair given at the Mid-Manhattan Library. I have fond memories of tooling around those fairgrounds as a teenager, devouring Belgian Waffles, oblivious then to the racial context that made this fair controversial. Despite the fact that we avoided midtown thus far, it seemed like an opportunity not to be missed. Failing to heed our instincts, we hopped the bus but were soon faced with the reality that it would move no faster than a torturous crawl down Fifth Avenue. At each stop crowds of out-of-towners boarded, fiddling maddeningly with their Metro Cards as if they were meant to solve a Rubik’s Cube and not simply dip the damned thing. As I silently corrected each clueless tourist, The Mister eyed my agitated miming and knew where that would take us, so he hustled me off the bus some 20 blocks before our designated stop, knowing that on foot we would still beat the bus to our destination.

Having successfully avoided the midtown holiday madness for so many years, I was stunned at the surge that quickly engulfed us along the avenue and not a happy caroler in the lot. Nerves were frayed and tension pulsed through the crowds like a shower on the third rail.

Fifth Avenue at Christmas was once the jealously guarded realm of a childless aunt who never failed her young nieces and pursued her holiday agenda with the characteristic zeal of a surrogate parent. We shuffled along with other children past department store windows and looked up in wonder at those fairytale displays; were hurried off to the Christmas Show at Radio City and afterwards cozied up to a grilled cheese sandwich and hot chocolate behind the ruffle-curtained windows of a Calico Kitchen. The sandwiches always came with potato chips and those little beveled discs we called bread-and-butter pickles; a poor kid's madeleine.

What I could see of the displays now seemed ludicrously opulent and in no way connected to the faces pressed around me. I thought—incredulous—that I had not been inside of any of the Fifth Avenue department stores—Bergdorf’s, Saks, Lord & Taylor’s—in nearly a quarter of a century! The Mister and I snaked single file through the inhospitable openings in the crush, like soldiers on a secret reconnaissance deep in enemy territory, signaling often that we were still together.

Later that night we were accosted on our block by a bearded young man, obviously down on his luck, who buttonholed us with a tale of lost bags in the back of a taxi, wallet gone, no way to get back to his brother’s place in Great Neck where he was staying while his brother was away. His accent was British. He said that back home he was a sous chef in a Kosher Indian Restaurant in the London neighborhood of Golders Green. New York’s finest had dismissed his plight. He had been to all the synagogues in our upper eastside neighborhood looking for help. It was clear that he had been sleeping rough; his feet shod in worn Crocs, unsightly at the best of times and utterly unsuitable on a bitter cold evening. He said he needed fifteen dollars to get a train ticket and he had no other recourse but to turn to Americans for help. I could see he might have a different take on the half-empty, half-full thing. We handed him a twenty and wished him well.

Unlike me and other friends who have lived through a troubled family life, The Mister’s initiation came much later—in fact, quite recently—swiftly, out of the blue and with heartbreaking force. We look around at the holiday now and see we are neither of us in touch with our families. They are mostly dead and our siblings have very little to offer that isn’t jealous recrimination for a fabricated past. They are last year’s voices and this is the New Year. I think that without families we are half-empty. The Mister says we are our own family now and that means half-full.

Two nights and three days in Montauk would straighten us right out.

In the past we’d pack up the car with a magnum of champagne, bottles of red wine, artery clogging cheeses, the disgusting but obligatory Bailey’s Irish Creme and sexy underwear. Our New Year’s Eve celebrations would entail an expensive alcohol-infused late night dinner among local revelers at The Shagwong before racing down to the ocean at midnight to gulp champagne and toast the New Year and then rock out with a band at the bar of the Memory Motel before continuing our rowdy party of two into the wee hours in our room at the Royal Atlantic.

We pack our own food now to save money, bring warm pajamas and roomy sweats, and barely get through a bottle of champagne on New Year’s Eve.

The dining room at The Shagwong was deserted this year from the many cancellations due to forecasted icy weather. Jackie K., Mick Jagger and one of those healthy American blonde models (not Christie B., the other one) stared down from their photos into empty space. A few stragglers hustled into the bar where we had stopped just before making our midnight ocean front appearance. The bar staff was clearly disgruntled; their biggest off season take had been slashed to 4 or 5 regulars and the out of town couple (us) who would not be coerced into more than one round of celebratory martinis. A glum bartender knocking back shots apologized for the drinks prices. I overheard her sad complaint: that she doesn’t belong in the real world. “I tried. I went to school for…mumble, mumble…can’t seem to get away from here.”

The endless loop of U-2 songs was finally replaced with Sinatra, Neil Diamond and that sure thing, for me anyway, Meat Loaf. We sang along, we even danced but we were out of there before our new best friends could even find out our names and we high tailed it to the sea front. It was a cold night—raw cold—and the sky was clear and bright. We made out the little dipper but had no idea where its bigger counterpart was in the constellation. I marveled, as usual, at the sea’s integrity and how it knows just where to stop. We, once again, found ourselves at midnight at the ocean bidding adieu to the old and welcoming the new. The Mister kisses me. It’s hard to be half empty after that.

Back in our corner room at the top of the stairs, the Wizard of Oz wind catches itself on the corner post outside our door with a high, demanding whistle and is the musical accompaniment all night; while we clink our Kir Royales, watch endless episodes of The Honeymooners, make love, and even while we sleep.

On New Years Day we start out for the familiar trails near the Point. It’s a place for us to isolate our old voices, inspect the words that come often, and sometimes thoughtlessly, and hear more clearly what has to be sorted out and why. After nearly twenty years of marriage we are still re-evaluating and because of an argument earlier in the day we abandon the hike. At The Mister’s suggestion, we sorted through the quarrel over steaming bowls of mussels pebbled with garlic back at the Shagwong. Restored. Friends again.

Back on the road to the Point, we discover a new walking trail and pull over. This one brought us along the top of the dunes where we spot a herd of deer. After that miracle we are treated to an Edward Hopper sunset from a vantage we have not experienced before. And then, at twilight, we returned to the Point and saw the Lighthouse, lit like an electrified gingerbread house. Intrepid tourists, mostly giggling Asian couples, were out in force; running from the car park to the café in little more than sweaters while I lurched about in puffy Michelin Man garb.

The drive back to the city in the morning had all the elements of a retreat well taken. Nothing had changed much outside of us. Where, when either of us had spied a red flag—on a beach or in a park or anywhere—we knew it to be a sign to, at the very least, pay attention—others who had invested their life savings had ignored red flags and held glasses they presumed were not only half full but overflowing. A prominent French Financier, a German billionaire had looked deeply into a glass and saw it empty and ended their lives. In shopping malls between the Gap Outlet and Buddha Express, young people are being recruited by the Army in military video arcades. In Gaza and Iraq the bloodshed continues and the games are real. Americans await another voice.

“Half-empty.” These are last year’s words. 

The Devil Is in the Detail

 “Okay, you win.”

Regina Wiley eyed an unfamiliar arrangement of rainbow-colored fireflies in the darkened room. Miniature bulbs, strung across the top of an overstocked bookcase, fell in strands to the floor at either end, like jerky illuminated sideburns. She regarded her husband from comfortable habit. Not counting past lives, they had logged thirteen years of marriage, with no formal attention paid to Christmas—no tree, no carols, and no midnight candlelight service. Old souls, in sync at the start, they had declared New Year’s Eve to be their personal celebration. They had fled from the year-end chaos of the city to raise gloved hands, tilt reddened chins and swig from a bottle of vintage Champagne—their gift to each other—as they greeted possibility on the cold, hard sands of Montauk. This year would find them again wrapped in the susurrus at land’s end, braced for the pulsing sea.

“The lights look great,” she cheered and immediately shuddered. Here it was. That feeling of well-being that sometimes unnerved her.

“I support sustainable marriage,” her husband quipped in a British accent worn at the heel after more than a dozen years in Manhattan. David Hawthorne knew he’d prevailed. He’d made the effort this year. Christmas was always largely ignored at her request. Or rather, at her hedging a bet that if it were left up to him, no move would be made. 

Two young cats skittered around his ankles, chasing an ethereal mouse. They had visited the shelter a month before. Just to look. Still, maybe, not quite over the death that summer of her old cat.

“We can call them fairy lights,” Regina said.

“Besides, it’s their first Christmas,” David insisted.

David held fast to the memories of his family in Leicestershire, where he’d grown up. The clutter and sparkle of cheap decorations lovingly preserved, the fireplace mantle topped by miniature village scenes sunk into blankets of artificial snow. He remembered, fondly, the desiccated turkey and overdone veg, gorging on sponge cake soaked in sherry, always feeling a trifle bombed by the end of the night. The three of them—an insular family—never tempted by the outcropping of aunts and uncles and cousins, and always within taut personal boundaries. The death of his parents contrived to hold these memories in place.

Regina had an unholy attachment to family that she longed to sever, but could not. Christmas, for her, recalled a tree painstakingly trimmed, all the more remarkable because her overdone father was blind drunk by the time he’d perch precariously on the hassock and, ever so delicately, like a sheepish driver submitting to a sobriety test, place the angel atop the tree. There was nothing remotely sweet about her mother, who invariably threw up her hands, angrily insisting on ordering dinner in. Her sister—bitter and vengeful at predicted disappointment—tore through presents with cyclonic force. Regina’s parents were dead. Her sister’s life had been reinvented, Regina sidelined.

“I smell heat,” Regina sniffed. “What the—? Why do they do that? It’s practically summer out.”

“The radiators are off,” David reminded her.

“I know. I know,” she huffed. “But it gets worse every year.” Regina hurried to yank the living room window open from the top a few inches. “Can’t let the terrorists win. Get the phone, would you?”

Recognizing the number, David knew Regina was on the outs with the caller. “It’s Gabe.”

“Let the machine get it,” she shot back. “I don’t have time for his shit.” 

“No message,” David said. “Still pissed at him?”

“Maybe. I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t want to spoil the moment.”

“Steady on. You know how he is,” David replied.

“How he is,” Regina muttered, “is what pisses me off.”

After Regina had lost her full time editorial position, her husband had put down his guitar full time to pick up the slack. David found work as a security guard. The pay was negligible but he was outdoors a good deal at a wildlife conservancy in Queens, and they needed health insurance. They agreed it was only temporary. 

She’d met Gabriel Price in the aftermath of 9/11, when many with comfortable incomes were forced to recalibrate and take meaner positions with fewer incentives. Gabriel was a couple of decades younger than Regina. He blinked at her radical political views, critical and unwilling to take it all on until he’d recycled the information, tailoring it to his peculiar proselytizing. From a Fundamentalist Christian family, he agonized over what was obvious, confiding in Regina, the older freelancer, with whom he felt safe. Although he was characteristically flamboyant among his social circle, and generally out with his coworkers, he feared the denunciatory edicts of his mother and the church back home in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Earlier, Regina and David had spent the day in SoHo, at the offices of God’s Love We Deliver. They’d joined an amiable bunch of volunteers, many of whom they recognized from year to year. They stuffed gifts donated for the homebound into paper shopping bags decorated by school children. Regina knew it didn’t entirely define the holiday for her husband, but he loved the whole New York feel of it.

On Christmas morning, the volunteers would meet at Cleo’s on Ninth Avenue, usually frequented by lifers in the theater. At an hour long before regulars took their customary bar stools, sleepy-eyed altruists gathered around a fearsome confectionery mound provided by a popular doughnut shop. They downed steaming cups of hot coffee. Fortified by sugar and caffeine, they’d head to their assigned neighborhoods to deliver gift-laden shopping bags, along with a prepared holiday meal. They had—and would do so again—visited emaciated young men in tenement walk-ups, grizzled warriors in SROs, resourceful old queens in rent-controlled apartments and low-income women in housing projects, some with children staring wide-eyed at the strangers bearing gifts.

At Regina’s suggestion, Gabriel—not one to be left out—had also signed on to volunteer. He couldn’t “do Christmas” because he was flying home, but he eagerly agreed to help fill the Christmas bags. For weeks around the office of a teen magazine, where he and Regina free-lanced, he’d babbled enthusiastically, basking in the attention he received for his “good deed.’’ He’d failed to mention Regina’s part in it.

As the morning inclined toward afternoon in SoHo, David had had to remind Regina over and over what Gabe was like, that maybe it was a rural thing, his inattention to time.

“To anyone else’s time,” she’d snapped, stuffing a bag. “Girl, you need to get one of them cell phones,” she minced, making David laugh. Afterward, exiting onto Sixth Avenue on an unusually temperate winter afternoon, she recognized Gabe’s car at the curb. He waved frantically, laughing and mouthing the familiar “sorry” refrain, beckoning them to the car. Breathless, Gabe leaned across to the passenger side window.

“Oh my God! You won’t believe what happened. I was so, so, so on time and then—.” Regina studied her watch. He giggled, the prelude to wangling forgiveness. “Let me make it up. Buy you guys a drink?”

They had dismissed Gabe, pleading a prior engagement. Undaunted, he’d called after them, “Have an awesome day folks. Love ya!” Seemingly on the spur of the moment, David had stopped into a hardware store and purchased the lights.

“Tea?” David asked, heading for the kitchen.

“M-m-m, dunno Sweetie.” Regina watched the cats following David, their Piper. She turned to the rows of books and cds shelved like subway riders in rush hour. “Is it too early for a drink?” She picked a cd at random. Her personal timeline ran from doo-wop through to the Beatles and Dylan, to the Sex Pistols, jazz, rockabilly, to the classical music she received as gifts. Though nowadays she rarely listened to any music other than her husband’s.

Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate bubbled from the cd player and filled the room. David hollered from the kitchen, “Haven’t heard that in a while!”

Regina scanned the shelves. Her gaze traversed a lifetime of books, her old friends. She lingered on an author she’d once read avidly. She reached up to stroke the thick spine of Flannery O’Connor before grabbing it off the shelf. “Born disenchanted,” she muttered.

David handed her a full glass of Pinot Noir. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” she replied, putting the book down. Palming her glass, she said, “Well, I mean the lights look fab.” She smiled, more inwardly, but he got it. She raised her glass to him, to the lights. “Thanks for all this.”

He nuzzled her shoulder, intuitive as ever. “Pecker up, lad. I’ll make us something to eat. Get that wine down your neck.”

It was a generational thing, she reasoned, her upset with Gabriel. She’d had many close gay friends in her life, still did. Years ago, some, younger than she, had struggled painfully

in a more hazardous environment. She became a confidant of sorts until they bashed their way out of the closet and she found she was no longer necessary. It was fine with her. She understood they needed to make their own path. Her close friends were older, bellwethers in their time.

Now was the time, though, that you wanted someone—gay or straight—serious and mad as hell. Someone who put aside feather boas and inconsequential personal drama. Gabe’s circle seemed so self-congratulatory, frothy and liable to disappear when you needed them. She had to be honest with herself. She was angry with Gabe, not so much for his absence earlier, but for something that had happened less recently. 

Just before Thanksgiving, he’d confessed to her that he dreaded the return home, how flustered he would be, so closeted with his family. He and Regina had talked for hours. She’d urged him to come out. Mothers need to know, she told him, and lies just made everyone sick. She had seen it in her own family. He’d returned from the holiday in high gear, ready to take on the world. “Whew-e-e-e!” He knew what it meant to be truly born again. His family was shocked. Shocked! But he had prevailed. Then, in a heartbeat, he’d turned on Regina over some remark she’d made regarding the furor that had resurfaced over “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” She’d cautioned against being deflected from even greater issues.

“dadt’s lobbed around like a political football,” she said.

His response was instant and lacerating. “You are a hetero! What do you know about it?” To her amazement he unleashed a tirade. “I’ll tell you what you know about it. Nothing. You know nothing about it!” 

She’d come home steaming. “You get too involved,” her husband had chided.

Regina flipped through a hefty volume of letters. “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. Maybe she was just worn down by circumstance, unfairly harsh with Gabe. At least he was true to himself, not like that pastor who chastised his congregation for going to social networking sites, calling them “portals to infidelity.” Later it was revealed that he’d had a three-way with his wife and a male church assistant. Gabriel didn’t so much apologize as seduce her with his capacity for fun. Better playmate than friend, she thought.

Caller i.d. prompted Regina to pick up the phone. Her expression caused David to lower the volume on Teresa Stich-Randall, and he watched as Regina’s jubilation disappeared. He picked up that it was something to do with family. She replaced the phone in its cradle. It was late. Taxis were dear, but they would have to get a cab downtown from the Upper East Side to an address in Greenwich Village. She advised David to bring his cell phone. “This is bad. This is very bad,” she said.

In a nondescript, reconverted warehouse on Greenwich Avenue, a thickset, unsmiling policewoman stood sentry at Lucien’s front door. David liked Lucien Edwards well enough, though he saw his wife’s cousin rarely and had never been to his apartment. He knew the cousins had hit a speed bump some time ago and slowed the pace of their relationship. 

Regina presented the requisite paperwork from the local precinct. The officer, somewhat mollified, guided them under the taut strip of caution yellow stretched across the entrance. Inside, Regina and David moved stealthily through the gloom, as museum-like as its place in her memory.

A muted yelp brought the policewoman to Regina’s side. 

“Sorry, Ma’am. Didn’t they tell you at the precinct?”

Regina averted her eyes from the mirrored walls reflecting a king-size bed, from the tangle of burgundy-colored satin sheets enveloping the long, white limbs of her dead cousin. His pronounced jaw was still exaggerated by a delicately drawn line of beard that met a trim goatee at his chin. He was sprawled like an afterthought, one eye open, and mouth agape, unclothed but for black boxer briefs, a full-page Calvin Klein advertisement.

“They haven’t come yet,” said the officer. “It’s a bad night. Lotta parties.”

Regina and David stared uncomprehendingly.

“The Coroner’s office, they should be here soon. I’m only here because the Sixth is having their party. I was sent over from the Seventeenth.”

“The seven—?” Regina started.

“Sutton Place. It’s pretty quiet over there.”

“Oh,” said Regina, eyes downcast. “We just need to pick up some clothes for the, you know, the funeral.” She shivered and the officer acknowledged that she had opened the windows earlier.

“He’s been here a while,” she added, not unkindly.

Regina blanched. “I feel a little weird.”

David hurried Regina to the kitchen and ran cold water from the faucet. Alone, they conversed in lowered tones. Regina knew they had more to do than gather a good suit, shirt and tie from her cousin’s closet. And shoes. Even dead he would need socks and shoes.

Regina studied the dark eyes in the officer’s plainspoken face, an expression that was not altogether official. “Listen, I need to ask you something.” She took in the close-cropped wiry hair, the masculine posture. “There’s things….”

“Ma’am,” the officer counseled, “Do whatever it is you needa do. My mother…” She stopped and gestured toward the vcr. “I’d start over there with that.”

Regina’s younger self—more boisterous and outspoken—had knocked around with Lucien. They were the oddballs in the family and their friendship was a kind of protest. Lucien was fiercely tall and he had a wicked laugh. Used to have, Regina thought. Though he’d been demonstrably out in the city, Lucien shrank into a straight man’s carapace around his widowed mother, Eve. Regina guessed it was the same for him in the school where he’d taught music. He was also organist and choir director at a church in Greenwich Village, but Regina had little time for that aspect of him. She had been urged to a few of his concerts and always came away disconcerted at seeing her Aunt Eve. Afterward, Regina was eager to reward herself with numbing cocktails at the Waverly Inn nearby. The strait-laced imperative of her aunt to “show generosity of spirit and embrace the Lord” drove her nuts. Eve was a bitter, closed-minded, holier-than-thou propagandist. She repelled Regina. Prediction slipped off her aunt’s tongue like a satiated leech. “Burn in hell” was a familiar conclusion. Oddly, Regina was still profoundly affected by an uncharacteristic wobble in her aunt’s voice on the phone earlier when she told Regina about the detective’s call. Lucien had not shown up at school. Her son was dead.

Fueled by dry gin martinis and heart-pounding meth, Lucien had once revealed the contents of a darker closet—bizarre things Regina had gazed at glassy-eyed, things she wanted immediately to forget. 

It was too much information, even for the free-spirited Regina. He’d boasted newly installed bedroom mirrors, satin sheets that, when lit from above, called up a burning bed. She had not understood and discomfort had crept over her like sunburn. How could he do all that good work in the church, teach music to children and still—?

“Because the church is Satan’s workshop,” he’d told her.

When he’d heard Regina was married, Lucien insisted on meeting the lucky guy. They kept their meetings playful and public, usually at Lucien’s favorite Spanish restaurant, where he inevitably ordered the Shrimp Diablo, until those meetings tapered off. 

David announced that he’d found the trash bags. “Let’s get to it,” he said. Resolute, they began with the videos and uncovered a large cache of Polaroid images of young men—too young. Very quickly they discarded the idea of sifting through the lot for anything that wasn’t questionable. There would be no keepsake photos for Aunt Eve. 

They searched through the hall closet. She pulled a conservative dress suit from a hanger, quickly picked a black tie from the rack. A collection of military caps was tossed in the trash; Lucien’s leather motorcycle jacket left untouched. David added a pair of black shoes and socks. Regina held out two dress shirts for appraisal.

“Blue or pink?” she asked.

“Pink,” David replied with a sly grin. 

Lucien’s final dress shirt would be periwinkle blue.

Regina peeked into the bathroom, at the walls papered with old Playbill covers. She cleared the medicine cabinet.

In the bedroom, Regina searched under the bed, careful to avoid looking at her cousin’s body. She found nothing. At the officer’s direction she lifted the seat of a boxy chair at bedside. She spied the contents in the false bottom. Grasping the edge of the bed, she sat down before hastily rethinking her miscalculated move.

David dragged the trash bag to her. She hauled out whips, handcuffs and leather masks, sex toys that were more frightening than playful to her. She interrupted David’s inquiries with, “Don’t ask.”

“Anyway,” David said, “it was his life.”

Regina forced herself to breathe. “Exactly.”

They rummaged through desk drawers. “Quickly,” Regina urged.

“But we don’t want to toss anything his mother might need,” David said. “You know, bills and bank stuff.” He held up a sealed envelope marked personal. “What about this?”

Regina tore it open, suspecting the contents. There it was: instruction to destroy everything listed on the sheet of paper she held in her trembling hands. The false-bottom chair and the videos had already been taken care of. 

“Right.” She exhaled slowly. “Let’s start at the top.”

They were halted by conversation in the front room. Two men, one doughy and pale, the other red-faced and thin, strode into the room like a silent comic duo. They nodded and quickly set about preparing the body. A gurney was retrieved. In a heartbeat her cousin’s body was bagged and gone.

The officer asked how it was going. Regina grimaced, showing her the list. “Okay, Ma’am. Let me know if you need any help.”

Regina pulled back a length of black velvet hung from the ceiling. It revealed a closet door. She stared at the doorknob. Her next move could pitch her down a very dark hole, a tainted Alice.

David ripped the cloth from its moorings and shoved it into a bag. “Let’s just get on with it,” he urged.

Religious vestments hung in the closet like forgotten extras in “The Exorcist.” Gingerly she pushed through them, revealing vestments embroidered with symbols she had shunted from memory a long time ago. On the shelf above stood engraved chalices and thick, black candles roped into bundles, like dynamite. Sealed tightly in the kind of plastic bags that usually housed more innocent items, such as sweaters and woolly hats, were the books she knew to be The Satanic Bible and The Book Of Lucifer. Another shelf held folders with pages and pages of liturgies and musical scores—her cousin’s handiwork—and she flinched when she recognized his feathery handwritten notes scrawled in the margins.

Like a curious child who had made the wrong turn in search of a gingerbread house deep in a frightening forest, she imagined tearing away from the terrible scene as fast as her legs would carry her. She jumped at a gentle nudge from David. “You okay?” he asked. Regina assured him that she was.

David lifted the last of the trash bags into the hall. They watched as the officer sealed the apartment. She lifted one of the bags, directing them to the elevator. “I can’t drop you anywhere. Regulations,” she told them apologetically.

In the street, David took the bag from her. They shook hands awkwardly, surrounded by the jumble of trash bags.

“We need to—,” David started.

“There’s a dumpster around the corner,” the officer advised.

Freed of their burden and clasped tightly to each other, Regina
and David headed toward Christopher Street, seeing no one in the quiet neighborhood normally rollicking with tourists and hardcore inhabitants. They crossed Sheridan Square and spied an all-night coffee shop.

“Coffee?” David asked.

Regina answered quietly, “Yes, please.” 

They sipped tepid coffee in the flyblown interior, picking at a puck-hard round of coffee cake. 

“I’ll call him.”

“Who?” David asked.

“Gabe. I’ll call him after the holidays.”

At the counter a disinterested cashier rang them up. His fingers shot from the register as if it was white-hot.

“Whoa,” he whispered. “Number of the Devil.”

Regina stared, fascinated: $6.66.

Before she could say anything, David slammed a packet of mints on the counter and the cashier readjusted the total. “There you go,” David declared. “We just beat the Devil.”

The taxi sped uptown with the kind of abandon cab drivers embrace in the middle of the night. The radio was tuned to some talk show that enabled shouting. They rode in silence until they reached their corner.

Regina sat up. “Shit!”

David rolled his head, coming out of a comfortable slump, digging for his wallet. “What?”

“The fridge! I didn’t check that. God, there’s probably poppers in there.”

Confused, David responded, “Popovers?”

“No,” she replied. “You know, the disco drug.”

David paid the driver. “Too ’80s. They don’t still do that?” 

Regina imagined aloud her aunt uncapping a small brown bottle of liquid and sniffing out of curiosity. 

A passerby saw them emerge laughing from the taxi, and smiled inwardly at the couple’s gay evening.

“It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.”—Marcel Proust

RESOLUTION NUMBER NINE

It’s the second day of the year. There are a couple of Christmas crackers still to be snapped. The last of the mince pies have been gobbled and very nice they were. Like certain scalloped-shaped cakes, they stir slumbering memory for The Mister. Christmas treats like Malteasers, Cadburys, Walker’s squirrel and stilton crisps, and chocolate tree ornaments have long since been devoured and are already forming unwanted pockets of bodily excess on my person. Requisite holiday alcohol in addition to the red wine staple—like rum for the soy eggnog, bourbon for the organic Christmas pudding from Sainsbury's, gifts of Grey Goose vodka and ruby port—has been drunk. A prettily decorated bottle of sangria mix remains unopened. Directions to just add brandy and fruit make the sangria sound suspiciously like a bottle of red wine and better left for the summer. We managed to resist the annual intake of Stone’s Ginger wine. Champagne at the New Year was not given much thought except to agree that we wouldn’t miss it. Bailey’s only rears its preservative-laden head when we are in Montauk so we avoided that car crash of a hangover this time.

A few nights in a hotel on the ocean at the tip of Long Island has, for the most part, been the preferred setting in which to welcome a New Year. Montauk was not in the cards for us this time. Old cat passing and new kittens’ arrival decided for us and we stayed close to home. We declined invitations to parties and went instead to V&T’s with a good friend on New Year’s Eve and indulged in one or a few slices of their brick oven pizza. Later the Mister and I were watching fireworks shot over the now defunct Tavern On the Green, joined by a couple of our neighbors. It was cold. It was raining. The street-wise ducks made barely a protest and from the looks of it as they sailed around the reservoir they were also enjoying the spectacle of wintry fireworks over the skyline. It was lovely.

Runners thundered past us at a few minutes after midnight on the drive below the bridle path. Some were in costume for the annual Midnight Fun Run, which The Mister and I participated in many years ago. My favorite was the quartet of ver-r-ry happy young women outfitted to represent the numbers 2,0,1,0. They quit the race where we stood at the 97^th street entrance and wobbled themselves into many configurations of those numbers as they made their precarious way on the path to Fifth Avenue. Bewigged in neon-colored afros they giggled and fell all over each other. But they did manage to hail a taxi. The ‘clowns in a car’ reference did not go unnoticed as we watched them drunkenly pile on top of each other in the cab. We went back to our apartment and settled into vicarious party going while watching Tom Jones on Jools Holland’s annual Hootenanny and finally drifting to a classic episode of The Honeymooners where Ralph saves the day.

The Mister and I require only one thing regarding the New Year when we have not been able to get to Montauk; that we are near a body of water. Central Park’s reservoir served for the eve and on New Year’s Day we took the long subway ride to Brooklyn, standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Coney Island with a lot of other New Yorkers, and fewer tourists, to watch members of The Coney Island Polar Bears Club lead the rest of a crowd of enthusiasts—or lunatics—into the freezing ocean on the first day of 2010. Unlike the one-time, toe-dipping participants on Friday afternoon, Polar Bear Club members continue their endorphin-raising mad winter bathing every Sunday. For a native New Yorker like me, it was a welcome atmosphere, being surrounded by the generally good nature and sly humor of other New Yorkers who were born here. I can’t explain it any other way than no matter how crappy a childhood or what youthful memories lay best undisturbed, it feels like going home. And The Mister is still a sucker for a twangy New York vernacular.

It wasn’t all funny faces, gooseflesh and deflated beefcake on the beach. The Polar Bear Club sponsors Camp Sunshine in Maine and everyone was encouraged to donate. On the shores of Sebago Lake little kids with big life-threatening illnesses get to spend time with their families; a respite in a beautiful and rustic haven.

I went to a Camp Sunshine when I was a girl. We lived in Astoria, in the borough of Queens. I went away one summer to a place I suspected, even then, was a camp for underprivileged children. My mother saw a listing for the place in the church bulletin. Any cost would have been prohibitive to my parents but the free pass of the righteous had them packing us off straightaway . Our summer camp adventure took my sister and me to the Watchung Hills in New Jersey for two weeks. Uncle Frank drove us there and back. In the car with us was my Aunt Fran and my non-driving parents. Camp Sunshine was less than an hour’s drive from New York City. A nudist camp, en route, with the same name caused Uncle Frank to lose his way every time. The joke never got old. On the weekend they visited and my sister and I would be collected at the camp and we’d drive into the nearest town of Bernardsville. Years later I’d recognize the place as Kennedy-Bouvier stomping grounds and probably a town of horsey polo playing residents who didn’t take kindly to our father and uncle downing beers in the town bar while we kids were left to our mother and aunt in a laundromat on the main street with a weeks’ worth of dirty clothes.

Church deaconesses, called sisters, organized the Christian camp’s activities. Bunk house arrangements based on age kept me relatively free from the unwanted attentions of a younger sister who operated largely on wrath. There was a swimming hole—mud hole more like— that we hiked to; rows of wary urban fledglings trudging under gigantic power lines over scrappy unmarked trails through fields of cow pats . The first tentative dip and the unfamiliar ooze between my toes on the bottom scuttled any further attempts. Blasted from our tiny bunk beds at the crack of dawn by sadistic “Sisters of Mercy” we stumbled in the near dark trying to dress while the badly played trumpet bleated relentless reveille; relieved if we were not the ones chosen to empty the chamber pots of a morning.

Breakfast was a bleak affair and we looked like diminutive prisoners, shadowed under the mildewed rafters of a screened-in shed, seated bleary-eyed at long wooden benches before our bowl of gruel. I am not given to early rising still. A chaperoned field trip to a penny candy store was made bearable for kids with no pocket money when we were told we could ‘sign’ for our sweet purchases. Thereafter we were given a set amount from our visiting parents and told to make do. Fields of corn surrounded the camp and successfully prevented me from venturing too far. I was a project girl. Corn, free standing fields of it in huge numbers, was an unknown not to be traversed. Escape was an overreaching desire

The following summer I wriggled out of the camp experience. Realizing a too small bedroom which had to be shared with an annoying younger sister would be free of said sister if I stayed at home, I hit on some reasonable excuse or other—I can’t remember what—and probably enjoyed blissful solitude for a week or two, not to replicated before I was finally on my own.

Even then I was keeping some kind of record. I had diaries, pink leatherette volumes decorated with a pony-tailed teen in perky attitude and poodle-skirt. A flimsy lock was meant to be broken by a prying younger sister and I didn’t seriously begin to keep a journal until I was in my early 20s. Because I have been writing short stories for the past year I have been mining my journals for details I thought I had forgotten but which come back to me in requited light. It’s a fascinating read for me because I have sometimes forgotten the strength of my youth in order to forget the pain. As compelling, if a little off-putting, is the seeming drive to be morosely honest in my accounts.

I had kept up in my journals with admiral persistence but it became sporadic at best in the last four or five years. The most valuable thing I take away from re-reading my old journals is that writing things down in a kind of honest heart-to-heart with yourself can only be a good thing. I had already resolved to return to journal keeping, apart from the blogging and short story writing, when I was given a journal at the holiday. I considered it to be a sign from the Universe and vowed to make some notation every day that affords a glimpse beneath the surface of events, no matter the difference between that exploration and merely listing what I ate and drank of a day, what the weather was like, who I spoke to and what upset as well as delighted me at any time. The eight other resolutions I made this year can remain private and will only see the pages of my journal. The journal is resolution number nine.

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.