I heard the news about Oliver Graeme at three in the morning on the sidewalk outside the fifth precinct in Manhattan, twelve hours after Susan Jelleme told me night court was out of the question.

          “What’s the problem?” I asked her.

          We were standing at ringside in Brady’s Gym on East 34^th street, sketching the boxers. Susan didn’t look away from the two featherweights warming up on the canvas, “I’m grounded,” she said. “I can’t go anywhere.”

          “But this is for school. Shall I give you a note?”

          “Lainie would just assume I forged it.”

          “I’ll call.”

          “Please, Mr. Mallory.”

          “It’s okay, I don’t mind -- ”

          “No. Seriously. I mean it. You’ll just make things worse.”

          I gave up, tilted my head toward the ring. “They’re squaring off again. Try to catch the tension between them right now -- before the first punch.”

          I paced behind the kids after that, making my mental notes: Susan looked like she was ready to punch someone, herself – maybe me, maybe her step-mother, maybe Travis. She seemed to have moved from heartbreak to hate when it came to him. That made sense. Hearts stiffen when they break and you don’t have to be limber to hate. No stretching required. I moved over to the Brinkley twins, both working fast and staring up at the boxers, still experimenting with drawing right-handed; then Paul Haddon ignoring everything but Emily Traherne, sketching her in profile as she worked beside him; Noah Lewis doing yet another Travis Blake portrait, and Travis himself projecting some kind of aerial view of the fighters, foreshortened from above. His hand was shaking – I didn’t know why.

The emotions sparking between them were so sharp and raw, so unmediated. They were all privileged kids, they may have been spoiled, but they weren’t jaded. I remembered my first taste of coffee, my first sip of beer – how bitter they tasted on my tongue, before the tender nerves wore down. People like to remember those days with nostalgia, but these kids were miserable. I felt bad for them.

I strolled back to Haddon, and tried to do my job. Watching his pencil move across the paper, I finally figured out what bothered me about his work.

His sketch showed Emily in profile, He was working in charcoal, blocking in the cascade of her dark hair.

“Try smudging the lines a little,” I said. “You’re using charcoal. Really use it.”

“I’m not sure exactly what -- ”

“There’s a shadow across her cheek from the fluorescent light up there. Push some of that charcoal up with your thumb. Just the tip. You don’t have to moisten it, your hands are sweaty enough. In fact wipe them off first. There you go.” I looked down as he worked the dust across the paper. A boxer knocked down his sparring partner and Jack Haigley, the trainer, crouched up  under the ropes and into the ring. He helped the fallen boxer up.

“You’re dropping your left hand, Tommy,” he said. “I know the glove is heavy but you’re leaving yourself wide open.”

Jack was an old friend of my Dad’s. He liked having the kids at ringside. The gym rats and aspiring pugilists (as he liked to call them) might have felt differently, but he didn’t care: they needed to get used to having an audience.

Not that Haddon, at least, was paying the slightest attention to them. Emily smiled;  he flicked the eraser and started to re-drew her mouth.

“So how’s that graphic novel coming?” I asked him.

He nodded without looking up. “Great,” he said. “Dark Horse wants to publish it.”

“Zombies, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s cool. All the dead people have risen at once and taken over the world. They ranch people like cattle. It’s funny -- it turns out the post office actually runs better with real zombies behind the counter. And they don’t like to be called ‘zombies’. That stigmatizes them as the undead.”

I had to laugh. “Politically correct zombies?”

“Totally. You have to call them ‘The Risen’. That’s the title of the book. Max is a genius.”

“Max Bulajic, right?”

Max was school’s pet miscreant, slouching though the halls, ignoring the (admittedly) loose dress code, wearing slip-on sneakers without socks and a blue jean jacket with just a t-shirt under it, leaving the building whenever he wanted, attaching his own little quizzes to the end of tests for teachers he despised. He rode a long skateboard that he had supposedly used as a weapon on more than one occasion. He smoked – Balkan Sobranies, no less. And these days he had a tattered copy of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf stuck in the back pocket of his Levis; last month it had been Lolita. Word around the teachers’ lounge was that he had very little interest in the actual reading curriculum, and was happy with Cs and Ds. “I slip through like a kernel of corn,” he had said to Dave Polonsky a few weeks ago, explaining yet another just-scraping by grade on yet another ‘pointless’ test. “I don’t want to be digested by this place.”

And what did he choose to do, instead? Write zombie comic books and corrupt the drawing style of my favorite student.

“It sounds great,” I said. “But it’s not exactly art. I mean … people don’t generally have black outlines around them. I’m not sure you’re really looking at your subject right now. This is … it’s a picture of a picture, Paul, not a picture of a person. Play with it some more. Lose those sharp lines. Break your habits. Let the real world in. It might change the way you draw  -- even when you’re only drawing comics.”

Haddon squinted fiercely down at the page for a second, and tore his sketch off the big pad. I could tell he was going to tear it up so I snatched it away from him. I thought he was going to make a grab for it, but he didn’t. I rolled it up.

“I’ll save this one for you. It’s a nice first step.”

I could see his shoulders tensing in frustration. I reached down and gave him a squeeze. “Never tear up your work, Paul. Seriously. It feels good for a second. Then it feels bad forever.”

Haddon sat next to me on the bus uptown. Everyone around us was in their own world: I counted three kindles, two nooks, a religious tract, two Wall Street Journals artfully, folded lengthwise, one regular paperback book, a pocket video game and five iPods. Everyone else was texting. I was sketching the line up of people on the other side of the aisle: the two rasta guys (you could actually hear the reggae when the roar and rattle of the bus abated at a stop or red light), the strap-hanging rumpled suit guy with the newspaper blocking my view of the immense black woman with her Watchtower magazine, sitting next to a harried-looking Hispanic mom, struggling to pay attention to A Storm of Swords (I recognized the green cover) against the relentless sibling warfare of two antsy kids fighting over one game-boy micro.

Haddon touched my arm.

“I need your help,” he said.

I closed the sketchbook, slipped my pencil into my jacket pocket. “What’s going on?”

“I just -- I need you to sign something for me.”

“What kind of thing?”

“It’s – you just basically … it’s a permission slip.”

“Okay, but why would you think I could -- ”

“You’re my teacher, you’re in loco parentis.”

“Wait a second -- ”

The bus pulled over and the doors sighed open. Haddon lowered his voice.

“You’re like a parent when the parents aren’t there. It’s the law.”

“Sure, for riding on the bus during school hours. But I mean … ”

Five tough looking white kids bustled aboard, obviously cutting school. Who was in loco parentis for them?

“I want to get a vasectomy.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to get Emily pregnant and every type of birth control sucks, so I figured -- why not get a vasectomy and be done with it?”

I shook my head, fast like there were wasps flying around me.

“That’s a really bad idea,” I said.

“So you won’t do it?”

“I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to!”

He turned away, facing the other side of the bus again. “Fine. Forget it. Whatever.”

I hate that word, the new usage of that word. “No,” I said. “Not whatever. This – this specific thing. Your request. My refusal. Your parents freaked out when you asked them, and you wouldn’t even ask your grandparents so that leaves … what? Some random adult who’ll sign a release form?”

“I said forget it.”

“Let’s say I was all for this. It wouldn’t help you.,  You’d be no better off and I’d get fired.”

“It was a stupid idea. I get it.”

“The vasectomy is the stupid idea, Paul. You can’t decide now that you never want to have children. That’s crazy. That’s like tearing up your art work. Don’t do stuff you can’t take back.”

“Vasectomies are reversible.”

“Sometimes. It depends on a lot of things – how long it’s been since you had the operation, the doctor, your physical condition. And you don’t always get back a hundred percent fertility anyway. It’s a crap shoot. You don’t go under the knife twice and risk never having kids because you’re too embarrassed to buy a condom. That’s got to be easier than talking to your parents about this.”

“I didn’t. I knew what they’d say.”

“We’ll they’d be right., Parents are right sometimes. Look, if the condoms are a problem I’ll buy them for you.”

“That’s crazy.”

“The school ought to give them out free. ”We jolted along in silence for a block or two. ‘It’ll be fun,” I said. “Think of it as an extension of Home economics class.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it. Condoms aren’t so terrible. Actually, I find they add a tonic note of slapstick to the proceedings.”

“It just feels weird.”

I nodded. “That part doesn’t go away.”

He pulled me aside as we got off the bus.

“Mr Mallory … listen – do you think we -- can we do it soon?”

“No problem. Just keep it between us.”

          “Hey, I’m not exactly going to brag about it, okay?”

          I kept the smile off my face. “Meet me at the CVS on eighty fourth and Lex. Right after school.”

          He grinned happily. “Okay. Great, Thanks.”

          He sprinted off to catch up with Travis and for a few seconds he seemed more like fourteen than seventeen. I envied and admired his innocence, growing up in Manhattan as he had. Whatever his parents might be doing wrong they were obviously doing something right.

Still, examining the elaborate contraceptive display at the drugstore that afternoon, I couldn’t help feeling this ritual would be more appropriately enacted by Paul and his father, though my own father had left me pretty much alone when it came to sex. His occasional snippets of advice struck a different note: never let a girlfriend leave a single item, even a toothbrush, at your apartment; avoid women with children and pets – that kind of thing. I think Dad assumed women handled the details of birth control.

Paul’s father believed in abstinence.

So was I being a bad loco parent? Or just a loco one? Was there a school rule about facilitating safe sex between consenting minors? I’d never seen it in writing, but I knew there were quite a few people, more than a few of them on the Dalton School Board of trustees, who would have believed fervently that I was giving my blessing to Haddon’s hormonal folly. As if my permission was required. Paul and Emily Traherne were going to be pulling their clothes off, unwrapping each other like Christmas presents every chance they got, whether the Board of trustees or their parents or I or anyone else gave them permission or not.

I didn’t really believe in that hoary oxymoron ‘safe sex’ -- the act was too fraught and inexplicable for that. But it didn’t hurt to try and side-step the more obvious physical consequences.

“What about these?” Haddon said, holding up a box of ribbed Trojans.

“The ones with the reservoir tip are better.” He picked up another box.  “you don’t need the lubricated ones,” I told him. “You’d better not.”

He actually blushed a little at that. I thought he was staring at his shoes, but he noticed me grabbing a package of the lubricated variety along with the ones we had picked out for him.

He smiled. “You have a hot night planned, Mr. Mallory?”

“Hey -- ”

“No, that’s cool. Practice what you preach, that’s what my Dad always says.”

“And yet you rarely hear a sermon about condoms. God is more of a ‘Go Forth And Multiply” kind of guy. Makes sense I guess, When you’re starting out with two people and a snake, you’re not really worried about population control.”

Okay, I was babbling a little there, I admit it. But I was embarrassed. Haddon had seen right through me. My purchase wasn’t just a gesture of solidarity or an example of practical optimism.

I was going to be spending all day Saturday with Joanna Clark; and I was hoping for Saturday night. Sure, I was getting a little ahead of myself, but the self I was outracing would never have called Joanna at all. He’d just think about it while he sat around his loft, eating microwave popcorn and watching The Wire on Netflix. So, fine: eat my dust, TV guy. And clean those kernels between the couch pillows!

Joanna was new to the city, so I decided to give her a tour, starting with breakfast at Yonah Shimmel.  Knishes and coffee – what could be better? Almost anything, I guess, at least according to Joanna. She would probably have preferred a basil frittata from The Morning Star Café, or eggs, bacon and black-eyed peas at the Pink Teacup; but she was game. I picked her up at eight in the morning – she was living in a couple of messy rooms above her restaurant – and we worked up a good appetite, walking across town.

It was a beautiful day – a blue sky scrubbed of clouds by a night of rain, a mild breeze off the Hudson, the streets fresh and festive, crowded but comfortable, nobody in a rush. 

“I’ll take late September in Manhattan over April in Paris anytime,” I said, as we strolled  east along Houston Street

.

She pushed her hair off her face, held it back against a gust of wind. “Have you ever been in Paris in April?”

“That’s proprietary information, m’am. Strictly on a need-to-know basis.”

“I need to know.”

“Well …”

“You’ve never been to Paris at all.”

“Does the France pavilion at Epcot count?”

She punched my arm.

“How about the Paris hotel in Las Vegas? They have an Eiffel Tower.”

“You’re pathetic.”

“I’ll go someday.”

“You better.”

She wound up liking the knishes all right, but she liked the old man behind the counter better. We paid and walked toward Orchard street with our hands full of potato dumplings and take-out coffee. I wanted her to see the street market.

“To be a real new Yorker you have to eat and walk at the same time,” I pontificated, between mouthfuls.

“No wonder they all look like they have indigestion.”

We walked along.

“This is my favorite kind of weather,” Joanna said a little later. “That chill in the air like a current of cold water in a warm lake. I love swimming in fresh water – no salt, no chlorine. It feels so good on the skin.”

“I prefer the ocean.”

“Too many weird fish. And kelp.”

“We have lots of friendly seals on Nantucket.”

“Don’t they draw the sharks?”

I shrugged; she had me there.

“When was the last time you were on  Nantucket, anyway?”

I thought for second. “Ten years ago?”

She put on a creditable Brahmin accent: “No one goes to Nantucket, any more my dear. It’s too crowded.”

“It was always crowded, at least in the summer, I just got tired of the shark.”

“Your own personal shark.”

“My land shark.”

“My client.”

“Exactly.”

“He’s a very good client.”

“I’m sure he is. He spends a lot of money. He’s very good at that.”

“Can we change the subject?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Here we are.”

 

We turned the corner into the bustle and  crowds of orchard Street. Stall were set up selling everything from used clothes and jewelry to counterfeit watches, from electronics  and pirated DVDs to glassware, bolts of fabric, kitchen utensils, wigs, stuffed animals and bad art. One table was set up for lamp shades, another for stationery and fountain pens. Someone was selling plastic cups of lemonade out of a barrel of ice; one little old man was surrounded by teetering piles of books. Joanna browsed through some scarves.

“This is pretty,” she said, holding one with a pattern of forget-me-nots under her chin.

“Let me buy it for you.”

She shook her head. “In my country, when a man buys a woman a scarf … very serious. They are bound together for life.”

I stepped back “Yikes.”

“Don’t be too scared.”

“Are you kidding?” I turned to the woman on the other side of the folding table. “How much is it?”

“Ten dollars.”

“I’ll give you five.”

“I couldn’t let it go for less than eight.”

“Six fifty?”

“Seven.”

“Sold. I peeled off a five and two ones, passed them over and presented the scarf to Joanna.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Bargaining for the symbol of our eternal life together? That’s a little cheesy.”

“Our eternal life?”

“Oh yeah,” she said taking the scarf and tying it into her hair. “I forgot to mention. No ‘till death do you part’ stuff in my country. You’re really stuck with each other where I come from. But it’s not so bad. People work out most of their differences after the first ten thousand years or so.”

“What? You’re a Mormon?”

She took my arm “No. I’m kidding. Lucky for you.”

“Whew. Call me a commitment-phobe – but I prefer to take things one millenium at a time.”

She eased through the crowd to a shop window, used it for a mirror. “This looks nice. My sister Carol always wears scarves in her hair. They look better on her, though. She has better hair.”

“You have a sister?”

“I have two sisters. I’m the oldest. Carol is the coolest and Susie works hard.”

“I think I can remember all that. I wouldn’t to be Susie, though.”

She nodded. “It’s a thankless job. Having us for sisters. She finally got married though, to a small pale thin person just like her, and they run a little antique store outside of Eerie.”

“Pennsylvania? You grew up in Pennsylvania.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t mean to be – But, Jesus … I mean, it’s the Mississippi of the North. Don’t you think?  I get the creeps just driving across Pennsylvania and it’s a hell of a long drive.”

“Well, I left. But I miss it sometimes.”

“So I’m off-base?”

“I don’t know. The part of Philadelphia where I grew up was very nice. We have the Liberty Bell and the Rocky statue … but no, not really. My sister Carol was very precocious. She came home from her first day of third grade -- we had just moved from Washington State for my Dad’s business -- and she  said. “I hate this school. I am surrounded by Troglodytes.”

“At age eleven.”

“Yeah.”

“She does sound cool.”

“Susie loved the place, though. She edited the school newspaper and the yearbook. She joined the basketball team when she was a freshman and stuck with it until she graduated, despite the fact that she never scored a single basket. She’s just completely unco-ordinated. She I don’t mean that in a nasty way. But she’s never really in her own body, you know? She’s always tripping over things and knocking things down. But she’s relentless. She couldn’t quit. That counts for a lot. That’s huge, actually. I’m learning that now.”

“The restaurant business,” I said.

Joanna nodded.

“Which you feel; you should be taking care of -- as we speak.”

She nodded again, smiling this time.

“But I gave you the scarf, so I get at least one day.”

She bowed her head down for a second. “That sounds fair.”

An older woman stepped around a trestle table piled with cassettes, eight-track tapes and their antique players -- Admirals and Chelcos and Sonys. The woman was bundled into a long camel coat with a fur collar, a little warm for the season, and burdened with a large purse and two shopping bags. She set one of them down to touch my arm.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I hate to intrude ... but the two of you look so happy. It reminds me of ... a long time ago. So I just wanted to tell you. You make a lovely couple.”

“Why thank you,” Joanna said. “That’s so nice.”

Her small mouse-like face tightened into a stern glance. She was looking up at me. “Don’t take it for granted, dear. Nothing is granted. That’s what you learn at my age. Nothing is granted.”

She picked up her bag and moved away into the shifting throng before I could answer her, not that I would have had any idea what to say.

“The ghost at the feast,” Joanna said.

“Two knishes and coffee? Not much of a feast.”

“Not much of a ghost, either.”

“I guess. Well, anyway – we’re a couple. What do you think of that?”

She pushed me gently. “None of your business.”

 

An hour later we were standing at the rail of the State Island Ferry heading for the Statue of Liberty.

“So what’s on Staten Island?’ She asked me.

“I have no idea. I just like riding the ferry.”

“We were very tired, we were very merry; We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.”

“Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

“You know her?”

I’m in love with her. It’s been tough for us -- her dying when I was twelve years before I was born and all. Still ...”

“Death, beating the door in.”

          “And it’s not enough that yearly down this hill Spring comes, babbling like an idiot and strewing flowers.”

She laughed. “New York harbor at dawn. Poetry -- ”

“And knishes for breakfast. “

“It’s too good to be true.”

I risked an arm around her shoulder. “And how good is that, exactly?”

“Hey – no fishing in New York harbor, buddy.”

I gave her quite a tour after that --  a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, a stroll through the Frick, lunch at Papaya King on 86^th Street and then the long bus ride up to Fort Tryon park for the Cloisters. We sat on bench in one of those inner gardens after lingering over the gorgeous unicorn tapestries.

“This place is incredible,” Joanna said. “How did they even build it?”

“They didn’t. They moved it, stone by stone, from France, back in the 30s – bits and pieces of these various monasteries and abbeys. It’s kind of like a greatest hits album of medieval architecture. Or a Quentin Tarantino movie – all the stolen pieces turn into something new and kind of great. Plus it’s on the Hudson river and everyone speaks English.”

“A Quentin Tarantino movie?”

I nodded. “Respect the magpie. Remember that cartoon Kiddo’s kid is watching at the end of Kill Bill 2? The magpies? That was no accident. That was a manifesto.”

“I think I stopped at Kill Bill 1. But I love talking about it in a monastery.”

After a while we eased back into the real world. We only took the bus part of the way, Joanna wanted to walk. We were midtown somewhere, in the garment district I think, when she noticed the girls ahead of us.

“Why do they wear those flip flops?” she asked. “It’s too cold.”

“They’re kids. They don’t feel the cold.”

“But look at the way it makes them walk – kind of knock-kneed and splay-footed. Graceless. I like it actually. It makes them so unattractive and awkward. It gives older women a chance.”

“Rawwrrrrr.”

“What is that? The universal sound for ‘catty woman’? I hate that. And I also hate the arrogance of those girls, that pack of girls with their money and their iPods and their perfect hair.”

I laughed. “You’re on a roll.”

“Are you kidding? I’m just getting started. I hate everything these days. I’ve become a hater. Hate is the new love. Hate is the new black. I hate stupid people who think they’re smart and dull people who think they’re interesting. I hate people who think they can write, and people who think they can sing and people who think they can drive. Newsflash: your stories are trite, your song is off key and you’re supposed to signal before you switch lanes and cut me off. I hate the cars choking every highway in the country and I drive one so I hate myself, too. But not enough to ride a bike.”

          “At least you admit that.”

          “Totally. Self hate is the best hate. What else? There’s so much.   I hate cops and I hate criminals. I hate everyone who gets a kick out of exercising any little trivial power they have over someone else. I hate insurance agents and DMV clerks and elementary school crossing guards.”

          “Crossing guards?”

          “Yeah, hello? You don’t get a pass because you’re protecting the children, buddy. Okay? I hate the new religion of protecting the children. I hate the body armor they have to wear just to ride a bike. I hate new parents who think they did something special. You didn’t. You did the most ordinary thing on the face of the earth. I hate people abuse kids and people who neglect kids and people who brag about their kids and people who encourage their kids for doing nothing, “Oooo, what a good breath you took, Bobby! You’re the best breather in the whole world! You’re going to get a big gold breathing star and some cake!”

          “You’re brutal.”

“By the way, I hate cake, too. And all the stuff that pretends not to be cake, like muffins. Muffins are cake. Corn bread is cake. Don’t eat it for breakfast. I hate eating. I hate the tyranny of it. We’re all addicts. “Oooo, if I don’t get more food I’ll die.” I hate grocery stores with that blood-sucking lighting and over air-conditioned climate control. I hate the industrial vegetables they sell and the waxed fruit. When was the last time you got a decent apple at the grocery?”

“I’m taking you to the Union Square greenmarket next Saturday. You won’t hate that.” 

“I don’t know. I hate stuff most people don’t even think about.  I hate … the seasons, how about that? And I especially hate the change of seasons. I hate daylight savings time. Losing an hour of my life every spring. So I get it back in the fall? Who cares? Daylight Savings should be for those industrial farmers only. I hate winter, it’s cold and miserable. I hate summer. It’s just as miserable, but hot. I hate spring -- it makes me want things I can’t have any more. I hate autumn -- it reminds me of death, and I hate death more than anything. I hate snow, it’s just about shoveling and trudging and watching little kids have fun and feeling old. I hate rain, it just means leaks and floods and water down your back and wet socks. I hate sunny days, too, Blue skies – is that really the only color they could come up with?”

I laughed out loud at that one. “Where’s my smart phone? I want to record this. It would be the best youTube video ever.”

“Nah, it would just bum everyone out. Who wants to hear someone bitching about sunny days?”

“Sunny days? You hate sunny days?”

“Sunny days make me want to stay home from work and play; rainy days make me want to stay home from work and read in front of a fire. So I guess I hate work most of all. And I hate being lazy, but I don’t have the energy to change.”

“But you did. You quit your shitty job and now you’re working like twenty hours a day at something you love. Right?”

She nodded. “But there are still days when I’d rather just be sitting home reading a book. With someone bringing me big burlap bags of money. Ideally with dollar signs stenciled on them.” 

“Sounds good.”

“Doesn’t it?”

          “Well the good news is – at least you’re cute when you get all hatey.”

“In that case … I just thought of some more things I hate.”

“Go.”

“I hate ball point pens that break in two days and chapped lip goo that makes my chapped lips worse, and pre-sliced liverwurst wrapped in plastic, everything wrapped in plastic, a whole suffocating world wrapped in plastic for our safety of course, and the calls are monitored for "quality assurance" -- for Christ's sake just fucking spy on me already. Don't get cute. I hate the way cords tangle together and bags break and you can never fit plug into a socket unless you're LOOKING RIGHT AT IT, which you can't do since you're trying to plug in a lamp! I hate the fact that I could go on all day talking about stuff I hate but I love that you think it's cute.”

“Then take a breath, cutie.”

 

 

She was actually panting, leaning against a van as someone jogged past with a rack of dresses on wheels. She looked beautiful and she’d just made me laugh three times in five minutes. I leaned over and kissed her. She kissed me back. Someone hooted at us. Finally I pulled away. Now we were both panting.

“Did you hate that?”

“Can’t tell yet.”

She kissed me this time. I kissed her back. No one seemed to notice.

She said. “Definitely did not hate that.”

“Good.”