It was getting dark by the time we reached the West Village.  We cut down east from Abington Square Park and wound up on Hudson Street in front of the White Horse. They still had tables set on the sidewalk. We grabbed one and ordered a couple of pints of Anchor Steam on tap.

Joanna looked around, sipping her beer. “So … Dylan Thomas died here, supposedly,” she said.

“You’d die too if you drank eighteen shots in a row. He actually died at St. Vincent’s hospital, later that same night.”

“What a waste.”

“I know. And I mean – someone served him those shots.”

“That’s actually a crime now, I think.”

“Fantastic. If there were any drunk, fucked up crazy poets as good as Dylan Thomas around today, that law would really come in handy.”

“There are plenty of good poets now. I just read a terrific poem yesterday, what do you think about that?”

“Do you remember any of it?”

“Sure. It’s called something like “Last Night I Went to the Map of the World and I Have Messages for You’”

“Cool title.”

“I don’t remember all the different countries – but Africa was having a birthday party, that one stuck in my mind -- no gifts, just come.  I really loved the ending. Hold it a second. I want to get this right.” She closed her eyes, let out a quick breath, then recited it: “Is that everyone? Oh yes, the oceans. They asked what they always ask and I promised I’d repeat it. Why do you never call? When are you coming home?”

“That’s great. Who is this guy?”

“His name is Brendan Constantine.”

“Never heard of him.”

She grinned, victorious. “That’s exactly my point.”

“Okay, he may exist – but is he a big fat crazy booze hound who could drink himself to death at the White Horse? That’s what we need today.”

“Sorry. He seems kind of normal.”

I shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect.”

Then I took a sip of beer and saw Tyler Bains walking up the street. He saw me at exactly the same moment and we each had exactly the same thought, which made the whole farce perfect. He stopped by the table, mortified but trying to man up. I must have looked exactly the same way.

“I know, I know -- I forgot our dinner,” he said.

“So did I.”

He laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“You weren’t there?”

“You never showed?”

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I lost my cell phone.”

“I dropped mine in the toilet.”

“So even if you’d tried to call me, I wouldn’t have --”

“Me, neither.”

And then I totally zoned the whole thing out, until this second.”

“Me too.”

Tyler just stood there and I put my glass down and we let the absurdity of the moment ricochet between us.

Joanna’s timing was perfect. The silence was a heartbeat away from turning awkward when she stepped in and summed us up: “This sounds like the perfect friendship.”

Tyler laughed. “You may be right. Tragically puny as that makes us look.” He extended his hand to her. “Tyler Bains. And you’re Joanna Clark. We met at Oliver Graeme’s opening. For some reason I gave you this peculiar fellow’s phone number instead of mine.”

 “You were there with your girlfriend,” I pointed out. “Sit down. Grab a beer.”

When he had his Blue Moon in front of him I asked, “So how’s Lisa doing these days, anyway?”

He shrugged. “That’s finished.”

I sat forward. “You’re kidding.”

“I failed to live up to her expectations. I couldn’t even keep them all straight. I should have used my computer. The spread sheet or the power point. That would have been fitting. Power was definitely the point.”

“So you just broke up?”

“Is that so baffling? You did, too.”

“She dumped me. For you, Ty. And it just seemed like the two of you were a permanent fixture.”

“Well, we made a pretty couple, I’ll give you that much. But it all fell apart when we got a joint back account. Catastrophically bad idea. She emptied it faster than I could fill it, Bobby. Which is saying a lot. The whole thing reminded me of that junker car I had at Hampshire. Remember? The Ford Escape With the oil leak? I was pouring a couple of quarts a week into that thing, because I was too broke to fix it. Then I went home for Spring break and when I got back the engine seized up the first time I drove it. Oops.”

“So it was just money?”

“Come on. You know Lisa.” He turned to Joanna., “Sorry, this is shockingly rude. I hate people who sort of parachute into other people’s conversations and take over.”

“It’s fine. I’m interested. We haven’t gotten around to the ex-lovers conversation yet.”

“Well, all right. So listen, I’ve been thinking about this. I believe that each person has a guiding emotion that sets the tone for their life. You can visualize it as some kind of physical material Like … Bobby here is defined by his essential optimism and happiness. I would visualize it as … a birch tree sapling. Lisa saw it a little differently. To her he was depressingly sweet, and getting a little crusty. Maybe,  the last piece of marzipan in the candy box. She never said that exactly but let’s face it, happy people annoy her. Lisa’s emotion is anger. She’s just pissed off most of the time. It’s exhausting. We were visiting my parents last year and she said, ‘If your mother makes one more perky cheerful comment I’m going to strangle her.’ I wouldn‘t have put my money on Lisa in that death-match, though. My Mom’s a tough old bird. And she fights dirty.”

“So how do you visualize Lisa? What’s her material?” Joanna asked. She seemed a little too interested. Tyler was on the prowl again now, and he had always preferred stealing his friends’ girlfriends to finding his own.

He took a sip of his beer. “I don’t know. Maybe an iron bar? But rusty and corroded. Something you wouldn’t  want to touch without a tetanus shot.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“No, no – iron is strong and solid and just – just one thing, you know? Not some fancy alloy. You dig iron out of the ground just the way it is. And hey, it makes a good weapon. If you’re living in the twelfth century. And you like smelting.  Lots of good things about iron. It fortifies the blood, It’s healthy in small doses. Well, very small doses. Extremely small doses, actually.”

“And how about you?” Joanna asked. She was getting into the game. “What’s your  material?”

“I don’t know. Etched glass?  Something elegant and brittle. Maybe a Tiffany lampshade. Something to keep away from corroded iron rebar, if at all possible.”

“So she shattered you?”

“She would have liked to. I slept with her best friend and now neither of them is speaking to me. Which works out well for everyone.”

The news didn’t surprise me. I gave Ty a sharp look now that said “Back off.”

Joanna noticed and Tyler caught her. I saw him note the fractional tightening of her face; the stiffened lips microscopically pulling the corners of her eyes down.

“Robert frowns on my behavior. He considers me devious and two-faced. He likes me well enough but would never go scuba diving with me --  there’s too much trust involved, apparently. I wouldn’t go scuba diving with him for the more comprehensive reason that I find the sport odious and dreary. Flailing around in the murk, breathing through a rubber tube for the amusement of assorted carnivorous fish.”

“You do make it sound kind of bad,” Joanna said.

“He won’t fly in my plane either. I co-own a Cessna out at Teeterboro.”

‘I told you --  I’m waiting until you get your instrument rating,” I pointed out..

“That should be soon. I’m finishing my fifty hours next week. I’ll take you both up for the aerial tour of Manhattan, to celebrate.” He touched Joanna’s wrist. “Or you could come alone, if Robert’s too nervous.”

“I’m fine,’ I said “It sounds like fun.”

“It’s up to me to broaden Robert’s horizons,” Tyler continued. “If not for me, he’d never try anything new.”

”Like those mussels you collected on the beach at Block Island that time.”

“Robert was too chicken to eat them,” he explained to Joanna.

“Yeah, good thing. Everyone got sick but me. I wound up driving five people to the hospital that night.”

Tyler shrugged. “Okay, bad example.”

We all sipped our beers. The evening was turning cool and the lights were coming up all around us – street lights and headlights and all windows in the buildings along the avenue: frenetic, nocturnal, looking for a party. I found it exhausting. I lived in the daytime city.

Tyler seemed to read my mind. “Hitting the clubs later?” he asked.

“Very funny.”

He touched Joanna’s wrist again. “If you’re still restless after Robert’s bedtime, give me a call.” He slipped a card out of his pocket and pushed it across the table to her. Then he finished his beer and stood.

‘Gotta go. Oh., I almost forgot. I met this gallery owner last night, Natalie Crane. She has a big space downtown. She’s hot right now. I told her about Raoul Morris, and praised him intemperately.  If I did my job well she should be calling you soon. Try to be polite. She could start your career.” He turned to Joanna, leaned down and kissed her cheek.

“Nice meeting you. Remember, the night is young.”

He walked away up the street.

“Wow,” Joanna said.

“Tyler likes to make an impression.”

“Maybe I’m just impressionable.”

“Could be.”

“He’s certainly good looking.”

“Yeah, I guess. If you like that all that blond, chiseled GQ Nazi propaganda poster stuff.”

“Hmmmm… he would look awesome in a uniform.”

“Oh boy.”

She reached across the table and punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Relax, I’m kidding. He’s actually not my type, believe it or not. And I hate the club scene, too. Plus, I’m starving and you promised to cook me dinner.”

 

We took a cab downtown and she settling into the loft while I  started a chicken roasting. She looked over  my collection of stretched canvases and I opened a bottle of wine while the chicken cooked.  I was a little nervous about preparing dinner for Manhattan’s newest restauranteur, but I had watched my Dad cooking all through my childhood, I even though  I had to spy on him to do it (“Don’t help!” was his idea of father son camaraderie in the kitchen). I had picked up a few of his tricks and internalized his casual attitude about the process.

The chicken basically cooked itself,  though I did baste it from time. When it was out of the oven, whole dinner took less than ten minutes. I threw some asparagus into the microwave while I whisked some flour into the pan juices to make the gravy, adding the little giblet-and-onion soup I’d kept simmering while the chicken roasted. As for the rest of it? Well, there’s no mystery about stove-top stuffing. I must say, though, the vinaigrette for the asparagus did come out well. The secret is really good olive oil and a sprinkle of dry mustard.

“Yum,” Joanna said as we dug in.

“More wine?” I had poured out the last of  the mid-range Chateau D’Eclans rose. It was still too expensive, but we could drink the cheap stuff later.

“I love the portrait of your mother,” Joanna said.

“But you never met her.”

“I never met Gertrude Stein, but I think Picasso did an OK job.”                    “People said it didn’t look like her. Picasso said, ‘It will.’ Cocky bastard.”

“Your Mom isn’t going to be aging into her portrait, though.”

“True.”

She reached across the table, took my hand. “Sorry.”

I squeezed back. “It’s okay. I don’t want to paint her the way she might have looked when she was older, anyway. I want to paint her exactly the way I remember her. But I can’t seem to manage that.”

“Maybe it‘s your memory. Memory is hard to control. It’s elusive. It fails sometimes.”

“Just like talent.”

She shook her head, made a sour little face “Boo Hoo.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Whatever. But thinking that way gets you nowhere.”

We came back to the subject later, standing at the roof parapet, looking uptown, at the immense colonnades of light marching north. It was chilly up there. You could feel more rain coming; something fresh in the air beyond the smell of tar and exhaust. We listened to the sirens, a car alarm bleating insistently from a few blocks away.

Joanna stared up at the intricate mosaic of illuminated windows. “It feels like anything’s possible up here,” Joanna said.

I shrugged. ‘Sometimes. Other times it feels like a big party and I’m not invited.”

“Yet.”

“Thanks for that.”

She sang lightly, “If you can make it there you’ll make it anywhere.”

I smiled. “Do you think that’s really true?”

“Actually, no. Not really. Take some of these New Yorkers out to a farm in Iowa, or an oil rig on the Gulf, I’m not sure knowing how to ace an audition or cut the line at Starbucks would really take you very far.”

“So New Yorkers are a bunch of xenophobic snobs.”

“Xenophobic? That’s for countries. This is just a city and it’s not even a whole city. It’s just one borough out of five.”

I gave the rest of the city a dismissive flip of the hand. “The other boroughs don’t count,” I said. “Maybe Brooklyn.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

I laughed.  “And it’s not even all of Brooklyn -- just the parts near the river the Manhattan wannabes.” 

She leaned over, glancing down at the street. “Try this one, Kander and Ebb: if you can make it here you can probably make it in Park Slope. Or at least Crown Heights.”

“Not a killer lyric,” I said.

We stood quietly for few minutes, sipping the cheaper wine we had brought from downstairs. I looked over the parapet with her. The sidewalk six stories down stretched empty except for two guys arguing and a woman on the other side of the street, trying to hail a cab. It must have been off duty. She slumped as it drove past, just ahead of the red light on Broome Street.

“I don’t think those people were invited to the party, either,” Joanna said.

I nodded. ‘It’s a pretty exclusive party. There’s a list. And a Marine at the door to make sure none of the wrong people get in. You ever watch American Idol?”

She pushed herself upright and leaned back against the retaining wall. “So, you picked up on that ‘people who can’t sing and think they can’ stuff.”

“Yeah. It’s fascinating -- all these stunningly untalented people, and they’re all so sure of themselves. I always thought music was the most objective art form. I mean -- if you’re singing flat, I can prove it with a tuning fork, you know? But none of that seems to matter. So you look at yourself and you say … I think I’m good, but so do these lunatics. How do you really know? How can you tell?”

“What? You think you’re no good?”

“No, no, I know I’m good.”

“But not good enough.”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Good enough for what?”

I shifted myself sideways, leaned an elbow on the parapet. She was watching me, studying my face in the gloom of reflected sodium street lights. An unmuffled motorcycle snarled up the street, that egg-beater engine note churning up the night as the echoes settled.

Finally I said, “The problem is, good enough isn’t really good enough at all. Good enough kind of sucks.”

She inclined her head slightly. “So to be really good enough you have to be great. Like your Dad.”

“You think that’s what I’m saying?”

“Is it?”

I let out a long breath. “For years I didn’t even want people knowing what I did. They’d just assume it was all because of him.”

“So what if it was? What’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t know. It just always made me feel like nothing, somehow Like I had no free will, no imagination, no … Like I was just an appendage. ‘I’m having what Daddy’s having’ I used to say that, in restaurants when he took me out to dinner.”

She smiled. “That’s adorable.”

“Thanks.”

“At least you’re doubting yourself. Those American Idol freaks never doubt themselves.”

“So doubt is good.”

“Sure.”

“Crippling, paralyzing doubt?”

“Excellent!”

“So if I wind up so miserable and self-loathing and inert I can’t work at all -- ”

“You’re a genius!”

“I like this. It’s much less labor intensive than actually painting.”

“I don’t know. Brooding can be a full time job.”

“Yeah.”

The sound of singing drifted up faintly from the street, and we leaned over again. Three kids, two boys and a girl, were walking along harmonizing on some old jazz tune as they moved out of earshot:

Mister Christopher Columbus

Sailed the sea with out a compass

When those sailors start to rumpus

Up jump Christopher Columbus

Don’t you make a sound now

When we hit the ground now

We’ll be rhythm bound now

 

“There’s your perfect role model,” Joanna said, when they’d turned the corner. “Columbus. He had no idea what he was doing. He just kind of charged ahead. Raised the money, hired the crew, took off. If I recall my eighth grade social studies, didn’t most people think he was going to sail off the edge of the world at that point? Then he discovered America by mistake. He was looking for India. I’m just saying.”

“So the moral of the story is … proceed, regardless.”

“Absolutely. Proceed regardless. That could be a great bumper sticker.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What scares you? Something has to.”

She glanced down. “Heights scare me.”

“Come on.”

“Hey -- no talent, no problem.”

“How about your business? Didn’t you tell me that ninety percent of restaurants in this city fail in the first year?”

She sipped her wine, shot a cool little squint over the rim. “Actually, you told me.”

“Right. And you seemed pretty blasé about the whole thing. At the time. Unflappable. But you’ve gotta be somewhat … flapped? Is that a word? I mean -- who wouldn’t be?”

She finished the wine, and gave me a level, leveling, stare. ”I’m scared shitless.”

“No plan ‘B’?”

“My parents have a good one -- marry a doctor. Preferably a surgeon. Who owns his own apartment on the Upper East Side.”

“I should have thought of that one myself. Go to medical school. I’ll wait.”

“I was going to say the same thing to you.”

“Hey, ten percent of restaurants succeed. Those are actually pretty good odds.”

“Compared to what?”

“The lottery? The trifecta at Belmont, the craps tables at the Bellagio.”

“You’re right --. It’s not like, insane, addicts-only gambling.”

“It’s just normal gambling. You’re gambling every time you cross a street in this town. Besides, your restaurant’s going to be cool. People will show up, just to be seen there.”

“You think?”

“Sure, why not? It’s possible.”

She sighed. I tracked the tiny blinking red lights of a plane headed out over the Atlantic, a night flight out of JFK, bound for London or Paris. Joanna was looking uptown: the tall buildings, the closed citadel of light.

“I see what you mean about that party,” she said.

I slid closer to her,  put my arm around her shoulder. “Fuck it. We’ll have our own party. No intangible phantasms of urban glamour allowed. They always kill you on the open bar anyway.”

“Yeah.” She shifted more comfortably into the crook of my arm. “So who does get to come?”

“I don’t know. Nobody? Just us.”

“So – this is it?”

“Pretty much.”

“Good.”

She twisted herself so we were face-to face, and kissed me.

We kissed for a long time on the roof, under the orange haze that hid the stars, perched over the street, alone and private on our tar-paper stage. When I slipped my hands under the hem of her skirt and up the back of her thighs she pulled away, took my hand and led me downstairs.

As soon as we got inside, she pushed me back against the big metal door, slammed it shut with our combined weight. She kissed me hard and I kissed her harder and we struggled together tongue to tongue as I pushed her dress up again, and slipped the flimsy elastic of her panties, hands pressed to flesh.

 That set the alarms off, like smashing the glass of a museum display case. I was caught in the act, my fingerprints tattooed on her ass.

She wrenched her head to the side and grabbed my elbows.

“Joanna?”

“I can’t do this.”

“What? I didn’t -- ”

“It’s not you. I’m so sorry, I feel horrible. I don’t know how to … This is just -- it’s too weird. I can’t handle it. I -- I want to be … oh, crap. I have to go.”

She shoved me aside, fumbled with the door knob, got it open a crack, slipped through and disappeared. I heard her heels clattering on the cement hall outside, the fire door opening and closing. Then she was gone.

I stood in the echoing empty loft -- Tom Kyle was visiting his parents in Toronto for the week and I had the place to myself -- trying to figure out what just happened.

Well, of course I was going to find out eventually. It would have been easier for everyone if Joanna had just told me that night, but I understand why she didn’t. Eventually we’d both mark the date on our calendars: September 24^th, 2011: the moment when an innocent lie went haywire, not even a lie, really, just a commonplace omission in the interests of basic civility. But still: a downdraft whirls a spark out of the fireplace, you forgot to set up the screen, it didn’t seem important, and now the curtains are on fire. You understand your mistake but it’s too late, you can’t stop the fire, all you can do is get the hell out of there.

So she did.

Are all men solipsistic clowns? Or is it just me? I poured myself a drink -- Lagavulin on the rocks -- and paced the loft working the possibilities: I had kissed her like a sloppy twelve year old, I should never had grabbed her ass, she barely knew me, this was basically a first date. It was all my fault. So when she came back half an hour later, I just assumed I was forgiven. I had finally walked myself out, left a second drink unfinished and was getting ready for bed when I heard the buzzer.

I pushed the button to open the intercom connection.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

I let her in. She took the elevator up and I listened to its industrial clanking and rumbling as it rose up the shaft. I was insanely excited, absurdly pleased with myself: I had gambled and won, pushed too far and gotten away with it.

She looked as wild as I felt,  a minute later, standing at the door, windblown and feral and shy, like some stray cat, lured inside by a bowl of food.

“Hi,” she said.

“So – it’s not really weird?”

“No. It’s completely fucking weird. I just don’t care.”

She stepped inside, pulled her dress over her head and jumped at me. I caught her and carried her to the bed with her legs wrapped around my waist, kissing her neck while she plunged her hands down between us, working my belt and zipper. We kicked and twisted the last of our clothes off as we hit the mattress. She found the box of condoms in the bedside table drawer, tore it open and bit the wrapper off one of them. As she fondled it onto me I had a lucid thought from a different world, a different life, or maybe it was just a different day, yesterday, though it seemed much longer ago than that:  a good piece of practical advice for Paul Haddon -- if you’re nervous about putting on the condom, let your girlfriend do it for you.  That pretty much solves the problem. 

Joanna had me pinned, brushing her nipples across my chest then squashing them against me as I eased into her. We both groaned at that first contact and then started laughing. Maybe it was the tension breaking, or maybe sex is just fundamentally ludicrous. Anyway, I found her mouth again, and silenced us both as she started rocking over me. She lifted her mouth off  mine far enough to say, “This feels so good.”

Then the phone rang.

My ring tone split the intimacy like a machete chopping a coconut. The two halves rolled away, spilling clear juice. The music repeated on its loop: the great Zulu concertina fanfare that begins Juluka’s “Trouble”, off their Musa Ukingilundela album.

Joanna stared down at me. I knew what she was thinking. It was almost one in the morning. At that hour no phone call is going to be good. You know it’s coming from the hospital, the police station or the morgue.

Joanna’s face said: who died?

The song started again. I reached down for my pants and dug my old LG dumbphone out of the pocket. I didn’t recognize the number, but it didn’t matter. I unfolded the phone, eased out of Joanna and let her slide off me.

“Hello?”

“Robert? This is Alfred Barudsky.”

“Alfred? What’s going on? It’s almost two in the morning.”

“Thank you for pointing that out, young man. Your father has landed himself in jail in a state of advanced intoxication, and needs to be bailed out. Please, I know. Let me finish. He wasted his one telephone call on me and I simply do not have the requisite stamina at my advanced age to play my part in these shenanigans.” The word sounded particularly silly in his deep voice, roughened with sleep and still exotic with the lilt of his Hungarian accent.

“Alfred -- ”

“I turn this matter over to you. Fifth Precinct, 19 Elizabeth Street, in Chinatown.”

“I know where it is.”

“And you know where I live, virtually at the other end of the island. You’re still his son, Robert. In a terrifying blind leap into sanity, I retired from being Harlan’s father some years ago.”

“Wait a second. How am I supposed to -- ”

“I’m sure you’re equal to the task. Good night.”

And he hung up.

Joanna was staring at me. “What?”

I set the phone down on the end-table and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

“I have to bail an asshole out of jail. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The 5^th Precinct was a handsome townhouse in the Federal style, complete with the 1881 set into the stone of the arched pediment and the carriage lights beside the front stairs. It looked like it had once been someone’s home, and then maybe a guest house, before the city bought the property.  Inside it was more what I expected: battleship green paint, scuffed linoleum, bored duty cops behind the desk and miserable citizens waiting on the benches. The place smelled of ammonia and sweat; and cigarettes, though no one had been allowed to smoke there for a decade. You could hear phones ringing down closed hallways, the heaters clanking, overheating the place. I heard someone shouting, then the sound was cut off fast, like someone threw a switch, or applied a choke hold. Everyone was tired, everyone wanted to be somewhere else. I fit right in.

I had to max out my credit card to make the five hundred dollars bail and I had a bad moment when I thought the charge might be declined. It went though all right, then I spent another hour on the benches, waiting for Dad to be processed out.

It was almost dawn when we finally hit the street. Dad looked bruised and bleary. His pants were ripped and his shirt was buttoned wrong. He needed a haircut. The sidewalk was empty, there was trash in the gutter, a drizzle had begun. The world looked dingy and bleak. I was looking around for a cab but I knew I wouldn’t find one.

This is how dad chose to break the silence: “Everyone on the streets at four in the morning is either drunk or crazy. Which are you?”

“How badly did you get beaten up? Can you get home all right?”

“Beaten up? I haven’t lost a fight in thirty years, kid. I could take you on right now and knock the crap out of you.”

“Whatever.”

“What’s the matter? Too scared to fight? Afraid of an old drunk?

He shoved me and I staggered a few steps backward. The moment had the surreal heightened vivid feel of a nightmare. Two cops standing in the doorway of the station were watching us with a kind of flexed indifference: ready to step in but off duty and heading home. I felt a raw twist of anger at Alfred for dragging me into this. For Dad I felt nothing at that moment. All I wanted was to get off the street, get home, get back to bed.  Just like those cops.

I started up the street but Dad wasn’t finished with me yet.

“You are scared!” he called after me. “Ah, you always were gutless.”

“You’re welcome, Pop,” I said. “Always glad to help out. The bail was five hundred dollars. Mail it to me.”

“Don’t you even want to know what I’m doing in the city?”

I stopped and turned. “You didn’t call me. That’s fine. Leave it there.”

“Oliver is dying.”

“What?”

“Oliver Graeme. They checked him into Lenox Hill. They say he’s got less than a week to live.”

“I thought he was in remission.”

“So did they. Fucking doctors.”

We stood on the street, staring at each other. Death fell between us like the sour orange glare of the street lights: unfair, ugly, relentless, unavoidable as the dog shit on the street, the filthy grit riding the wind. Dad couldn’t tell me what Oliver meant to him; I couldn’t tell him what Oliver meant to me. We stood rooted in a mortuary silence pimpled with distant sirens and the gravel rasp of traffic on Canal Street.

"You missed your chance to visit him,kid,” Dad said finally. “I’m breaking him out of that fucking jail tomorrow.”