Sometimes I will open my eyes or turn my head, and it will hit me quickly and hard, he appears so clearly; as if my father or someone else long dead had walked into the room, and smiled at me. 

***

What is it?  Shave-and-a-hair-cut, two-bits.  Two bits is twenty-five cents in American money.  I remember that.  I remember my father telling me that.  People knock out that rhythm on doors around the western world, I’d think.  How would the boy know it?  The words makes no sense in his language.  

***

The flat is on the fourth floor of a walk-up in the West Village.  The building is old, with warped stairs covered in a sort of dark baize, and there is the smell of an old urban building in it, of generations of people who have lived some or all of their lives in a place that does not belong to them.  I know that scent now as though I had known it always.

Two years ago the boy didn’t knock.  I was in the flat, in the small bedroom.  I think I was drifting into sleep.  I had arrived that day.  I was waiting for him, listening for the harsh buzzer that always startles me to let me know that he was downstairs on the step in the winter night.

My cell phone rang.  “Honey, can you let me in?  I am right outside the door.”

Someone had seen him there on the step in the night, tall and thin, in a long coat, with two roses in his hand.  Someone judged him to be on a harmless mission, someone soft-hearted and trusting for a New Yorker, and let him into the building.  That person walked up the stairs with him, continuing on past my door to the top floor.  “She’s there!” he told me the man said to him, “I can hear the television.”  A stranger spoke to the boy encouragingly.  Delivered him right to me.  

The boy knocked, and I didn’t hear him.  And so he rang.  “Honey, can you let me in?”  His accent makes the first syllable of honey sound like a breath in the ear.

***

And I went anxiously to the door.  We had seen each other only once before, the previous summer, in this city, when we met in class, the two-week workshop.  When we stayed together the last night before we returned to our respective countries, and I proved such a shock to myself.  I had never done that before, taken home someone to whom I’d only chatted casually over the previous fortnight as I watched him, I thought, unobserved.  Someone much younger than I, and so beautiful.  Someone who spoke my language indifferently because it was a new taste to him; someone whose language I spoke fretfully because it was an old memory to me.  A better actor than I, a well-raised man whom I had asked to walk me out in the night after the group’s farewell party in a doubtful part of the city simply because I did not want to wait for a taxi alone.  I, who do everything and go everywhere alone.  

Was it predatory? I later asked myself, many times.  Did I separate the young from the pack, circle him? 

Is the wolf more dangerous, or the little fox?

And when he hailed the taxi I moved to kiss him goodbye, in the civilised way of all people from his culture and mine, still in innocence, I thought, and the kiss became three kisses.  And he told the taxi driver to go, and put his arms around me and kissed me again.  And I made him walk around that doubtful part of New York in the middle of the night for an hour because I did not know what to do with him.

Perhaps my jaws were then at his throat.  Perhaps his at mine.

***       

I opened the door.  And it hit me quickly and hard as he smiled at me.  Bearing a white rose and a yellow rose in the middle of the winter, the only man ever to bring me flowers.  Those pelagic eyes.  He is not unarmed.  But so young.  Delivered to me.  Did I circle him?

***

Since then, he has approached the doors between us with that knock, happy:  Shave-and-a-haircut.  This summer I knew he was coming up the stairs; the buzzer had made me jump.  And I knew he had a suitcase, a large one.  I wondered if I should meet him, fly down the crooked stairs and make some awkward attempt to help him drag the thing.  I told him after that I had wondered about that.  “No,” he said, “that’s not how we do it.  I knock.  You open the door.”  Of course, this is the ritual.  This is how I first catch my breath:  when he smiles, and it hits me quickly and hard.  He is not unarmed.  

I think of last summer and how he stood there with his arms around me as I wept, telling me, “I love you, and everything will be alright, I promise.”

***

In mere days, he should be in the street, then on those stairs--should I fly down them to meet him?  No; he knocks, I open--then at the door between us.

Did I separate the young from the pack, circle him?

Shave-and-a-haircut--

I will open the door.  I will be hit quickly and hard, and he will smile.

The wolves.  The little foxes.