"I thought we were to have a long evening together."
"So did I. But I have to go back to Medical Center. They called before
supper. There's a peculiar pneumonia up there--and something that isn't
leukemia but acts like it."
We stood up and went across the grass, blinking in the gloom and
stepping around prone figures.
"You seem all right," he said.
"I'm all right."
"I still think we could use that book--and I hope that we'll get it."
"Thanks."
"Need anything?"
He meant medicine. I said I didn't.
We both waved and a cab stopped.
He thanked me rather formally for dinner.
"So long, boy," he said, then. "And don't give up hope."
"I've got plenty of hope--it just isn't immediate, like the fiscal
prospects of department stores."
"I mean for yourself."
"Hope isn't for yourself," I said.
"Night!"
His voice was gentle, affectionate. The door thwacked.
The cab went away into the torrid murk, its two little top lights
blinking out when the driver threw the flag.
I stood on the corner, on cobblestones, shaded from nothing by the
suffocating trees above me and thinking, I guess, about the book I
wasn't going to write. All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears. I
felt so lost, so lonely, so ashamed of my body and so scared that I
wanted to have someone put comforting arms around me.
A couple necking on a flat bench beside the Park wall diddled a battery
radio and it began to sing through its nose.
"Alllll--thuh worrrrld--is waiting for the sunnnnrise--alll--"
All that was coming up was the stone moon.
Diagonally down Fifth Avenue, I noticed the spot where the canoe-hat
had poked the girl who looked like my daughter.
I went over there. On the cement sidewalk--a broad, pale path that
sparkled in the street light--I saw the stains of that bastard's blood.