"Where?"
"Here and there." I had one idea, anyway.
She undid her dress and stepped out of it and threw it over her
arm. She looked at me for another moment with eyes both jumpy and
expressionless. "You wouldn't regret it."
"Some other time, baby. I got to go find that cluck."
"See you," she said and swept out in her bra and petticoat.
This time, when I heard her shower begin, I locked my door. Then I put
on a dry, newly pressed seersucker, a light silk tie, and went out
before she decided to try again.
The cab tooled along Fifth Avenue a ways, dove through the Park, and
rattled into a semislum section--an area of delicatessens and bowling
alleys, dated, disreputable hotels, massage parlors, shrieking truck
brakes, trickling electric signs, jaded cafeterias, and a crosshatch
of streets narrower than the avenues, darker, lined on both sides with
identical brownstones that exuded a smell of senescence and rotted
brick tenements upon the façades of which hung rusty fire escapes. On
the fire escapes were people, their pets, bedding and potted plants,
beer pails and radios, along with their accents of Crete, Sicily and
the Balkans, Bohemia and Slovakia and Sudetenland--the wonderful poor,
the authority for democracy--they said, the intellectuals who had made
gods of them without touching them.