"You bet," she said cheerfully. He eyed her uncertainly.

The message was from Richard. It said, "Confirming our 'date.'" She liked the quotation marks. She folded the pink slip of paper and slipped it into her shirt pocket.

"Here," Tony grumbled. Handing her money for the coffee.

"Naw, that's okay," she said. "It's on me."

Perplexing the poor man no end.

"You're from Ohio?"

It was eight p.m. They were sitting in Rune's gazebo, listening to the Pachelbel Canon. Rune had eight different recordings of the piece. She'd liked it for years-even before it had caught on, the way Greensleeves and Simple Gifts had.

Richard continued. "I've never met anyone from Ohio."

She was wearing a black T-shirt, black stretch pants, and red-and-white-striped socks. She'd done this as a homage to Richard's costume the other night. He, however, was in baggy gray slacks, Keds, and a beige Texaco Service shirt with the name Ralph embroidered on the pocket.

This man is pure Downtown. I love him!

Rune sang, " 'What's round on the ends and high in the middle? It's O-Hi-O!' That's it. One more syllable and Rodgers and Hammerstein could've written a musical about it."

"Ohio," Richard said thoughtfully. "There must be something in that. Solid, dependable. Working-class. Sort of metaphoric. You were there and now you're"-he waved his hand around the loft-"here."

"It's a nice state," she said defensively.

"I don't mean anything bad. But why'd you come here and not Chicago or L.A.? A job?"

"No."

"I know. Boyfriend."

"Nope."

"You moved to Manhattan by yourself?"

"To go on a real quest, you have to go by yourself. Remember Lord of the Rings?"

"Sort of. Refresh my memory."

Sort of? How could he not remember the best book of all time?

"All the hobbits and everybody started out together, but in the end it was Frodo who got to the fiery pit to destroy the ring of power. All by his little-old lonesome."

"Okay," he said, nodding. Not sure what the connection was. "But why Manhattan?"

Rune explained. "I didn't spend a lot of time at home in the afternoons. After school, I mean. My dad was pretty sick and my mom'd send my sister and me out to play a lot. She got the dates and boyfriends. I got the books."

"Books?"

"I'd hang out at the Shaker Heights Library. There was this book of pictures of Manhattan. I read it once and just knew I had to come here." Then she asked, "Well, how 'bout youT

"Because of what Rimbaud says about the city."

"Uhm." Wait. She'd seen the movie and hated it. She didn't know Rambo'd been a book. She thought of the cardboard cutout in Washington Square Video-of Stallone with his muscles and that stupid headband. "Not sure."

"Remember his poem about Paris?"

Poem? "Not exactly."

"Rimband wrote that the city was death without tears, our diligent daughter and servant, a desperate love, and a petty crime howling in the mud of the street."

Rune was silent. Trying hard to figure Richard out. Downtown weird and smart. She'd never met anyone like him. She was watching his eyes, the way his long fingers went through a precise ritual of pulling a beer can out of the plastic loops that held the six-pack, tapping the disk of the top to settle the foam, then slowly popping it open. Watching his lean legs, long feet, the texture of his eyes. She had a feeling that the posturing was just a facade. But what was underneath it?

And why was she so drawn to him? Because there was something she couldn't quite figure out about him?

Because of the mystery?

Richard said, "You're avoiding my question. Why did you come here?"

"This is the Magic Kingdom."

"You're not addressing Rimbaud's metaphor."

Addressing? Why did he have to talk that way?

Rune asked, "You ever read the Oz books?"

" 'Follow the yellow brick road,' " he sang in a squeaky voice.

"That's the movie. But Frank Baum-he was the author-he wrote a whole series of them. In his magic kingdom of Oz, there were lots of lands. All of them are different. Some people are made out of china, some have heads like pumpkins. They ride around on sawhorses. That's just what New York is like. Every other city I've ever been in is like a discount store. You know-clean, cheap, convenient. But what, basically? Unsatisfying, that's what. They're literal. There's no magic to them. Come here." She took his hand and led him to the window. "What do you see?"

"The Con Ed Building."

"Where?"

"Right there."

"I don't see a building." Rune turned to him, her eyes wide. "I see a mountain of marble carved by three giants a thousand years ago. They used magic tools, I'll bet. Crystal hammers and chisels made out of gold and lapis. I think one of them, I forget his name, built this castle we're in right now. And those lights, you see them over there? All around us? They're lanterns on the horns of oxen with golden hides circling around the kingdom. And the rivers, you know where they came from? They were gouged out of the earth by the gods' toes when they were dancing. And then… and then there're these pits underground, huge ones. You ever heard the rumblings underneath us? They're worms crawling at fifty miles an hour. Sometimes they get tired of living in the dark and they turn into dragons and go shooting off into the sky." She grabbed his arm urgently. "Look, there's one now!"

Richard watched the 727 making a slow approach to LaGuardia. He stared at it for a long time.

Rune said, "You think I'm crazy, don't you? That I live in a fairy story?"

"That's not bad. Not necessarily."

"I collect them, you know."

"Fairy stories?"

Rune walked to her bookshelves. She ran her finger across the spines of maybe fifty books. Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Perrault's Fairy Tales, the Quiller-Couch Old French stories, Cavendish's book on Arthur and three or four volumes of his Man, Myth and Magic. She held up one. "An original edition of Lady Gregory's Story of the Tuatha De Danann and of the Fianna of Ireland." Handed it to him.

"Is it valuable?" Richard flipped through the old book with his gorgeous fingers.

"To me it is."

"Happily ever after…" He scanned pages.

Rune said, "That's not the way fairy stories end. Not all of them." She took the book from him and began thumbing past pages slowly. She stopped. "Here's the story of Diarmuid. He was one of the Fianna, the warrior guards of ancient Ireland. Diarmuid let an ugly hag sleep in his lodge and she turned into a beautiful woman from the Side, that's the other side, capital S-the land of magic."

"That's sounds pretty happy to me."

"But that wasn't the end." She turned away and stared past her dim reflection at the city. "He lost her. They both had to be true to their natures-he couldn't live in the Side and she couldn't live on earth. He had to return to the land of mortals. He lost her and never found love again. But he always remembered how he much he'd loved her. Isn't that a sad story?"

She thought, for some reason, of Robert Kelly.

She thought of her father.

Tears pricked her eyes.

"You sure have a lot of stories," he said, eyes on the spines of her books.

"I love stories." She turned to him. Couldn't keep her eyes off him. He was aware of it and looked away. "You were like him, coming after me. The other night, all dressed in black. I thought of Diarmuid when I first saw you. Like a knight errant on a quest." She scrunched her face up. "Accompanied by two tacky wenches."

Richard laughed. Then added, "I was on a quest. For you." He kissed her. "You're my Holy Grail."