The bohemians. The intellectuals. Tamayo and Tamayo and Tamayo, seeps in this petty paste from plate to plate. If they stopped that talk for three consecutive minutes the world would blow up.

“—Do I know Willie? Why, he quotes me three separate times in one chapter—”

“—If I saw Heathcliff on the street I’d just die—”

It got to be ten. It got to be midnight and then one o’clock. You can drink a goodly amount of whisky in that time, say a pint. I was saving a buck or two by drinking it out of the bottle instead of across a bar. Be sensible that way for another decade and I could probably even manage that two-week cruise to the Bahamas I’d been dreaming about all those years.

It was 1:49 when I tagged them. He was a tall slender kid with fairly good shoulders under his denim jacket. He was wearing tan slacks and a black knit tie and white sneakers and if someone had told him that the frat was holding a stag beer party he would have trotted off on the spot. Nobody told him. She had him by the arm and when they came up the stairs onto the sidewalk she said something and he laughed.

They came past the car. She never saw me. They were both laughing now but she was not that tight. She walked easily and when they were turning the corner I saw his arm go around her hip.

They walked two more blocks and then they went into a rundown building with a grocery store on the street floor. I was sixty yards behind them on the other side of the street. Next to me a sign in a plumber s window said, IS THERE WATER IN YOUR BASEMENT?

After a minute a light went on two flights up. Third floor front. I lit a cigarette. The grocer was pushing haddock that year. I smoked the cigarette hard. I was still trying to finish it when the light went out again.

I went across.

There were a lot of bells and a lot of names. Lonergan. Goldman. Zachery. Hoy. Cranley. Philkins. When I was nine years old an avant-garde juvenile delinquent named Philkins knocked half the spokes out of the front wheel of my Western Flyer with a baseball bat. Or maybe that was Filkins. There was no lock on the outside door.

There was one naked light bulb for each flight. There was a faint odor of turpentine. The walls were a drab schoolroom brown. The door I wanted was like any other dingy door in any other dingy walk-up anywhere. I wondered what I was doing there.

I rang the bell hard, hearing it blast inside the apartment.

A minute passed. If they had the turpentine I wondered why they didn’t get some paint. I heard him padding toward me. “Who is it?” he said through the door.

“Delivery.”

“Huh? Here?” The door opened. “You want Cranley, mister?”

He was peering out at me, tying the sash around a blue robe. He was a good-looking boy, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. The line of his nose was sharp and straight where the light from the hall cut it half into shadow. I would not have had to move my right hand more than ten inches from where it lay near the bell to change all that.

“You sure you want Cranley, mister?”

“Go back inside,” I said. “Tell her it’ll be cleaner if she’s got something on when I come in.”

“What? Hey now, what is this? Who do you think you’re—”

I took him by the front of the robe, moving close to him. “Maybe you better say you never saw her before tonight,” I told him. “Maybe you better get that over with first.”

He got with it quickly enough then. I let him go and he edged away a step or two, his eyes going toward a closed door that would be a bedroom and then back to me. He was pushing six-one which made him almost as tall as I am but I had him in all the other ways and he knew that. He was about as thick through the chest as a breakfast lox. He swallowed once, scared.

“Look,” he said then, “if you’re her husband, honest, I didn’t know. I never did see her before, really. She said she was divorced and she—”

“You got a can?”

“What? Yes, sure, right over there—”

“Get in it,” I said. “Get in it and lock the door and scrub the bowl or something until you hear us leave.”

He didn’t argue. He wasn’t going to write home about the experience but he went. I waited until he closed the door and then I walked across and opened the other one.

The candy-striped skirt and the white blouse and her underclothes were thrown over a straight-backed chair. She was lying across a rumpled spread with her back toward me, looking at a magazine. One small shaded bulb threw a tarnished circle of light over the bed, and if I’d been Leonardo da Vinci I probably would have started fumbling around in a panic for paper and crayons.

She thought I was the kid. “Aren’t you lucky,” she said. “People bringing you surprises in the middle of the night.”

“What was it, a race?” I said. “Do you get a trophy for it?”

She hadn’t moved, not consciously. I saw the muscles tighten beneath the flesh of her shoulders as her arms went rigid to the elbows beneath her. Then her head came around slowly. Her face was the color of ice cubes.

“You had to go marry a cop,” I said.

She came apart then. Her lower lip quivered and her eyes filled. I had never seen her cry before. It broke me up real bad. “Wrap it up,” I told her. I shut the door on her and went back into the other room.

I stood there, feeling the whisky in my stomach and seeing the place for the first time. She’d found herself an adult one. He collected things. There were lanterns from construction barriers, signs that said No Parking 8 AM. to 6 P.M. Near the door there was a cross-wired Department of Sanitation street-corner trash basket big enough to turn over and cage a walrus in. He didn’t have the walrus but it wouldn’t have taken more than a word. The kid’s jacket was hanging over a chair and the label said Whitehouse and Hardy, Fifth Avenue, so good old Dad had paid for that the same way he was paying for the graduate school. There were enough books to repave the Jersey Turnpike.

There was a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it. G P. Cranley, it said at the top, Comp. Lit. 207, Page 4, and under that it said:

And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—

She was dressed. She went straight to the door and out without saying anything and I followed her down. When we got to the street she turned the wrong way and I said, “This way.” I said, “Here,” when we got to the car. I ran a red light on Hudson Street and said, “Nuts,” when some guy yelled at me. So I won. That made four more words than she had said.

Coming out of Central Park I had to wait for a light at 66th. “He didn’t even know my name,” she said then.

“That’s all right,” I told her. “I didn’t once either. Maybe something lovely will grow out of it for you both.”

She sucked in her breath. I found a parking slot directly in front of the apartment and she went in ahead of me with her own keys while I was locking the car. I wondered why I was bothering to do that with a rented job. She was in the good chair with one small light on when I came up, sitting with her head on her chest and her arms dangling, looking like a thrown coat.

I made myself a drink, spilling an inch and a half of Jack

Daniels into a kitchen tumbler and taking it without ice. It had the same effect as a short carrot juice. I went out and sat across from her.

You could hear the busses out on Third Avenue.

“Why?” I said.

She said nothing.

“I thought it was good. Plodding, dull-witted old Harry, I thought nothing could be better. And all the while I—”

“It is good. But I’m just—”