Then he’d go home, to his home, and Yvonne would have dinner all ready. Not just TV dinners, shit like that, either. Real home cooking. Girl was well trained. And afterward they would go into the living room and turn on the tube and watch the Series. Later, love. It had seemed all right, it had all seemed his. There hadn’t been one single thing hassling his mind. Nothing had been so good since then. Nothing.

He realized he was crying a little bit, and he felt a momentary disgust that he should be sitting here on a bench in Central Park, crying in the sun like some wretched old man on a pension. Then it occurred to him that he had a right to cry for the things he had lost, that he had a right to be in shock if that was what this was.

His mother had died three days ago. She had been lying on a cot in the hallway of Mercy Hospital when she died, crammed in with thousands of others who were also busy dying. Larry had been kneeling beside her when she went, and he had thought he might go mad, watching his mother die while all around him rose the stench of urine and feces, the hell’s babble of the delirious, the choking, the insane, the screams of the bereaved. She hadn’t known him at the end; there had been no final moment of recognition. Her chest had finally just stopped in mid-heave and had settled very slowly, like the weight of an automobile settling down on a flat tire. He had crouched beside her for ten minutes or so, not knowing what to do, thinking in a confused way that he ought to wait until a death certificate was signed or someone asked him what had happened. But it was obvious what had happened, it was happening everywhere. It was just as obvious that the place was a madhouse. No sober young doctor was going to come along, express sympathy, and then start the machinery of death. Sooner or later his mother would just be carried away like a sack of oats, and he didn’t want to watch that. Her purse was under the cut. He found a pen and a bobby pin and her checkbook. He tore a deposit slip from the back of her book and wrote on it her name, her address, and after a moment’s calculation, her age. He clipped it to her blouse pocket with the bobby pin and began to cry. He kissed her cheek and fled, crying. He felt like a deserter. Being on the street had been a little better, although at that time the streets had been full of crazy people, sick people, and circling army patrols. And now he could sit on this bench and grieve for more general things: his mother’s loss of her retirement, the loss of his own career, for that time in L.A. when he had sat watching the World Series with Yvonne, knowing there would be bed and love later, and for Rudy. Most of all he grieved for Rudy and wished he had paid Rudy his twenty-five dollars with a grin and a shrug, saving the six years that had been lost.

The monkey died at quarter of twelve.

It was on its perch, just sitting there apathetically with its hands drawn up under its chin, and then its eyelids fluttered and it fell forward and hit the cement with a final horrid smack.

Larry didn’t want to sit there anymore. He got up and began to walk aimlessly down toward the mall with its large bandshell. He had heard the monster-shouter some fifteen minutes ago, very far away, but now the only sound in the park seemed to be his own heels clicking on the cement and the twitter of the birds. Birds apparently didn’t catch the flu. Good for them.

When he neared the bandshell, he saw that a woman was sitting on one of the benches in front of it. She was maybe fifty, but had taken great pains to look younger. She was dressed in expensive-looking gray-green slacks and a silk off-the-shoulder peasant blouse… except, Larry thought, as far as he knew, peasants can’t afford silk. She looked around at the sound of. Larry’s footsteps. She had a pill in one hand and tossed it casually into her mouth like a peanut.

“Hi,” Larry said. Her face was calm, her eyes blue. Sharp intelligence gleamed in them. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, and her pocketbook was trimmed with something that certainly looked like mink. There were four rings on her fingers: a wedding band, two diamonds, and a cat’s-eye emerald.

“Uh, I’m not dangerous,” he said. It was a ridiculous thing to say, he supposed, but she looked like she might be wearing about $20,000 on her fingers. Of course, they might be fakes, but she didn’t look like a woman who would have much use for paste and zircons.

“No,” she said, “you don’t look dangerous. You’re not sick, either.” Her voice rose a little on the last word, making her statement into a polite half-question. She wasn’t as calm as she looked at first glance; there was a little tic working on the side of her neck, and behind the lively intelligence in the blue eyes was the same dull shock that Larry had seen in his own eyes this morning as he shaved.

“No, I don’t think I am. Are you?”

“Not at all. Did you know you have an ice cream wrapper on your shoe?”

He looked down and saw that he did. It made him blush because he suspected that she would have informed him that his fly was open in that same tone. He stood on one leg and tried to pull it off.

“You look like a stork,” she said. “Sit down and try it. My name is Rita Blakemoor.”

“Pleased to know you. I’m Larry Underwood.”

He sat down. She offered her hand and he shook it lightly, his fingers pressing against her rings. Then he gingerly removed the ice cream wrapper from his shoe and dropped it primly into a can beside the bench that said IT’S YOUR PARK SO KEEP IT CLEAN! It struck him funny, the whole operation. He threw his head back and laughed. It was the first real laugh since the day he had come home to find his mother lying on the floor of her apartment, and he was enormously relieved to find that the good feel of laughing hadn’t changed. It rose from your belly and escaped from between your teeth in the same jolly go-to-hell way.

Rita Blakemoor was smiling both at him and with him, and he was struck again by her casual yet elegant handsomeness. She looked like a woman from an Irwin Shaw novel. Nightwork, maybe, or the one they had made for TV when he was just a kid.

“When I heard you coming, I almost hid,” she said. “I thought you were probably the man with the broken glasses and the queer philosophy.”

“The monster-shouter?”

“Is that what you call him or what he calls himself?”

“What I call him.”

“Very apt,” she said, opening her mink-trimmed (maybe) bag and taking out a package of menthol cigarettes. “He reminds me of an insane Diogenes.”

“Yeah, just lookin for an honest monster,” Larry said, and laughed again.

She lit her cigarette and chuffed out smoke.

“He’s not sick, either,” Larry said. “But most of the others are.”

“The doorman at my building seems very well,” Rita said. “He’s still on duty. I tipped him five dollars when I came out this morning. I don’t know if I tipped him for being very well or for being on duty. What do you think?”

“I really don’t know you well enough to say.”

“No, of course you don’t.” She put her cigarettes back in her bag and he saw that there was a revolver in there. She followed his gaze. “It was my husband’s. He was a career executive with a major New York bank. That’s just how he put it when anyone asked what he did to keep himself in cocktail onions. I-am-a-career-executive-with-a-major-New-York-bank. He died two years ago. He was at a luncheon with one of those Arabs who always look as if they have rubbed all the visible areas of their skin with Brylcreem. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.”

A finch landed in front of them and pecked the ground.

“He was insanely afraid of burglars, so he had this gun. Do guns really kick and make a loud noise when they go off, Larry?”