I saw her approach through the layered smoke. Flashing, dark. The palms were silly and the camel couldn’t make it across a vacant lot. She was at the table. She looked insolently down at me. I could smell her. The belly wove circled quivered danced. Something dark, darker than her hair, clotted in me. I was being asked to do something. To be the place’s fool. The castanets went soft and mocking, the belly, with its bedded jewel, laughed at me. It didn’t matter. The sand had another reality. I buried my face against the sweated skin and kissed her belly and the drum thudded, and there was a great ah! from the room. I heard someone laugh: was it Michael, or the girl? The music skirled. Soraya of Istanbul was gone.

13

It was two minutes to twelve. Exactly. The elevator ascended. He was the sort of man who always removed his hat in an elevator. He was short, clean-shaven and my age. Too many men short, clean-shaven, ascending in elevators looking at their wristwatches at two minutes to twelve, were my age.

I said: “You’ll be in your room at exactly midnight.”

He looked at me.

“Yeah.” He even smiled. But dourly. “I’ve got to call my wife. If I don’t, she’ll think I was out, purring.”

He got off at the sixth floor, short, clean-shaven, my age. Dour. I had no wife to call. I had been out, purring. On my lips I could taste the absurd sweaty kiss. Her belly. Jeweled. She would repeat the performance at the second show. I got off at the eighth floor. The corridor was silent. Old Tom the Whipper-In was being buried on the wall. I sat down and read the paper. I had a sense of muffled and furtive voices, of muffled and furtive movements, in the hotel. Room service closed at midnight. On the Drive there had been an odd crime. A couple, playing gin. The doorbell. Three Puerto Ricans. With a toy gun. They’d bound the husband and raped the wife. He’d managed to reach a phone. When the police came one of the Puerto Ricans was in the living room on his knees praying. I went to bed. Nobody knew where I was. I’d fled. A disappearing act. The only one of my life. She’d come home. She’d found the house blazing with lights. She’d gone through the house turning the lights out. From empty room to empty room. The little dour man clean-shaven my age checked in at midnight. To some beneficiary of his insurance. I fell asleep.

It was the first morning sleep had refreshed me. I hadn’t awakened in the middle of the night. I left the hotel early. I had breakfast at the counter in a small place called the Parisian Café though it was hard to see why. I began to walk. Certain questions were before me. Things I’d obscurely felt since looking out of the window I’d watched the chauffeur sedulously polish the Cadillac. They had formed themselves. They had occurred to me without my seeking them out. In the first place: why did I feel this small connection with the time? A round building. Down went the Ziegfeld. Up went the incredible Americana. But down went what with the Ziegfeld? Up went what with the Americana? No. That wasn’t it. Not just simple demolition. A vast iron ball smashing. Debris and excavations. That wasn’t it. Broken off. A disconnection. Something that did not follow. Ah. Closer. What was put up being put up did not resemble did not seem to evolve from did not appear to have a connection with what was knocked down being knocked down. Gaps. Non sequiturs. Something that did not follow. An experience of a different order. What? And what was it I expected it to evolve from have a connection with? My time. My life. My past. I was fifty-one.