And that skylight slanting over them.

“Well, what do you say, Michael? Is it a deal?”

He got up from the bed. He opened a drawer in the office desk. He took out what looked like a thin pamphlet.

“You can read these if you want,” he said. They were his poems. It was, I guessed, his way of saying it was a deal.

15

Vote for Jose Fuentes it said on the window of the Puerto Rican grocery. The street was wider than I remembered it. A peeling tenement. I’d lived there. Michael stared up obediently. At night I used to hear the rats in the ceiling. We were on the top floor. When was it? Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. I split the rent: Willie Snow. He was a photographer. I had the front two rooms. Once, after a May Day parade, with a girl named Viola, I came up the stairs. A long gray hairless obscene tail hung out of the dumbwaiter.

A drunk. On Second Avenue. Old. Trembling hands. I gave him a cigarette. He couldn’t light it in the wind. He cupped his hands and bent over the flame. I could smell the booze and dried vomit. Michael waited. The old bum sucked at the cigarette. Fukn niggers he said ruint the country. Gawd bless ya. The National Winter Garden was gone. In the dairy Michael ordered barley soup. The onion rolls were still there in the wicker baskets. You could order white coffee in a glass. Sunday mornings I used to come to the dairy. Everybody was poor. Michael nodded. A thin chinless comic sat at the adjoining table. He was on his way to or had come from a TV studio. There was one now in what had been Ukrainian Hall. I kept saying goodbye to things. The chinless comic had or was about to perform in a Jello commercial. “There’s a big punchbowl, see?” He was talking to a woman in a suede coat. She wore boots. Everybody wore boots. “Only it’s full of Jello, see? I ladle the stuff out in a wineglass. I act like I’m drinking.” Gesture. Gulp. He had a huge Adam’s apple. “Then I sidle up to her, see? I say: have you tasted Jello? What a punch! Get it?” We finished lunch. Two boys were standing in front of a haberdashery. Everything was reduced. They carried musical instruments. One of them was white. They were looking at the turtleneck sweaters and the checked double-breasted jackets. The salesman stood in the doorway. The white boy carried a horn case. He had long black curly hair and wore a pea jacket. “He don’t look like a horn player,” the salesman said. “He looks like he come off a coal barge.” “He just needs a little D,” the young Negro boy said to the salesman. He wore jeans and a narrow-brimmed high-crowned hat. “D?” said the salesman. He stomped his feet. “De water. De soap. De bath,” the Negro boy said.

The wind blew. Meals, long since chewed, eaten and digested. Flats, leased and sub-leased, full of ancestral flushings and haunted couplings in beds that no longer existed. The weather of long ago. The menus of dead chefs. Assignations in taxis since junked and scrapped. Stuff gone from the shop windows of shops that didn’t exist in streets watered by other sanitation trucks. Vote for Jose Fuentes.