On moving day, Russell slept uncharacteristically late, and in order to make it to the store on time, he had to dash around the apartment pulling on his clothes and swiping at his hair as he brushed his teeth. He gave Desmond a distracted, passionless kiss as he hurried out the door. “Have a good trip,” he called out as he ran down the hall to the elevator.

Desmond packed the car in the stifling midday humidity, bid farewell to the apartment, and got onto the West Side Highway. He made it only to 96th Street before hesitantly pulling off the road and driving back into the city. Desmond had been counting on Russell to initiate a big, sloppy goodbye, preferably with tears and a hint of anger and a fast hot fuck to finish it off properly. Instead, there had been all that emotionless rushing around. It wouldn’t do to leave town like this. Among other things, it was unfair to Russell, who would regret having been brusque the minute he walked into the apartment that night and realized that Desmond wouldn’t be living there for another four months.

He drove across the city in the dense haze of sick air, through the forest of Central Park where all the trees and the parched lawns seemed to be crying out for rain and a little privacy. They were predicting an active hurricane season this year, and after a summer of heat waves and drought and subtropical nights, Desmond was ready for it. Turn on the faucet, he thought. Drown me.

On Second Avenue, he slipped in a tape he’d made of some of Pauline Anderton’s better-known recordings, and within seconds the car was filled with the overpowering sound of her amazing and awful voice singing “Cry Me a River.” This was the first song on Pauline Anderton’s first album, one of two recordings in her career to make the charts, and supposedly the song she’d been singing when Walter Winchell wandered into a dreary cocktail lounge—the Brown Room—on the outskirts of Tallahassee, Florida, and discovered her.

At a stoplight in Midtown, a passenger in a taxi glared at Desmond and rolled up her window. Desmond smiled at her and lowered the volume. Listening to the tape and lane-hopping through the heavy traffic, Desmond felt a surge of enthusiasm for the project, something he hadn’t felt in months. Perhaps it was a good thing he’d stalled as long as he had; by the time the book came out, Bette Midler would be exactly the right age to play Anderton in the middle years of her career.

He drove across Houston and wove through a maze of narrow, shadowy streets, finally turning onto Ludlow. Less than two blocks from Russell’s store, he found something that would easily pass for a parking space and backed into it.