And he accepted this. He had to. He had made her that way.

You don’t know how this feels, he thought now as he watched her jam her foot in her shoe.

The best work of his best years had been secretly dedicated to her. He was thinking especially of Seoul now. The Olympics. The commission to create the ornamental friezes for the stadium. Each of the female figures—six hundred and seventy-two of them—had parts that were modeled on hers. Eyelids. Kneecaps. Shoulder blades. Toes. Guilt was a brilliant muse. Fire thought he’d come to America to run down fame. What did he know? But then what had he told him? Nothing. Why add more to his plate, which was already filled up with Blanche. He’d even asked her to marry him—this fucking bitch who was leaving now—and she’d said no. Said some fuckery like, Only if we’re allowed to see other people.

And he’d beaten her. Kick way her leg-dem. Siddown pon her chest and pin down her hand-dem. Take out him stiff-up cocky and baton her face. Buss up her lip. Blood up her mout. Swell up her wandering eye.

Then tried to kill himself … sucked on a pistol for a half a day, but the bullet wouldn’t come.

“Goodbye, Ian.”

He looked up from the floorboards. She was on the landing now. Her hands gripped the railing as if she were thinking of vaulting downstairs to get out of his life a bit sooner.

“What should I say to Phil?” he asked.

“That he should pack his things and leave.” There was a gun under the bed. Maybe he should pull it out and shoot her.

Ian went out for a walk at about eight o’clock that evening, dressed in black. The Puerto Ricans were out on the sidewalk in their lawn chairs listening to salsa and watching the Mets on their portable TVs. Ian stopped for a little bit with a group outside a bodega and sat on a beer crate and watched part of the game, shaking hands with all the neighborhood folks who came to pay their respects to El Jamaiqueño, whom they hadn’t seen in a little while.

He moved on, and walked up Kent Avenue—the foreshore road that runs from Fort Greene up to Long Island City in Queens—through Williamsburg, where the Hasidim scurried out of his way; to Greenpoint, Little Poland, where he stopped in at a bar and shot a round of pool; then on to Astoria, Little Athens, where he had dinner at Uncle George’s.

He walked a lot that night, moving in a hunched-over shuffle like a laborer carrying a sack of cement. And he stopped in at many places. Illegal gambling dens. Warehouse raves. Strip clubs. Churches. Crack houses. Poetry readings in performance spaces. Artists’ studios. Cafés. Liquor stores. Record shops.

He walked around until he could find nowhere else to go, then walked back home.

It was two A.M. The street was deserted. The lights in the tortilla factory across the street were on, and a few cars were parked along the curb. But there was no sound—at least none that he could hear, because his hearing, like the rest of his senses, had turned inward.