to the apartment, although he holds her jacket in his hand. The man takes the change and puts it in his watch cap. “Your name is Charles, is that correct?” He writes on a pad and shows it to him, but the name that he has written is “Claire.” “No, I want to eat.” “Eat?” the man says. “Fifty-six twenty-five Parkcrest West is your apartment?” The man nods, and thinks that he will never be able to find his way back to the apartment, to which he is now certain that his wife has not returned, but, instead, is having sex with two men in a hallway. The redheaded man reaches into his pocket and gives him two ten-dollar bills and three singles. “Here! Interest on the five hundred dollars your uncle told you about.” He cannot remember what uncle the man is referring to. “What?” he says. “I don’t want to get involved. Where is my wife?” But the men have left the store and where the wall against which the man slouched had been there now stands a high wooden fence, on the other side of which he can hear the three men laughing and commenting on his wife’s breasts in exaggerated Yiddish accents. He shouts, hoping that he can be heard on the other side of the fence, and the voices suddenly stop. He sees that the fence has, some four feet above the ground, a glassless window, behind which there is a kind of corral. The redheaded man is in the center of this corral, speaking to a woman dressed in a white shirt, fashionably faded and tattered jeans, and highly polished boots. The redheaded man has an expression of stupid and besotted lust on his face, a look of idiotic fascination. “I so admire Meryl Streep,” he says, “she is such a great thespianess.” The woman looks like Meryl Streep, but is a whore. He knows, now, that the redheaded man will not tell him anything about the subway that took his wife to the hallway, that he has completely forgotten him, that he is hypnotized by this whore. She smiles lasciviously at the redheaded man and suddenly, almost comically, falls on her back onto the muddy ground where she lies, supine, at his feet. Her arms are rigid at her sides and, naked below the waist save for her boots, she has spread her legs. The redheaded man is going to mount her. “Twenty-three dollars,” she says. His wife strolls into the corral and says, “What a cheap lay.” The young black man, who has been sitting on a folding chair, opens his briefcase. “I got the money,” he says, “I got the money, you fucking Jew bastard.”
On the Roof
H E WAS A SENIOR CREDIT INVESTIGATOR NOW FOR Textile Banking, a man to whom the younger men came for advice. He had his own cubicle and a pool secretary. Even though he himself was comparatively young, he was, he felt, entitled to wear an oxford gray suit and a homburg. She’d laughed at him when he first bought the hat, and her deadbeat summer friends from the beaches and bars of Coney Island and the Rockaways laughed, too, though they didn’t know him, didn’t even know his name. All they knew was that this boring office slave had managed to land Estelle. She was some piece of ass. They figured he’d been married before, because Estelle occasionally talked about some whining bitch and her brat who wanted more money, more money, always more money. And he’d just, finally, gotten a raise, for God’s sake. He emerged from the rooftop cupola and there they were, five tanned young jerks, sitting under an awning they’d rigged out of blankets and sheets they’d tied to and draped over clotheslines and poles. Estelle looked up and moved away, slightly, from some redheaded slob with his arm around her shoulders, but only slightly. She called out to him to come on over and have a cold beer in the shade. “You won’t even need a hat!” she yelled, the cunt. She laughed delightedly, and the slobs laughed even more delightedly. They were drinking his beer, they were eating his food, they were spending his money, they were, maybe, of course they
On the Roof
H E WAS A SENIOR CREDIT INVESTIGATOR NOW FOR Textile Banking, a man to whom the younger men came for advice. He had his own cubicle and a pool secretary. Even though he himself was comparatively young, he was, he felt, entitled to wear an oxford gray suit and a homburg. She’d laughed at him when he first bought the hat, and her deadbeat summer friends from the beaches and bars of Coney Island and the Rockaways laughed, too, though they didn’t know him, didn’t even know his name. All they knew was that this boring office slave had managed to land Estelle. She was some piece of ass. They figured he’d been married before, because Estelle occasionally talked about some whining bitch and her brat who wanted more money, more money, always more money. And he’d just, finally, gotten a raise, for God’s sake. He emerged from the rooftop cupola and there they were, five tanned young jerks, sitting under an awning they’d rigged out of blankets and sheets they’d tied to and draped over clotheslines and poles. Estelle looked up and moved away, slightly, from some redheaded slob with his arm around her shoulders, but only slightly. She called out to him to come on over and have a cold beer in the shade. “You won’t even need a hat!” she yelled, the cunt. She laughed delightedly, and the slobs laughed even more delightedly. They were drinking his beer, they were eating his food, they were spending his money, they were, maybe, of course they