Ray sits down with his plate of crackers and cheese and a beer. He looks at the tears streaming down my cheeks and shoves over close to me. He takes a big drink and puts the beer on the grass. He pushes the tray next to the beer can.
“Hey,” Ray says. “Everything’s cool, O.K.? No right and no wrong. People do what they do. A neutral observer, and friend to all. Same easy advice from Ray all around. Our discretion assured.” He pushes my hair gently off my wet cheeks. “It’s O.K.,” he says softly, turning and cupping his hands over my forehead. “Just tell me what you’ve done.”
Greenwich Time
“I’m thinking about frogs,” Tom said to his secretary on the phone. “Tell them I’ll be in when I’ve come up with a serious approach to frogs.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m the idea man, you’re the message taker. Lucky you.”
“Lucky you,” his secretary said. “I’ve got to have two wisdom teeth pulled this afternoon.”
“That’s awful,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry enough to go with me?”
“I’ve got to think about frogs,” he said. “Tell Metcalf I’m taking the day off to think about them, if he asks.”
“The health plan here doesn’t cover dental work,” she said.
Tom worked at an ad agency on Madison Avenue. This week, he was trying to think of a way to market soap shaped like frogs—soap imported from France. He had other things on his mind. He hung up and turned to the man who was waiting behind him to use the phone.
“Did you hear that?” Tom said.
“Do what?” the man said.
“Christ,” Tom said. “Frog soap.”
He walked away and went out to sit across the street from his favorite pizza restaurant. He read his horoscope in the paper (neutral), looked out the window of the coffee shop, and waited for the restaurant to open. At eleven-forty-five he crossed the street and ordered a slice of Sicilian pizza, with everything. He must have had a funny look on his face when he talked to the man behind the counter, because the man laughed and said, “You sure? Everything? You even look surprised yourself.”
“I started out for work this morning and never made it there,” Tom said. “After I wolf down a pizza I’m going to ask my ex-wife if my son can come back to live with me.”
The man averted his eyes and pulled a tray out from under the counter. When Tom realized that he was making the man nervous, he sat down. When the pizza was ready, he went to the counter and got it, and ordered a large glass of milk. He caught the man behind the counter looking at him one more time—unfortunately, just as he gulped his milk too fast and it was running down his chin. He wiped his chin with a napkin, but even as he did so he was preoccupied, thinking about the rest of his day. He was heading for Amanda’s, in Greenwich, and, as usual, he felt a mixture of relief (she had married another man, but she had given him a key to the back door) and anxiety (Shelby, her husband, was polite to him but obviously did not like to see him often).
When he left the restaurant, he meant to get his car out of the garage and drive there immediately, to tell her that he wanted Ben—that somehow, in the confusion of the situation, he had lost Ben, and now he wanted him back. Instead, he found himself wandering around New York, to calm himself so that he could make a rational appeal. After an hour or so, he realized that he was becoming as interested in the city as a tourist—in the tall buildings; the mannequins with their pelvises thrust forward, almost touching the glass of the store windows; books piled into pyramids in bookstores. He passed a pet store; its front window space was full of shredded newspaper and sawdust. As he looked in, a teenage girl reached over the gate that blocked in the window area and lowered two brown puppies, one in each hand, into the sawdust. For a second, her eye met his, and she thrust one dog toward him with a smile. For a second, the dog’s eye also met his. Neither looked at him again; the dog burrowed into a pile of paper, and the girl turned and went back to work. When he and the girl caught each other’s attention, a few seconds before, he had been reminded of the moment, earlier in the week, when a very attractive prostitute had approached him as he was walking past the Sheraton Centre. He had hesitated when she spoke to him, but only because her eyes were very bright—wide-set eyes, the eyebrows invisible under thick blond bangs. When he said no, she blinked and the brightness went away. He could not imagine how such a thing was physically possible; even a fish’s eye wouldn’t cloud over that quickly, in death. But the prostitute’s eyes had gone dim in the second it took him to say no.
