Smoke

seemed that way. On the other hand, he'd been seeing her around for a couple of years, but now for the first time he could pause and study her and marvel at how fat she'd managed to get herself while still in her twenties.

But that wasn't all. He could also look at the good-looking women, so far as this neighborhood had any, and he could watch the old guys in front of the social club and how they talked with their hands and their chins, and he could watch the different ways people wait for a bus, and he could thumb his nose at the patrol car when it drove slowly by, the cops inside there telling each other war-hero lies and laughing in their own private party; you could rob the Cheez Doodles right out of that fat kid's stroller, those cops would never even notice.

He could, in other words, do a thousand different things to help fight off boredom, without ever actually fighting off boredom.

What he was doing out here, just before lunch on a warm sunny Saturday in June, was making Peg happy. Trying to make Peg happy, anyway. He and she had a long talk in the van the other night, Thursday night, after they left Jersey Josh Kuskiosko. It was somehow easier lately for Peg to talk to Freddie after dark, so while she drove and he wore his Bart Simpson head she explained how she felt about things, and how she didn't want to break up with him or anything like that, but not being able to see him while he was all the time able to see her was really getting her down.

He made very sympathetic noises while she explained all this, and said he understood, and in fact he did understand, at least partially. Since she couldn't be with him completely while he was invisible like this, she had to have some time when she could be completely by herself. Of course, when you said it like that it didn't make any sense, but Peg had ways of saying it where it did make sense, or anyway it was important to her, so finally in the van Freddie suggested something that might help, and Peg agreed to it at once.

The idea was, since they weren't eating their meals together anymore — Peg still didn't know that food took a couple of hours to fully join his invisible body, and with luck she never would know — Freddie would leave the apartment at lunchtime any day it wasn't raining, go for a walk or take in a matinee movie (he wouldn't have to pay, after all) or whatever he wanted, while Peg ate her lunch and did whatever she had a mind to do in her own home without any thought that Freddie might be lurking somewhere, watching. (That was Peg's word, lurking, which Freddie himself wouldn't have used, but which he'd made no beef about, merely nodding his agreement, which of course she couldn't see.) Then, after an hour or so, Freddie would come home and have his own lunch, which Peg would have left on the kitchen table. It wasn't a solution to the problem, but it ought to at least help.

There was only one movie house in the neighborhood, and it showed a matinee only on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but all four days of one week the same movie. So Freddie yesterday went in and watched an action movie where guys get blown up and you see them arc through the air like off a trampoline and afterward their machine guns still work, never mind the guys.

This is not a movie you can see two days in a row. One day in a row is a lot. Also, it turned out the matinee was senior discount time, and seniors in a movie theater in the middle of the day act exactly they way they did when they were eight years old in the same circumstances, talking and yelling at each other, changing their seats, eating stuff and throwing the wrappers on the floor, asking each other what just happened up on the screen. The only difference is, they totter up the aisle instead of running, and it's the toilet they're headed for, not the candy counter.

So Freddie wasn't looking forward to a repetition of that experience anytime soon, except maybe to go in with an Angel of Death kite and swoop it around over their heads until the theater emptied.

Anyway, today he was viewing the rich panorama of street life while time crawled by, and also incidentally looking for a telephone. Peg had suggested he phone her every day when he was ready to come home, and although she said it was because she wanted to be sure she got his lunch on the table at the right time, he knew it was because in her innermost heart she didn't entirely trust him, and wanted him to prove he was actually out of the apartment by phoning her from someplace else.

So yesterday he'd snuck into the manager's office in the movie theater, while the manager was out separating two codgers who were beating on each other with canes in the process of their discussion of whether or not Walter O'Malley was totally culpable in the felonious robbery of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. He'd made his call, assured Peg he was enjoying the movie — Holy Shit III, or whatever it was called — then got out of the way as the manager returned to his office to tend to his nosebleed.

Today, though, was a little different. He was not going back into the Megablok Star, no matter what, not even just to use the phone in the manager's office. He couldn't use a pay phone because he didn't have a quarter on him; in fact, he didn't have anything on him. And pay phones were the only kind of phones to be found out here on the street. But to go inside, into the storefront dentist, or the deli, or the copy shop, or the dry cleaner's, would mean somehow using a telephone right under the eyes — and ears, let's not forget ears — of employees, customers, dentists.

Still, to go home without having made a call would leave Peg convinced he'd never gone out in the first place, which would be not good. The last thing Freddie wanted to do was feed her doubt and paranoia. He was, after all, well known to be a liar and a thief insofar as other people were concerned, so if Peg gave way to occasional suspicion or skepticism she couldn't really be blamed.

And here came a guy talking on the phone. A guy in a tan suit and pale green shirt and dark green tie and brown shoes. A guy in his thirties, with a narrow sandy mustache and sandy hair cropped close all around so his big ears stuck out. One big ear, anyway; the other one would probably stick out, too, but at the moment the cellular phone was pressed against it as the guy walked along, swinging a briefcase in his other hand, chatting away.

It was only envy at first that made Freddie lope along beside this guy, ducking around oncoming pedestrians as he listened to the guy's half of the conversation, learning that he was an insurance salesman calling his office, reporting on his appointments so far today, wondering if there'd been any messages. It should have been a short call, since there weren't any messages for this guy, and not a lot had happened in his appointments till now, but he dragged it out, prolonging it, obviously getting a kick out of walking there on a semicrowded shopping street in Brooklyn in the sunshine talking on his brand-new toy.

Still, the conversation eventually had to wind down, because the secretary or whoever it was at the other end of the call had work to do, couldn't just sit there and play games all day. But the so-longs also stretched out, and then Freddie saw the stocky older woman coming slowly the other way, fresh from the supermarket, weighed down by full plastic bags dragging at each downward arm, slogging ahead flat-footed, oblivious to the world and even to the sight of a tall insurance man in a tan suit talking on the telephone as he walked along the sidewalk.

Good-bye good-bye good-bye. Timing is everything. The woman approached, the guy said yet another good- bye, then thought of one more irrelevant question to ask, started to ask it. The woman passed, headed the opposite way. Freddie plucked the phone out of the guy's hand and dropped it into the woman's right-side shopping bag.

The guy talked another two syllables before he realized the phone wasn't there anymore. Then he stopped dead, said, 'Wha?' and moved his now-empty hand, still cupped for the phone, around in front of his eyes, where he could stare at it.

Meanwhile, Freddie backed away out of the flow of foot traffic, stood with his back against the cool glass of the nearest storefront window — ladies' garments, latest styles, large sizes a specialty — and watched to see what would happen next, which was that the woman kept trudging homeward with her groceries, unaware of anything at all occurring anywhere in the world, while the guy in the tan suit started spinning in circles, looking down, out, up, around, everywhere. A couple of little kids, bopping along, deep in their own conversation, stopped to look at this weird grown-up, and the grown-up stopped his whirling to glare at them and shout, 'Where is it?'

'Where's what?' one of the kids asked, while the other kid, wiser in the ways of adults, said, 'We don't have it.'

'I want my phone!'

'There's a phone on the corner,' the wiser kid suggested, pointing.

'I want my phone!'

An older guy with half a dozen magazines under his arm stopped to say, 'What's the problem?'

'My phone, I—' The guy would have torn his hair if it weren't too short to get hold of. 'I was talking on it, and it disappeared!'