'Most people make it a point to speak at a meeting on their anniversary, or within a few days of it. At some groups they give you a cake.'
'A cake?'
'Like a birthday cake. They present it to you, and everybody has some after the meeting. Except for the ones on diets.'
'It sounds—'
'Mickey Mouse.'
'I wasn't going to say that.'
'Well, you could. It does. In some groups they give you a little bronze medallion with the number of years in roman numerals on one side and the serenity prayer on the other.'
'The serenity prayer?'
' 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.' '
'Oh, I've heard that. I didn't know it was an AA prayer.'
'Well, I don't think we have exclusive title to it.'
'What did you get? A cake or a medallion?'
'Neither. Just a round of applause and a lot of people telling me to remember it's still a day at a time. I guess that's why I belong to that group. No-frills sobriety.'
' 'Cause you're just a no-frills kind of guy.'
'You bet.'
When the check came she offered to split it. I said I'd get it, and she didn't put up a fight. Outside, it had turned a little colder. She took my hand when we crossed the street, and went on holding it after we reached the curb.
When we got to her building she asked me if I wanted to come in for a few minutes. I said I thought I'd go straight home, that I wanted to get an early start the next morning.
In the vestibule she fitted her key in the lock, then turned to me.
We kissed. There was no alcohol on her breath this time.
Walking home, I kept catching myself whistling. It's not something I'm much given to.
I gave out dollar bills to everyone who asked.
I woke up the next morning with a sour taste in my mouth. I brushed my teeth and went out for breakfast. I had to force myself to eat, and the coffee had a metallic taste to it.
Maybe it was arsenic poisoning, I thought. Maybe there had been shreds of green wallpaper in last night's salad.
My second cup of coffee didn't taste any better than the first, but I drank it anyhow and read the News along with it. The Mets had won, with a new kid just up from Tidewater going four-for-four. The Yankees won, too, on a home run by Claudell Washington in the ninth inning. In football, the Giants had just lost the best linebacker in the game for the next thirty days; something illicit had turned up in his urine, and he was suspended.
There had been a drive-by shooting at a streetcorner in Harlem which the paper had characterized as much frequented by drug dealers, and two homeless persons had fought on a platform of the East Side IRT, one hurling the other into the path of an oncoming train, with predictable results. In Brooklyn, a man in Brighton Beach had been arrested for the murder of his former wife and her three children by a previous marriage.
There was nothing about Eddie Dunphy. There wouldn't be, unless it was a very slow day for news.
After breakfast I set out to walk off some of the loginess and lethargy. It was overcast, and the weather forecast called for a forty percent chance of rain. I'm not sure just what that's supposed to mean.
Don't blame us if it rains,they seem to be saying, and don't blame us if it doesn't.
I didn't pay much attention to where I was going. I wound up in Central Park, and when I found an empty bench I sat on it. Across from me and a little to the right, a woman in a thrift-shop overcoat was feeding pigeons from a sack of bread crumbs. The birds were all over her and the bench and the surrounding pavement. There must have been two hundred of them.
They say you just exacerbate a problem by feeding pigeons, but I was in no position to tell her to stop.
Not as long as I went on handing out dollar bills to panhandlers.
She ran out of bread crumbs, finally, and the birds left, and so did she. I stayed where I was and thought about Eddie Dunphy and Paula Hoeldtke. Then I thought about Willa Rossiter, and I realized why I'd awakened feeling lousy.
I hadn't had time to react to Eddie's death. I'd been with Willa instead, and when I might have been sad for him I was instead exhilarated and excited by whatever was growing between us. And the same thing was true, in a less dramatic way, with Paula. I'd gotten as far as some conflicting data relating to her telephone, and then I'd put everything on hold so that I could have a romantic encounter.
There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with that. But Eddie and Paula had been stowed somewhere under the heading of Unfinished Business, and if I didn't deal with them I was going to keep having a sour taste in my mouth, and my coffee was going to have a metallic aftertaste.
I got up and got out of there. Near the entrance at Columbus Circle a wild-eyed man in denim cutoffs asked me for money. I shook him off and kept walking.
She'd paid her rent on July 6. On the thirteenth it was due again, but she didn't show up. On the fifteenth Flo
