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he and Breckie lived too close to the EmpireState Building, the waves shooting out over them and missing the apartment altogether. Once in a while, usually after he got a call from Glen Scarp, Harry would turn the TV on, just to see if things had changed, but it was always a blare of static and police calls from the squad cars that circled the block like birds. “We’re going to have to face it,” he said to Breckie. “This television is just a large, broken radio with abstract art on the front.”
    “I can’t live like this anymore,” said Breckie. “Harry, we’ve got to make plans. I can’t stand the whores, the junkies, the cops, the bums, the porno theaters—you know what’s playing at the corner?
Succulent Stewardesses
and
Meat Man.
I’m moving. I’m moving to the Upper West Side. Are you coming with me?”
    “Um,” said Harry. They had talked once about moving. They had talked once about marriage. They would have children, and Harry would stay home and write and take care of the children during the day. But this had troubled Harry. During the day he liked to go out. He liked to wander down the street to a coffee shop and read the paper, think about his play, order the rice pudding and eat it slowly, his brain aflame with sugar and caffeine, his thoughts heated to a usable caramel. It was a secret life, and it nourished him in a way he couldn’t explain. He was most himself in a coffee shop. He imagined having a family and having to say to his children—tiny squalling children in diapers, children with construction paper and pointed scissors, small children with blunt scissors, mewling, puking children with birdhead scissors or scissors with the ears of a dog—“Now, kids, Daddy’s going to a coffee shop now. Daddy’ll be back in a while.”
    “Are you coming with me?” repeated Breckie. “I’m talking you get a job, we get an apartment in a building wired for cable, and we have a
real
life. I can wait for you only so long.” She had a cat who could wait for anything: food, water, a mouseunder a radiator, a twistie from a plastic bag, which, batted under the rug, might come whizzing back out again, any day now, who knew. But not Breckie. Her cat was vigilant as Madame Butterfly, but Breckie had to get on with things.
    Harry tried to get angry. “Look,” he said. “I’m not a possession. I may not even belong
with
you, but I certainly don’t belong
to
you.”
    “I’m leaving,” she said quietly.
    “Aw, Breck,” said Harry, and he sank down on the bed and put his hands to his face. Breckie could not bear to leave a man with his hands to his face until he had pulled them away. She sat down next to him, held him, and kissed him deeply, until he was asleep, until the morning, when it would be, when it was, possible to leave.
    The first few weeks of living alone were difficult, but Harry got used to it in a way. “One year of living alone,” said his old friend Dane in a phone call from Seattle, “and you’re ruined for life. You’ll be spoiled. You’ll never go back.” Harry worked hard, as he always had, but this time without even the illusion of company. This time there was just the voice of play and playwright in the bombed-away world of his apartment. He started not to mind it, to feel he was suited in some ways to solitude, to the near weightlessness of no one but himself holding things down. He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn’t want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal with the face, have the waitress bring them two tin cans and some string so they could just converse, in a faceless dialogue. It would be like writing a play, the cobbling in the night, the great cavity of mind that you filled with voices, like a dark piñata with fruit.
    “Tell me something