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Frightened, hot and wet, his heart pounding, Domostroy pulled out of the girl. “Who was that?” he asked, grabbing for the spread and covering them both with it.
    “What? Oh, that!” She sprang out from under him and turned on the light. He watched her smooth back her hair and study his perplexed expression. “They,” she said, flavoring the word with mystery and laughing, “are probably taxi or truck drivers. Every once in a while, usually in the middle of the night—by electronic miracle—my tuner picks their voices up as they talk to each other on their citizens’ band radios.”
    The voices interrupted her again. Chattering, they seemed to be talking for the sake of talking and of having someone to listen to.
    “Really, I’m telling you, man …”
    “C’mon, José, you know what I mean …”
    Soon the voices dissolved again in the music.
    “You’re shivering,” she said. Then she laughed again. “They frightened you, didn’t they?”
    “I guess they did. Weird. But it’s also cold as hell in here. Can I turn on the heat?”
    “You can try, but the valve is stuck. The super has never come to fix it.”
    He walked from the bed to the radiator casing under the window. Consciously keeping his back to her, he squatted down, opened the metal flap, and tried to turn the valve. But it was stuck tight, and although he assaulted it several times, he couldn’t get leverage. The valve wouldn’t budge. As he crouched on the cold floor with the draft from the window blowing in on him, he began to shiver and, feeling awkward and embarrassed, he mustered all his strength and leaned with both hands on the valve. He felt it give, and then he heard it snap off under his weight. As he pitched forward, a jet of scaldingsteam shot from the opening, barely missing his lower arm and thigh. In catapulting backward to get away from it, he fell over a chair and went sprawling under a table. Vaporizing steam began to fill the room, obscuring its contours. Near him he heard Andrea laugh, but he could only barely distinguish her nude form as she rose, ghostlike, in front of the brilliant haze of the lamp near the bed. Then, he could not see her at all. In the white steam he, too, stood up and groped his way toward the hissing valve and the window above it. He and Andrea kept calling to each other, then—soaking wet, covered with thin, warm rivulets of water—they collided, only to cling to each other. Finally, Domostroy found the window and opened it. A wave of cold air rushed in, sending them both back to bed, shivering and laughing as they huddled together under the blanket. Minutes later, when the built-up steam had run out of the radiator, the air cooled and the fog lifted. Like a garden after a rain, the ceiling of the room, the walls, and the furniture were all dripping water.
    “Storm’s over,” said Andrea, “I’ll put a towel over the leak.” And without pausing, she asked, “Why do you think I went to bed with you? Because I’m in love with you, or because I want to use you?”
    “I hoped it was because you needed me,” said Domostroy.
    “Really? You mean you don’t mind being used?”
    “I can handle it. Being used comes with a clear motivation.”
    “What about love?”
    “Love does not. And it doesn’t fit in with the trappings of my life.”
    Located in the South Bronx, a twenty-minute drive from Manhattan, in the old days Kreutzer’s had attracted a fairly chic crowd who went there to hear some of the country’s best saloon singers. Domostroy recalled a period some twenty years ago—it was about the time when he’d finished his studies and
The Bird of Quintain,
his firstwork, was being performed by major orchestras—when he used to take dates to Kreutzer’s for an evening of great music, elegant dancing, and good Italian cuisine, served in the club’s famous Borgia Room. Also during that time, Kreutzer’s, like so many other clubs, used to discriminate against blacks. Unable legally to