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cheese on one half of her bagel.
    “That was in New York?”
    “Yes.”
    “Was there a particular moment, some particular place, where you’d say the Curfew broke up? Where the band made the decision to stop being a band?”
    “I’d have to think about it,” she said, knowing that was really not what she should be saying.
    “I’d like to do a piece,” he said. “You, Inchmale, Heidi, Jimmy. Wherever you were. Breaking up.”
    Odile had started shifting on the tuck-and-roll, evidently in the dark as to what they were talking about, and not liking it. “Eenchmale?” She frowned.
    “What are we going to see while I’m in town, Odile?” She smiled at Alberto, hoping she signaled Interview Over. “I need your suggestions. I need to arrange time to interview you,” she said to Odile. “And you too, Alberto. Right now, though, I’m exhausted. I need sleep.”
    Odile knit her fingers, as well as she could, around the white china bowl. Her nails looked like something with very small teeth had been at them. “This evening, we will pick you up. We can visit a dozen pieces, easily.”
    “Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack,” suggested Alberto. “It’s down the street.”
    She looked at the crowded, oversized, frantically ornate letters inked in jailhouse indigo down both his arms, and wondered what they spelled. “But he didn’t die then, did he?”
    “It’s in Virgin,” he said. “By the world music.”

    AFTER THEY’D HAD a look at Alberto’s memorial to Helmut Newton, which involved a lot of vaguely Deco-styled monochrome nudity in honor of its subject’s body of work, she walked back to the Mondrian through that weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning in West Hollywood, when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in. That sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of something a little more than a hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget.
    Sunglasses. She’d forgotten to bring any.
    She looked down at the sidewalk’s freckling of blackened gum. At the brown, beige, and fibrous debris of the storm. And felt that luminous instant pass, as it always must.

5. TWO KINDS OF EMPTY
    C oming back from the Sunrise Market on Broome, just before they closed, Tito stopped to look in the windows of Yohji Yamamoto, on Grand Street.
    A few minutes after ten. Grand was completely deserted. Tito looked each way. Not even the yellow of a cab moving in either distance. Then he looked back at the asymmetrical lapels of a sort of cape or buttoned wrap. He saw his own reflection there, dark eyes and dark clothing. In one hand a plastic Sunrise bag, with its nearly weightless burden of instant Japanese noodles in white foam bowls. Alejandro teased him about these, saying he might as well be eating the white bowls, but Tito liked them. Japan was a planet of benign mystery, source of games and anime and plasma TV.
    Yohji Yamamoto’s asymmetrical lapels, though, were not a mystery. This was fashion, and he thought he understood it.
    What he sometimes struggled with was some understanding that might begin to hold both the costly austerity of the window he stared into now and the equally but differently austere storefronts he remembered from Havana.
    There had been no glass in those windows. Behind each crudely articulated metal grating, at night, a single fluorescent tube had cast a submarine light. And nothing on offer, regardless of daytime function: only carefully swept floors and blotched plaster.
    He watched his reflection shrug softly, in Yamamoto’s window. He walked on, glad of his thick dry socks.
    Where would Alejandro be now? he wondered. Perhaps in the nameless Eighth Avenue bar he favored, below Times Square, its neon announcing TAVERN and nothing more. Alejandro made his gallery contacts meet him