This time the news was completely delivered in under a minute, but I caught it and it made me rise from my seat.

“Yes!” I heard myself say to the TV. “Yes! Of course!“

It was 1992 now, and while years had passed since Walter and Anna Marie were an object of media interest, I, for one, hadn’t forgotten this couple. I’d first become aware of them — and been as aghast at Walter’s actions as everyone else — on the evening of the incident, an evening in July of 1985, when national TV stations carried reports from their South Florida affiliates. It wasn’t until the fall though, when they made the wires again on the day Walter was sentenced, that they got a serious grip on my attention.

Indeed, learning that what transpired at the sentencing had triggered a major focus on Walter and Anna Marie in the Miami Herald and the Kendall Star (the journal representing the Miami suburb in which they lived), I became, for the next few mornings, a regular customer at an out-of-town newspaper store. As I’m prone to do, I was thinking about the breadth of human resourcefulness in response to the horrific knowledge of being mortal; about the variety of remedies, usually subconscious, often implausible and sometimes abhorrent, that we’ve fashioned for the mother of all anxieties. And albeit a strictly visceral reaction at this stage, I was, upon seeing the headlines, at odds with what these papers were making of the sentencing’s extraordinary events. In step with the newscasts I’d watched, the Herald referred to Walter and Anna Marie as the “Demented Duo,” and a piece in the Star was titled “The Twisted Psychology of a Victim.” Still, notwithstanding my quarrel with what struck me as limited vision, both the Star and the Herald published extensive articles that promised details, and details being what I wanted (and was gratified to discover — they would buttress my faith in my instincts) I read everything. I found the Star especially valuable. It ran interviews not only with Anna Marie, who recalled entire conversations with Walter almost verbatim, but with family members and others. And it printed numerous photographs, images of the incident site among them.

Twenty years old at the time, Walter was five-foot-nine and squarely built with unruly shoulder-length hair that shrouded much of his angular face but failed to wholly obscure a profusion of severe acne scars. Although he was not without friends, one of them a confidante who would be interviewed at length, his inclination was to keep to himself, and snapshots from his early childhood — he was the youngest of four boys — revealed that his dour countenance had been a lifelong characteristic. From the week following his high school graduation through to the incident date, Walter worked as an auto mechanic at a popular gas station where he was reputed to be indolent and less than tidy when it came to the simple tasks, but was also known as a talented problem solver. He’d procrastinate about the easy things, and leave a wrench in a gear shift or oil stains on a steering wheel when he was finally done. But in respect to a car’s more elusive issues he would engage and persevere until he’d produced the correct diagnosis and solution. His declared ambition was to eventually own a repair shop. His preoccupation, however, was Anna Marie.

Anna Marie was two months younger than Walter and an inch or two shorter. If she could claim prominent breasts and large green eyes with long and thick lashes, she was hardly, at least insofar as her appearance was concerned, a woman you’d expect a man to be obsessed with. Her nose was too big, her cheeks too fleshy, her chin too brief, her bottom too broad and her “dirty” blonde hair (which she wore at shoulder length or pulled into a ponytail) too stringy. A brother of Walter’s described her as “maybe a six.” Employed since high school as an assistant manager in a supermarket in Kendall’s largest shopping center, she lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her mother who was suffering from an abundance of ailments and essentially house-bound. It was the same apartment in which she’d been raised. Her father, a building construction worker, had died on her ninth birthday, not long after he was trapped in a fire ignited by a gas explosion. She was an only child.

Walter and Anna Marie met in their junior year of high school and that was when, as another of Walter’s brothers expressed it, the “simple teenage crush that just got crazy” commenced. Walter had apparently been smitten the instant he saw Anna Marie. They were in three of the same classes and in the opening weeks of the term he maneuvered to sit near her whenever he could. (He would lean towards her to capture her fragrance, to study her face and to watch for the bra straps that tended to slip below the short sleeves of her blouses.) But she showed no interest in him, never so much as glanced in his direction. And his natural shyness, exacerbated by the inflamed condition of his pimples in this period, it was beyond him to make a move on her.

Then, on a midweek morning in late October, she was passing his desk and tripped over his book bag which happened to be protruding into the aisle. She crashed against the desk in front of his and he heard her groan. Seizing the opportunity to help her, he felt the cool flesh of her arm in his hand and would “forever remember” the “electrical current” that charged through him when they made this first physical contact. As she composed herself, pressing her fingers to her forehead — she was in evident pain — she took a hard look at him and smiled.

“Is this your way of flirting?” She said.

Walter, taken aback, his face hot, had no answer. He only gaped at her.

“The book bag,” she said, still smiling. “Well, it worked. My name’s Anna Marie. What’s yours?” She held out her hand and he noticed a welt beginning to form over one of her eyes. “I could have croaked,” she said. “But I’m still here.”

Dating by the weekend, Walter and Anna Marie were “going steady” in a matter of days and they defined their relationship that way for a full year. “Sixteen! The best year of my life,” Walter would say. Much of their time was spent in Anna Marie’s room. Down a long hallway from her mother’s, and largely unchanged since her girlhood, the capacious room was painted pink and all but consumed by a collection of gargantuan rag dolls and oversized, multi-colored pillows strewn on the bed and the floor. They’d talk spiritedly there for hours at a stretch.

As a rule, Walter had little to say about himself and spoke mainly about cars. He could name the make, model and year of every car on the road. But on one evening he told Anna Marie that he’d never felt “wholeheartedly loved” by his parents. Walter’s parents owned a modest one-story house a short bus ride from Anna Marie and Walter shared a bedroom with his second-youngest brother — which accounted for why Anna Marie seldom reciprocated his visits. His father was a mid-level executive at an auto parts company and his mother a part-time bookkeeper. They were depicted by the Herald as “intensely private people” and few in the community were personally acquainted with them. “Don’t get me wrong,” Walter said. “They’re okay. They’ve done what they were supposed to. They haven’t abused me or anything like that. But I never get the strokes my brothers get. I think — my mother mostly — they didn’t want another kid, definitely not another boy, and that I probably wasn’t supposed to happen.”

In turn Anna Marie, who was enamored of horror films and would chatter about their plots in every detail, abandoned her favorite topic to tell Walter about her father in the ICU after the fire. “He was in godawful pain,” she said. “Even though he was taking morphine the pain just overwhelmed it. He was in agony and couldn’t move ’cause they had him strapped down. Then he breathed funny and passed away, just like that. All that pain, it was for nothing. What’s the point of pain if you don’t live through it? If it had been something he had to feel to stay alive, that would be one thing. But then he died. I still dream about it.”

They also made out a lot. The both of them still virgins, they brought each other to climax with their hands.

In their first year Walter would experience facets of Anna Marie that served to markedly enhance his feelings for her. She’d privately shop for acne ointments and then apply them to his face herself. Walking next to him on the street, she’d suddenly, for no particular reason, grab and embrace him. But she was not without some troubling aspects.

Given to a seemingly willful carelessness, she’d often march across streets against the light and in total disregard of flowing traffic. And habitually leaving her opened handbag on a restaurant table or chair when she went to the ladies’ room or was engrossed in conversation with someone, she was twice a victim of theft. (When he heard of the second event, Walter took to holding her bag when he was out with her.)

What’s more, there were stretches that could last for several days in which she’d become listless and distant. The loss of her attentiveness upset Walter. But her unhappiness bothered him more. He couldn’t stand to see her in distress. He wanted her to feel good. He needed her to feel good. “What happens to her happens to me,” he said to the friend in whom he confided. “It’s like my nerves are soldered to her nerves.”

For Anna Marie, what was most impressive about Walter in this beginning year was his “gentle nature” and the “incredible generosity” — the steady flow of presents and flowers — that accompanied it. But vying for top spot with those distinctions was his “slovenliness.” His schoolwork notes were such “an unholy mess” that she had to spend whole days organizing them for him. And his “indifference to personal care” was “almost a joke.” He’d wear the same shirt for a week. His sneakers had holes in them. Though she loved his long hair it was “insistently unkempt” and she wished he would “style it more.” Sometimes his “seedy” appearance was “seriously aggravating.” Just as often though, it was “endearing.”

They had their first real sex when they were seventeen. Walter deemed the milestone near to spiritual. Anna Marie thought it was “good,” but that something was missing. “Do you have to treat me so delicately?” She asked the next time “Why don’t you push me around a little?” But he couldn’t do that. Hurting her was the last thing he could do. She frowned at him and he felt chastened and inadequate.

And it was during the year they turned seventeen, and not long after she’d asked Walter to take her kayaking in the Everglades and he’d exclaimed — Are you kidding? With the alligators?” — that Anna Marie remarked to a friend: “Walter’s pusillanimous.”

“Pusill-what?” the friend said.

“Funny word, huh?” Anna Marie said. “It came up in a crossword. It means he’s chickenshit. He’s so sweet to me, which I cherish. But sometimes he’s too timid. It’s all sugar and no spice.”

It was also in that year that a shift occurred in their relationship.

The change commenced on the day an older boy gave Anna Marie a ride on his motorcycle. When Walter connected with her later she was wearing a heavy bandage on her ankle. “It still stings,” she said breathlessly. “We skidded on a slick patch and we actually grazed the ground before he got the bike upright again.” She lifted the bandage to show him the burn. “Do you think it’ll leave a scar?” He saw her eyes widen at the prospect. “It was scary,” she went on, “especially when I felt the scrape. But now I feel terrific, like indestructible — is there anything better?”

Not long after that she broached the idea of an “open relationship.” She would date other boys and he could see other girls. “From time to time and just, you know, casual-like,” she said.

In a voice he didn’t recognize as his own, Walter said, “You’re my girl.”

“It won’t be so different,” Anna Marie said. “We’ll still be together. Most everything will be the same. There’ll just be times when one or the other of us will be…indisposed.”

Walter was in all imaginable misery. What, he wanted to know, did she mean by “casual-like?” How could she be sure that he or she wouldn’t get attached to someone else? And what about sex?

After Walter’s sentencing, Anna Marie would tell her interviewer that all she’d wanted was to “have some fun.” Her response at this moment was to erupt in a fit of giggles and, when that was done, to reach out and touch Walter’s face. “The Acknomel’s working great,” she said. “That’s good. We’ll get some more.” (In a separate article, her high school grade advisor was quoted as saying that although Anna Marie was “not stupid,” she was “a bit of a space cadet with little or no self-awareness.”)

Inasmuch as a life without Anna Marie was inconceivable to him now, and fearful of antagonizing her, Walter declined to challenge her proposal. He reminded himself that she still wanted him close, that she still needed him. It was only a phase she was going through. In no time at all things could revert to where they’d been. With the exception of him seeing other girls, which was out of the question, he agreed to the arrangement she asked for.

As it played out the arrangement would last nearly three years, years in which, and despite the fact that the routines of their relationship were not appreciably altered (they continued to see each other almost every day and still had sex, if less frequently), Walter was left to live with a tension that varied in degree but never fully dissipated. Unable to feel that his place in her life was secure — she was his girl and she wasn’t all at once — he was also burdened with a new and abiding apprehension about her physical and emotional well-being.

Anna Marie, who’d anticipate her extracurricular activities with unabashed excitement and who spoke openly with Walter about them (as openly, he assumed, as she dared to since she consistently denied having sex), would be “indisposed” once or twice every couple of months. It was always with guys she referred to as the “devil-may-care ones,” but who Walter regarded as “ “sketchy.” One was a drag-racer, another was into hang gliding. still another was a bungee jumper. All of the boys dropped her after one or two dates. When that happened, her initial elation would rapidly devolve into depression, a depression that might last for weeks. Never gloating or vindictive when she was down, Walter was, on the contrary, sympathetic and solicitous. He admitted to jealousy, but he increasingly perceived himself as her “guardian.” If the spells of melancholy weren’t worrisome enough, her fervid descriptions of her adventures with the drag-racer and the hang-gliding enthusiast, respectively chronicling near collisions and violently shifting wind currents, horrified him — he maintained that “all that really mattered” was Anna Marie’s welfare. That she’d return from dates she labeled her “best” with a smarting cut or contusion “concerned” him, he imparted to his confidant, “more than anything else.”

In the hope of dissuading her from pursuing “outside engagements,” and reasoning that he would be with her should she be in jeopardy, Walter, at one point, and as inimical as it was for him, determined to emulate the boys Anna Marie was drawn to. Though half of him dreaded an affirmative reply, he offered to take her up on her Everglades idea. But it was too late. Her sense of him was already fixed. “Wally, you know you don’t want to do that,” she said, slowly shaking her head and cupping his cheek with her hand.

A few months after they graduated from high school, the month of his eighteenth birthday, Walter left home and along with the purchase of his first vehicle — a pickup truck that he could use for work — rented a furnished room in Anna Marie’s immediate neighborhood. That room remained his place of residence until the day of the incident.

From his close proximity, and with his newly acquired wheels, Walter began to surreptitiously trail Anna Marie when she went on her dates. His purpose, he said, was to be there for her should she require his assistance. Pressed by his confidante, he conceded that he was also motivated by a need to see for himself “just what she was up to.” Ironically, the proceedings Walter would witness were all confined to the stuff of ordinary dating. But while it never became necessary for him to go to Anna Marie’s aid, what he observed was enough to cause him no small measure of grief.

Walter would find himself chain-smoking and sipping beer in the pickup outside a club or movie theater Anna Marie and her date had gone to. (He kept an empty gasoline can on the floor under the glove compartment to urinate in.) Clocking every couple in the crowds that emerged from the place he was monitoring — feeling his blood jump when he saw a girl wearing her colors — he would, once he’d spotted Anna Marie and the guy she was with for sure, start his motor and set out after them. Most of the time the guy would bring her directly back to her apartment house. In these circumstances, Walter would park as close as he could get to the house — sometimes recklessly close — and stick around to see what she did. Anna Marie, Walter was invariably relieved to note, took no one inside. But when she lingered too long in the car, or if there was a more than perfunctory kiss at the door, it would take all of his will not to shout to her to break it up. There were also nights, less frequent but well-nigh unbearable, when she’d go to the guy’s digs. On those occasions, Walter would wait for as long as it took for her to rematerialize in the doorway — in several instances hours elapsed — and to either be driven home by the guy or to hurry into a cab that had been ordered. Although she’d eventually buy a car of her own, Anna Marie rarely used it for her liaisons.

On nights Anna Marie was with someone else and Walter was, for one reason or another, unable to follow her, he would, beginning at eleven o’clock, call her on her personal line to see if she was home yet. If she answered he could go to bed. If she didn’t answer he would call her at 15-minute intervals until she did. He couldn’t sleep unless he knew she was home. When he heard Anna Marie’s voice Walter would hang up without speaking and she never questioned him about the calls.

At 2 a.m. on one such night, and well into the arrangement’s third year now, Anna Marie’s phone rang two-dozen times with no response and Walter felt something he hadn’t felt before, a fierce and consuming anger. He wished that Anna Marie had engaged in one of her foolhardy exploits and that an accident had resulted, a disfiguring accident that would make her repugnant to other boys. But merely allowing this thought to enter his mind made him as angry with himself as he was with her. It was so far removed from what love was supposed to be about. And he would never want Anna Marie to be his woman because she had no other options. He wanted to win Anna Marie. In the circumscribed world of his fixation, a world that had narrowed more and more with the inception of the arrangement, nothing less than his very life depended upon her freely and fully giving herself to him. To claim her by default would kill him just as surely as losing her would. He recognized, of course, that the prospects for a positive outcome weren’t good. The arrangement itself was ample evidence of that, and if further signs were needed, whenever he tried to discuss a future together, she quickly changed the subject. The problem, his gut was telling him, was that he wasn’t loving her enough. But what did that mean? How much more could he love her than he already did? He didn’t know. He did know that she wasn’t happy, not even with the arrangement. Not really. He’d begun to think of her — the perception bruised his heart — as some kind of pain junkie, and he viewed the boys she went out with as her dealers. They wanted a sexual score and she was, certainly now and then, trading her body for the hurt they promised. If they delivered, she’d get high for a while and then all raggedy and strung out when she got cut off. “It’s just sports and games anyway,” she’d said to him on one of her low days and after an especially vivid recurrence of that bad dream. “Most of the time it’s no better than a scary movie. No souvenir afterwards to prove the point. You know what I’m saying?”

What she was saying had, like the reason for her chronic discontent itself, baffled him. And believing that her equanimity was his to secure, and that its achievement would assure her devotion to him, he’d continually — he was doing it now — ransacked his knowledge of her looking for clues to what he was missing. Thus far, however, his incessant brooding had yielded only frustration. But when he called her again, and she answered this time, which caused a wave of affection for her to flush through him, but also, and confusingly at first because his anger was gone, restored the notion of a maimed Anna Marie to the foreground of his mind, he had what amounted to an epiphany. He understood, and would convey to his confidant with a remark the astuteness of which astonished me, that “It isn’t pain and injury Anna Marie gets off on, it’s the feeling of surviving them.” But that wasn’t the whole of it. The rest, which he was careful not to disclose until a jailhouse exchange with his friend following the incident, was the realization that had arrived with his insight of what loving her enough meant and of what it might demand of him.

Shortly thereafter, on an afternoon he was at work and under the assumption that she was too, Walter received a call. “I’m still here,” were the first words Anna Marie uttered. She was in an airfield phone booth twenty miles from Kendall. A boy she’d recently encountered and mentioned only in passing to Walter had taken her sky diving and once they’d landed remembered an “urgent matter he had to attend to.” She was “busted up and stranded.” Walter, doubly disturbed by her uncharacteristic omission of advance notice about the date, found her holding her wrist. “I tripped when I touched down,” she said. “I tried to break the fall. I think I might have fractured something.” He rushed her to an emergency room where the diagnosis was a simple sprain. In good spirits for a week, about as long as it took for her wrist to heal and for her to grasp that the boy had blown her off, she gradually became pensive and withdrawn. Then, in the midst of her despondency, the cycle was in motion again. A guy she’d met at work, another biker, had asked her out and she had accepted.

“I don’t know,” Walter said.

“I thought we had an understanding,” Anna Marie said.

“I don’t know,” Walter said.

“Walter,” she said, “what do you want from me?”

“I want you to be okay,” he blurted. “To be okay and to love me.”

“You are so sweet,” she said, plainly moved by his statement and stepping towards him.

He readied himself for a passionate clinch but what he got was a kiss on the cheek.

Confronted by a parade of cars, most of which, and oddly, required new batteries, Walter was backed up with work and well on the far side of his regular hours. The minute he finished he climbed into the pickup and set out for Route 1, the highway that would take him the 150 miles to Key West. He’d been experiencing a turbulence in his chest the entire day and warring thoughts were roiling his brain. A long drive would maybe pull him together.

Once he was past Key Largo’s garish strip of motels, fish shacks, hamburger stands and gift shops, the road opened to water on both sides and there were stretches in which no land could be seen. To be on this road in the middle of the ocean ordinarily blew his mind. But there was no thrill in it this time. This time what was happening in his mind shut out his surroundings. Holding the wheel steady against occasional squalls, he kept his eyes on the asphalt and the traffic in front of him. He wanted, right now, no wondrous seascapes or stunning sunsets, only the pickup’s motion and the grind of its engine. He could just as well have been driving through a tunnel. He stopped solely for gas and to relieve himself, and never turned the radio on. Arriving at Key West in three hours, he drove half the length of the island where he made a right turn and then another right onto an avenue that led him directly back to Route 1. By the time he returned to Kendall, deep into the night, in a light rain and to streets empty and hushed, his heart was still beating too hard, but his head was clear.

With the heat index in the mid-nineties and the sun fiercely radiant, Anna Marie, a self-described “sun freak,” was outside on her two o’clock lunch break. Dressed in shorts and, to absorb every ray, flexing and extending her already deeply tanned legs, one and then the other, she was perched on a metal railing at a short distance from a small group of similarly sun-worshiping colleagues in the section reserved for “Associates’ Vehicles” adjacent to the shopping center’s parking lot. Across from her was the familiar vista, shimmering now in the dense atmosphere, of a giant Macy’s, a Chinese restaurant, an ice cream parlor, a RadioShack and the Winn Dixie she worked for. The center’s expansive parking area, in the foreground of her view, was bounded by palm trees and only a quarter full. The people passing through it were mostly housewives and young children. Somewhere close magnolias were in blossom, while just overhead two blue and white tree swallows chased each other back and forth, stirring steamy breezes strong enough to feel in her hair.

When a mosquito invaded the space behind her sunglasses and bit her eyelid, Anna Marie had a sandwich in one hand and a bottle of soda in the other. Placing the sandwich on her lap, she removed her glasses to rub at the itch, but she rubbed too vigorously and the sandwich slipped from her lap and dropped to the ground. As she was bending to retrieve it with the hand that held her glasses, she pressed the glasses against the pavement and broke off a stem. Crouching in front of the railing, she set the soda down and took the glasses into both of her hands, wondering if she could fix them. It was at this moment that Walter’s pickup, coming from the left, pulled to a stop on the roadway a few yards in front of her.

She didn’t see that it was Walter’s pickup. From the angle at which she was positioned she was facing directly into the sun, and the pickup was only an amorphous shadow in the wicked glare. She identified it by the clamor of the always unfastened chains and tire irons that rolled around its body whenever he began to move or to brake.

She could hear Walter disembark and hear, as well, that he’d left the motor running. She expected to hear the driver-side door slam shut behind him but, in this regard, there was only silence. Then, as he came around the back of the pickup — himself a gray specter in the impossible light — his movement halted and, she could tell by the clunk and the creak, he opened the passenger-side door. Was he planning to take her somewhere, and in a hurry? Was there an occasion that she’d forgotten? He knew she was working.

He started to approach her and appeared to have something with him, an object that, bouncing along with his gait in a corner of his darkened mass, was of a lighter hue. She thought it must be a gift. Then, as he got closer and the object got brighter, she thought — she was convinced — that it was a bouquet of daisies, her favorite flower. He was about to present her with flowers. But as she proceeded to stand, the murkiness dissolved and she saw that he was holding a can, an opened rectangular can colored a brilliant yellow with green and white lettering. She was staring at the can when Walter, now no more than a foot from her and without a word, jerked it at her face. The can contained battery acid and she received the searing liquid with a long siren of a cry that was joined by the sound and smell of a hamburger sizzling on a charcoal grill.

“It was like he threw fire at me,” she would later recount how the splash of acid felt to her.

The sunglasses Anna Marie still had in her hands fell from them and were crushed beneath her weight as she collapsed at Walter’s feet. Weeping loudly, she was clutching her fist to her eye. Walter swiftly lifted her and, cradling her with the palm of his hand under the back of her head, carried her to the pickup. Ignoring red lights and stop signs — and dogged by a horn-honking band of appalled witnesses — he drove her at great speed to the nearest hospital’s emergency room where he’d been arrested.

TV and newspaper coverage of the assault, which excoriated Walter (and caused his mortified family to refuse any contact with the press for a month), was predictably lurid. It faded though in just a couple of days with reports that Walter had pleaded guilty and that he’d be confined in a Miami jail to await sentencing. Anna Marie would remain in the hospital for a week or so. She’d undergone a surgical procedure and more were planned. One of them, perhaps a year away, would likely involve the excision of her left eye. A pain management specialist forecast a “lifetime of moderate to severe discomfort” in the afflicted space.

Aside from a freelance photographer’s attempt to sneak into Anna Marie’s room on her second night at the hospital — he was promptly apprehended — Anna Marie was not pursued by the media at the hospital or when she was discharged and there were no indications of what was to follow.

The sentencing proceedings were held in late October, on a fall day that was unusually sweltering even for Miami and in a courtroom in which the cooling system had failed. The windows were thrown open, but there was little movement in air rapidly soured by some fifty perspiring bodies. Moreover, an hour from the appointed time would pass before the judge, a tall, skeletal man in his sixties, made his appearance. Despite his tardiness he was in no hurry to get to the bench. A clearly casual ten-minute conversation with the bailiff took place before, in shirtsleeves, he assumed his position. At this juncture Anna Marie, who was sitting in a front row with an aunt and across an aisle from Walter’s parents and brothers, stood up. She’d misplaced, that morning, the white cloth patch she normally used in public now to conceal the damage the acid had done (that it had to have been a frantic morning would presently become obvious), and wearing instead an accessory she might once have donned on a New Year’s Eve — enormous, rhinestone-studded cardboard-framed glasses with plastic electric-blue-tinted lenses that did succeed in masking all of her upper face — she said, in a voice astonishingly resonant, that she hoped “His Honor would consider probation for Walter.”

“What did you say?” The judge was incredulous.

“I couldn’t bear to be without him,” Anna Marie said, turning toward Walter who was shackled to a chair at a table near the bench. Walter had been keeping his face down and lifted it then. He’d endured, while in jail, a compulsory haircut and the acne remnants, fully visible, were accompanied by newly inflicted bruises — obviously something else had happened in jail as well.

The spectators reacted to Anna Marie’s words with startled exclamations and much murmuring. The judge was apoplectic. Quivering with rage, he said that he had a daughter of his own and that if something “so depraved” had been done to her he would have “blown the dirt bag’s head off with my shotgun.” Anna Marie’s plea was “ludicrous” and would have no mitigating effect on the sentence, he said. In fact, given the “unconscionable cruelty of the act,” Walter was going to get “every bit of what was coming to him.”

According to the judge, what Walter had coming was ten years in a Florida state prison. (He would wind up serving seven.)

As Walter, shuffling in his leg irons but with his head still raised, was led away, the judge summoned a now hysterical Anna Marie and her aunt to the bench. In her discombobulated condition, Anna Marie had knocked her appurtenance askew to reveal a melted-shut left eyelid and the raw, mottled meat, speckled with tiny white pustules and stretching from her hairline to the edge of her nostril, that was the flesh surrounding it. The judge, blanching at the sight of her naked wound, advised Anna Marie to seek counseling. “I don’t need counseling,” she sobbed. “I need Walter.” (Subsequently the judge would tell a reporter that, “The girl is as sick as the perp.”)

Most everything I’ve related here I would learn on the succeeding mornings when I perused the regional dailies. But what in particular had led me to balk at the blanket derision Walter and Anna Marie elicited, and then to read every word printed about them, was the video I saw when I turned on the news later that evening. Anna Marie, in her comical shades, was emerging from the courthouse and her indignation lit up the screen. Visibly spraying saliva, she sputtered to a cluster of reporters, and before any of them had a chance to speak: “Walter’s the whole package. I would have floated right off the world if he hadn’t been around. He makes me feel safe.”

“I’m still here,” she added, and then stalked off to a waiting car.

So, seven years afterwards, with the accuracy of my instincts long since confirmed to my satisfaction, but anticipating no further word — seven years was, after all, a long time — you can guess what the sudden announcement was.

Below a new picture of a grinning Anna Marie — she seemed to be wincing slightly and the left side of her face, from which a conspicuously prosthetic eye stared, was discolored and mildly tumescent but perfectly smooth — the caption read:

“Victim of 1985 acid attack, Anna Marie Woods, marries her assailant, Walter Parchman, upon his release from prison.”

In my mind I offered my congratulations. They would be, I expected, something like all right.

From 2002

Blanche Dubois always depended on the kindness of strangers. Me, I’ve always depended on strangers thinking I’m someone else.

I’m referring, in my case anyway, to getting sex.

I know it’s weird, but the assumption some women make that I’m one or another of a certain group of actors and musicians has been, from my early adulthood to what’s now my middle age, how I get my pipes cleaned more or less regularly and for free.

It’s also made it possible for me to have (however briefly and if you’re willing to stretch the definition) an actual relationship.

I should make it clear right away that on my own terms I’m not someone you’d describe as spilling over with attractive qualities. For one thing, a future with the second towel man in a car wash certainly isn’t something a lot of women lie awake at night fantasizing about. No, it’s not that I’m dumb; it’s a problem that I have with applying and executing. I’m not good at those things. In fact, I’m terrible at them. I think this is because I’ve never been comfortable with the whole business of living. There’s something unnatural about it that I find unsettling and I tend to lose my concentration in the least challenging of situations. You might want to indulge a generous impulse and remind me that anyone, on a given day, can screw up the Post Office test. But when I tell you that I also failed the New York City Transit Authority’s dispatcher quiz, you’ll have to agree that the condition of ineptitude here does for sure have a stunning dimension.

And if my level of achievement and corresponding financial circumstances aren’t enough to give a lady pause, there’s my appearance. Although I’m of Greek ancestry, the figure that I cut is something less than Greek. Just under average height, more skinny than slim, and with long, usually unkempt hair hanging over my ears and forehead and down the scruff of my neck, I also have heavily lidded eyes, sunken cheeks and a pallor that’s cadaverous. While we may not be talking Elephant Man, this still isn’t a picture I’d want to keep in my heart-shaped locket.

But here’s the thing: When I look in the mirror I see (if a likeness is to be drawn at all) Ratso Rizzo or Sonny, the pathetic loser in “Scarecrow.” But a number of women, when they look at me, see Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino. Or, for that matter, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, among others.

Typically, and on an average of once a month, I’ll be in a bar, seated alone in a corner and nursing a beer when, just like that, a woman will be at my shoulder.

“I know this is rude,” she will say, “but I couldn’t help myself. I had to come over to tell you how mesmerizing you were in ‘Godfather II’.”

Or: “‘Positively Fourth Street’ — it changed my life.”

I realized some years later that the “strange thing” (as I came to call it) surfaced for the first time when I was only twelve. A dozen or so teenage girls were exiting a theater that was playing “A Hard Day’s Night.” As I passed by on the other side of the street, one shouted something and then three or four of them broke from the others and began to run in my direction. I can recall my sensory equipment registering a small blip that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But terrified by their shrieks and the predatory way they were licking their lips, my reaction was to flee.

Nine years would pass before anything remotely comparable happened again, but by then, though no less mystified by what was taking place, I was at least ready to respond more appropriately.

Two weeks after my twenty-first birthday (and just one week after my graduation from high school), I was working as a messenger and in a cab on a summer morning with a package to deliver. Heading across town we were paused at a light when an incredible creature materialized. Wire thin, without a curve or a bump in her entire torso, and all arms and legs (especially legs — in my memory, doubtless distorted by time, her skirt is hemmed at just under her chin), she had to have been seven feet tall, and I’m not even counting the fuck-me heels and tendril-like spikes of hair that, drooping just a bit at the ends and gently waving as she moved, erupted from the top of her head. Factoring in the enormous sunglasses she was wearing on an oval face, she resembled nothing so much as a giant insect.

Coming alongside the cab, she did a broad double take, exclaimed, “Holy shit, I don’t believe this,” and yanked the door open. The light was still red when, tucking me back into my pants, she said, “Say ‘hi’ to Miss Baez for me, Bobby.”

(I remember that my driver was holding both sides of his head with his hands and that his eyes were popping out like cartoon eyes on springs. When we arrived at my destination he not only refused to take any money, he actually gave me a roll of quarters.)

I still had no reason to regard this incident as anything more than a bizarre and isolated case of mistaken identity, until I encountered, a couple of weeks later in a bar, another woman who was under the impression I was Bob Dylan — and then another who was thoroughly persuaded that I was Al Pacino. With these events I could hardly fail to recognize the pattern that was developing.

Of course it would be awhile before I got a handle on the amazing gift I’d been handed and was able to realize something like its full potential. But in much the same way that I finally achieved respectable levels of competency in toilet procedures and at masturbating by myself, determination, practice and a willingness to learn from my mistakes paid off and I became increasingly proficient at utilizing it.

In the first of the instances I’ve just noted, for example, my response to the woman who approached me was to thank her for the implicit compliment and then to correct her. But when I observed that being truthful didn’t just dampen her interest in me but provoked a discernible hostility — when, that is, she put her cigarette out in my drink and called me an “asshole” — I understood that denying the identity a woman assigned me was not the way to go and that I’d do well in the future to stifle the reflex to be honest.

And bearing this lesson in mind on the second occasion, I did get the girl to come back to my place.

Now before I go on I should point out that my place isn’t exactly a showplace. It suits my budget, but it’s in an old Lower East Side building where the facilities aren’t in their conventional locations. (We’re talking bathtub in the living room, toilet in the kitchen, that sort of thing.) Plus, I share the joint with several legions of cockroaches, an ever-extending family of rodents and an apparently unprecedented and aerodynamic hybrid of the two. (The biologists who’ve come from everywhere to investigate this phenomenon always leave with very concerned expressions on their faces.)

So as you’ve no doubt gathered, bringing a woman home was a really bad move. I’d go into detail about what took place when we arrived at my apartment, but since the matter is still in litigation it’s probably wise to say only that (as I got it explained to me later) it was almost certainly the sudden presence of a total stranger, especially one with red hair, that precipitated the attack. (Apparently the creature was acting on some primal imperative to protect its young.) Okay? In my judgment it was more of a menacing and hovering thing than what you’d call an attack. But I think that’s all I’d better say about it.

Despite the unpleasantness, however, this episode was an important learning experience, and when yet another woman who believed I was Al Pacino presented herself I not only made no protest but insisted that we repair to her place. Well, a few hours later I was cheerfully extracting my shorts from a tangled mix of hastily discarded clothing at the foot of her bed (and promising that first thing in the morning I would instruct my agent to forward a signed eight-by-ten glossy from “Bobby Deerfield”).

But my education was hardly completed. If, at this point, I had two basic rules to follow — never volunteer the truth about myself and never let a woman anywhere near my apartment — I would soon recognize the need for a third: Never even think about initiating a hook-up. I’m referring here to events that took place on an evening when, horny enough to jerk off to a postcard of the Statue of Liberty but attracting no attention, I approached a woman and boldly introduced myself as Al Pacino. The loosened retina I sustained (and which makes everything get like very white for a second) has served to keep me mindful of just how critical to my success, not to mention my well being, is the discipline of laying back.

Yes, I did feel a little guilty at first but I got over it.

Look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that what I do isn’t nice, that I take advantage of the women I connect with. Do you know what I want to say when I hear that? I want to say “FUCK YOU!” — that’s what I want to say. I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought and I’ll explain this just once. The women I attract are not what you’d call off the top shelf. Though they all qualify as women in the technical sense, are all, that is, in possession of the crucial anatomical components (which, more often than not, are in something like a normal configuration), they are not exactly achingly beautiful, beaming with mental health or candidates for a Star Fleet Academy scholarship. In fact, and without exception, they are pretty desperate people, sick puppies and three-legged cat types. Many of them suffer horrendous hygiene problems and are also myopic to the point of posing a serious threat to themselves. They are usually very drunk as well. Given their condition the service I provide them is every bit as valuable as what they do for me.

Now don’t understand me too fast — I’m not talking about providing them with sex. I’m talking about helping them satisfy another need, a need that’s just as real and urgent as the need for sex. I’m talking, of course, about the need to feel special. By physically connecting to my celebrity these women can feel that they are sharing in my anointment.

But that’s not all. After suffering the consequences of being truthful, and noticing over time that what questions they would ask me could, for the most part, be readily answered by any faithful viewer of “Entertainment Tonight,” it gradually became clear to me that somewhere in their brains these women understood that I wasn’t the luminary they were taking me for. But given how pressing was their need to rise above their abject circumstances, even for a minute (and something — whatever it was — about my physiognomy enabling them to use me to this purpose), the fact that they sort of knew they were delusional wasn’t about to interfere with their pursuit of me.

So, as you can see, there’s no exploiting going on here — not from my end anyway. I mean the very last thing these women wanted me to be was straight with them. On the contrary. They were counting on me to help them finesse a trick they were playing on themselves.

A trick they were playing on themselves! Get it?

Okay. I didn’t mean to get vicious there, but since it’s never really me who gets laid, I suffer a pretty large indignity myself. So I think people might find it within themselves to be, you know, a little less judgmental.

In any case, with the recognition that my role in the process was just to show up and play along, other methods of procedure I would over time develop are fairly simple, intended only to make sure that I’m presenting myself in a way that’s as amenable to distortion as I can get it and then to forestall the possibility of ruining things.

My manner of dress, for example. To try and stay apace of what some half-dozen affluent and more or less fashion-conscious men might be wearing at any given time would have been out of the question even if I’d been able to afford it. And since I never know who I’ll be before I venture outside, whose wardrobe would I choose? So in the summer I wear jeans and a work shirt (cleaned and pressed to be sure) and either sneakers or boots. In the winter I add a sweater and a pea coat. I might very well be the complete non-entity and total loser that I am. On the other hand I could just as easily be a Master of the Universe in a casual mode.

My demeanor is informed by the same psychology. Once a woman has established contact I try to limit my responses to those rare questions I have no answer for, to an ambiguous smile. Or, when I think it’s best, I become silent and expressionless. Real actors will notice that, in the latter respect, I avail myself of a rudimentary device of their craft. Taking on a poker face, I let the woman read into it what her wishes and expectations dictate and require.

And, of course, no matter how agreeable the experience and melancholy the break, I always make it a point to disappear after one night.

With just one notable exception, I’ve scrupulously adhered to these rules and they’ve helped to assure me a fairly decent range of experiences.

I’m thinking now of a woman who despite an off-putting quirk that she had of blowing her nose with her hair, kept my interest by taking me through not just every position in the Kama Sutra but more than enough new ones to justify a supplementary volume. (It being Lou Reed’s turn to get lucky I was serenaded all the while by her tape of my “Greatest Hits.”)

I’m thinking as well of the time identical triplets, appropriately sharing the same delusion and built like middle linebackers, invited Leonard Cohen to a cluster fuck and wound up breaking two of my ribs.

It’s a little off to the side, but I’m also thinking of a period that lasted several months during which I was continually approached by men. “I really enjoyed your work in “Cocks ‘n’ Cocks,” they would say. And they would go on to tell me how impressed they were by the way I took “full occupation” of my “space.” That sort of thing.

It was puzzling. I’d never heard of this film, or of the actor — Johnson something — they were taking me for. At first uncomfortable with their advances, it dawned on me one evening that my chances for scoring had suddenly doubled and that I’d be a fool not to take advantage of this turn of events. (I mean where’s the problem? It’s just friction, isn’t it?) But sad to say, not much would develop for me in this area. Before anything happened these guys would erupt in fits of incapacitating laughter, get really nasty or become crestfallen and disconsolate. It turned out that they’d decided I was Johnson Johnson, a porn actor who (within his discipline) was having his fifteen minutes. Curious, I found “Cocks ‘n’ Cocks” in a theater on 42nd Street and checked him out. To my surprise there were real and striking similarities between us; many more in fact than was usually so. Unfortunately there was also one significant difference. I had barely qualified for the “Woman’s Home Companion” category in the old high school joke. When Johnson Johnson used the urinal in a men’s room he probably had to stand in the hall.

And then there’s the “relationship” I spoke of, which was also the time I broke most all of my rules. We’re going back a dozen years here, but there are still nights during which I’m abruptly awakened by the sound of my voice calling her name. When I’m not alone these outbursts cause my bedmates to awaken rather abruptly themselves, but I think at least a part of what they find disconcerting is that the name I call is “Roger” — her father wanted a boy and he hadn’t taken no for an answer.

A sparrow of a girl, no more than four-foot-ten and alarmingly skinny, Roger had thick black hair that, falling over most of her face, also fell nearly to the floor. The first time I saw her, from the other end of a long and crowded bar, I thought she was a half-opened umbrella standing on its handle.

We were introduced later that evening by a casual acquaintance of mine she turned out to be with who knew nothing about me except my real name (and who was obviously trying to dump her). But when he said, and quite clearly I thought, “Roger, I’d like you to meet Pete Papadopolous,” her reply was: “Mr. Hoffman! What an honorary and spectaculated phenomination. This is peerless even.”

Now the thing was that when I saw what was happening normal procedure in this circumstance went out the window. I think I knew immediately that Roger was a keeper and at once recognizing how much she wanted me to be Hoffman and deathly afraid that she would turn away at the slightest hint that I wasn’t (which would have been difficult to tell since her hair made it all but impossible to know in which direction she was facing), I went out of my way to nourish and perpetuate the “misunderstanding.”

What can I say? I was in love for the only time in my life, and when, in our initial embrace a couple of hours later I must have squeezed her too hard and she urinated all over my sneakers, I just — I guess it was the intimacy of it — went over the top. Indeed, before the sun came up I had invited her to live with me and she had accepted.

“I’m so excrutiated,” she gushed. “I’m besides both sides of myself. And yours too!”

Yes, of course I knew there was no way it could work, that it had to end badly. But I couldn’t help entertaining the fantasy that if I drew her in really tight before she discovered her error, we might achieve a depth of bonding that would make my true identity (or lack of one) irrelevant.

The following morning (and amazed by the soothing effect her presence was having on my flying roommates — who’d stopped fluttering around so much and were making sweet cooing sounds), I was more than anxious to know everything about her.

She hadn’t, I learned, had an easy time of it.

Her father, she said, had been a profligator of languigistics at a presticated universalment but had quit his tender position and dissipated — just, and poignantly, a day after Roger, then a toddler, had spoken her first paragraph.

Even more heartbreaking, her mother, on whose insurance policy she’d been living for the last twenty years, had tragicastically electrified herself when she dropped a George Foreman grill into the bath she was taking — this on the evening of the day she’d come to Roger’s first grade class to hear her recite “Mary Kept A Smallish Lamb.”

But at this point (and apparently wrestling with her delusion — which was something I’d never known any of my women to do and which, I thought, said something about the quality of her character, though I’m not sure what exactly), she began to ask some questions of her own.

“How come you don’t seem to have the majority of cash I respected?” she said. “How come you don’t habituate in a nice place? How come you don’t have a phone in case Steven Spielberg and Sidney Pollack are feeling communicable? How come your closet is only fulminating with jeans? Also, how come you don’t keep your birds in cages?”

Considering that I wasn’t used to such an interrogation — and that I was obliged to think on my feet — I came up with something that I thought wasn’t bad.

“Honey,” I said, “you’ve entered my life at the worst possible time and while I know that it’s asking a lot, I can only hope you’ll find it within yourself to bear with me. I’m afraid that I may be afflicted with what’s called the ‘J.D. Salinger Syndrome’. It’s a condition of creative paralysis that sometimes develops in artists who have achieved a legendary stature. Owning the prospect of a fame that will survive their demise, they live in terror of losing that prospect by producing work that might be inferior to what they’ve already accomplished. Rather than risk tainting their image, they cease to function and, in the worst cases, to even appear in public where the possibility of a clumsy or mediocre utterance could alter and diminish the way they’re perceived. What happens is that they effectively sacrifice the remainder of their lives to their immortality. I may or may not overcome this disease and I’ll understand completely if its something you want no part of. All I can say is that I’m deliberately staying out of the public eye right now and that I’ve cut myself off from even my closest friends and associates who, meaning well but not understanding, would only make light of my problem and encourage me to work. This unfortunately includes my accountant who happens to be the only person with access to my bank accounts. As for the apartment, it’s my hideout. It’s perfect as a hideout because no one would ever think to look for me in such a crummy place. You’re the only one who knows about it, the only person I’ve trusted enough to bring to it. But again, I’ll understand if this isn’t something you want to involve yourself with because it won’t be a whole lot of fun and I don’t know how it will end.”

And it worked. Roger said nothing, but in addition to breaking out in a really hideous rash as I spoke, her chest swelled noticeably, almost expanding into something like a bosom. She must have felt five feet tall to be deemed worthy of sharing in my time of trial.

But her obvious uneasiness with the situation in which she found herself would periodically surface. A couple of days later she wanted to know why more people didn’t notarize me on the street.

“Really good actors,” I said, “have the ability to be anonymous when they want to be, sometimes even invisible.”

I remember that when I said this it made her giggle.

But even putting aside the considerable tensions caused by my charade (and the always frazzling necessity to invent places I was going to when I left the house for the car wash every day), living with Roger was nerve-racking all by itself — like being tuned to two radio stations at once in a room with the light bulb loose in its socket. Periods of incessant chatter, for instance, would suddenly be interrupted, often in mid-sentence, by a dead silence, as though her plug had been pulled from the wall. At such times she might become motionless as well. Although her eyes would remain open I couldn’t be sure if she was actually conscious. In fact, on several occasions, I’d have been ready to believe she’d expired were it not for an odd clucking sound, the origin of which I was never able to locate, and something unattractive that she did with the muscles around her mouth.

Still, as enormous as the problems were, the moments of bliss I experienced in those first weeks more than compensated for them.

Spring was beginning and, celebrating its arrival, we did the things new lovers do when spring is upon them. We went to a windswept beach where we romped and frolicked in the sand. Locked in an embrace we rolled over and over down a steep hill in Central Park. In the evenings I washed her hair and she gleefully folded my penis into woodland animal shapes.

I’d have to say that, all things considered, life was pretty good.

Then it went bad.

Roger read in a newspaper that Hoffman was going to shoot a film somewhere in the Midwest and that he’d be on location for two weeks.

“Why didn’t you push my head up?” she said, showing me the article.

Even though I’d known all along that such a development was inevitable, I was nonetheless shaken by this news. It took no small effort to collect myself sufficiently to say: “I was going to tell you, but I thought I’d wait until the last minute because I wasn’t sure the part would work out and because I knew how painful a separation now will be for us. I didn’t want to make you sad before I had to.”

But she was happy. Clapping her hands she said, “I’m so glad to know you lastly clambered over your jaded salanjastiker hippodrome.”

“Well,” I said, “ let’s not get ahead of ourselves, it could be just a fleeting thing.”

Needing a place to get lost for two weeks, and with nowhere else to go, it was left for me to seek accommodations at the car wash. And the night before I departed Roger helped me pack my things. When we were done she went to the kitchen and brought back a bottle of cheap champagne she’d concealed in the back of the refrigerator.

“This is a time for jubilating,” she said, pulling the cork herself. Then, touching my glass with hers, she said, “Breakfast with eggs, Duster!”

As you can imagine, the following days were either bad or worse than bad. Sleeping in various vehicles in a lot adjoining the wash, I showered and did my laundry standing behind cars on the conveyor belt. And missing her terribly, the fact that I couldn’t call the apartment because I’d never been able to afford a phone was torture for me. I could only hope that she was okay.

Finally, mercifully, the two weeks were up and I went home.

Hearing my key in the lock, Roger came to the door with one of my “birds” perched on top of her head and holding another newspaper. Without a word, she shoved the paper at me before I’d even crossed the threshold. It was open to a story about Hoffman. Some kind of budget issue had arisen and production on his film had been suspended. During the hiatus Hoffman was staying in New York. The paper had been printed on the date he arrived.

He’d been here for a week!

Putting the paper down I met her eyes and saw that they were red and swollen.

“Where were you?” she said. ” A whole plus seven — and twenty-four as well.”

When I had no quick answer she said, “You’re doing an exquisite triathlon, isn’t it?”

You will appreciate that, as heart wrenching as her question was, my principle emotion at that moment was relief.

“Darling, Darling,” I said, “No way. There’s no way I would ever betray you like that. No, I’m not having an illicit liaison. How could you think such a thing? I’m playing an unhappy man and to stay in character I deprived myself of your company — for as long as I could bear it anyway. It’s just a coincidence that it was exactly one week.

Roger stepped toward me and buried her face in my abdomen.

“I was frightful,” she said

She was trembling and so was I. We stood holding each other for a very long time.

Determined from then on to be more careful, I made a special effort to monitor what she might read, see or hear. But I couldn’t cover everything. Just a few days later we were awakened by the radio alarm clock and immediately heard on a newscast that the budget problem had been resolved and that Hoffman was back on location. Fleeing to the kitchen to find something to kill myself with, I could feel Roger right behind me. I expected flying dishes. What I got was a juicy kiss.

“You didn’t have to submit a misleader about being Dustin Hoffman,” she said. “Why did you think you had to be duplicacious with me?”

I was stunned. Had my wildest dreams come true? Was it possible that Roger had come to love me for myself after all? I couldn’t believe it. Nor could I believe the sex that was

to follow.

I always knew Roger was hot when (it was her signal to me) she lay down on the bed on her stomach, raised her skirt and floated an air biscuit. But that morning’s air biscuit resonates for me to this day. Indeed, it will be forever etched in my memory, not only for its remarkable housekeeping application (it worked to clear the apartment of all vermin for almost a month), but because it served to set the stage for the most incredible orgasm I’ve ever had.

I’ve never been able to faithfully describe that orgasm. If I report that before it I’d had no idea how much sheer joy there was to feel in sex, that never in my life have I known so pure an ecstasy, I don’t begin to do it justice or to convey how, in the throes of it, I felt myself transported to a place beyond time and that, floating free as something like total spirit, I was privy for an instant to the deepest secrets and most puzzling mysteries of creation. (In that apocalyptic moment I actually understood, for example, why Chuck Norris was on the planet.)

And I can say this notwithstanding the fact that the orgasm was somewhat premature — I was still standing over the bed and fully clothed when it happened.

Anyway, when it was done and I lay down next to her, happily exhausted, basking in the afterglow, I was ready to drop my guard and reveal my true self to her in all its emptiness. Brushing away her hair to find her face, which took a awhile, I was about to speak when she said:

“You’ll never assume the crush I had with you.”

“?”

“I saw ‘Our Picnics in Needles Park’ six times and ‘Bobby Dearest’ eleven times. God, Alfredo, how I wanted to sit on your head!”

If, only minutes earlier, I’d discovered what it must feel like to win the lottery, now I knew the depths of despair. Even to think about commencing a new deception was beyond my strength.

I didn’t know what to do.

Just a few days later, and too weary at this point to bother checking the TV listings, the matter was taken from my hands. Pacino suddenly turned up on a live talk show we were watching. When he came on, Roger looked at me, then back at the screen and then at me again.

“How are you doing that?” she said.

When I had no response she bolted from the room and was gone for twenty minutes. She must have lapsed into her semiconscious thing because I could hear that strange clucking sound (which was a lot louder than usual). When she returned she stood directly in front of me with her arms akimbo. (I could tell her arms were akimbo because her elbows were sticking out of her hair at the same 45-degree angle.)

This time there was no mistaking it, she was pissed.

“You haven’t been Al Pacino either,” she said.

“No, Honey, I haven’t.”

Where once Roger had contemplated me with an unabashed reverence, as though an aureole surrounded my face, now she looked at me as though I was the lowest form of nature’s creepy crawly creations.

“I’ve known it,” she said. “You’re a pathoprecocious person. You’re a hypothetical liar. Well, don’t bother to make up something improved because it’ll be too little and without much else.”

“Sweetheart…”

“I mean it,” she said. “I’m cognisacious of the person you really are now. I’ve been expecting it for days.”

Yes, I was ready to say ruefully, I’m Fred the Fraud. I’m Sid the Shit. I’m Deforest the Deceiver.

“You’re Emilio Estevez,” she said. “You’re Emilio Estevez and you’re ashamed of yourself. Why? Why, Emilio? I know you aren’t a word that people keep inside the house, but yesterday when my suspicionings aroused me and I said to myself, ‘Roger, you’re a chimp, this can’t be broccoli you’re smelling’, I went to a laberarium and found you in a book. It said you were a ‘thirdly ratinated thesspassian who sometimes didn’t stink up the place’. Wouldn’t I co-habituate with Emilio Estevez? Am I so stuffed-up, or what the fuck is this?”

“Rog…”

“If only you’d had the retegritude to level yourself for me. But now…. Oh Emilio, I could never stay with a man who has so weenie an esteement for his aural fibers. Nor I myself.”

I pleaded with her not to go. I had no way to pull it off, of course, but I promised to take her backstage to meet the cast of “Cats.” I know she agonized over the proposal, but this lady was not without principles. Indeed, she looked at me then as though it was a few years after Watergate and I was Richard Nixon wondering aloud to Republican Party officials if they might, you know, consider nominating me again.

A few months later Roger took up with a guy she’s been with ever since. I think she thinks he’s Danny DeVito and I’ve often wondered, since they have a phone, how he handles it when Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas never call.

And while I’m on a sour note anyway I might as well tell you of a period in which the celebrity connection women make for me actually worked to my detriment. It was when Pacino’s “Revolution” was released — and on its heels the video. Amounting to a devastating left jab, right cross combination, these unfortunate events threatened to end my career as well as Pacino’s. In fact, it got so bad for a while that even women who thought I was Gabriel Byrne would suddenly back off and decide to take a pass. It really wasn’t until “Sea of Love” revived Pacino’s popularity that I got hot again.

When I look back, however, it’s clear to me that even during that difficult interval I was better off than I would otherwise have been and I know that I have nothing to complain about. Although I may not have put up Wilt Chamberlain numbers, neither has my life been bereft of carnal experiences.

Moreover, I got a woman to actually live with me and though it was very brief, that union produced a son. (Unbeknownst to us at the time, Roger was pregnant when she left me.) I haven’t mentioned my son because frankly he embarrasses even me. To say it as gently as I can, most people, when they’ve seen him or tried to engage him in conversation, take for granted that his parents were first cousins. But Eileen (Roger wanted a girl and she wouldn’t take no for an answer) is almost a teenager now and I’ve noticed lately, when he comes to visit and we’re out on the street, that he’s begun to turn the head of more than an occasional young lady.

Here’s wishing whoever they want him to be a very long run.

Emerging from the john with her coat draped over her arm and carrying her overnight bag, Sharon tossed a gift-wrapped box onto the living room couch where I was reclining and half-asleep.

“I would have given you this tonight,” she said. “Happy fucking birthday, Steve. You’ve traveled around the sun thirty-five times now and you still haven’t seen the fucking light. Enjoy the rest of the fucking weekend.”

And then, slamming the apartment door behind her with a force that knocked a picture from the wall, she was gone.

For minutes afterwards I stayed put on the couch, processing what was clearly her permanent departure. Yes, it disturbed me that her decampment had come on the afternoon of this particular birthday. And I did experience an uneasiness about the void her absence from my life would leave. (Although we’d maintained separate Greenwich Village residences, she’d been my steady girlfriend for nearly six months and slept at my bigger place a lot.) But these concerns were quickly dissolved in a wash of relief; a relief succeeded by apathy.

Not to say that I’d stopped liking Sharon. I still had an affection for her. The issue was that I couldn’t fully love her. And her persistent demands, especially in the last weeks, to move in, to marry, to have a baby, had become oppressive. (She was just months younger than me and the alarm on her biological clock had been sounding long before our hookup.) Of course, the strain I’d been made to feel in this period wasn’t all about Sharon specifically. It was rooted in the fact that the depth of emotion required to respond to such entreaties had always been off my spectrum. I was more than capable of lust and, occasionally, of infatuation. But love, certainly of the kind she wanted, was something alien to me.

Indeed, what transpired with Sharon had merely perpetuated a lifelong pattern. In one manner or another, it had happened in all of my “serious” relationships with women.

What I’m referring to would invariably begin in the early stages of routine intimacy, and it didn’t take much to trigger it. I’d hear the sounds they made in the bathroom, or suddenly notice a simple mole or dimpled hollow on a breast, and instantly suffer a spasm of revulsion that was accompanied by a heart jolt of fear — it was as though I’d caught a glimpse of the Grim Reaper himself. If the intensity of that reflex passed quickly there was an insidious after effect. An emotional distancing would be left in its wake, a distancing which was beyond me to repair. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake my perception of women’s bodies as things that decayed and ultimately vanished. They were, their bodies, an atrocious and ephemeral concoction of pipes, wiring and nasty liquids that nature had fiendishly devised and then camouflaged by, at best, a pretty face or figure. Any ardor I may initially have felt would fade, and sex would become obligatory and mechanical. In the aftermath of the ensuing split-up, that could take place anywhere from weeks to months later, I would feel only a listlessness in the company of any new women I met. My torpor would last until my libido necessarily reawakened — it represented, after all, a biological imperative. Then, not counting one-nighters that were over too fast for me to find cause to recoil, I would once again enter a familiar scenario.

Sharon had attributed my resistance to her wishes to what she called “commitment phobia” and I should acknowledge that I’d given her mixed signals, which undoubtedly shaped her reading of me. But if I’d led her on a little it was because I was afflicted with an ambivalence that hadn’t been a problem in previous failing liaisons. I was approaching middle age with no significant couplings to show for it, and given that she was comely, personable and intelligent, I thought I ought to want her. As a result, I couldn’t bring myself to thoroughly discourage her aspirations. Despite her constant complaints about the noise that extended into the early morning hours from the nightclub across the street and just four floors below — I barely noticed it myself — she’d remained adamant about taking occupancy (with getting hitched and becoming a mother to quickly follow). And I had intimated that, when I turned thirty-five, I might be ready. If, all along, I knew that my readiness wasn’t very likely in the cards, I did live with the hope that something would at one point rescue me from my condition. But when the time came that something hadn’t materialized.

“So, are you prepared to take the next steps?” She’d asked me in bed that morning, snuggling behind me.

“Shit,” I grunted. “I can’t.”

Sharon’s parting critique of me, let it be said, had been off by 180 degrees. My dilemma wasn’t that I hadn’t seen the light, but that I’d seen too clearly what it exposed.

My mother told me once that when I was born the obstetrician had remarked that I was “high-strung.” Since no further details were recalled by her, I can only imagine that I evacuated the womb trembling with terror. When I think of this, I’m reminded of another ghastly aspect of women’s bodies. This one involves nature’s design of the female anatomy and it makes perfect sense of my trepidation. A freshman at Pratt, for Christ’s sake, would know better than to locate the portal to the world in such close proximity to the anus. This ungodly configuration made the moment of one’s birth comparable to exiting a subway station in pre-gentrified Jersey City.

Now that’s not just a joke. As it occurred to me later, the doctor’s comment had predicted a handicap to which I’d been sentenced. If my innocence as an infant hadn’t shielded me from too much clarity, as an adult, the crucial repression and denial mechanisms that mute too keen an awareness of the uglier realities of existence — and belonging, it appeared, to most everyone else — would be glaringly absent.

I’m talking about the mechanisms — the illusions and mental manipulations — other people were able to employ in order to live with some measure of interior peace in respect to the unacceptable reality nature posed. I’m speaking of religion and the immortality it promised. (My parents were atheists.) I’m also speaking of an immersion in social or political missions to absorb the attention. (I had no interest.) And, to be sure, I’m speaking of profound romantic love which, from what I’ve observed, is a method used to transform the body from a source of apprehension into something quite the opposite — a vessel of transcendent pleasure. (This is probably the fundamental reason the termination of romantic attachments seems to be so shattering for many people.)

And the consequences of missing insulation were hardly confined to my inability to deeply connect with the women in my life. In fact, that was only a piece of it. I was also consigned to a chronic anxiety about my own physical composition and fate, which, I suppose, the women simply mirrored. The sinister underside of nature being so evident to me, I lived with a dread that would fluctuate from low to high, but which was relentlessly there. The horror of the inevitability and agony of death that I knew their beauty disguised and distracted us from, a bright spring day or magnificent landscape were not, for example, phenomena to rejoice in, but ominous and disquieting.

If you want to know what nature is watch those shows on the animal channels for a demonstration. See how it doesn’t give an antelope’s ass about the destruction of innocent life, but just makes more.

My state of mind, however, was a secret that, with one exception back in my twenties, I never revealed, not to the women it affected or to anyone else. More than a little embarrassed by it, and my socializing being minimal anyway (I had friends but none with whom I was particularly tight), I was loathe to discuss it. And inasmuch as I was functional, decent looking, educated and with a well-paying, if unrewarding, job, no one I came into contact with would suspect that something might be wrong. To my knowledge, the most negative thing ever expressed about me (apart from “commitment phobia,” whatever the hell that actually is) was that I tended to be “sullen.”

“Sullen.” I could summon no argument against that description. Veiled as my inner wretchedness may have been by a determination to appear as together as possible, I was still, and much too often, visibly tense and morose.

That exception I mentioned above was a psychiatrist who I saw once a week for the better part of a year. I told him my story and he diagnosed the symptoms I presented as depression; a condition he defined as a chemical imbalance. In the course of my treatment, I went through an array of psychotropics, none of which had any effect whatsoever on my thoughts or moods. (The street drugs I’d tried, like cocaine and speed, had worked to appreciably lift my spirits, but as good as they’d made me feel, the gratifications they afforded would dissipate rapidly and leave me worse off than I was before.) My depression, this shrink said finally, was “refractory,” impervious, that is, to medication, and he was talking about alternatives like electric shock therapy when I upped and left. What this man didn’t grasp was that my “depression” was caused by — I’ll say it again — seeing the world as it is. Bringing my chemicals into balance (which, for all we knew, the meds had accomplished) wasn’t going to change that.

As I’ve indicated, I hoped that something would happen to free me from my situation. Well one day, and out of nowhere, something did happen; something at once trivial and seismic, and that I could not have foreseen.

A bitterly cold midwinter month of dragging myself through the rounds of my days had passed since Sharon took off and I was walking into the laundry room of my building’s basement when I felt a hard crunch under my foot. Looking down I saw that I’d stepped on a large water bug and that its crushed remains were oozing from under my shoe. In the same instant I also saw a second bug right next to my shoe. Apparently in reaction to the event, it jumped some six inches straight up and, upon landing, scurried away. I felt no guilt or remorse about what I’d done. But I wasn’t indifferent either. No, what I felt was something like a thrill that made me want to repeat the experience. Compelled to chase after the companion bug, I cornered it behind a trash can where I dug my heel into it and watched it break apart, its lifeless tentacles still gently waving. With this action I felt another thrill akin to the high from a line or two of blow. But this one was joined by a revelation that had the impact of an epiphany.

I could end my difficulty with nature by becoming one with it!

Before I was back upstairs, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

How I acquired the weapon — an AR-15 with a 16-inch barrel and iron sights, or the half-dozen 30-round magazines that came with it — is nobody’s business. I will report that I found it, in its design and craftsmanship, to be a stunningly beautiful instrument and that, immediately in its thrall, when I first held it in my arms — it weighed maybe six or seven pounds — it seemed to pulsate as if it was possessed of a beating heart. Was I, at that moment, projecting the excitement of my own wildly beating heart onto it? The gun was also, considering it was second-hand, remarkably clean. All the preparation it needed was a quick tidying.

Per the previous owner’s instructions, I removed the rear takedown pin and took out the bolt carrier group and charging handle. With that done, I wiped these components with a rag to rid them of small bits of black sludge that was dirty oil. Then, using a nylon bristle brush, I scoured the inside of the upper and lower receiver. Next, I ran a bore snake through the barrel to make sure it was completely clear. Finally, I added fresh oil to the outer three flanks of the charging handle and, returning to the bolt carrier group, put several more drops of oil into the holes on the side.

And that was it.

With the gun all set, I became feverish and agitated. Anxious to get moving, I was unable to sleep that night. In the morning I left a voice mail for my boss to tell him I was sick. After that I paced the breadth of the apartment repeatedly, pausing only to glance out the window at the shuttered night club below. Then, when darkness fell at last, and wearing a thick parka with the loaded gun clutched against my chest and extra clips in a backpack, I climbed the two flights of stairs to the roof. Once there, I slid the long dead-bolt rod and opened the creaking metal door to a blast of icy air, which made me wish I’d thought to bring gloves. Maybe twenty patrons, all of them young, were queued now in front of the club when I got to the roof’s ledge overlooking the street some thirty yards from the door. Pulling the parka’s hood tighter around my head and laying the gun at my feet, I crouched and wedged myself between a skylight and a fireplace chimney and, peering down, watched them. I could hear some in the group laughing. They were anticipating a good time.

I didn’t wait to start. The ready and easy marks I’d correctly envisioned clearly illuminated by street lamps and the club’s neon sign and decorative lights, I picked up the gun and began firing right away, moving my aim from the back of the line to the front. Having had no prior experience with this rifle, the crackles and pops of the reports were much louder than I’d thought they’d be. And the force of the recoil against my armpit was stronger than I’d expected. It would doubtless leave a bruise, but I felt no pain. The thing was I couldn’t really feel my body. I wasn’t even cold. From the moment I’d started shooting I was liberated from my body and, by extension, from all the grief that it generated for me. I wasn’t scared anymore. On the contrary, I was ecstatically happy. In the process of killing, you kill your own death, at least your anxiety about it. Feeling far greater than anything I’d ever felt on coke or amphetamines, I realized what being truly “high” meant. It meant to be outside of and above the body that will ultimately destroy you. I’d mimicked nature — given it what it obviously relished — and I’d been rewarded by euphoria. The vivid red blood that was erupting like a fountain of mini geysers all along the line was glorious to behold. I heard muffled cries, but no screaming. It was happening too quickly for that. One guy, who I’d hit in the torso, looked in my direction with a questioning expression before falling. Even with the wind up the smell of sulfur was thick in the air. Shell casings were scattered all around me. And in short order sirens began to wail.

I think I got most all of them.

Since I had no presence on social media and had given no hint of my intentions to anyone, I knew there’d be puzzlement about my purpose. Had I come from some twisted ideology? A grudge against the club? People would look for a rationale that, however demented they’d deem it, was comprehensible to them. What could my motive have been? Well, I’ll tell you. Self-defense. I was defending myself against my crippling terror of death. But no, they won’t get it. This explanation will willfully mystify them because to understand it would oblige them to examine the devices they use to protect and sustain themselves and would, in turn, undermine those devices.

It was at this point that, separated from my body and with the prospect of my own death no longer frightening me, I thought to turn the gun on myself. If death or permanent incarceration were all that was left for me — and not knowing how long my exaltation would last (it might have made a life in prison tolerable if it continued) — I wanted to take advantage of a moment in which my demise would be all but painless.

That was when I heard a grating sound at the rooftop door. The first responders had shown up. They’d knocked out the stairwell bulbs, but there was still sufficient light from the windows of the surrounding and taller buildings to see the door, which I’d left slightly ajar, slowly opening wider. They were cautiously pushing against it with their weapons. Then they egressed, dropping to their stomachs on the tarred roof floor and crawling military-style along it.

Looking at these men, I found myself feeling emotions that surprised me. I was caring about them. Deeply caring. Had the ecstasy my act induced enabled me to tap a previously inaccessible dimension of myself? And coming now from an extraordinary disposition, I was thinking that, although they were helmeted and heavily armored, it took courage to do what they were doing; unlike me they had normal lives to lose. Following that thought came an adjunct thought — for them to claim a kill would fittingly confirm and reward the heroism they wanted to own. Immediately after that, however, I flashed on a quite different explanation for their presence here, an explanation which came in the form of a question. Had they picked this job for the chance to get a taste of what I’d arrived at? But why they’d chosen to be here didn’t matter now. Now either of those reasons was enough to move me. Out of admiration for their valor, if valor was what it was, or empathy, if a private misery was what it was, came a swelling of generosity and a better idea than my first one.

Standing fully upright and facing them, I emptied a clip in their direction, careful to aim above them. There followed a crackling fusillade of hail-like metal, the impact of which lifted my feet and hurled me backwards and, in its deafening volume, so all-consuming of my senses as to further reduce my capacity to know any pain to a slight burning in my chest. With that, as the blood spilled from my ripped heart into the cavities of my body, I entered a sweet oblivion.

It began when my wife of three years announced it was time to have a baby. Connie was twenty-eight and I was thirty. Given our ages, I pointed out in my argument against the idea, the matter was hardly an urgent one. But after she’d voiced her objective — which must have crystallized it for her — the achievement of motherhood became an obsession and she was rarely off my case about it. Finally, and several months later, my ongoing reluctance to enlist in her project resulted in a not so veiled threat: “Steven,” she said. “Either we have a baby very soon or I’m out of here.”

“All right,” I told her, “get off the fucking Ovral then.”

Now it wasn’t that I’d never wanted a baby, and not that, when I had one, I didn’t want it to be with Connie. Strong of character, nurturing, attentive and sometimes astonishingly perceptive (as well as pretty), Connie was a terrific wife and more than qualified to be an exceptional mother. The notion of one day having a family with her wasn’t at all disagreeable to me. Indeed, I’d talked, and sincerely, about wanting a family quite frequently during our courtship.

But that was in the abstract and far away at the time.

What commenced to trouble me when the prospect became imminent — what troubled me immensely — was a consequence of the prospect that bolted to the fore of my brain and lodged there. Fathering a child would bind me to the hideous plan that nature has devised for everything corporeal. I would be, by nature’s design, replacing myself.

If Connie, born Catholic but now earnestly New Age in her faiths and sentiments, mollified her apprehension of death by believing in reincarnation, I was a secular Jew and had only the void to anticipate. And if I’d always been keenly tuned to the terrible price of existence, and lived in a perpetual state of medium-grade anxiety because of it, the newly heightened appreciation of my mortality destroyed any semblance of internal equilibrium I could claim. The underbelly of nature had turned itself toward me and it wouldn’t turn away. My now hyper-consciousness of what it ultimately meant to be alive was making a magnificent vista of extravagant greenery — albeit as manicured as Central Park — grotesque and menacing to me. In the most serene of moments, I was seeing what William James saw, “the skull grinning in at the banquet.”

I was also, much of the time, in a small rage about the new burden I’d be taking on. I’m referring not to the responsibility of child raising, but to the fact that no matter how large was the contempt I’d developed for humanity, having a child would force me to care about what the world might be like after I expired.

Thoroughly upended, I even began to think about homosexuality; about, that is, the solution it afforded to the problem of getting your rocks off without spinning what Kerouac called the “wheel of the quivering meat conception.” Though it wasn’t of itself an appealing option, there were hours when I couldn’t help but feel titillated by the concept of having sex that was unencumbered by procreative ramifications.

In the petrifying absence of contraception, I found myself avoiding sex with Connie. And when I couldn’t avoid it, my performance was consistently impeded by occlusions in my circuits that would leave the both of us in a condition of considerable frustration. I was fine jerking off, but I could not for the life of me get functionally erect with her, let alone ejaculate. Moreover, my very biology had decided to collaborate with my emotional afflictions. A lab I visited at Connie’s insistence forced me to suffer the embarrassment of a sperm count that it twice reported was “negligible.”

Further compounding my miseries, at once increasing my sense of urgency and exacerbating my paralysis, was Connie’s evident disappointment in me; a disappointment that was evolving into disdain. I knew that I was becoming, in her eyes, something less than a man. Recalling her admission to me once that she’d believed all Jewish men were extraordinary providers and natural born fathers — and having early on disabused her of the former assumption — I knew that I had no choice now but to keep the latter one alive.

Reasoning that a change of scene might turn the trick, Connie suggested one morning that we split from our Manhattan apartment and try the country for a few days. When I agreed, she arranged for us to stay with our friend Betsy who ran a little print shop out of her house in a Catskill town not far from Kingston. Connie was excited by her idea and in her phone call to Betsy gleefully told her what we were up to.

The plan was to leave in a month.

With Connie’s impatience only increasing, it was, I knew, something like now or never for me and I made ready to win a war with myself. In preparation for that war, the first thing we did was suspend all attempts at sex. (It was Connie’s idea.) With that, and after adhering to a simple regimen that Connie dictated — four weeks of wholesome foods, vitamins, structured and daily exercise and “absolutely no masturbation” — I actually felt not so bad and I was ready to give it a go.

But upon arriving upstate, I was seriously frightened again. If what I felt wasn’t quite what a German soldier entering the Russian front must have felt, the dread I was enduring was awful enough to make me think of such a soldier. Undoubtedly contributing to that thought was the weather. It was the middle of winter, the sky was low and gray, the drifts from a recent snowfall were thigh-high and the temperature was near to zero. It was not, on top of everything else, an atmosphere conducive to a successful completion of the undertaking at hand. Especially not when, in the back bedroom to which Betsy assigned us (and which she used to store old printing equipment and bound stacks of posters and flyers), you could see your breath and needed to wear a coat.

Still, as inopportune as the setting may have been, it was on our second afternoon there that a child was conceived.

I want to say, first of all, that I was feeling physically ill, and it wasn’t only because I was on the edge of a cold. In a generous if misguided gesture of support, Betsy had pumped the thermostat up to steam bath levels. The oppressive heat, coupled with an effluvium of musty furniture and nasty chemicals, threatened my ability to both keep my lunch and remain fully conscious.

In any case, with Betsy at work out front, Connie, after giving me a thumbs up sign, took off her clothes and arranged them carefully over a chair. Deliberately presenting her bottom to me as she bent to the bed to pull away the quilt, she followed this maneuver by abruptly turning around and flopping onto the bed on her back. Then, reaching for a pillow, she propped it under her buttocks and spread her legs.

“Stevie, do you feel it, too? It’s as though there’s a spirit hovering near us waiting to be reborn.”

“Great,” I said, removing my pants. “I hope it’s the spirit of a heavy-duty bond trader who happened to have a coronary while he was up here for a weekend. Please don’t let it be one of the local yahoos who ran his pickup into a tree.”

I entered her immediately — it had, after all, been weeks since I’d last pleasured myself. But very quickly I knew I was going to wither. My deprived member’s rote response to a welcoming vagina notwithstanding, the gravity of the occasion continued to undermine me. Still, I’d made a compact which I had to honor. Inasmuch as the peril the woman beneath me signified was serving to turn me more off than on, I began, then, to leaf through bodies, shuffle through poses, postures and configurations in my private Kama Sutra file. And then, beginning to sweat profusely, to ransack my memory and imagination. But no one and no thing I could remember or think to want would get me up, let alone elicit the participation of my gonads. What I wouldn’t have given for a premature orgasm. I tried, with my hand, to stuff it in.

“Stop.” Connie said. She squeezed out from under me and, her hair trailing along my chest and stomach, ran her tongue down the length of my torso to the numb thing between my legs.

A determined virgin into her early twenties — she would not permit a man inside her until she was twenty-two — Connie’d had some experience keeping boyfriends with her mouth. In seconds, and despite my mental condition, she got it halfway up and we tried anew. But once more I evacuated her ignominiously and she was left to root in me again. Ten minutes must have passed with nothing much happening before she raised her head. I was expecting an expression of scorn. Look, I was prepared to say, I’m sorry. This is really out of my hands. But Connie was grinning at me. Crawling backwards a little, she reached, with outstretched arms, behind my back and, using her shoulders, raised my legs until they were almost perpendicular to the bed. Then, holding my haunches up and steady with both of her hands, she lowered her head to my starkly exposed ass and drove her tongue into my rectum. After lingering there for a while, she let my legs down, lay on top of me and, brushing it against my nostrils en route, brought her mouth to my ear.

“You poor chicken-hearted hymie,” she whispered. “I wish you were the lesbian you’d like to be because what I really want to do is eat your pussy.”

Score one for Connie’s acumen and her resourcefulness in an emergency. “Harder,” she was instructing me after no more than a minute had elapsed. “Go deeper. Yeah! Oh! Splash.”

Cody was born nine months later, almost to the day. Nature being oblivious to human expectations of justice and symmetry, he had, contrary to the circumstances of his conception, a proper allotment of toes and fingers and a countenance that was amazingly genuine in its sweetness and innocence. I mean there was nothing unhealthy or freakish about him; nothing that was even remotely Damienish. By every measure he was a wonderful specimen.

And me? Well, I was worn by then to a physical as well as emotional nub. I lost twenty pounds during Connie’s pregnancy and the run up to it that I didn’t need to lose. But not dropping dead with Cody’s arrival had a salutary effect on my nerves that was almost immediate. I was still afflicted with my chronic trepidation, of course, but significantly less clamorous it was, relatively speaking, a manageable trepidation.

Just a day or so after his birth I was, in fact, as close as I get to all right again.

Imagine that suddenly, with no expectation of the impending event, you void your bowels on a stalled and packed rush hour subway. Imagine that the ventilating system has shut down and that the lights have remained on at full wattage. Also imagine that, stuck in a tunnel and still a half-dozen stations from your destination, your best choice will be to stay on the train when it starts to move and make normal stops again. Now think of being trapped in such a nightmare circumstance not for twenty minutes or an hour but for nearly two months.

And that’s just a piece of it. Imagine as well that throughout this period you feel as though a butcher knife has been planted in the very center of your heart. If you can imagine these things, you’ll have some inkling of what much of the summer of 1994 was like for me.

That monstrous season of very bad days, sandwiched by days that were worse than very bad, began in early July when Maryellen split. It would have been awful enough had Maryellen left me with only the aforementioned deep and abiding agony in my chest that derived from the loss of a woman I cared about. (And awful enough with only the cluster of physical tribulations that would immediately follow the loss.) But because of what triggered it this breakup was, you could say, beyond devastating.

What happened was that — I’ll state it flat out — Maryellen, who’d been living with me in my apartment for nearly two years, caught me flagrante delicto with Maureen, her Cocker Spaniel.

Coming out of nowhere, with, I swear, nothing in my history to predict it, I didn’t think at first that what I’d done was “depraved and disgusting,” to quote Maryellen, and I was very much at odds with the character judgment implicit in her reaction. It didn’t seem in my case to be either fair or accurate. I mean I’d always had a probing mind, a mind that, forever in search of the deeper truths, often drove me to challenge things that others took for granted. (Although it was a bit outside of what I normally focused on, and while I don’t remember thinking about it specifically, the assumption that boundary lines in nature are fixed and inviolable, would be a decent example.) It was entirely possible, I thought, that my philosophical bent had subliminally impelled me to take the leap from rumination to hands-on inquiry. For another thing, Maureen had been bathed that morning and her shimmering coat smelled a lot like Rive Gauche — a fragrance widely known to be irresistibly seductive. And besides the chance that I’d been a victim of the shampoo industry, there was a strong likelihood that I’d suffered a drug overdose. It was quite conceivable that — strict dosage instructions included for a reason — the extra teaspoon of Nyquil I’d taken for a post-nasal drip had caused me to lose my species bearings for a minute.

What’s more — and who would argue with this? — when you call your dog “Maureen” you’re asking for trouble. And, Jesus, hadn’t Larry Flynt confessed to the serial raping of chickens without incurring one iota of damage to his reputation?

But thoughts like these ended quickly. It was impossible for me to deflect for long the horror in Maryellen’s eyes when, on the evening in question, she came home early. With the stereo blasting, I didn’t pick up on the fact that Maryellen was there until, all at once, she was big in the room. Maureen, I realized afterwards, was aware of Maryellen’s presence before I was. I saw one of her ears rise and I saw what I understood later to be an expression of alarm as she turned her cranium towards me. But probably because her countenance was open to several interpretations at that moment, her heads-up went right by me.

At any rate, I hadn’t seen the rage and revulsion Maryellen’s face presented to me since, standing next to my mother, I barfed into the family “Important Documents” chest when I was five. The abhorrence it conveyed seemed, in its breathtaking proportions, to have issued from the depths of creation itself. No, try as I might I couldn’t deny it. Diddling Maureen had been an egregious act — a crime against all that was sacrosanct. And I didn’t know why I’d done it. I didn’t know what had dispatched me to such a forsaken place. That the act had been, as I’ve indicated, both unpremeditated and unprecedented, only compounded a mystery that would eat at me for quite a while. I mean, I’d always been indifferent to dogs and that included Maureen. If I perfunctorily scratched her head from time to time, and walked her when Maryellen couldn’t, at no point had I bonded with her, not as a pet or otherwise.

Well, what can I tell you? This turn my life had taken was more than I could cope with. I went, I guess, into something like shock. For the next three weeks I never once left my apartment. While I managed to phone my boss, Mr. Mintz, every couple of days to make reports on a virus of some enigmatic, thoroughly debilitating and likely very contagious strain that I’d contracted, all I did besides that — and when I wasn’t pacing furiously from room to room — was intermittently endeavor to lose consciousness for a few hours by consuming tall glasses of scotch mixed with beer.

Now much as I’d like to, I won’t pretend that, though it was not of a similar kind, I’d been without an emotional issue before the incident.

In contrast to Maryellen, who worked for an investment firm and recently gotten a second promotion in less than a year, I’ve had, since my quite ordinary middle-class childhood, a childhood (if you skip the vomiting episode) free of any noteworthy traumas, some problems with applying and executing. I’m not good at those things. Functioning on an elevated level isn’t my forte. My IQ is high, but I’d barely made it through a year of college. I think this is because the ugly fate of decay and dissolution that awaits everything with a body rattles me too much. I know that the inevitability of death (not to mention the horrors that might follow it) disturbs everyone. But where others find ways to mitigate their fear of dying, I haven’t come up with very much. When the gods were distributing psychic forms of armor against the dread of death, they’d been outrageously skimpy with mine. It isn’t just that being born under a death sentence that could be invoked at any time scares me but that it also makes me feel guilty. I must have done some serious shit to be in so much trouble. And it makes me feel ashamed as well. Unable to alter my situation, to change the given, I’m incompetent where it counts the most. Brooding over my destiny, and persistently cogitating about ways to handle it, perpetually distracts me and results in my tending to lose my concentration in practical matters a lot.

And neither will I attempt to portray my relationship with Maryellen as unfettered by difficulties before the Maureen debacle.

Four years younger than me — at our separation I was twenty-seven and she was twenty-three — Maryellen, whose pleasing face, affable personality and sense of humor had speedily won me over, was from a well-off, straitlaced upstate New York family. Like her older sister, she’d majored in finance at a local college before coming to the city to pursue a career. Unlike her sister, who’d gravitated to the Upper East Side, Maryellen had what she proudly referred to as a “maverick streak” and she wanted to live in Greenwich Village. Planning to get a place in the Village once she’d found a job, she was staying, when we met, in the adjoining neighborhood of Chelsea, with Maureen and her college roommate, Barbara. Charmed by my bathtub-in the-kitchen Village walkup near the Hudson River, visibly enthralled by my pontifications on subjects ontological and titillated by my regular, though moderate use of alcohol, when she discovered I was on a first name basis with the bartenders at the White Horse she and Maureen moved in with me just days later.

And that first year with Maryellen was nothing short of excellent. It was a year in which we had an abundance of sex, took long hand-in-hand walks around the Village, went to scores of cultural events in the area and hung with friends of mine, most of whom were of an artistic persuasion. But after that year and, it doubtless being relevant, a year in which she’d found lucrative employment, her “maverick” thing began to wane. Souring on the Village and our social life, she would talk frequently about us moving to a “normal” apartment and to a neighborhood with different people, maybe somewhere near her sister. She also wanted me to make my drinking less than regular and moderate. When my responses were essentially evasive and transparently intended to delay such changes, she gradually became moody and distant and, after a while, it would sometimes seem that all of my foibles had become sources of irritation to her. My tendency to drool when I slept, which she’d initially been amused by, started to antagonize her. And, unnoticed by her before, the sartorial faux pas of wearing socks that matched the color of my shoes and not my pants, captured her attention one morning and incensed her no end.

It was, however, my job and lack of real money that were the primary and most constant aspects of me to rankle her. A typesetter for a printing company housed in a rundown building on a still only partially gentrified street near the Garment Center, I made just enough to get along, had no opportunities for advancement and didn’t have to wear a suit, all of which grated on her not a little. Referring to me on more than one occasion as a “glorified typist” who worked in a “type factory” she took to calling me a “slacker” and was incessantly after me to connect with a “respectable” profession.

I suspect that having her meet me at work one evening when I had to stay late played a role in much of what I’ve recounted. The last to leave, we were almost out the door before she said she needed to use the bathroom. Having only the men’s room key, it was the men’s room to which I sent her — utterly forgetting that the only person who hadn’t been granted a key to it was the janitor. I’ll spare you a detailed depiction of the men’s room. Suffice it to say that some unspeakable carnage appeared to have taken place there and that upon her emergence Maryellen was weeping.

Still, her disdain for my job, her increasing displeasure with our way of life and, yes, her disaffection with me in general notwithstanding, I remained confident that Maryellen would stick around. I say this because we’d already lasted almost two years, and because she had a conspicuous flaw of her own, a flaw that limited the field for her. You could call it a weight problem, but it wasn’t so much that as a weight displacement problem. Spherical at her bottom and tapering markedly toward her top — and with a stem-like ponytail to complete the resemblance — Maryellen was the very picture of a pear, which is a fine shape for fruit (not to mention pendants and tones) but not that terrific for human bodies. Understanding from the start that this imperfection had contributed to making her available to me I was actually grateful for it. Bottom line: She was a woman whose figure was suitable to my station in life. (And to my own physical composition. I was all of five foot six, more skinny than slim and with a nose you would think must obstruct my vision.)

So when, after a call to her sister — who had a car and who would wait in the hall to help her — Maryellen hurriedly packed her things and, with Maureen clutched under one arm, fled the apartment, I loathed myself all the more for having dismissed the signs that our union was in jeopardy to begin with. And in those first three weeks I just wasted away. Indeed, I lost twelve pounds I didn’t need to lose. This was mostly due to the lack of an appetite. But it was also because Maryellen had, without my catching it in the state I was in, emptied the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator of the groceries she’d purchased, leaving me to survive on an economy-size jar of Marshmallow Fluff and a dozen frozen waffles (along with my booze stash which was untouched).

If that wasn’t enough, my wretched condition was soon exacerbated by a number of physical ailments and handicaps. For one thing, thick clots of mucous were continually sliding from the back of my nose down into my throat. For another, a tooth with a chronic abscess was acting up again. Although the pain it caused was only occasional, I knew it was on its way to meaning business this time.

I had, moreover, a substantial eye crisis. Already living with one frayed contact lens, which clouded my sight and made it feel like dirt was enmeshed inside it when I blinked, the other one blew off my fingertip one night and vanished down the sink drain. And just minutes after that happened, I proceeded, while I was pacing, to step on my backup glasses. These misfortunes forced me to view my surroundings and myself with what amounted to one crippled eye. But even with this impediment I could still perceive, when I looked in the mirror, a growing bump in my jaw and, already in need of a barber for weeks, that my head was now crowned by a wild man’s hair. But leaving my apartment for any reason at this point was out of the question. I couldn’t even summon the will to shower with regularity, or to shave at all.

It might have helped to talk to a friend about what was going on. But reaching out would have involved a discussion of my transgression, a transgression I had no stomach to reveal to anyone who was ignorant of it. The few times someone called me, and knowing it would not be Maryellen, I didn’t answer and disregarded any messages that were left.

To cap it off, I was enduring my loss, humiliation and bodily maladies with only a semi-functioning air conditioner to combat the onset of a hellish heat and a level of humidity that would have suffocated a rainforest.

I did consider suicide. Craving eternal oblivion, dying to that end would have been a blessing now. But, as I’ve said, I’m scared of dying. And absent the assurance of oblivion, or the guarantee that my grievous Maureen offense wouldn’t lead the gods to punish me with an afterlife that was even more gruesome than the one I was living, I rejected it.

With suicide off the table as a means with which to escape my forlorn straits, I concluded that to feel any better there was really only one recourse. It was to get Maryellen to forgive and return to me. Accomplishing this objective, once it occurred to me, became an all-consuming goal. And the way to go about it, I reasoned, was to reconstitute myself. I would rebuild myself into a healthy-minded man of purpose and ambition. This notion got me fired up. But as eager to begin as I was, my enthusiasm was soon dampened by a disconcerting thought. An undertaking of such dimensions would require time to complete. (Especially when I was clueless as to how to begin.) Unaware of it, Maryellen would only drift further away from me and one day, it was bound to happen, take up with someone else. Prudence dictated that I tell her of my plan and the new me it promised.

So, impersonating an old college friend, I rang her parents and learned that she’d gone to stay with Barbara again until she could get a place of her own. And that evening I called her there. Actually, prodded by the significance of my news, I called her there every few minutes because each time Barbara would answer and hang up when she heard my voice.

With that, I knew I had no alternative but to tell her in person, and the size and urgency of my mission overrode my reluctance to face the outside world.

Assuming that Maryellen would be home, I picked a Saturday and set out for Barbara’s apartment with a dangerously racing heart to accompany the now throbbing bump in my jaw and the commencement of a sharp soreness in my throat from my post nasal drip. The headlines on the newsstands I passed announced “ANOTHER SCORCHER,” and at only ten in the morning my shoulders were already burning under my shirt when I came upon a major street fair replete with merchants of every category, live and loud music and some seriously teeming humanity. Worse, an upward slope on the main avenue made it clear that this thing went on for blocks, smack to the border of Chelsea.

Barbara’s building was just on the far side of the fair. But the fair also stretched down intersecting streets and this made circumventing it more daunting than advancing directly. So arms tight at my sides, I walked right into it. As it turned out, the disaster that had befallen my appearance worked to my advantage here. Instead of being bumped and jostled, or repeatedly forced to stop and wait behind ambling fools who, unlike myself, had no important business this day, spaces were opened up for me. So fast were people to move aside it was like stepping through a series of automatic doors.

Then, as I made my way, I passed a stall of grilling sausages. The aroma of them took me back to an evening in the third week of our living together when we’d gone to a festival in Little Italy and, tossing softballs at a mechanical monkey and pitching quarters into a glass, I’d won, in rapid succession, a can of Spam Lite and a yellow parakeet. That the very next day the bird, when we released it from its cage, would fly headlong into a closed window and expire, took nothing from my memory of that extraordinary evening. I felt perfectly centered that evening — and fearless. Unencumbered by my chronic engrossment in my body’s eventual disintegration, I was absolutely without inhibition. I could, I felt, have excelled at anything I cared to do.

It was also on that evening, and just after I won the Spam Lite, that Maryellen unexpectedly turned toward me while we were walking to the parakeet stand, pulled me to her, kissed me squarely on the mouth and told me, for the first time, that she loved me.

Arriving at Barbara’s street, I saw her building, took a deep breath, entered the vestibule and found a sign that said the inner door buzzer was broken. Expecting the usual reaction, but with no option other than to go home, I went to a phone booth on the corner.

Presumably Barbara was out because it was Maryellen who picked up.

Too taken aback for any salutations, I went, following a startled pause, directly to the meat of it and said: “I need to tell you something.”

After a long silence she said: “You need to tell me something? I don’t want to hear it. Just the sound of your voice creeps me out.”

Although I would rather have received a warmer reception, that she stayed on the phone made me giddy, so giddy that I lost sight of my purpose in contacting her.

“Maryellen, I love you, but you know only my grandmother’s allowed to say that.”

“This is a mistake,” she said. “I shouldn’t be talking to you. I’m going to get off. I’m cringing right now. You don’t seriously think…? God, I’m so embarrassed for you. I knew you were warped and a slacker…the drinking, that job, the saliva thing, always putting things off, those morbid, convoluted…musings — oh yeah, that reminds me. That thing you said about why people procrastinate. What was it? ‘The longer you put it off the longer you have to live’? What the hell does that mean? Who knows what that means?”

“I told you and you seemed to understand. There’s no such thing as ‘lazy’. It’s about the sense the procrastinator has that he’s suspending time. Did you ask somebody?”

“Why would I ask somebody?”

She’d obviously vetted my intellect with someone who’d been critical of me. I was stung by her need to do that and by the negative verdict, but I did stay giddy.

“I’ve been wanting to explain the hidden genius of the slacker to you,” I went on. “You’re forgetting the benefits. If you don’t stick out too much, don’t achieve too much, the gods might just forget about you. Forget, you know, to kill you.”

“You’re an idiot, too.”

“This attitude you’re taking. It’s really about that driving mishap in Rochester, isn’t it? If you remember, even the judge said I wasn’t entirely to blame. He said that family must have been really stupid to build their house just a hundred yards off the highway.”

She didn’t laugh.

“Look,” she said, “ I know you have serious problems and I don’t want to be insensitive, but I have a major meeting today and I have to go.”

“It’s the weekend, Maryellen.”

“That’s what I told my manager.”

“Listen,” I said. “Please. I can see how what transpired might have tainted my mystique for you, but if you really can’t stand me anymore, maybe we could be best friends.”

“Friends? With you? My God, you’re lucky you were born before they invented amniocentesis!”

She hung up.

I called her right back.

“Can’t you find someone else to call? Like maybe a doctor?”

“Something’s terribly wrong here. I did call someone else. Just this morning I called Jeanne Dixon. She said ‘Reunion with a loved one, today.’ That’s got to be you.”

”Well it’s not. Maybe Lassie’s coming home again.”

She hung up once more and the only thing I could do was wait for her to go to her meeting.

I didn’t have to wait very long. Just a few minutes later I saw her distinctive silhouette behind the shaded glass of the outer door. But when she came out and saw me, she pulled back and the door shut.

I wasn’t sure what my next move should be. Reckoning that she’d returned upstairs, I let a minute pass before calling her again.

“You’re not afraid of me now?”

“What are you doing here? Do you know what you look like?”

“I’m here for the fair. Remember the para…?”

“This is harassment. If you don’t go away, I’m calling the police.”

She hung up still again and, I had to fish in my pocket for my last remaining quarter, I called her right back. I couldn’t help it. “That’s it,” she said and threw the receiver down.

The blood gone from my legs, I just stood there. I was expecting half a dozen screaming squad cars to pull up from every direction. But what I got, some ten minutes later, was a slight and obviously fledgling cop on a motor scooter circling to a stop in front of her door. Seeing him looking around and past me, I have to say that as a taxpayer I was a trifle vexed by his size, his youth, his vehicle and his inability to spot a perp who was standing in front of him. (In fairness, I should note that there were a number of other guys on that corner who, if they weren’t in the process of harassing a woman were for sure considering it.) In any event, when he entered the building on the heels of a resident apparently grasping a key, I knew it was time to leave.

Not that, as my legs recovered, my evacuation meant I was ready to give up on her. No way. If so much had gone wrong, if, and worst of all, I had, in my giddiness, failed to inform her of my mission and was now at a loss as to how to communicate it to her, I was nonetheless encouraged. Why? Because I realized as I made my retreat, that she hadn’t given 911 my description. This was a telling omission that betrayed, at the very least, a lingering conflict about me.

When no police showed up at my door in the ensuing days (meaning that she hadn’t provided my name and address either), her ambivalence was confirmed for me and I decided that to reappear in her life at some point in the near future, stylishly dressed, financially thriving and glowing with mental health, had been the right path, the adult path, to take all along. So, determining that my initial order of business should be to pull myself together appearance-wise, I got a haircut. Preferring not to have my regular hair cutter see me in the plight I was in, I found a barber in the catacombs of the Fourteenth Street subway station. Since I didn’t want my face hanging out too nakedly, I asked him not to take too much off, to just “shape it a little.” Twenty minutes later my hair had a style again. That it was early Ringo Starr was unfortunate, but I reminded myself that at one time at least it had been fashionable.

Then, fantasizing that Maryellen was watching me and to demonstrate to her that I could be a responsible citizen with a social and political consciousness, I kept the TV on and tuned to cable news. And I expanded my range of concerns. To my personal worries I appended Bosnia and Rwanda and the Chinese withdrawal from the nuclear moratorium, among other things.

I didn’t go to the dentist though. This was because (and I thought about it long and hard) relinquishing my physical suffering before I’d completed my reformation was too dicey. It would have been like cheating and might have made the gods madder at me than they were already. (That the tooth pain, which by now was snaking along my jaw line from my chin up into my ear needed to be suppressed by outdated Percodan from a years ago root canal if I was to carry out my project was something I hoped they’d cut me some slack on.)

Nor, for the same reason, did I alter my eating habits very much. I was buying basic groceries now, but I continued to eat sparsely and to watch that I wasn’t getting too many nutrients. Under the current circumstances gauntness was good, gauntness made me feel less likely to provoke more wrath from the gods.

And inasmuch as a palpable contempt exuded from literally every person I passed on the street — was I projecting my self-hatred or was it true? — I didn’t call my optometrist either. I didn’t want to see too clearly people seeing me.

But my sick leave days having long since expired, I did go back to my job where, curiously, the posture of Mr. Mintz constituted an exception to the scorn I was experiencing.

Mintz, pushing seventy and who, with his squat body, putty cheeks and bulbous nose, could have passed for a road company W. C. Fields, was an old-time typographer — one of the last of a breed that knew the difference between a dash and a hyphen. I respected him for this, but his impatience with errors and his fixation on refinements that no one seemed to care about anymore, made working for him less than agreeable — and particularly when you added his wearying sense of humor to his perfectionism. Upon being approached, for instance, he would invariably feel it necessary to ask, “Was it something I set? (I remember that when I introduced them on that men’s room day, Maryellen found this line hilarious. “What a cute old man,” she’d said.) And once a week, at a minimum, he would tell me to inquire how he’d gotten to be where he was in this business.

“How did you get to be where you are in this business, Mr. Mintz?”

“Well, if you must know, I took the type-casting couch route. Okay? I won’t apologize for it. I saw what I wanted and I decided to go after it by any means necessary.”

Another thing I didn’t appreciate was his sarcasm. When, in one of my calls to him, I’d settled on mononucleosis as my reason for being out so long, his response had been, “Poor guy, I didn’t think they still had that disease. I haven’t heard of anyone getting it since my son took a semester off from college.”

I’d supposed from early on that it wasn’t going to pan out with Mintz, that I would have to fire him from his position as my employer. But the shortage of bosses that the advent of desktop publishing was creating made replacing him problematic. Now, as it turned out, I was glad that I’d kept him.

When I returned to work, he could not have been more considerate. I could only assume that my weight loss, swollen face and cadaverous pallor had persuaded him of the authenticity and severity of my illness and made him feel sorry for me. I mean, I made no contribution to the country’s GNP; if anything, considering the quantity of typos I managed to squeeze into the briefest of paragraphs, I probably lost us a few points. (I was, I remind you, still seeing out of one defective eye.) But Mintz never got angry or threatening about it. In fact, he went out of his way to give me only simple assignments that were without urgent deadlines.

It was a strange thing.

Within just days however, I felt myself slipping back to virtually where I’d been the night Maryellen decamped. Though working had restored a measure of normalcy to my life, Maryellen’s opinion of my job, joined with my inability to think of anything else to do and the fact that I’d never advised her of my plan to reform myself — that I’d failed to put her on hold — added panic to my litany of miseries.

So not making progress in mustering ideas that would result in a meaningful difference, I paced compulsively when I was home and drank myself to sleep each night (so much for moderation). It was while I was engaged in the former activity that I wondered what I was really up to, why I’d been ignoring anything I could claim of common sense. It occurred to me that, besides being a sicko, I was also in the grip of an obsession that was blinding me to the reality of Maryellen’s alienation. But upon thinking that, and in no more than a beat behind simultaneously, the parakeet/Spam Lite night came rushing to the fore of my mind and I knew what I was doing. My obsession was rooted in the feelings we’d exchanged that night. Brief as the moment may have been, those feelings had transformed my body from my enemy to a source of enormous pleasure and, by my standards anyway, an instrument of supernatural powers. They’d made me, and more so after the sheer ecstasy of the sex we had that night, happy to have a body. Had romantic love been invented to serve precisely this purpose? No. I could hardly let common sense divert me from my attempts to repossess the woman who had stirred those feelings.

The day on which matters came to a head, was the day Maryellen and I would have been together for exactly two years.

I got up that morning in even more physical distress than had become my lot. Along with an inability to properly breathe through my nose and a burning pain in my throat when I swallowed, the ache in my face was deep and sharp and my mirror now reflected a chipmunk bringing home an acorn for the winter. On top of that I had a vicious hangover. The night before I’d doubled up on my scotch, beer and Percodans. But at 4 AM I’d been rudely restored to wakefulness by a fierce banging that was followed by a nasty grinding and a barely audible, human-like groan — the death rattle of my air conditioner. Incapable of returning to sleep in the godawful heat, and too nauseated for more alcohol, I could only lie there for the rest of the night, on my back with my folded arms pressed rigidly against my chest, against the torment inside it.

Then, when I arose at seven to shave, I encountered some trouble distinguishing my undulating features from one another in the bathroom mirror. In consequence I opened a deep gash just above my right eyebrow. No amount of styptic pencil would stanch the bleeding and since the bandages had belonged to Maryellen and I hadn’t replaced them it became necessary to apply a patch of toilet paper to the wound.

And when I finally got myself together and, with one finger hooked into a belt loop to hold up my pants, ventured outside, I was greeted by a glaring sun and a pile of festering garbage from a tipped over can. It was all I could do not to upchuck the morning’s portion of newly purchased Marshmallow Fluff and small consolation to know that my nasal passages hadn’t become hermetically sealed.

At work, where the ribbons on the air conditioning ducts were rippling nicely, it wasn’t long before I lapsed into a semi-stupor. I did, several times, raise myself and careen to the men’s room to pee or gag or both (and, having found no band aids in the first aid box with which to stem a persistent flow of blood, to also replace the toilet paper patch). But in my cubicle, movement was largely confined to the pulsing in my jaw.

Then, just before noon, there was a terrifying thunderclap behind me. I turned to look out the window and saw that the sky had become pitch black.

I also saw Maryellen.

A screeching brake drew my attention to the street three floors below and — my heart almost bolted from my chest and out through the glass — there she was strolling up the sidewalk across from me. Even with only one semi-functioning eye and the light gone there was no misreading the ponytail and that splayed, but oddly endearing walk that often befuddled — and froze in their tracks — people finding themselves in her path who couldn’t be sure on which side she intended to pass. And I could hardly fail to recognize the gray pinstriped pantsuit. She’d worn that new “power” suit to show to Barbara on the night before she left me. If I say that I was beside myself with joy I don’t begin to define the emotion I was feeling. Maryellen was back — she’d come back!

Then the rain began and, running, she made a sharp turn into the restaurant opposite my building. Calling out in a breaking voice to anyone within earshot that I was going to lunch, I raced to the hall and, bypassing the elevators, tore down the fire stairs and out to the street.

The rain was torrential now and clouds of steam were rising from the previously baking pavement. Dashing between cars with their headlights turned on and shining in already forming puddles, I was inside the restaurant in what couldn’t have been more than a minute after I’d spied her.

I’d never been in there before. Big and softly lit, linen tablecloths, beds of flowers along the base of the walls, all of the waiters male and uniformed, it was well off my lunch break spectrum. (Maryellen’s too.) It was also very crowded — every table looked to be occupied. And it was fiercely cold.

Just inside the entrance I stood as still as my excitement would permit and, with my working eye, tried to locate her. People were milling in front of me and I didn’t see her. I did see a beefy bartender take notice of me, and I saw customers who were queued in front of the maitre d’s station frowning in my direction. Squinting at myself in a full-length mirror next to me I had to concur that I was presenting myself inappropriately. First of all, I was oozing and/or dripping a variety of liquids. Besides the drain-off from a thorough drenching I’d suffered in the rain, and despite the frigid air, sweat was pumping from my every pore. Also, the latest toilet paper patch was already bright red with blood, an overflowing stream of which was reaching nearly to my cheek. Not only that, a mini glacier of mucous was floating from my nostril towards my upper lip. While I could count the socks I was wearing as a plus, the tail of my shirt was hanging out over my pants and my pants in turn were about to lose their tenuous grip on my hips. What’s more, my jaw was now sticking out a couple of inches, I was noticeably shivering and I knew I didn’t smell very good either. My breath alone, given the taste in my mouth, must have made coming within ten feet of me comparable to entering a chicken coop.

I was about to try and effect some superficial repairs to my face with my handkerchief when a line of sight opened and I saw Maryellen being seated with her back to me in a far corner of the room. It was a magical moment because the maitre d’ was just then pulling back his rope as if to usher me inside. Concerns about my appearance instantly evaporating, I responded to this action with a quick end run around the line that remained and headed in her direction.

Taking those first steps toward Maryellen I was buoyant. I understood that what the real problem had been all along wasn’t Maureen’s biological category but Maryellen’s wounded ego. Witnessing me with Maureen had been a blow to Maryellen’s womanhood. And she had masked her injury by descending to a speciesism that hardly spoke well of her character. With the passage of time, and coming to miss me, she’d recognized this and she’d realized too that as hurtful as my indiscretion may have been, it hadn’t been with another girl! Now she was contrite about her hysterical reaction. So contrite, and too embarrassed to come to me directly, she’d arranged to have our meeting appear to be accidental. She’d maneuvered, by just happening to be in my work neighborhood and prancing around in front of my window on our anniversary day, to have me chase after her.

But then my thoughts and emotions began to undergo abrupt and pendulous shifts. Practically convulsing with rushes of affection for her, and more than ready to indulge her in her little game, I quickly became indignant. Did this woman have any idea of the ordeal she’d put me through? What amends did she intend to make? Then, just as suddenly, I felt a wave of generosity. I would seek no retribution. I had to concede, after all — and I took some pride in my emotional maturity here — that my own reflex had I come home to discover a bra, a flea collar, panties and a leash in a sordid pile on the floor at the bedroom door would have been exactly the same as hers.

And then, as I continued to make my way toward her, forcing people to move tighter to their tables, spraying various forms of moisture on them, I felt a really bad feeling. Resting on the seat next to her was a new leather briefcase. I’d planned to buy her one like it — though not so expensive and much less masculine in style — for our anniversary.

But what was even more upsetting than the fact of the case itself was its color. It was cordovan. Maryellen hated cordovan. She had what could be construed as a pathological aversion to it. She said it reminded her of the shoes an uncle of hers who smoked cigars always wore. And she’d actually thrown out my best pair of shoes one night because they were cordovan. So seeing that bag profoundly saddened me. It made me feel that she’d already evolved into someone I didn’t know anymore; that our estrangement was complete and irrevocable.

Then it struck me (and with a force that almost made me stop in my tracks) that she wasn’t here for me at all but to meet someone else, someone I might even work with — maybe even Mintz who was being so benevolent because he was guilt-ridden about banging my girlfriend for what was probably weeks now, a girlfriend, furthermore, who couldn’t care less that I might see her with him on our anniversary day!

And then — I was looking at her ponytail and thinking that she’d kept it — I felt all right, I felt good, because women, it’s common knowledge, always change their hairstyle when they’re making a new beginning.

But coming to within a few feet of her I got pissed again. She was absorbed in the menu when her neck should have been craned toward the entrance in anticipation of my arrival. I found it gauche and disappointing, that though here to effect a reconciliation she would still take a cavalier stance toward me. Me a man who cared passionately about world affairs and who, alarmed by mounting evidence of his less than splendid character, worried that Clinton might have a Richard Pryor-type freebasing accident and burn down the White House. It was truly irksome. It was past exasperating. It was enough to make me want to grab her ponytail and yank her awake.

And yank is what I did.

“You stupid fool! You think you’ve got a leg up on people slacker-wise? For Christ’s sake, Maryellen. You own a dog you get it fixed!”

The first thing that impressed me about the grimacing face that snapped backwards to meet upside down with mine was the very wrong nose hair. A nanosecond later I was struck by the thick sideburns that ran very nearly to the jawbone. Then, as I was making a mental note to rethink my suicide option, I was reminded of the time my father took me to a Veterans Day parade. I was four and I remembered how he had lifted me up for a better view.

Confused? So was I. What happened was that some pear-shaped schmuck with a ponytail was sitting where Maryellen was supposed to be sitting. And promptly following my moment of contact with him, the bartender I’d seen coming in had embraced me from behind and raised me a foot or so above the floor. (I can still recall the freshly pressed scent of his black linen vest and a hint of Joop! Homme.) Then what happened was that, negotiating the aisles between the tables with a deftness I could only admire, he carried me back along the very trail I had myself so recently blazed and, without a word and much more gently than you would figure, deposited me on the street.

The rain had stopped but the heat had persisted — which ironically was now a relief after the chill of the restaurant, but under the circumstances, hardly something I could enjoy. I wished I had thought to inform this bartender that what we were dealing with here was grossly impaired vision, a very physical, not psychological, handicap and that I wasn’t, and could never be, the authentic wacko he thought I was. I also wanted to tell him that he was dead wrong if he thought that Maryellen had never liked me or that we hadn’t been close; that, on the contrary, and albeit on her way to a garbage can, she had once held my cordovan shoes in her hands. Then I wanted to say — my mental and emotional pendulum was swinging again at full throttle and now I was infuriated — how fucking dare you interject yourself into my personal affairs? And I wanted to say after that: Just what exactly is this shit you think you’re handing me?

I got back upstairs and to my desk all right but, when I sat down, I experienced an amazing weariness. I didn’t care that my pants, soaked from the rain, had made of my seat a bucket of ice. I’d never felt so enervated. It was as though all of my energy had leaked out of me. I half expected, when I looked down, to see blood seeping from my shoes.

I wanted, badly, to go home.

As if the gods were ready at last to show me some mercy I scored a break. Mintz had gone to visit a client and he would not be back. Freeing me of an explanation to make, this news tapped a reserve of adrenaline I was astonished to learn that I had and I got myself out of there too.

Yes, back outside, I thought to check out the restaurant again because it dawned on me that the timing of Mintz’s departure was too coincidental and that maybe the real mistake I’d made was to believe that I’d made a mistake and that it had been Maryellen sitting there — and waiting to meet that “cute old man.” But too weak at this point to make the effort and the pain in my tooth, which I’d been oblivious to during my misadventure, now expanding into every corner of my head, the best I could do was hope that the cook had hepatitis.

It was right about then, I think, that the commander of my immune system yelled something like “Every antibody for itself!” and took off through the nearest orifice. Now I have no recollection whatsoever of making it to my apartment. (Did I take the subway? A cab? I couldn’t have walked, could I?) And I don’t remember what I did when I got there; I think I just passed dead away. But I do recall that at some point in the evening I felt a searing pain behind my eyes and that I had a fever that exceeded the temperature in my apartment, which itself must have been in the mid-hundreds. The abscess, it turned out, had spread to my brain and, seen lying on the floor by passing neighbors who called an ambulance (I’d unwittingly, but luckily, left my apartment door wide open when I got home), I was immediately dispatched to the ICU, where the doctors told me later, they were all but sure they were going to “lose” me.

***

When I was released from the hospital it was already fall and, to go with an exhilarating briskness in the air, there were some dramatic changes to take note of.

For openers: Although I was minus two teeth (which, for a reason I’ll explain in a minute, I opted not to replace), my jaw was back to normal, my nose and throat were clear and dry, my forehead had stopped bleeding and I owned a new pair of contact lenses.

But of special significance was the radical change in my emotional disposition; a transformation which derived from the knowledge that I was in the gods’ good graces. While they’d punished me severely for my despicable behavior, they’d deemed me worthy of living!

With this recognition I was, much of the time, near to euphoric. By going through all that I had and surviving it, I felt that I’d successfully atoned for both the crime I’d perpetrated with Maureen and the capital crime I’d presumably committed prior to my birth. In the fevers of my elation, they’d conflated and, for all practical purposes, become one and the same.

If you think about it, this is some spectacular shit!

(Yes, I knew of course that I would still croak someday. But the concern that my demise might be imminent or at best premature, had pretty much disappeared. That burden — along with the fear of a ghastly afterlife — had lifted.)

While my pacing as well as my heavy drinking were now in the past, something that hadn’t changed was my tendency to ruminate — it was my nature after all. And remembering now that Maryellen had told me she might be home early that day, I wondered if the answer to the mystery of what happened with Maureen hadn’t been there to see all along. Was it possible that I’d subconsciously orchestrated the whole thing? I mean, my problem with mortality maybe even more desperate than I’d realized — and sensing, somewhere in my brain, the magnitude of what I could achieve — had I seized on the concurrence of a random hardon and a bitch in heat, to intentionally commit an appalling but redeemable crime in order to fashion a chance to experience my complete and total absolution?

Had I fucked a dog to feel myself eligible for eternal life in heaven?

With these thoughts — and the realization that what I’d fundamentally wanted all my life was what I got — came another thought. It was a given that my feelings for Maryellen had led me to try and win her back. But had her importance in my life also qualified her to represent an objective that was far deeper than winning her back? Was securing her forgiveness, that is, about her forgiveness alone, or (and this would likewise be true of her horrified reaction when she came upon Maureen and me) had I made of her a surrogate for the gods?

If so, I didn’t require a proxy any more.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I was perfectly okay. I still cared about Maryellen and there were hours when I missed her a lot. I also, on occasion, did suffer spasms of shame and self-contempt. But when that happened, I would run my tongue into the hollow my lost teeth had left. This little ritual would remind me of the price I’d paid for what I’d done and it did much to help me sustain my new equilibrium.

And, to be sure, I still had no idea what the future held for me. (I had the same job — thank you, Mr. Mintz, I guess.)

But I knew that I had a future.

Then, from a block away one afternoon, but for certain this time, I saw Maryellen. She was arm-in-arm with a guy who was a ringer for Richard Nixon and, for some reason, it made me think of a photo she’d shown me of her boyfriend before me who’d had a pronounced unibrow. Although the sighting made my blood jump, I didn’t follow her.

In the summer of 1962, Cecil lands a three-month, four-night-a-week gig at The Take 3 coffee house on Bleecker Street. A large nondescript room with a stage at the back end and several dozen tables of various shapes and sizes, The Take 3 is right next door to the glittering Bitter End where Woody Allen had performed just weeks before. (Allen was second on the bill and I’d thrown him a quick couple of lines in the Village Voice column — something about how this new comic exploited his appearance to good advantage.)

For Cecil, 33 now, The Take 3 experience will be important for the opportunity its extraordinary duration affords him to develop new ideas and achieve deeper levels of interaction with the two musicians he brings with him, Jimmy Lyons, alto saxophone, and Sunny Murray, drums. (The trio will be joined on occasion by either Buell Neidlinger or Henry Grimes on bass, but most of the time there’s no bass player.)

For me, 23, and never happier than when I’m in a jazz club and in the company of musicians I admire, it’s a chance to hang in my element on a semi-regular basis. But it’s something else as well. This is 1962. An increasing number of us live with the conviction that a seismic change in human consciousness is both possible and imminent. We also share a belief that the New Jazz, in its break with established forms and procedures, and with its resurrection of ancient black methodologies, is showing the way. “Man,” the bassist Alan Silva (coming off an hour-long, 13-piece collective improvisation one night at another venue) can say to me, “in ten years we won’t even need traffic lights we’re gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another.”

At The Take 3, I’ll feel myself to be at the very center of the universe.

I mention Cecil’s engagement in the column a few days before he opens and maybe six people a night show up in the first week. The following week, ignoring criticism that I’m functioning as Cecil’s unofficial publicist, I write what amounts to a paean to him. I also discuss a simultaneous Monk date at the Five Spot. (Monk, of course, is one of Cecil’s principal influences.) The Voice titles this column “The Monk and the Taylor” and gives it a banner front page headline. The next night I arrive at The Take 3 and see that the proprietors have hung an enormous sign over the entrance:

“CECIL TAYLOR! ‘STARTS WHERE MONK LEAVES OFF!’ — VILLAGE VOICE”

Not exactly the way I had put it, but so what? The column and the sign serve their purpose. From this point on the room is usually filled to capacity.

Among the musicians who come on a night that I’m there (and who would have come without the hype) are John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. When the last set ends, they sit at a table with Cecil, Anne (my girlfriend then) and me, and a love fest breaks out. John says to Cecil that he’s “awestruck” by him, that he’s “never heard three people make so much music.” Eric calls Cecil “the spaceman — the astronaut!” After Cecil tells Eric that Eric is “about to become great,” I raise my hand and say, “So, what about me?” Everybody laughs except Eric. I can see him thinking: Wait a minute. Should I know…? Does Bob play an instrument?

John and Cecil had recorded together in 1958 and a word on the album they made, and their musical relationship in general, is in order here. The album, Hard Driving Jazz, was originally a Cecil date and later reissued under Coltrane’s name as Coltrane Time. It was certainly an interesting document but it turned out to be less than terrific.

Tom Wilson, an early champion of Cecil’s and the producer of his first record, Jazz Advance, produced this one as well. He also chose the sidemen, all of whom — trumpeter Kenny Dorham, bassist Chuck Israels, drummer Louis Hayes and tenor saxophonist Coltrane — were serious beboppers and, with the exception of Coltrane, very much set in their ways.

Tom believed that he was putting something seminal together, something that would foreshadow where, following Cecil’s lead, bebop would go from here. But surrounding Cecil with a group composed largely of obdurate beboppers was counterproductive to say the least. While Coltrane acquitted himself decently, Dorham (a splendid bebop trumpet player) was incensed by Cecil’s “eccentric” comping and he made no effort to conceal his feelings. For their parts, Israels and Hayes could only struggle with the rhythmic challenges Cecil posed.

But the album would still have failed to predict bebop’s future even if these men had been more flexible. Although it wasn’t entirely clear at the time, Cecil was in the process of creating a discrete system of his own; if anything, he was shedding bebop. (It would be Coltrane who’d deliver bebop to its outer limits.) Given this circumstance, what a Cecil Taylor record needed was musicians inclined and prepared to take his journey with him. Cecil had been opposed to Dorham’s inclusion on the date — he’d wanted Ted Curson, a younger trumpet player who was very much in sync with him. And he hadn’t been so sure about using Coltrane either. That John would be more capable than the others of taking Cecil on wasn’t necessarily enough.

(Jimmy Lyons, whom he didn’t encounter until 1960, became Cecil’s most congenial supporting player. Jimmy survived for years on odd jobs in order to be available if Cecil had work, and when Jimmy needed a new saxophone Cecil rewarded his loyalty by buying him one. “It had to be a Selmer, so that’s what he got,” Cecil told me. When Jimmy died in 1986, it was months before Cecil could bring himself to go near a piano again.)

Probably the closest thing to a successful number from the Hard Driving Jazz recording sessions, Mel Tormé’s “Christmas Song” — “For the Noël market,” Cecil said — was left out of the album. (No, I never learned why.)

By 1962, of course, Coltrane was all but possessed by the Free Jazz players. He was both their patron — he gave them money and employed many of them in his bands — and their student. “He loved us,” Archie Shepp would say. But as far as Cecil’s approach was concerned, there was only so much that John could use. “That’s too complicated,” he remarked about it once, and he derived a lot more from Archie, Eric, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler, among others.

But Coltrane was always prepared to honor Cecil. I’m thinking of a night at Birdland a year or so later. John is about to go on as Cecil and a small group of us come in. We walk past the bar where Pee Wee Marquette, the club’s midget and famously nasty emcee, is saying to the bartender — and just loud enough for us to hear — “How much more of this Greenwich Village jazz am I supposed to take?” John sees Cecil and says something to McCoy Tyner who’s already playing an intro. Tyner abruptly quits the number he’s started and they open the set instead with “Out of This World.”

Another musician who comes to The Take 3 doesn’t stay very long.

It’s between sets and the band is backstage when I hear something going on at the door. I turn to look and see Coleman Hawkins standing there. Coleman Hawkins! The “Bean” himself!

I can’t make out what Hawkins is saying, but I hear the girl who collects the admission charge say: “Everybody pays a dollar, Sir.”

I see what’s happening and I want to rise from my chair and drop a dollar onto the girl’s table, but I can’t do anything. I’m frozen. Coleman Hawkins!

And it’s over too fast. Hawkins glares at the girl, then turns and splits.

“Maybe ‘Bean’ didn’t have a bean,” Cecil says when I tell him about it.

So, what about me?

On the same night as Hawkins’s abortive visit, Cecil and I leave The Take 3 together. In the years ahead I’ll grow up a little and how I relate to Cecil, who I met in 1956 and who quickly assumed the role of an older brother, will change. But as I’ve made evident elsewhere, in this period of my life I’m not someone you’d describe as perfectly centered and no serious time spent in Cecil’s company can pass for me without a certain issue erupting. I refer to my unrealized and maybe never to be realized, creative writing aspirations and to the envy and resentment that will unfailingly be triggered in me at one point or another. Cecil is a genuine artist. The real thing. I’m chronically “blocked” and without any clear sense of what I want to say or how to proceed. (If a part of me is counting on osmosis with him, it isn’t working.) In Cecil’s words, spoken without malice — to be straightforward about such matters, at whatever the cost, is central to the stance he’s taken in the world — I’m a “person of artistic persuasion.” It’s a phrase that he’s used more than once and it embarrasses and infuriates me. But anything that makes me too conscious of the contrasts between us can set me off. When that happens, my pattern is to become aggrieved and petulant and then, in a paroxysm of indignation and vainglorious self-assertion, to withdraw from him, sometimes for months. In this particular instance, however, a separation at least is forestalled by Cecil in a way I could not have anticipated.

With the completion of an evening’s last set, Cecil’s usually eager to see what’s going on in clubs that are still open. But on this night, a sultry night in late August, he’s not feeling well and he wants to go home. I need to get home as well — to finish an overdue Blue Note liner. “You’re killing me, Robert,” Frank Wolff had said to me earlier on the phone. “Frank,” I told him, “I’m suicidal myself. This is the fourth Jimmy Smith album you’ve assigned me. Didn’t you get that I had nothing to say about him the first time? Why doesn’t Joe Goldberg have to do these?”

I plan to accompany Cecil as far as Second Avenue.

“What’s the matter with you?” I say once we’re outside. “You don’t have the clap again? I warned you not to sit on public piano stools.”

Cecil, who’s looking a little gray, grimaces. “Ulcer attack,” he says. “I have something to take at the apartment.”

The stomach ulcer has been a persistent concern for Cecil (he’s convinced it will soon become something fatal) and waiting for traffic to pass on the corner of LaGuardia Place, I’m about to ask him if he’s seen his doctor recently when this guy I’d noticed standing outside The Take 3 approaches us. “Excuse me, Mr. Taylor,” he says — and to me, “Excuse me, Sir.” He’s black and around my age.

“Mr. Taylor,” he says, “I just wanted to tell you how amazing I think you are and how much I love your music. No one can play the piano like you do.”

Cecil smiles. “Thank you,” he says.

“I wish I could be a musician,” the guy goes on. “I’ve taken lessons, but I’m no good at it. I just don’t have the aptitude for it, I guess.”

Cecil looks at him and says gently, “Then be a good listener.”

Not a bad answer, I think, and I’m instantly rankled by it.

“What empty shit,” I say after the guy — nodding earnestly, then smiling broadly and vigorously shaking my hand as well as Cecil’s — backs off. “‘Be a good listener.’ Was that the best you could do?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Cecil says as we resume walking. I see that his countenance has brightened considerably. Cecil responds well to adulation.

“I mean that’s not what he wanted to hear,” I say.

“He seemed satisfied to me, Bob,” Cecil says. “But then you may be right. Since when do I give people what they want to hear?”

“He wanted you to tell him the secret,” I say. “When he digests what you said he’s going to sink into a profound depression.”

Cecil gives me a sidelong glance. “Are you talking about him, Bob? You’re not starting some shit here, are you?”

I ignore this. I’m remembering something I’d all but buried, but which is suddenly of great importance to me, and I say: “Come to think of it, since when do you really give much of anything, even when you say you will?”

Cecil stares at me. He obviously has no idea what I’m talking about.

“Cecil,” I say. “What the fuck happened to ‘Bobt’?”

“What the fuck happened to who?” He says.

“To ‘Bobt’, I say. “Shit, man. Not ‘who’. What! ‘Bobt’!”

“Bob,” he says laughing at me. “Listen to you. Are you’re having a fit of some sort? Should I take you to an emergency room?”

“You said you were composing a tune for me and that you were calling it ‘Bobt,’” I say. “That was a year ago. I’ve waited long enough, don’t you think? Where is it? I want it.”

“You want it?” Cecil says. “Have you collapsed into an infantile state, man? Do I need to remind you of the vicissitudes of the creative process?”

“In other words, you never wrote it,” I say.

“‘In other words, please be kind’,” Cecil sings. ” ‘In other words…’”

“You were bullshitting me,” I say. “Will you cut the crap and give me a straight…”

“It was absorbed by something else.” Cecil nods to himself after he hears what he said. He’d bought a moment with the musical interlude and he’s pleased with the answer he came up with.

“‘Absorbed by something else’?” I say. “That’s beautiful. Well, you know what, Cecil? I’m going to write a poem for you — a poem I’m going to finish — and I’m going to call it…”

“‘The Magnificent One’?” He says. “‘The Immortal…’?”

“I’m going to call it ‘The Insufferable Self-Centered Prick’,” I say.

“Bob,” he says, his hand on his chest, “Are you saying that I’m self-centered? Me? The amazing Cecil?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m saying,” I say. “I don’t need this shit — that’s what I’m saying. The one thing I do get back from knowing and touting the ‘amazing Cecil’ is reflected glory, and it definitely has some practical benefits — I can point to two occasions when it’s actually gotten me laid. [Cecil finds this statement hilarious.] But is it worth the indignities I have to suffer? Will it make me immortal, too? No, you can shove reflected glory, man. I don’t have to settle for it anyway. I’m making some moves. I’m going to be my own Cecil Taylor.”

Cecil feigns a horrified expression “You…you…” he blusters. “You would dare take my name, the name of Cecil?”

I stifle a laugh. “And I’m not exactly beginning at zero either…”

“Listen,” he says, “there’s something I haven’t told…”

“…Maybe it isn’t really ‘writing’,” I continue, “but…”

“…The column?” He says. “You’re talking about the column? I appreciate what you’ve done with it but no, you know it isn’t ‘writing’.”

Ready, in the wake of this remark, to take permanent leave of him, to never even listen to a record of his again, I say: “I just conceded as much. But fuck you, Cecil. No one’s ever told me their three-year-old daughter could do it.”

Cecil stops walking and grabs my shoulder. “Robert,” he says, “I haven’t mentioned this.”

“What?” I snarl, pushing his hand off me.

“A while back,” he says, “that poem you wrote…the one you gave me …”

“That poem?” I say. “That poem sucked. It was awful.”

He shakes his head. “Something about that poem…it made me want to write poems myself. I started writing poetry the next day.”

“I didn’t know you were writing poetry,” I say. “How fucking dare you.”

He laughs. “I haven’t been able to stop. Not since I read that poem. No one’s seen any of it yet. I guess I’ll have to show them to you now.”

I take this in. I’m still only a “person of artistic persuasion” — at best I’m destined to be a footnote in his biography. But I’m also something more than Cecil’s flack now. I’ve managed to have an impact in a way that really matters to me. “Bobt”? Who needs “Bobt”? I regard what Cecil’s imparted as a gift beyond measure.

“I’m glad to see that you’re feeling better,” I say a moment later when we arrive at Second Avenue. “So, Coleman Hawkins came to check you out. Too bad he didn’t want to pay for the privilege.”

Cecil shrugs. “We could have used his dollar,” he says. Then he says: “I’m thinking about going to Slug’s. Come with me.”

“Sure. Yeah.” I say.

If Frank Wolff dies, I’ll find a way to live with the guilt.

[Following a trip to Scandinavia in the fall of 1962, Cecil, Sunny and Jimmy played The Take 3 again in 1963. It was during the second engagement that Albert Ayler made an impromptu appearance. Since, at this point in time, I tend to recall both gigs as one, I’m reporting on the event here.]

Albert Ayler

On a night I’d have regretted missing, a heavy presence causes me to turn my head in the middle of a set and I see this dude with an odd patch of white on his goatee and wearing a green leather suit. He’s holding a gleaming tenor saxophone. (Sunny will tell me that he polishes it every day.) I know who he is. Sunny and Jimmy had both spoken about Albert Ayler, the “new bitch on tenor” they’d met and played with in Copenhagen on the recent tour. Before they left Denmark, Cecil had invited him to “say hello” when he returned to the States.

But Albert isn’t wasting time with formalities. The cap is already off his mouthpiece and he’s edging his way between the tables toward the bandstand. Sunny says to Cecil, “Albert’s here,” and though Cecil barely raises his head that’s enough for Albert to mount the stage.

I write this half a century after the fact, but the first sounds Albert makes remain as vivid and immediate to me as if I’d heard them only moments ago.

It’s his vibrato. The breadth, the amplitude, of his vibrato is astonishing. (It will redefine the scope of the tenor saxophone and Coltrane will admit to having dreams about trying to duplicate it.) If it results in chasing a portion of the room into the street, the rest of us are riveted by it. Coming from an apparent rhythm and blues matrix, and reminiscent of the shouters and honkers of the ‘40s and ‘50s, what Albert is playing — with suddenly shifting meters and no regard for tonal centers — isn’t a sequence of notes so much as an amalgam of sounds. Primal sounds. Ecstatic sounds. Achingly mournful sounds. Grotesque and funny sounds.

Albert’s intention, he’ll explain to me, is to reassert black music’s original function, to “conjure up holy spirits.” I can’t vouch for his success in that regard, but I can say that for me what he’s doing is almost equal in its emotional impact to the first time I heard Cecil.

And Cecil. When Albert begins to play, Cecil laughs and his posture changes noticeably. He’s recalibrating to accommodate Albert. Sunny and Jimmy respond in the same fashion. They embrace Albert and unite with him. Half an hour passes before the number he cut in on is completed.

Of the many gifted musicians who belonged to the New Thing’s second wave, Albert, an astronaut and an archeologist all at once, was the monster. The full range of his unique vision wasn’t revealed the night he sat in with Cecil, of course. But later, in bands of his own and with the pre-Louis Armstrong-through-Ornette Coleman spectrum of material he would utilize, Albert created a fascinating body of innovative work. Many of us took for granted that he’d be the next major force in the music.

In 1964, when I’d be living with “Pretty,” Albert came to the apartment several times to hang out and also to do an interview. The tape of that interview (and a tape of an interview with Betty Carter) was inside the Wollensak case when I was burglarized. I never got the chance to transcribe it.

Albert would die in 1970, apparently by his own hand. A year after that, in the process of moving to the West Village with Carolyn, I discovered a leather tie on the floor of the bedroom closet. It was caked in plaster dust, but I was able to make out the letters “AA” written in ink on the label. My first thought was, how the hell did this get here? Had Albert removed his tie while we talked and forgotten about it? Had “Pretty” found it and, for safekeeping, hung it in the closet where, forgotten by her as well, it had eventually been jostled from its hook? After a moment I realized that the circumstances behind the tie’s appearance were probably not so innocent — and I could smile about it now. When I met her, “Pretty” had already “balled” every living entry in the Encyclopedia of Jazz and cohabiting with me had in no way discouraged her from moving on to the supplementary volume. Why not Albert?

Speaking of girl singers, I should note that in the course of Cecil’s run a couple of remarkable vocalists, Jeanne Lee and Sheila Jordan, work opposite him from time to time. Another performer who turns up (making his debut, as I remember it) is Tiny Tim. “What the fuck is this?” two people at separate tables exclaim in unison when he launches into “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”

I should also add that someone who doesn’t show is Ornette. Eventually Ornette and Cecil will be acknowledged as the dual progenitors of the New Music, but they’ve been competing for sole ownership of this distinction from the start and, declarations of mutual respect aside, they aren’t especially supportive of one another. Ornette, who’s the better known of the two, clearly wants to protect his advantage. A few days after the “Monk and Taylor” column I’m walking on 8th Street, head down against a driving rain, when my path is suddenly blocked. I look up and it’s Ornette.

“You must make a lot of money writing for that paper,” he says and brushes past me.

So much for the parties at Ornette’s loft.

(There’d been talk about Ornette and Cecil recording together since the late ‘50s, but nothing ever materialized. Around 2003, preparations, including rehearsals, for an album by them were actually underway when Ornette decided not to go ahead with the project. “Cecil,” he said, was “playing too much.”)

Just days before the ’62 gig will come to its conclusion, and determined to savor every last moment, I’m seated at a table right near the stage. The band has been “exchanging energies” for forty minutes. Each time the torrent of sound begins to ebb and you think, that’s it, they’re spent, they can’t possibly have anything left, an apparently tossed-off phrase, a single note, reignites the process and the music builds to even greater levels of intensity than it had reached before. (Buell Neidlinger, who’s here tonight, isn’t going along at this point. He’s stopped playing and he looks to be exhausted — or worse. Eyes closed, his glasses askew, his head is hanging over his bass at an alarmingly strange angle. Has he broken his neck?)

I’m facing straight ahead and totally absorbed in what’s taking place, when Jack Kerouac bounds onto the bandstand in front of me. Appearing to be in a…well…beatified condition, he twice, and very slowly, makes a circle around the entire group. Then he walks between and around each of the individual players. Finally he bends down and slides under the piano where, lying on his back, he folds his arms across his chest. At the end of the piece (some twenty minutes later), he emerges from beneath the piano and extends his hand to Cecil.

“I’m Jack Kerouac,” he says, “and I’m the greatest writer in the world.” A startled Cecil (who at first isn’t sure who this cat is and who’d apparently been unaware of his presence) recovers quickly. Accepting Kerouac’s hand he says: “I’m Cecil Taylor and I’m the greatest pianist in the world.”

Me, I’m thinking, Jesus, this is too much — it’s way past too much. And if it occurs to me to say to them: “I’m Robert Levin and I’m the greatest person of artistic persuasion in the world,” that’s just a reflex. I’ve got, right now, no need to say anything — certainly nothing bitter. No. Should reflected glory turn out to be the best kind I’ll get I’ll take it. Right now, my simple proximity to this is enough to make me feel like I’ll live forever.