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about you during lunch today. He’s a curious man, Weede. Sometimes given to rash judgments. Better get cracking on that laser beam thing. I’ll be in early tomorrow to take a look at it. Weede’ll be in early tomorrow too. We’re all coming in very early tomorrow. Have a nice evening, Carter. Say hello to your wife for me.”
    “Dave, I’m not married.”
    I went back to my office. Binky was in there trying to straighten out my files. It was almost time to leave. I fixed my tie and buttoned my shirtcuffs. In the corridor all the phones were ringing. I wondered who Trotsky was.

3
    People leaned into the traffic, scouting for cabs. Thousands of men hurried toward Grand Central, moving in broken strides, dodging, marching down deep corridors, emptying into chambers, the warm trains waiting, long darkness, newsprint on every finger, the fight against sleep. I liked to walk home from the office because it made me feel virtuous.
    The crowds didn’t begin to thin out until I got south of Forty-second Street, and traffic was bad all the way. Below Forty-second, people were able to choose their own pace and yet here the faces seemed gray and stricken, the bodies surreptitious in the scrawls of their coats, and it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. It was just a passing thought. I got home, turned on the TV, undressed, and got in the shower.
    I was living then in an apartment overlooking Gramercy Park. My ex-wife lived in the same building. The arrangement wasn’t as strange as it may sound—it wasn’t even an arrangement.While married we had lived in a larger apartment on the other side of the park. From a friend I learned of the vacancy across the way and it seemed sensible to move in since my wife had just left me and there was no need for such a large place and no point in paying the higher rent. She lived in the Village for a while, taking ballet lessons, courses at the New School, instructions in macrobiotic nutrition; she also joined a film society and began going to an analyst. She invited me down to dinner one evening and said finally, over coffee, that her new life wasn’t working out too well. The activities were not very involving and her gentlemen friends seemed able to discuss nothing more important than their season tickets to hockey games, football games and the Philharmonic. She missed Gramercy Park, she said; it was one of the last civilized spots in an ever-darkening city. Some time later an apartment became available in my building. I told her about it and she took it sight unseen.
    She was a pretty girl, blond, with small breasts and a cheerleader’s bounce. Meredith Walker was her name. We had met at a country club dance in Old Holly, the Westchester town where I was raised. I was nineteen then, home from college for summer vacation. Merry had been living in the town for only a few months. Her father was an Air Force major who had been assigned to head an ROTC detachment at a small college nearby. She said the family had been moving from place to place all her life. She was eighteen and didn’t know what it was to have a home. I can remember that night well, a perfect August night with a warm wind raking the tops of the big oaks, with lawn sprinklers hissing and the silver couples standing near the trees, the men in white dinner jackets and their girls in chiffon and silk, each couple sculpted in the dim light, almost motionless, and the distances between them absolutely right so that the whole scene obeyed an abstract calculus of perspective and tone, as if arranged for the whim of a camera. A girl walked across the grass, then quickly whirled, shrieking, as the spray from a lawn sprinkler touchedher arm. The laughter of her friends on the warm night was like a knife-chime on delicate glass and it