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colored paint under his fingernails. A smear of green on his forehead was partially obscured by his blondish brown hair, which hung like dirty corn silk. His skin was pasty from too many long nights at The Tiger’s Eye and too many days spent inside his one-room apartment, whose only light—save for the 60-watt bulb that hung from an uncovered ceiling socket—emerged from a gritty window that faced the side of another building. But the ashen pallor of his skin lit up his eyes, a shockingly pale green, flecked with yellow. Edward’s wide set eyes, ringed in black, gave his face a startling beauty and magnetism. Without those eyes, Edward might have simply melted into the crowds of similarly dressed poor New Yorkers, culturally aware young men who dressed themselves in worn berets, tattered jeans, and cotton print shirts. Edward wore paint-spattered jeans, ripped at the knees, black Converse sneakers, and a rumpled plaid cotton shirt. He forewent the beret; he didn’t want to look
that
affected.
    Edward was actually sipping whiskey that cool September night, a rarity. He couldn’t usually afford anything more than beer, and tonight was no exception. But it had been such a hard day. His body ached from his efforts to distinguish himself, to transform himself from someone who aspired to being a painter, to one who actually was. He wanted to free himself from the bondage of necessities such as short-order cooking, selling encyclopedias, cab driving, apartment cleaning, or message delivering. The aches along his rib cage and the bruises on his limbs came from Edward’s style of painting, which was to smear his entire body with various colors and fling himself at over-sized canvases, contorting, rolling, and turning his body to create—he hoped—an electric fusion of color and movement, a way to record something important about himself
at that moment
that no one had ever seen.
    Today, his work had littered the floor of his apartment (a wooden plank floor almost black from neglect and from not having seen the underside of a mop in generations): three canvases, all of them riots of color that traced the movements of a small man, ambitious and a dreamer. There were only small paths from his front door to his bed (a mattress on the floor), his bathroom (a toilet and small claw-footed tub occupying one corner of his kitchen), and to the grimy window, which would never close all the way.
    When evening came, and the apartment grew dim, and the sounds outside of cab horns, newspaper vendors hawking that day’s news, and the cries of passersby became intolerable, Edward dressed himself, stopped at the newsstand on the corner for a pack of Luckies, and headed over to The Tiger’s Eye.
    Alcohol and maybe—if he was lucky—the warmth of another man’s arms might act as a balm to the soreness in his muscles and the drain of his hard day’s work. If he could procure that balm, Edward thought, it would be worth losing the little bit of money he still had left from his last temporary job working as a clerk in a paint store on West 14th.
    He leaned against the bar, smoking, listening to Charlie Parker’s plaintive sax, and watching a guy at the end of the bar. The guy was dressed all in black, wearing sunglasses in spite of the gloom of The Tiger’s Eye. Little, tiny, round gold-rimmed sunglasses that made it look like he had holes where his eyes should be. The effect was chilling, scary…and it drew Edward in a dangerous way, repellent and gripping at the same time. His face, like Edward’s own, was pale, but defined by sharp angles, good jaw line, and strong chin. Blond hair fell in soft waves to his shoulders. There was something stirring, strange, and beautiful about this character, something that made him stand apart from the other men and the few women in the bar, all roughly the same age as Edward, all sporting the same look of studied bohemian dishevelment.
    Edward had been watching him for the past hour or so, his stare