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staring at me in astonishment. ‘You want to know
your
future, you goddamned laughing hyena?’ I shouted at him. ‘You’ll get married, deafen your wife, deafen your dog and deafen your children. Finally you’ll deafen yourself. The rest is silence!’
    â€˜What’s eating you, buddy?’ he replied, backing away.
    â€˜Harry, please don’t lose your temper,’ Karen begged me.
    â€˜Yeah, Harry,’ said the business type. ‘
Please
don’t lose your temper.’
    â€˜How would you like a smack in the face?’ I asked him; but Karen snatched hold of my sleeve.
    â€˜Harry —’ she implored me, ‘just come have a look. That’s all I want you to do. Just come have a look.’
    â€˜Yeah, Harry,’ echoed the business type. ‘Do us all a favour, and go take a look.’
    I signed the cheque, drew back the table so that Karen could get out, and then ushered her towards the door. As I opened it I turned round and said to the business type, ‘Believe me, friend, you could go far with a laugh like that. You could go to Paterson, New Jersey, and we’d still be able to hear you.’
    *
    It took us nearly twenty minutes to reach the Greenbergs’ house because of a traffic snarl-up around Union Square. The fat black driver kept singing ‘Message in a Bottle’ over and over. At least his air-conditioning worked. Outside it was eighty-seven degrees with eighty-one per cent humidity and the air was the colour of breathed-over bronze.
    Karen told me everything that had happened to her since I had wished her goodnight and closed the door on her bedroom twenty years ago. It was hard to believe so much time had passed. I had remembered her face so clearly — pale, elfin, with flawless skin, and now here she was grown-up, a woman with the lines of a woman.
    Jim’s kindness hadn’t been the only problem in their marriage. Jim had wanted children, but after what had happened at the Sisters of Jerusalem Karen hadn’t been able to face it. Jim had been one of those men who desperately wants a son. He was the last of the Hartford van Hoovens: he had wanted Karen to bear him at least one heir, so that the line could continue into the next century. He was now married to a lady professor with wild, hay-coloured hair, a strident line in home-knitted sweaters, and good child-bearing hips. It tickled Karen to think that both she and this academic Valkyrie shared the name of ‘Mrs van Hooven.’
    Eventually we reached East 17th and climbed out stiffly onto the roasting sidewalk. I didn’t know this area very well, although I used to have a girlfriend on East 15th who wrote for the
Voice
and I often used to meet her for drinks at The Bells of Hell. I looked up and down the street. It stank of garbage and fumes and something else: something sickening and sour. A blind man with white stubble on his chin was leaning on a white stick playing
Funeral Blues
on a key-of-F harmonica.
    The Greenbergs’ house was a flat-fronted brownstone, with two dusty bay trees on the step outside the front door,both of them heavily chained to the stone balustrade. On the west side of the house there was an envelope factory, which looked as if it had been built around 1914, livid brown-and-white bricks and dusty blacked-out windows. On the east side stood another brownstone, much larger, with squatter proportions to its windows, and soot-scale on its brick. A red neon sign over the porch said Belford Hotel. It was the kind of hotel you would walk the streets all night rather than stay at — the kind of hotel with used needles in the lobby and all night long the sinister surreptitious rattle of people trying your doorhandle.
    Karen pressed the bell marked M & N GREENBERG and after a while a strained voice said, ‘Karen? That you?’ over the intercom.
    â€˜I’ve found Harry,’ she said; and immediately the buzzer unlocked the