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radical, an anarchist. His formative event the Tompkins Square Park riots, when the police quelled the rebel spirit of the Lower East Side. (I faintly recalled these facts, another version of the city’s Original Sin.) Abneg had spearheaded a squatters’ seizure of a famed building on Ninth and C, a cherished last stand, a toe stuck in the slamming door of progress. Out of this had come a career in tenant advocacy, bulldog negotiations on behalf of those sidelined in gentrification’s parade. Now, ultimate irony, Abneg worked for Mayor Arnheim, managing the undoing of rent stabilization. He’d become a major villain to some who recalled his earlier days, Harriet Welk informed me. Yet Abneg clung to his sense of duty, always alluding to how much worse it might all be without his interventions, a jaw-clenched claim on a higher realism. His intimates, like Harriet, could see what it had cost him, going to that crossroads, making that devil’s bargain. They kindly left the ironies unconfronted. What Richard Abneg had carried forward, always, anyhow, was a certain sense of his own crucial place in the island’s life. He’d never copped out. And the beard, that too was uncompromised, continuous. He grew it when he was fifteen and reading Charles Bukowski and Howard Zinn and Emmett Grogan. I soaked up Harriet’s description and braced myself. What she hadn’t warned me was that I’d like him.
    Richard Abneg scotted over to us now. Stuck out a horny hand for me to shake, but while I held it, addressed Harriet Welk.
    “You see her?”
    “Who?”
    “Don’t look, don’t look. The ostrich-woman.”
    He meant Georgina Hawkmanaji. I’d seen her come in. For her hair pinned in a high, plumed construction, her long pale neck and narrow shoulders, her lush bottom, ostrich-woman was a fair summary. Worth twenty million or so of inherited Armenian plunder, educated in Zurich and Oxford, but sure, ostrich in stature and perhaps soul as well. She stood a foot taller than Abneg.
    “Sorry,” he said abruptly. He introduced himself, and freed my claustrophobic fingers. “Don’t get any ideas, I’m going home with her.”
    “I’ll give you an advantage,” I said. “She lives in this building, the penthouse.”
    “Well I’m getting clear go-signals.”
    “Go-signals from the ostrich-woman.”
    “Yeah, exactly.”
    “Never ignore those,” I told him. “I never would.”
    When it was time for dinner Richard Abneg and I were seated on either side of Georgina Hawkmanaji, as it happened. His strategy, which given its unhesitating launch must have been instinctive, was to more or less shun Georgina completely and at the same time physically occupy her lap, in an ostensible campaign to impress himself on me . Repartee with Georgina could, in my experience, be a tad Sisyphean—she wasn’t dumb, on the contrary, astute on nearly any subject, but her formality and deliberateness were a type of damp weather. So I admired the stunt. Abneg used Georgina for triangulation. She didn’t have to keep up, only periodically ratify something particularly emphatic in his talk. That, and tolerate his spittle landing on the breast of her high-necked silk dress, tiny glints accumulating like a new constellation in the night sky.
    Richard Abneg liked to dynamite his own ego, with tales of deals struck in offices where you counted your fingers after handshakes and found a few missing, where believing you’d won meantyou’d misread the stakes. Between the jokes I heard him rationalizing a life’s arc of excruciating compromise. He painted himself as a specialist in sheltering sand-castle idealisms against the undertow of the city’s force of change, a force not so much cynical as tidally indifferent. Coughing up the lion’s share of what you’d sworn to protect, in days of privatizing plunder, might be to keep from losing it all.
    Abneg’s voice was insinuating and sarcastic, a bully’s, though he bullied only himself. At some point