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and smile, reminded me of Bob. He had said, holding the Oscar, “Don’t let anybody tell you this isn’t a terrific feeling,” and I had pictured Bob.
    Bob laughed. “Oh, I never watch the Academy Awards. I made a vow never to watch that commercial bullshit.”
    Our room was next to theirs. Bob did Linda’s pregnancy exercises along with her every day. We heard them counting. We also heard a lot of laughter, and the sound of continuous munching.
    The refrigerator was filled with milk, yogurt, coconut juice, health foods. Everything reeked of health. We hid our liquor.
    In the baby’s room we awoke to their laughter.
    One morning I awoke, heard their laughter, and wept. Karen cradled me in her arms.
    â€œThis is the town for you, Michael,” Bob said. “These laid-back, bland blonds don’t have the energy. It’s a terrific place for a New Yorker with talent and brains. You know, Mike, I’m surprised you didn’t blow your brains out in Vancouver. We’ve got to get you out of there.”
    He earnestly, arduously set about finding me a job in the movie colony. He found an apartment for me and Karen to sublet behind theirs. He came by in the morning, leaving pastry at the door and copies of Daily Variety, Billboard , Cashbox, The New York Times and the L.A. Times . During the day he phoned me with interviews he had set up. In the evening he waited for the news.
    Nothing worked. Bob looked away or directly downward as I talked to him, giving explanations, expressing my hopes.
    It was while Bob and Linda were away for a week that I saw an ad for a job at a civil rights organization called Jewish Punchers in Manhattan. It was the kind of place where I knew if I got the job, I’d want to kill myself. So of course I would get it. I left a note for Bob and flew to New York for the interview. The editor of Jewish Punchers’ Magazine spoke of the difficulty of finding a good bathroom in the city, and gave me a list of his favorites.
    And I got the job. We would be moving back to Manhattan. I called Butinsky in Boston for the first time in five years. “Please help me,” I said. “I’m still here, at the same old address,” he said. He could hardly wait to see me.
    Twenty-five years later, Karen said to me, “I would have had a child with you but I thought you’d leave me. How you cried at Robert’s. You were constantly yelling in those days. You would have been a terrible father then. I had no security. You were constantly threatening to leave me.
    â€œBut then we were thinking of doing it four years later. But I had a hysterectomy, remember? A fibroid uterus.” No, I didn’t remember it. I remembered almost nothing. And then, as she spoke, I did.
    After Karen told me this, she said, “Life is winding down so rapidly, like a tape unspooling more and more quickly as it comes to the end.”
    IV: I’ll Take Manhattan
    It was 1978. We were back in Manhattan and had 13-year old Kevin with us. Almost every street seemed to have a resonance for me, a memory. For the next fifteen years, I walked back and forth across the city. I walked from Columbia University down to Battery Park; I took the ferry to Staten Island and back; I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge into Brooklyn Heights. I walked across the esplanade and into Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens. And I walked back. Alfred Kazin walked the city and he crossed the bridge. I stayed where I was.
    And I walked up and down Riverside Drive and Broadway and through Central Park and visited the street fairs. Sometimes I walked to a building where I woman I had a crush on lived and I stood outside, just as I had done as a schoolboy. And always I expected to find someone that would end this silence and darkness, with whom I could begin to live.
    Karen fed and clothed me, led me piddle around the way writers did, hoping for a flash. She let me take the little freelance reviewing