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am.”
    “Harry, I can’t be writing your plays with you right now.”
    “Do you recall any trucks hanging out in front of our building, running their engines all night? Did that happen when you were here, when we were living together, when we were together and living here so much in love?”
    “Come on, Harry.” There was some muffled noise, the seashell sound of hand over mouthpiece, the dim din of a man’s voice and hers. Harry hung up. He put on his Maria Callas records, all in a stack on the phonograph spindle, and left the apartment to roam the streets again, to find an open newsstand, a safe coffee shop that didn’t put a maraschino cherry on the rice pudding, so that even when you picked it off its mark remained, soaked in, like blood by Walt Disney.
    When he trudged back to his apartment, the morning at last all fully lit, falsely wide-eyed and innocent, the trucks were always gone. There was just Deli in the doorway, smiling. “Mornin’, Harry,” she’d say. “Have a bad dream?”
    “You’re up early,” said Harry. Usually that was what he said.
    “Oh, is it daytime already? Well, I’m gonna get myself a real job, a daytime job. Besides, I’ve been listening to your records from upstairs.” Harry stopped jangling his keys for a moment. The Callas arias sailed faintly out through the windowpanes. “Isn’t that fag music, Harry? I mean, don’t get mewrong. I like fag music. I really like that song that keeps playing about the VCR.”
    “What are you talking about?” He had his keys out now, pointed and ready to go. But he kept one shoulder turned slightly her way.
    “
V-C-R-err
,” sang Deli.
“V-C-Dannemora.”
Deli stopped and laughed. “Dannemora! That girl’s in Sing Sing for sure.”
    “See you,” said Harry.
    On his answering machine was a message from Glen Scarp. “Hey, Harry, sorry to call you so early, but hey, it’s even earlier out here. And wasn’t it Ionesco who said something about genius up with the sun? Maybe it was Odets.…”
Odets?
thought Harry. “At any rate, I’m flying into New York in a few days, and I thought we might meet for a drink. I’ll phone you when I get in.”
    “No,” said Harry out loud. “No. No.”
    But it was that very morning, after a short, cold rain, just after he’d opened the windows and gotten the apartment aired out, that the bathroom started acting up. The toilet refused to swallow, gurgling if Harry ran the kitchen faucet, and the tub suddenly and terrifyingly filled with water from elsewhere in the building. Somebody else’s bath: sudsy water, with rusty swirls. Harry tried flushing the toilet again, and it rose ominously toward the rim. He watched in horror, softly howling the protests—“Ahhhh! UUUaahhh!”—that seemed to help keep the thing from overflowing altogether.
    He phoned the landlord, but no one answered. He phoned a plumber he found in the yellow pages, some place advertising
High Velocity Jet Flush
and
Truck Mounted Rodding Machine.
“Are you the super?” asked the plumber.
    “There is no super here,” said Harry, a confession that left him sad, like an admission that finally there was no God.
    “Are you the landlord?”
    “No,” said Harry. “I’m a tenant.”
    “We charge two hundred dollars, automatic, if we visit,” said the plumber, calmly. Plumbers were always calm. It wasn’t just because they were rich. It had something to do with pipes and sticking your hands into them over and over. “Tell your landlord to give us a call.”
    Harry left another message on his landlord’s machine and then went off to a coffee shop. It was called The Cosmic Galaxy and was full of actors and actresses talking wearily about auditions and getting work and how useless
Back Stage
was, though they bought it faithfully and spread it out over the tables anxiously to read. “What I’m trying to put together here,” he overheard one actress say, “is a look like Mindy and a sound like Mork.” Harry thought with