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reached down to flush the toilet. The water gushed away, though the weird brown stuff remained. He sighed. There were still some days when he thought it was kind of romantic to be a dissolute Village poet. Then there were days like this one: when he thought he was going to vomit until his ears bled. He twitched the string to turn off the bathroom bulb. Then, tugging one more bit of dribble off his pud, he stalked back into the other room.
    Avis Best was there. She was just climbing in through the window, her baby under her arm. Perkins waved to her wearily, his eyes half closed. He made his way to the mattress on the floor. He flopped down on it with a groan.
    By that time, Avis was standing by the window. She was staring around the room, her mouth open. Behind her, a line of blue sky showed through the bars of the fire escape. She held her baby on her hip. The baby played with her face as she stood there gaping.
    â€œJesus Christ, Perkins,” she said.
    Perkins rolled onto his back on the bare mattress. He flung his arm over his eyes. He felt black and lonely and dry, his whole body stuffed with gritty sand. “Oh, Avis,” he said pitifully. His head hurt too and he was beginning to feel nauseous.
    â€œOh, really,” Avis said. “Do you mind telling me what you’re trying to do to yourself?”
    He shook his head slightly. “I don’t remember. But it must be something really awful.”
    â€œSure looks like it.”
    â€œI just hope I don’t deserve it.”
    â€œPah! Pah! Pah!” the baby cried out. He had noticed the naked figure on the bed. He was twisting in his mother’s arms, straining toward the man, reaching out.
    â€œAll right.” Avis let out a breath. She started picking her way to the mattress through the mess. “Look at this place.” Even in the dim western light from the window, she could see it was a disaster.
    It was just a studio, just the one large room. A subway map taped to the wall. A framed drawing of Whitman. A poster from the Keats House one of his girlfriends had brought him from Rome. There was a writing desk with a Spartan wooden chair. A dresser. A few canvas chairs, a couple of standing lamps. There was the mattress, bare on the floor.
    But mostly, there were books. There were books everywhere, gray and dusty. Piles of them lined the walls, two deep, three deep, four. Stacks of them rose up at random in the center of the room like stalagmites. Books covered the desk and all the chairs. Even the bookshelf—Avis thought she remembered a small bookshelf here somewhere once—was buried now under the books.
    And then there was the rest of it. His bedcovers splayed everywhere. His jeans over a chair back, his sweater over a tumbled mound of Dostoevskys. His underpants tied around a lamp.
    Gimme a break , Avis thought sourly.
    And bottles of Sam Adams beer lying in the gaps all around. Empty bottles made of brown glass: Wherever she looked, her eye fell on one. She bumped one with her toe as she reached the mattress, sent it rolling with a clink into an illustrated Quixote.
    She lowered herself to the mattress, sat down next to Perkins. Perkins dropped his arm and gazed up at her pitiably. She tried to keep from glancing down at his nakedness, but she couldn’t help it. He was a sturdily built man with a hairy barrel chest and muscular arms. He wore his black hair long and had an angular face, pouched and lined at thirty-one. She found his eyes—his brown eyes—seductively miserable.
    She placed the baby on his chest. He held the chunky little kid steady. The baby gave a big smile and pawed him. Perkins suddenly blew up his cheeks and the baby looked up at his mother in surprise and laughed.
    Avis smiled. She touched Perkins’s forehead, brushed his hair with her fingers. “How bad is it?” she said softly.
    â€œOh …” He wrinkled his nose at the baby. “‘My heart aches, and a drowsy