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trains and let the sunlight in, Hell's Kitchen became, to Louisa's mind, an excellent place to grow up in comparison with the Hell's Kitchen Walter still lives in, one populated with the ghosts of thugs and filth and Freddie.
    On her way to work Louisa heads over to Fiftieth Street where she can catch the Eighth Avenue IND. Most days she walks to work. It is not too far away, twenty-odd blocks. But the wonder of the subway lines still thrills Louisa, so on cold or nasty days like this one she allows herself the small luxury of paying one nickel to ride the train down to the hotel. As she approaches the station she can smell the subway from above ground. It smells like rocks and dirt. She walks faster, hearing a train arrive. It forces warm air up the stairwell out onto the cold sidewalk like a tongue. As she pays her fare, the train pulls out of the station. Louisa hears another rider, one who missed this car by a far narrower margin than she, moan long and low, whimpering as though he were a movie-house vampire exposed to the first piercing rays of sunlight. When Louisa arrives on the platform this man is mumbling, repeating the word
damntrain, damntrain,
under his breath.
    The station has a vaulted ceiling walled with millions of ivory-colored tiles that give the acoustics a chilly tone as though Manhattan were a mountain and they were tucked down into its stony underbelly where the echoes of trains slithered through darkened, rocky tunnels.
    "Damntrain, damntrain, damntrain." Not angry, almost like a prayer.
    There is a continuous whoosh of far-off motion and air as it makes its way through the underground like a distant roaring. Louisa tries to ignore the stranger, wondering if he might not be a bit daft. She has a seat and, in order to avoid eye contact, she pulls a horrid book from her bag,
On the Aft Deck
by Wanda LaFontaine. It is a ladies' novel that was left behind at the hotel and stuffed into Louisa's purse before she realized just how silly a book it was. She feels the stranger's eyes on her. She starts to read slowly, whispering the pronunciation of each word, entirely unable to concentrate on the book but happy to be able to hide in its pages from the stranger's eyes. She reads the same sentence,
Ahoy! said the captain's lusty wench,
over and over and over again. The man beside her, the late rider, is staring directly at the side of her face. She can feel his stare on her left cheek and chin.
    She stops trying to read and, annoyed, turns to look at him.
    Oh, she thinks. Oh. Because while he might be crazy, he is also quite handsome.
    The man is about Louisa's age. He wears his hair long, as if he were a British poet. His hands are large and rough. Each fingernail has been bitten back to a red nub and is lined with black grease. His shoulders are quite broad, and he wears the collar of his coat turned halfway up, halfway disheveled and down. He pushes a pair of wire spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.
    "Louisa Dewell," he says. "Hello." He smiles. "How's Marlene?"
    "What?" she asks. She's never seen this man before in her life.
    "Marlene the pigeon. You don't remember me?"
    "No. I'm sorry. I don't."
    "I'm Arthur Vaughn. You and I were in primary school together. I guess that was a long time ago now."
    Louisa remembers everyone from elementary school, but she does not remember this man. And she would remember him. "Are you sure?" she asks.
    "You went to Elias Howe Elementary on Forty-fifth Street. Your homeroom teacher was named Miss Knott. Right?"
    "Yes. That's right." For some reason what this man says makes Louisa blush. It burns. Louisa is not one accustomed to blushing. She's had a good deal of experience with the opposite sex, and while she couldn't say that she's ever been in love, it is only because she hasn't chosen to fall in love. Men do not intimidate her; instead she delights in intimidating them. She considers herself thoroughly modern. She once shocked a suitor by walking herself home, alone,