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    "The pigeons. How do they always know the way home?"
    "I," she says, "haven't," as slowly as she can, "any idea, Arthur."
    "Forty-second Street. Connection to the BMT and IRT available!"
    "Oh." He straightens up. "I see," he says raising his voice, pulling back from her, disappointed as if he himself had been trying to find his way home and was hoping Louisa would tell him. "Well, I think we should find out. Don't you?"
    She sees dark hairs inside his nose and it thrills her. He is an adult, complicated by all the adult things, hairs, scars, breath, glasses. "How?" she asks.
    He raises his eyebrows. "I don't know yet," he says. "But I'll think about it and let you know." And then Arthur stares right at her and Louisa stares right back, her mouth open a bit because it is this staring that seems to make him so very different from any other men Louisa has ever known, even Walter. Arthur, unlike the others, actually seems to be trying to see her. She draws back, suspicious as if she'd found a dollar bill in the street. At first one always thinks something good is a trick.
    He shakes his head and his hair falls over his eyes.
    "Thirty-fourth Street. Pennsylvania Station. Transfer available to the IRT and Long Island Railroad!"
    "This is my stop. I have to go," she says.
    "Well, think about it. Let me know if you come up with anything," he says.
    "I will. I will" She steps through the door. "Happy New Year."
    "Happy New Year, Louisa. See you" Arthur yells.
    "How?" she turns to ask—rather coyly, she thinks—but then the doors close and she is mortified to be left holding an unanswered question, as if he duped her somehow. She watches him a moment through the glass and her eyes flash. He lifts one arm to wave through the window. She turns quickly so that he won't see, as she heads off toward the hotel, how the eyes of Arthur Vaughn have been burned into the very back of her brain.
    Louisa surfaces in the middle of a construction site. Ever since they tore down the El, building has been booming. The sidewalks are lined with scaffolding and cranes. Metal and wood skeletons surround new buildings that rise so high Louisa can barely see the tops of them. The workers use a system of derricks, ropes, and pulleys to haul building supplies from the sidewalk up hundreds of feet. Pallets of goods swing high up into the air before being lowered slowly into a circle of outstretched arms waiting to gently receive the delivery. Louisa imagines a crane that would swoop her up of the sidewalk, her skirt billowing in the breeze, the fabric lifting halfway up her thigh. She'd be suspended on an iron hook that would raise her fearlessly high up into the sky before slowly, slowly lowering her into a union of outstretched arms, the eager limbs of surprised and delighted construction workers, each one of them Arthur Vaughn. Louisa bites her lip. Nine Arthurs, adjusting their eyewear, waiting to receive her.
    She speeds her steps past the construction site. She's going to be late for work.
    The Hotel New Yorker, at Thirty-fourth and Eighth Avenue, was the tallest building in New York City when it was built in 1930, at a cost of over twenty-two million dollars. It is forty-three stories high. It has its own power generator, producing enough energy to support thirty-five thousand people. The kitchen is an entire acre. There is even a hospital with its own operating room inside the hotel. There are five restaurants, ten private dining rooms, and two ballrooms where, as the brochure says,
World famous orchestras interpret the syncopated rhythms of today!
There is an indoor ice-skating rink on the Terrace Room's dance floor where chorus girls perform an Ice Fangles at both lunch and dinner daily. Magical conveyor belts whisk dirty dishes through secret passageways down to the fully automated dishwasher. Four stories below ground, bedsheets and tablecloths are miraculously laundered, dried, ironed, and folded without ever being touched by a human hand.