Lispenard is a block below Canal Street, which puts it in that section known as Tribeca. Tribeca is a geographical acronym for Triangle Below Canal, just as SoHo derives from South of Houston Street. There was a time when artists began moving into the blocks south of the Village, living in violation of the housing code in spacious and inexpensive lofts. The code had since been modified to permit residential loft dwelling and SoHo had turned chic and expensive, which led loft seekers further south to Tribeca. The rents aren’t cheap there either now, but the streets still have the deserted quality of SoHo ten or twelve years ago.

I stuck to a well-lighted street. I walked near the curb, not close to buildings, and I did my best to move quickly and give an impression of alertness. Confrontations were easily avoided in those empty streets.

Janice Keane’s address turned out to be a six-story loft building, a narrow structure fitted in between two taller, wider and more modern buildings. It looked cramped, like a little man on a crowded subway. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the width of the facade on each of its floors. On the ground floor, shuttered for the weekend, was a wholesaler of plumber’s supplies.

I went into a claustrophobic hallway, found a bell marked Keane, rang it two long and three short. I went out to the sidewalk, stood at the curb looking up at all those windows.

She called down from one of them, asking my name. I couldn’t see anything in that light. I gave my name, and something small whistled down through the air and jangled on the pavement beside me. “Fifth floor,” she said. “There’s an elevator.”

There was indeed, and it could have accommodated a grand piano. I rode it to the fifth floor and stepped out into a spacious loft. There were a lot of plants, all deep green and thriving, and relatively little in the way of furniture. The doors were oak, buffed to a high sheen. The walls were exposed brick. Overhead track lighting provided illumination.

She said, “You’re right on time. The place is a mess but I won’t apologize. There’s coffee.”

“If it’s no trouble.”

“None at all. I’m going to have a cup myself. Just let me steer you to a place to sit and I’ll be a proper hostess. Milk? Sugar?”

“Just black.”

She left me in an area with a couch and a pair of chairs grouped around a high-pile rug with an abstract design. A couple of eight-foot-tall bookcases reached a little more than halfway to the ceiling and helped screen the space from the rest of the loft. I walked over to the window and looked down at Lispenard Street but there wasn’t a whole lot to see.

There was one piece of sculpture in the room and I was standing in front of it when she came back with the coffee. It was the head of a woman. Her hair was a nest of snakes, her face a high-cheekboned, broad-browed mask of unutterable disappointment.

“That’s my Medusa,” she said. “Don’t meet her eyes. Her gaze turns men to stone.”

“She’s very good.”

“Thank you.”

“She looks so disappointed.”

“That’s the quality,” she agreed. “I didn’t know that until I’d finished her, and then I saw it for myself. You’ve got a pretty good eye.”

“For disappointment, anyway.”

She was an attractive woman. Medium height, a little more well-fleshed than was strictly fashionable. She wore faded Levi’s and a slate-blue chamois shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. Her face was heart-shaped, its contours accentuated by a sharply defined widow’s peak. Her hair, dark brown salted with gray, hung almost to her shoulders. Her gray eyes were large and well-spaced, and a touch of mascara around them was the only makeup she wore.

We sat in a pair of chairs at right angles to one another and set our coffee mugs on a table made from a section of tree trunk and a slab of slate. She asked if I’d had trouble finding her address and I said I hadn’t. Then she said, “Well, shall we talk about Barb Ettinger? Maybe you can start by telling me why you’re interested in her after all these years.”

SHE’D missed the media coverage of Louis Pinell’s arrest. It was news to her that the Icepick Prowler was in custody, so it was also news that her former employee had been killed by someone else.

“So for the first time you’re looking for a killer with a motive,” she said. “If you’d looked at the time—”

“It might have been easier. Yes.”

“And it might be easier now just to look the other way. I don’t remember her father. I must have met him, after the murder if not before, but I don’t have any recollection of him. I remember her sister. Have you met her?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t know what she’s like now, but she struck me as a snotty little bitch. But I didn’t know her well, and anyway it was nine years ago. That’s what I keep coming back to. Everything was nine years ago.”

“How did you meet Barbara Ettinger?”

“We ran into each other in the neighborhood. Shopping at the Grand Union, going to the candy store for a paper. Maybe I mentioned that I was running a day-care center. Maybe she heard it from someone else. Either way, one morning she walked into the Happy Hours and asked if I needed any help.”

“And you hired her right away?”

“I told her I couldn’t pay her much. The place was just about making expenses. I started it for a dumb reason—there was no convenient day-care center in the neighborhood, and I needed a place to dump my own kids, so I found a partner and we opened the Happy Hours, and instead of dumping my kids I was watching them and everybody else’s, and of course my partner came to her senses about the time the ink was dry on the lease, and she backed out and I was running the whole show myself. I told Barb I needed her but I couldn’t afford her, and she said she mostly wanted something to do and she’d work cheap. I forget what I paid her but it wasn’t a whole lot.”

“Was she good at her work?”

“It was essentially baby-sitting. There’s a limit to how good you can be at it.” She thought for a moment. “It’s hard to remember. Nine years ago, so I was twenty-nine at the time, and she was a few years younger.”

“She was twenty-six when she died.”

“Jesus, that’s not very old, is it?” She closed her eyes, wincing at early death. “She was a big help to me, and I guess she was good enough at what she did. She seemed to enjoy it most of the time. She’d have enjoyed it more if she’d been a more contented woman generally.”

“She was discontented?”

“I don’t know if that’s the right word.” She turned to glance at her bust of Medusa. “Disappointed? You got the feeling that Barb’s life wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind for herself. Everything was okay, her husband was okay, her apartment was okay, but she’d hoped for something more than just okay, and she didn’t have it.”

“Someone described her as restless.”

“Restless.” She tasted the word. “That fits her well enough. Of course that was a time for women to be restless. Sexual roles were pretty confused and confusing.”

“Aren’t they still?”

“Maybe they always will be. But I think things are a little more settled now than they were for a while there. She was restless, though. Definitely restless.”

“Her marriage was a disappointment?”

“Most of them are, aren’t they? I don’t suppose it would have lasted, but we’ll never know, will we? Is he still with the Welfare Department?”

I brought her up to date on Douglas Ettinger.

“I didn’t know him too well,” she said. “Barb seemed to feel he wasn’t good enough for her. At least I got that impression. His background was low-rent compared to hers. Not that she grew up with the Vanderbilts, but I gather she had a proper suburban childhood and a fancy education. He worked long hours and he had a dead-end job. And yes, there was one other thing wrong with him.”

“What was that?”

“He fucked around.”

“Did he really or did she just think so?”

“He made a pass at me. Oh, it was no big deal, just a casual, offhand sort of proposition. I was not greatly interested. The man looked like a chipmunk. I wasn’t much flattered, either, because one sensed he did this sort of thing a lot and that it didn’t mean I was irresistible. Of course I didn’t say anything to Barb, but she had evidence of her own. She caught him once at a party, necking in the kitchen with the hostess. And I gather he was dipping into his welfare clients.”

“What about his wife?”

“I gather he was dipping into her, too. I don’t—”

“Was she having an affair with anybody?”

She leaned forward, took hold of her coffee mug. Her hands were large for a woman, their nails clipped short. I suppose long nails would be an impossible hindrance for a sculptor.

She said, “I was paying her a very low salary. You could almost call it a token salary. I mean, high-school kids got a better hourly rate for baby-sitting, and Barb didn’t even get to raid the refrigerator. So if she wanted time off, all she did was take it.”

“Did she take a lot of time off?”

“Not all that much, but I had the impression that she was taking an occasional afternoon or part of an afternoon for something more exciting than a visit to the dentist. A woman has a different air about her when she’s off to meet a lover.”

“Did she have that air the day she was killed?”

“I wished you’d asked me nine years ago. I’d have had a better chance of remembering. I know she left early that day but I don’t have any memory of the details. You think she met a lover and he killed her?”

“I don’t think anything special at this stage. Her husband said she was nervous about the Icepick Prowler.”

“I don’t think... wait a minute. I remember thinking about that afterward, after she’d been killed. That she’d been talking about the danger of living in the city. I don’t know if she said anything specific about the Icepick killings, but there was something about feeling as though she was being watched or followed. I interpreted it as a kind of premonition of her own death.”

“Maybe it was.”

“Or maybe she was being watched and followed. What is it they say? ‘Paranoiacs have enemies, too.’ Maybe she really sensed something.”

“Would she let a stranger into the apartment?”

“I wondered about that at the time. If she was on guard to begin with—”

She broke off suddenly. I asked her what was the matter.

“Nothing.”

“I’m a stranger and you let me into your apartment.”

“It’s a loft. As if it makes a difference. I—”

I took out my wallet and tossed it onto the table between us. “Look through it,” I said. “There’s an ID in it. It’ll match the name I gave you over the phone, and I think there’s something with a photograph on it.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Look it over anyway. You’re not going to be very useful as a subject of interrogation if you’re anxious about getting killed. The ID won’t prove I’m not a rapist or a murderer, but rapists and murderers don’t usually give you their right names ahead of time. Go ahead, pick it up.”

She went through the wallet quickly, then handed it back to me. I returned it to my pocket. “That’s a lousy picture of you,” she said. “But I guess it’s you, all right. I don’t think she’d let a stranger into her apartment. She’d let a lover in, though. Or a husband.”

“You think her husband killed her?”

“Married people always kill one another. Sometimes it takes them fifty years.”

“Any idea who her lover may have been?”

“It may not have been just one person. I’m just guessing, but she could have had an itch to experiment. And she was pregnant so it was safe.”

She laughed. I asked her what was so funny.

“I was trying to think where she would have met someone. A neighbor, maybe, or the male half of some couple she and her husband saw socially. It’s not as though she could have met men on the job. We had plenty of males there, but unfortunately none of them were over eight years old.”

“Not very promising.”

“Except that’s not altogether true. Sometimes fathers would bring the kids in, or pick them up after work. There are situations more conducive to flirtation, but I had daddies come on to me while they collected their children, and it probably happened to Barbara. She was very attractive, you know. And she didn’t wrap herself up in an old Mother Hubbard when she came to work at the Happy Hours. She had a good figure and she dressed to show it off.”

The conversation went on a little longer before I got a handle on the question. Then I said, “Did you and Barbara ever become lovers?”

I was watching her eyes when I asked the question, and they widened in response. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

I waited her out.

“I’m just wondering where the question came from,” she said. “Did somebody say we were lovers? Or am I an obvious dyke or something?”

“I was told you left your husband for another woman.”

“Well, that’s close. I left my husband for thirty or forty reasons, I suppose. And the first relationship I had after I left him was with a woman. Who told you? Not Doug Ettinger. He’d moved out of the neighborhood before that particular shit hit the fan. Unless he happened to talk to somebody. Maybe he and Eddie got together and cried on each other’s shoulder about how women are no good, they either get stabbed or they run off with each other. Was it Doug?”

“No. It was a woman who lived in your building on Wyckoff Street.”

“Someone in the building. Oh, it must have been Maisie! Except that’s not her name. Give me a minute. Mitzi! It was Mitzi Pomerance, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t get her first name. I just spoke with her on the telephone.”

“Little Mitzi Pomerance. Are they still married? Of course, they’d have to be. Unless he left, but nothing would propel her away from hearth and home. She’d insist her marriage was heaven even if it meant systematically denying every negative emotion that ever threatened to come to the surface. The worst thing about going back to visit the kids was the look on that twit’s face when we passed on the stairs.” She sighed and shook her head at the memory. “I never had anything going with Barbara. Strangely enough, I never had anything going with anybody, male or female, before I split with Eddie. And the woman I got together with afterward was the first woman I ever slept with in my life.”

“But you were attracted to Barbara Ettinger.”

“Was I? I recognized that she was attractive. That’s not the same thing. Was I specifically attracted to her?” She weighed the notion. “Maybe,” she conceded. “Not on any conscious level, I don’t think. And when I did begin to consider the possibility that I might find it, oh, interesting to go to bed with a woman, I don’t think I had any particular woman in mind. As a matter of fact, I don’t even think I entertained the fantasy while Barbara was alive.”

“I have to ask these personal questions.”

“You don’t have to apologize. Jesus, Mitzi Pomerance. I’ll bet she’s fat, I’ll bet she’s a plump little piglet by now. But you only spoke to her over the phone.”

“That’s right.”

“Is she still living in the same place? She must be. You wouldn’t get them out of there with a crowbar.”

“Somebody did. A buyer converted the house to one-family.”

“They must have been sick. Did they stay in the neighborhood?”

“More or less. They moved to Carroll Street.”

“Well, I hope they’re happy. Mitzi and Gordon.” She leaned forward, searched my face with her gray eyes. “You drink,” she said. “Right?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re a drunk, aren’t you?”

“I suppose you could call me a drinking man.”

The words sounded stiff, even to me. They hung in the air for a moment and then her laughter cut in, full-bodied and rich. “ ‘I suppose you could call me a drinking man.’ Jesus, that’s wonderful. Well, I suppose you could call me a drinking woman, Mr. Scudder. People have called me a good deal worse, and it’s been a long day and a dry one. How about a little something to cut the dust?”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

“What’ll it be?”

“Do you have bourbon?”

“I don’t think so.” The bar was behind a pair of sliding doors in one of the bookcases. “Scotch or vodka,” she announced.

“Scotch.”

“Rocks? Water? What?”

“Just straight.”

“The way God made it, huh?” She brought back a pair of rocks glasses filled about halfway, one with Scotch, the other with vodka. She gave me mine, looked into her own. She had the air of someone trying to select a toast, but evidently she couldn’t think of one. “Oh, what the hell,” she said, and took a drink.

“WHO do you think killed her?”

“Too early to tell. It could have been somebody I haven’t heard of yet. Or it could have been Pinell. I’d like ten minutes with him.”

“You think you could refresh his memory?”

I shook my head. “I think I might get some sense of him. So much detection is intuitive. You gather details and soak up impressions, and then the answer pops into your mind out of nowhere. It’s not like Sherlock Holmes, at least it never was for me.”

“You make it sound almost as though there’s a psychic element to the process.”

“Well, I can’t read palms or see the future. But maybe there is.” I sipped Scotch. It had that medicinal taste that Scotch has but I didn’t mind it as much as I usually do. It was one of the heavier Scotches, dark and peaty. Teacher’s, I think it was. “I want to get out to Sheepshead Bay next,” I said.

“Now?”

“Tomorrow. That’s where the fourth Icepick killing took place, and that was the one that’s supposed to have spooked Barbara Ettinger.”

“You think the same person—”

“Louis Pinell admits to the Sheepshead Bay murder. Of course that doesn’t prove anything, either. I’m not sure why I want to go out there. I guess I want to talk to somebody who was on the scene, someone who saw the body. There were some physical details about the killings that were held back from the press coverage, and they were duplicated in Barbara’s murder. Imperfectly duplicated, and I want to know if there was any parallel in the other Brooklyn homicide.”

“And if there was, what would it prove? That there was a second killer, a maniac who confined himself to Brooklyn?”

“And who conveniently stopped at two killings. It’s possible. It wouldn’t even rule out someone with a motive for killing Barbara. Say her husband decided to kill her, but he realized the Icepick Prowler hadn’t been to Brooklyn yet, so he killed some stranger in Sheepshead Bay first to establish a pattern.”

“Do people do things like that?”

“There’s nothing you can imagine that somebody hasn’t done at one time or another. Maybe somebody had a motive for killing the woman in Sheepshead Bay. Then he was worried that the murder would stand out as the only one of its kind in Brooklyn, so he went after Barbara. Or maybe that was just his excuse. Maybe he killed a second time because he’d found out that he enjoyed it.”

“God.” She drank vodka. “What was the physical detail?”

“You don’t want to know about it.”

“You protecting the little woman from the awful truth?”

“The victims were stabbed through the eyes. An icepick, right through the eyeballs.”

“Jesus. And the... what did you call it? Imperfect duplication?”

“Barbara Ettinger just got it in one eye.”

“Like a wink.” She sat for a long moment, then looked down at her glass and noticed that it was empty. She went to the bar and came back with both bottles. After she’d filled our glasses she left the bottles on the slate-topped table.

“I wonder why he would do a thing like that,” she said.

“That’s another reason I’d like to see Pinell,” I said. “To ask him.”

THE conversation turned this way and that. At one point she asked whether she should call me Matt or Matthew. I told her it didn’t matter to me. She said it mattered to her that I call her not Janice but Jan.

“Unless you’re uncomfortable calling murder suspects by their first names.”

When I was a cop I learned always to call suspects by their first names. It gave you a certain amount of psychological leverage. I told her she wasn’t a suspect.

“I was at the Happy Hours all that afternoon,” she said. “Of course it would be hard to prove after all these years. At the time it would have been easy. Alibis must be harder to come by for people who live alone.”

“You live alone here?”

“Unless you count the cats. They’re hiding somewhere. They steer clear of strangers. Showing them your ID wouldn’t impress them much.”

“Real hard-liners.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve always lived alone. Since I left Eddie, that is. I’ve been in relationships but I always lived alone.”

“Unless we count the cats.”

“Unless we count the cats. I never thought at the time that I’d be living by myself for the next eight years. I thought a relationship with a woman might be different in some fundamental way. See, back then was consciousness-raising time. I decided the problem was men.”

“And it wasn’t?”

“Well, it may have been one of the problems. Women turned out to be another problem. For a while I decided I was one of those fortunate people who are capable of relationships with both sexes.”

“Just for a while?”

“Uh-huh. Because what I discovered next was that I may be capable of relationships with men and women, but what I mostly am is not very good at relationships.”

“Well, I can relate to that.”

“I figured you probably could. You live alone, don’t you, Matthew?”

“For a while now.”

“Your sons are with your wife? I’m not psychic. There’s a picture of them in your wallet.”

“Oh, that. It’s an old picture.”

“They’re handsome boys.”

“They’re good kids, too.” I added a little Scotch to my glass. “They live out in Syosset. They’ll take the train in now and then and we catch a ball game together, or maybe a fight at the Garden.”

“They must enjoy that.”

“I know I enjoy it.”

“You must have moved out a while ago.”

I nodded. “Around the time I left the cops.”

“Same reason?”

I shrugged.

“How come you quit the cops? Was it this stuff?”

“What stuff?”

She waved a hand at the bottles. “You know. The booze.”

“Oh, hell, no,” I said. “I wasn’t even that heavy a hitter at the time. I just reached a point where I didn’t feel like being a cop anymore.”

“What did it? Disillusionment? A lack of faith in the criminal justice system? Disgust with corruption?”

I shook my head. “I lost my illusions early in the game and I never had much faith in the criminal justice system. It’s a terrible system and the cops just do what they can. As far as corruption goes, I was never enough of an idealist to be bothered by it.”

“What then? Mid-life crisis?”

“You could call it that.”

“Well, we won’t talk about it if you don’t want to.”

We fell silent for a moment. She drank and then I drank, and then I put my glass down and said, “Well, it’s no secret. It’s just not something I talk about a lot. I was in a tavern up in Washington Heights one night. It was a place where cops could drink on the arm. The owner liked having us around so you could run a tab and never be asked for payment. I had every right to be there. I was off-duty and I wanted to unwind a little before I drove back out to the island.”

Or maybe I wouldn’t have gone home that night anyway. I didn’t always. Sometimes I caught a few hours’ sleep in a hotel room to save driving back and forth. Sometimes I didn’t have to get a hotel room.

“Two punks held up the place,” I went on. “They got what was in the register and shot the bartender on the way out, shot him dead just for the hell of it. I ran out into the street after them. I was in plainclothes but of course I was carrying a gun. You always carry it.

“I emptied the gun at them. I got them both. I killed one of them and crippled the other. Left him paralyzed from the waist down. Two things he’ll never do again are walk and fuck.”

I’d told this story before but this time I could feel it all happening again. Washington Heights is hilly and they’d taken off up an incline. I remembered bracing myself, holding the gun with both hands, firing uphill at them. Maybe it was the Scotch that was making the recollection so vivid. Maybe it was something I responded to in her big unwavering gray eyes.

“And because you killed one and crippled another—”

I shook my head. “That wouldn’t have bothered me. I’m only sorry I didn’t kill them both. They murdered that bartender for no good reason on God’s earth. I wouldn’t lose a dime’s worth of sleep over those two.”

She waited.

“One of the shots went wide,” I said. “Shooting uphill at a pair of moving targets, hell, it’s remarkable I scored as well as I did. I always shot Expert on the police range, but it’s different when it’s real.” I tried to draw my eyes away from hers but couldn’t manage it. “One shot missed, though, and it ricocheted off the pavement or something. Took a bad hop. And there was a little girl walking around or standing around, whatever the hell she was doing. She was only six years old. I don’t know what the hell she was doing out at that hour.”

This time I looked away. “The bullet went into her eye,” I said. “The ricochet took off some of its steam so if it had been an inch to the side one way or the other it probably would have glanced off bone, but life’s a game of inches, isn’t it? There was no bone to get in the way and the bullet wound up in her brain and she died. Instantly.”

“God.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong. There was a departmental investigation because that’s standard procedure, and it was agreed unanimously that I hadn’t done anything wrong. As a matter of fact I received a commendation. The child was Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Estrellita Rivera her name was, and sometimes the press gets on you when there’s a minority group casualty like that, or you get static from community groups, but there was none of that in this case. If I was anything I was a fast-acting hero cop who had a piece of bad luck.”

“And you quit the police force.”

The Scotch bottle was empty. There was maybe half a pint of vodka in the other bottle and I poured a few ounces of it into my glass. “Not right away,” I said, “but before too long. And I don’t know what made me do it.”

“Guilt.”

“I’m not sure. All I know is that being a cop didn’t seem to be fun anymore. Being a husband and a father didn’t seem to work, either. I took a leave of absence from both, moved into a hotel a block west of Columbus Circle. Somewhere down the line it became clear that I wasn’t going back, not to my wife, not to the department.”

Neither of us said anything for a while. After a moment she leaned over and touched my hand. It was an unexpected and slightly awkward gesture and for some reason it touched me. I felt a thickening in my throat.

Then she had withdrawn her hand and was on her feet. I thought for a moment that she meant for me to leave. Instead she said, “I’m going to call the liquor store while they’re still open. The nearest place is on Canal and they close early. Do you want to stick with Scotch or would you rather switch to bourbon? And what brand of bourbon?”

“I should probably be going soon.”

“Scotch or bourbon?”

“I’ll stay with the Scotch.”

While we waited for the liquor delivery she took me around the loft and showed me some of her work. Most of it was realistic, like the Medusa, but a few pieces were abstract. There was a lot of strength in her sculpture. I told her I liked her work.

“I’m pretty good,” she said.

She wouldn’t let me pay for the liquor, insisting that I was her guest. We sat in our chairs again, opened our respective bottles, filled our glasses. She asked me if I really liked her work. I assured her that I did.

“I’m supposed to be good,” she said. “You know how I got into this? Playing with clay with the kids at the day-care center. I wound up taking the clay home, that yellow modeling clay, and working with it by the hour. Then I took a night course at Brooklyn College, an adult-ed class, and the instructor told me I had talent. He didn’t have to tell me. I knew it.

“I’ve had some recognition. I had a show at the Chuck Levitan Gallery a little over a year ago. You know the gallery? On Grand Street?” I didn’t. “Well, he gave me a one-man show. A one-woman show. A one-person show. Shit, you have to think before you talk nowadays, have you noticed?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I had an NEA grant last year. National Endowment for the Arts. Plus a smaller grant from the Einhoorn Foundation. Don’t pretend you heard of the Einhoorn Foundation. I never heard of it before I got the grant. I’ve got pieces in some fairly decent collections. One or two in museums. Well, one, and it’s not MOMA, but it’s a museum. I’m a sculptor.”

“I never said you weren’t.”

“And my kids are in California and I never see them. He has full custody. The hell, I moved out, right? I’m some kind of unnatural woman in the first place, some dyke who deserts husband and kids, so of course he gets custody, right? I didn’t make an issue of it. Do you want to know something, Matthew?”

“What?”

“I didn’t want custody. I was done with day care. I had fucking had it with kids, my own included. What do you make of that?”

“It sounds natural enough.”

“The Maisie Pomperances of the world wouldn’t agree with you. Excuse me, I mean Mitzi. Gordon and Mitzi Fucking Pomerance. Mr. and Mrs. High-School Yearbook.”

I was able to hear the vodka in her voice now. She wasn’t slurring her words any but there was a timbre to her speech that the alcohol had provided. It didn’t surprise me. She had matched me drink for drink and I was hitting it pretty good myself. Of course I’d had a head start on her.

“When he said he was moving to California I threw a fit. Yelled that it wasn’t fair, that he had to stay in New York so I could visit them. I had visitation rights, I said, and what good were my visitation rights if they were three thousand miles away? But do you know something?”

“What?”

“I was relieved. Part of me was glad they were going, because you wouldn’t believe what it was like, traipsing out there on the subway once a week, sitting in the apartment with them or walking around Boerum Hill and always risking blank stares from Maisie Pomerance. Goddamn it, why can’t I even get that goddamned woman’s name right? Mitzi!”

“I’ve got her number written down. You could always call her up and tell her off.”

She laughed. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “I gotta pee. I’ll be right back.”

When she came back she sat on the couch. Without preamble she said, “You know what we are? Me with my sculpture and you with your existential angst, and what we are is a couple of drunks who copped out. That’s all.”

“If you say so.”

“Don’t patronize me. Let’s face it. We’re both alcoholics.”

“I’m a heavy drinker. There’s a difference.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I could stop anytime I want to.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Why should I?”

Instead of answering the question she leaned forward to fill her glass. “I stopped for a while,” she said. “I quit cold for two months. More than two months.”

“You just up and quit?”

“I went to A.A.”

“Oh.”

“You ever been?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it would work for me.”

“But you could stop anytime you want.”

“Yeah, if I wanted.”

“And anyway you’re not an alcoholic.”

I didn’t say anything at first. Then I said, “I suppose it depends on how you define the word. Anyway, all it is is a label.”

“They say you decide for yourself if you’re an alcoholic.”

“Well, I’m deciding that I’m not.”

“I decided I was. And it worked for me. The thing is, they say it works best if you don’t drink.”

“I can see where that might make a difference.”

“I don’t know why I got on this subject.” She drained her glass, looked at me over its rim. “I didn’t mean to get on this goddamned subject. First my kids and then my drinking, what a fucking down.”

“It’s all right.”

“I’m sorry, Matthew.”

“Forget it.”

“Sit next to me and help me forget it.”

I joined her on the couch and ran a hand over her fine hair. The sprinkling of gray hair enhanced its attractiveness. She looked at me for a moment out of those bottomless gray eyes, then let the lids drop. I kissed her and she clung to me.

We necked some. I touched her breasts, kissed her throat. Her strong hands worked the muscles in my back and shoulders like modeling clay.

“You’ll stay over,” she said.

“I’d like that.”

“So would I.”

I freshened both our drinks.